This is part 3 in a series of post about what’s going to be on the agenda for 2009. Today, I’m talking about the how the financial turmoil changes the web landscape during the coming year.
The year is starting slow, and it’s going to be anything but white hot. The financial difficulties is going to throw many decent companies into despondency and we’re certainly going to loose some of them. In some cases it’s going to be a much needed weeding out of sub par services, in others it’s going to be a sad loss. Consolidation will be the word, and a lot of invested time is going to change hands.
More notably, is that when people have less money to spend, they’re going to be more picky about where they spend it. It’s anything from big to small – I’ll probably cancel either my Spotify or my Raphsody account. Maybe I’ll stick to one morning newspaper instead of two. Nothing big unless drastic actions are required, but my small stuff is the entire business of some companies.
When I consider the implications of this depression on Interaction Design in products and services, I can’t help but feel positive. Increasingly, it’s going to be the decisive factor when user decides what to let go of. Feeling good about the brand, and having a good user experience is going to be important when the choice suddenly becomes limited. Value for money, or time, transcends content mass or user base in 2009.
Mediocre services and devices are going to fall hard this year. Those who try to be everything for everyone are going to be losers and those who specialize and focus their offerings and interfaces are going to be winners.
Footnote: Om Malik wants to say goodbye to mediocrity, focusing on bad talent and bail-out plans. It’s a nice rant & call to action. I’m all for it.
[...] companies that are in survival mode don’t do anything that would make them go from being mediocre to being great — because they are too busy just surviving.
…
All posts in my series of predictions for 2009;
I’m visiting my hometown Lund for some x-mas pregame activities. This afternoon I was visiting a friend and found myself peeking into the room of Felix, her 14-year-old son. He was sitting in front of his computer in the dark, headphones covering one ear. He was playing World of Warcraft, working simultaneously with several characters, which he will later sell on e-bay for $300-$400 a piece. He was also IM-ing (with Skype) with someone and watching an episode of Scrubs in a very small window on his monitor.
Felix has grown up with the Internet and as far as he’s concerned it’s ubiquitous. The Internet he knows, is imbued with communication. There are few activities that aren’t shared or social. His spatial awareness and multitasking ability is awesome.
What I’m curious to find out is how my son, Loe (almost three), will interact with the world. I already see some very interesting behaviors, that I think he’ll share with many others in his generation. He’s of course colored by the fact that his father is a gadget freak, as I was by mine being an early adopter working in a scientific field.
The first time he held an iPod Touch, he was a couple of months shy of two. He picked it up, and it lit up. His finger quickly gravitated to the unlock arrow and when he touched it, it moved a little. He got the message and pressed down again and swiped it across the screen. To his delight, the screen filled with colorful icons. This is of course also an example of excellent interaction design on Apples part.
He now regularly picks up my iPhone, unlocks it, opens the YouTube app and flips to bookmarks, to watch one of the short clips of Höjdarna that he enjoys immensely. In the car the other day, it was taking some time for the clip to start rolling, we’re were out of 3g coverage. “It’s loading, but it starts soon” he voluntered, upon seing the spinning circle and then patiently waited for at least two minutes until it started. Man, was I proud.
When he picks up a camera, he instantly knows how to turn it on and how to take pictures. When I got my new unibody MBP, he instantly noticed and commented on the fact that I had a new computer. He often requests to video-chat over Skype with his godfather and his grandma (and sometimes random people I’ve never heard of). Talking on the mobile is old news, he often instructs me to text people.
To Loe, everything is time-shifted. He’s hardly watched any regular programming at all. After an episode of this years x-mas calendar on Swedish public service broadcasting, he had a very hard time understanding that he couldn’t watch it again, or watch more of it right away, it just wouldn’t compute. If he’s watching something, and I ask him to pause it to do something else, he makes no fuss of this because he knows how pause works, and that it will be there waiting for him when he comes back. He fell instantly in love with Wall-e, a figure as natural to him as a cuddly pet.
Time-shifting is going to be defining for the next generation. They will never consume media on other terms than their own. There will be no broadcasting, only streaming. Live will mean accessing content as it is being made available. They’re unlikely to accept commercial breaks, but will surely be completely enveloped by product placement.
When Loe grows up, everything will be online. The notion of offline, unwired, will be completely foreign. He’ll certainly exist in an Internet of Things.
To me, there wasn’t always mobile phones, and there wasn’t always Internet. To Felix they’ve always been there, but he has still experienced the advent of the social revolution, especially with gaming. Facebook and YouTube are sort of new even to him, as well as time-shifting. Try as I might, I can’t really imagine the things that Loe will consider as novel or new.
I keep wondering – what will awe the next generation?
Over at my favorite Norwegian usability powerhouse Halogen, Kristian Pålshaugen and Jørgen Dalen posted a segment about Internet trends for 2009 (in norwegian). You should read the full post if you can. In summary, they’re predicting;
- Refinement over redesign
- Media institutions surrender the race to be the first to tell and embrace social media services.
- Give me people, not documents – only 10% of organizational knowledge is documented – the rest is in the grey matter of employees.
- Social services that also have professional value
- Conversion becomes the new success criteria for search results, as opposed to just driving visitors.
- The fusion of social media and e-mail
- Core data increasingly available
I have a few ideas of my own, as to what to watch out for next year, and I guess I should do a write-up of them, it seems like the thing to do… I sort of sneak-started talking about it a couple of days ago while ranting about shipping. The gist of that post was;
Online retailers that do their homework set up a kick-ass logistics operations that
- Offer free delivery in reasonable time
- Offer same day delivery and next day delivery at competitive prices
- Advertise their delivery advantages openly
are going to be the big winners next year.
Actually, it’s paved with good intentions, and that’s certainly what Panic had in mind when they added the CTRL+Q shortcut to the lastest version of Coda (OS X). What’s it for? Open Quickly. I don’t even know where to start ranting, but come on, this must be one for the books. After years of chiding Windows for having Shut Down hidden behind Start, you’d think an outfit like Panic (“Shockingly Good Mac Software”) would be clever enough not to go and do that.
Since CMD + Q closes apps, using CTRL + Q for opening things is A Bad Idea, period. It’s also hilarious. I sure would like to hear their rationale for this.
For clarity; I haven’t tried Coda myself. Many people swear by it. I’m sure it’s nice and I will give it a go sometime. I remain ever sceptical though, it seems nothing can one up my all time favorite companion, now defunct, HomeSite.
I’m working on payment patterns for Rebtel, which is quite complex what with their service being available in more than 40 countries. One payment service provider for credit cards is Bibit, and right now their hosted checkout page is used. A minute ago, I was testing the current interaction to find room for improvement (there’s lots of room). I submit the payment form to see what happens. Now I’m privately amused and publicly horrified.
One of the address fields is missing, or contains illegal data
Fail.
Did I accidentally add a scene release screener of Quantum of Solace to one of the fields?
Of course not. Bibit, being a technologically driven company, has left the error feedback in the hands of an overworked programmer, who in his infinite smartness (and being an excellent driver in general) decided that this message was outstanding in its correctness, since it covers many eventualities and uses powerful language. In nerd lingo illegal just means “not the way my code wants it”. Last, but not least, it nicely reflects his internal favorite validation regular expression IllegalDataRe.
Now, I understand what is actually meant, and most other people will too, after a second or two of thinking. But even then there is a problem with the message, because it’s too generic and actually doesn’t tell us what’s wrong.
The big issue here is that Bibit didn’t care. They process millions of payments every day but they’re too lazy to construct their single most important interface in a proper way. The example above is just one of a dozen things wrong with its interaction. It’s not badly designed, it’s not designed at all.
I can’t help but wonder what effect this negligence has on their customers’ bottom line. At any rate, I’m happier now than I was a minute ago because at least I got to rant and have a laugh about it :). What’s your favorite bad checkout or input validation?
When you ask visitors to surrender their e-mail addresses to you, make your case well or you’ll end up with too many duds. You should always provide a clear and immediate benefit to your visitor as to why you need this. If the real answer is “We need it for CRM reasons”, you shouldn’t be asking at all.
Reasons your visitors are less likely object to
- It’s your login name
- We need it if you forget your password
- We need it notify you when other users interact with you
- We need it to send you a receipt of your payment
Of these, the first three allows you to ask for an e-mail address early in your relationship, whilst the fourth is on a need to know basis.
Two Damme Tough
When it comes to validation, it’s far from uncommon to add double fields for e-mail input. The idea is to reduce the risk for typos as visitors type their e-mail address twice, and it probably will catch one or two typos. Now take a moment to consider the other aspects of this pattern.
- Some users will type their e-mail once and then copy & paste it into the second field.
- Autocomplete may have been corrupted with a bad address and will Autofail with misspelled address in both fields (this is usually a transient problem but also the cause for much chagrin until diagnosed).
- Some Users simply have their e-mail address wrong in their heads.
- It’s One More Field to be completed before the visitor can move on to what they’re actually after. One more obstacle on the path to instant gratification.
How to validate properly
First of all; Make sure your developers are happy and rested. Secondly, Don’t let anyone waste their time on defining the perfect e-mail validation regular expression – according to RFC 2822, almost anything is a valid address. Read this post if you’re curious for more.
Instead, do this;
Validate the domain part of the e-mail address by making sure there are MX records configured for the domain. This won’t ensure the validity of the recipient, but chances improve drastically. You can take it even further, and basically query the actual mail server if will accept an e-mail for a specific alias. There are several companies that offer this as a service.
Challenge-response confirmation
This is very common, especially when using e-mail addresses as usernames. You send an e-mail, and the user confirms their control of said address by clicking the link in the e-mail or copy-pasting the unique token into a form on your website.
The pattern sometimes fails and common culprits include spam-filters and network congestion. Challege-response confirmation is relatively onerous to your users and requires patience from both parties. Again, there should be a clear reason and obvious benefit to the user for this to be viable.
Feedback confirmation
Sooner or later, collected addresses are going to be used. The feedback from this should be taken into account. A bounce could void previous positive confirmation and the user will be asked to revalidate, or the address simply marked. LinkedIn does this well in theory; If an e-mail sent to my primary address bounces, they’ll e-mail all my secondary ones telling me about it and also asking me to revalidate. In practice however, it’s not very cool – they’ve asked me to revalidate approximately twice every month for some time now, and I’m quite sure my address has been operational throughout.
If you’re going to take one thing away from this post
You can ask for and collect virtually any information, as long as you provide a clear reason and obvious benefit for the user.
Jag jobbar med användbarhet, ofta som konsult. Jag är också en av grundarna till Underskrift.se där alla kan underteckna dokument elektroniskt. På fritiden gillar jag att springa riktigt, riktigt långt.
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