Personas are useless. OK there I’ve said it. I’ve made a strong, dare I say “controversial”, statement. How useless are they? Well that’s another matter. There is a modicum of utility to them if a designer never gives much thought to who’s on the other side of the of the screen when creating new products. After all, human understanding is the currency we deal in. It is empathy we need, that is what connects us as humans, one to another. Personas are not a necessary means to empathy and can quite often be the heavy mallet that shatters the fragile subtitles that enrich human experience.
Personas are so very correctly referred to as a tool. Some tools prove useful and stand the test of time and some tools turn out not to live up to their promise and should be discarded. The endemic problem are not the personas themselves but rather it’s the designer wielding them. See, we humans are pretty clever and despite the old saying that you “can’t fit a square peg into a round hole”, we can. We can as long as we have the right tool.
Big news with the announcement of Google TV at Google I/O. This is a huge leap forward and actually brings the term interactive television closer to the expectation of it’s namesake. For a long time “interactive” with regard to television has been limited to basic playback controls, content streams, advertisements, SMS votes and other lower level transactions that pass for interaction, but really don’t make it “interactive” in the sense we’ve long had the appetite and aptitude for.
Armed with Googles massive library of API’s and android’s extensive open source penetration, this thing is gonna take the world by storm. Integration with phones, offers the opportunity to split the same TV ‘event’ experience across multiple users within a single context (ex. the living room). I with my phone, you with yours, in the same room can dually mediate a shared experience. Not augmented via telepresence like parallel play but colocation, actual you-me-now socializing. More like a video game, but entirely different. Most often, video games provide agency within a narrative. A compelling method, no doubt, but Google TV is poised to offer a different sort of communal screen based activity, more group collaboration.
Clicker.tv just launched a 10ft UI version of their aggregation service and I’ve had the time to give it a spin so I thought I would pass on my initial reactions. I realize that it’s in ‘beta’ (the infernal excuse for not doing it right) but there were quite a few points of friction for me.
First things first, this is fast! Wow. It’s an HTML 5 front end that really moves but unfortunately it seems a bit for show (or at least premature) since all of the actual content is served by non-HTML 5 providers (will return to this topic). Despite that, I’m willing to give them credit on this point and will chalk it up to ‘looking ahead’. Its UDLR (Up/Down/Left/Right on a keyboard or remote) optimized interface is swift and agile. Even after using it for an extended time I was still impressed by the performance.
An interesting topic came up today that I’ve had pause to consider on a number of occasions, but one I’ve never done a deep dive on. I’m not sure how deep this dive will be either, but wanted to at least lay the groundwork for some future thinking.
The topic focuses on virtual versus physical media ownership, and specifically the newer streaming model of consumption. Media like photos, music, movies, and video games are all available digitally without the need to occupy actual three dimensional space, on a desks, a shelf, or a living/work spaces. Traditionally all of these items have had a physical component the most recent of which has been the Digital Disk (CD/DVD) complete with jewel case, printed cover art, and bonus added features.
The shift from CDs to MP3s (probably one of the more accepted means of digital ownership) allowed for the transfiguration of physical artifacts into digital ones, thus expanding the physical space allocation of owned content. What was once on CD is now also on a hard drive. The digital version is then capable of being further duplicated onto various devices in an ever expanding footprint of ownership. DVDs have this ability as well, but the DRM (digital rights management) and space requirements often make this a far less likely outcome. The pure MP3 download (i.e. without a CD) has become ubiquitous thanks to iTunes and Amazon MP3 but even then a footprint is felt, occupying a bit of real world hardware space.
I complain about ‘apps’. I complain about apps, a lot. I am of the opinion that there is more hype to 80% them than long term utility. But gripes with ‘apps’ is an entirely differnt post. This time I want to highlight an ‘app’ done right. This one was built for the Ipad and designed to pair with a Comcast Xfinity box and came to my attention today after griping about another cable provider’s new set-top-box UI (see previous post).
I believe that a cable set-top-box is capable of a more interesting browsing experience than the Trio UI that has been recently announced from Cox Cable. In fact, I’m sure of it.
In case you are unaware, there are many limitations that come with developing engaging user experiences on devices like set-top-boxes because of limited storage and chipset capabilities. They’re really, really, dumb machines compared to how we are used to consuming media in our broadband world. They’re nothing like desktop computers or cell phones. But technical constraints are no excuse for poor design implementations. Some amazingly creative ideas have emerged despite severe limits. In partnership with frog design the Trio UI is being baked into Cox Cable’s latest hardware offering. The new design takes advantage of the wider 16:9 format of today’s TV sets by offering three panes (Trio, get it) that function as a cascading menu. I want to spend some time unpacking my grudges with it because it bothers me too much to ignore. I will be ignoring the outdated graphics and ‘borrowed’ navigation highlight bar care of TiVo. I’m really sticking to the Trio UI as a poor choice for an optimal multi channel browsing experience on the television.
So I’ve updated the gutz of speak.illations.com in order to make life a whole lot easier on me. I’ve been an absolutely terrible poster to the site, but I’m determined to make that change so here’s a start with a brand new relaunch. It’s nothing custom, word press back end and a prefab theme with a minimum of customizations. I wanted to keep it dirt simple focusing on the content more than the design of the blog so here’s to the relaunch and new thoughts.
I may repost a couple of older thoughts if any strike me as interesting, but I’d prefer to look ahead to new ideas
