At the convergence of improved lightweight operating systems, lower cost yet higher powered hardware, high quality streaming media and consumer hunger for content based technology, more and more televisions are turning into “Smart TVs.” We designers are constantly in the spotlight walking the tightrope of good user experience. One end of the rope is tied to the project inception and the other to post launch feedback and as the gravity of competing priorities pulls ever harder, we teeter, sway, and stumble along trying to balance the best interactive experience across the span. In this emergent phase of Smart TV technology, we must take well considered steps forward lest we carelessly and overconfidently miss the rope, lose our balance and tumble, head over heels, toward the unforgiving ground below.

Inevitably, there are birth pangs with any new and developing product opportunity. When attempting to whet developer curiosities and interest in building applications for Smart TVs we must do so with caution. Caution not because of anything inherently wrong with applications on the television, in fact there is an exciting world of possibilities ahead of us as technology and creative development continue to converge in the living room. The caution is against taking what seems to be the “sensible”  path of moving an existing phone or tablet application to a television. While this seems like a quite logical product strategy, it isn’t. It isn’t, because of the unique history and attributes of the television set in the home and our understanding of our relationship with it.

Let’s have a look at a successful app strategy to date. Twitter’s 140 character message stream-of-internet-consciousness began as a website. Then as the iPhone and ITunes App Store offered expansion, the rush was on to port the existing web experience into the more coveted “app” status. Get the shiny icon presence in the App Store, get more loyalists. Downloads, reviews and updates keep a tight feedback loop between provider and consumer it’s a win-win for company and consumer. Then comes the tablet. Again, all hands on deck to get a tablet version of the phone app launched ASAP. Bigger form factor, more screen real estate, more control and display options for the user without the tiny phone sized screen constraints. The process was repeated outside of the Apple ecosystem as well bringing Android and Blackberry users into the Twitter App fold as well. One last point to mention is that somewhere between website and app is the Twitter mobile site where all the remaining internet connected but non-app capable phones can feel all the love that Twitter community has to offer.

This pattern has largely been repeated by every social, e-commerce, content, and service brand on the internet with greater or lesser success. Additionally, there is another segment of developers and businesses that skipped step one altogether (having a website) and simply went straight to the app business. A recent survey noted that the iTunes App Store has over half a million apps and the Android Market over two hundred thousand and climbing. With so many successes and a bright future ahead for apps, why should we as user experience designers proceed with caution when taking the next step into the living room? Glad you asked.

The number one reason for this caution is that the Smart Phone is a completely different ‘thing’ than the Smart TV. The Smart Phone is the little brother of the PC. A smaller, more portable multi tasking device. Born of a phone, the “Smart” stuff (ie SMS, camera and photos, mp3 playback, email, web browsing, and apps) filled up all of the unused time that was hanging out in your pocket with the little plastic brick you were forced to carry around with you until you needed to reach out and touch someone. The “phone” part of today’s devices has easily taken a backseat to the “Smart” stuff because the nature of a phone device is largely that of standby, rather than active. On the other hand, a television is an active continuous stream of content.

The second reason for caution is that like its big sister the PC, Smart Phones are individualized devices. In fact, I would argue the Smart Phone is the most personal device in human history. Computers are shared in many environments, the workplace, hotels, schools and libraries are the most obvious cases and users have become familiar with the necessary “log out” and privacy needs of this sort of multi-user environment, but even in the home there are multiple users on a single computer which makes account switching necessary for everything from OS settings to email accounts. To the contrary, a phone is a “my device,” not an “our device.” I may let others use my phone but they have to be members of a very trusted inner circle. Given the quantity of private and personalized data on today’s Smart Phone, the act of asking to borrow someone’s phone is about as socially uncomfortable as asking to browse through their wallet. Smart Phones and more specifically Apps to date are very aware of this hyper-individualization and often go to great lengths to optimize for ease of personalization, with cross app sign-on,  syncing, ewallet functionality, etc., etc. I never question when I pull up an email reader on my phone whose account it is and in fact, it’s very rare for anyone to sign out of an account on a Smart Phone, even more rare (and odd) for someone else to check his email on your phone. The Smart Phone and its apps have conditioned users to think of them as a cadre of personalized information distributors and collectors that act as their passport to the digital world. To be continued…

Is that because design is currently a fad? Is it a concept to commoditize as a bullet point in boardroom PowerPoint presentations? Or is it because the business side of the room feels that design is something they understand and therefore can manage? I think that the answer is probably “both” but, in the interest of change, the latter has a greater ability to influence and change while actually bolstering the former.

Software development is a mystery. It uses strange terms, lots of computations and foreign languages. Developers deal in alien algorithmic alchemy and produce functioning products that can distributed and commoditized. Designers, they make things look good. Right? Business people know what looks good, so it’s a no brainer. VPs and C-Level execs assume that they “get it” when it comes to design. Sure, sometimes they do. However, it’s not a given. There is no design training in an MBA program yet frequently the most senior roles that marshall the design teams in technology based organizations desire MBA qualifications, not MS (HCI) or MFA.

I frequently like to use cooking as an analogy to design and even more so to “big D” Design. There is a wide chasm between a cook and a Chef. They both work in a kitchen, with the same tools, in a service capacity. Yes, they can both make good (or bad) food, but there the similarities end. Cooks are line workers with a set of technical and mechanical skills sought after to be the best repeaters of a process that they can be. A Chef is the one who creates the process, the recipes, the methods, the timing, the styling, the sourcing. In short, a Chef is a repository of knowledge, skill, and experience that contribute to producing new and exciting points of view on food and eating that help customers experience joy. The most successful even extend their sensibilities out of the kitchen and into the front of the house becoming restauranteurs. This is an extension of their point of view, their integrity, their passion, and their mountain of experience, and that’s ultimately what customer’s pay for.

Here’s the thing. Just because I like to eat good food, it doesn’t mean that I should tell a cook how to make an omelette or better yet, a Chef how to run a kitchen. Even if I’m really smart, even if I have a track record of successfully managing teams, even if I have an MBA, I still have a zero percent chance in the kitchen next to a Chef. Sure I can apprentice and work my way up like everyone else and someday after years of trail and error, training, exposure, and effort become a Chef with my own point of view, but I can’t reasonably assert myself as an authority on the kitchen because I like to eat good food

Now back to design.

There are those designers that make a living out of being amazing (and yes terrible) production technicians who are masters of creative applications, documentation, and the production pipeline. Likewise, there are those Designers who compound their technical proficiencies with abductive thinking and broad exposure to methods, philosophies, synthesis, and abstraction in relentless pursuit of the whys to compliment the hows. These Designers are able to synthesize multiple inputs and offer a point of view that is more art than science. These skills take time and experience and are hard won through many successes and failures. This is the type of leader a truly Design forward company needs to be sitting at the table on equal footing with product, technology and marketing. Instead, too many organizations hope to hire great production ‘cooks’ to be directed by their business and product leads.

It’s my challenge to all companies – dominant or emerging – that want to talk about their commitment to design to allow Design to lead it’s own resources. By appointing a Chief Design Officer or a VP of Experience and bestowing upon them the authority to slip a launch if the product isn’t up to par, or refuse a release that doesn’t meet customer needs, or even insist on creating products that are built from the ground up to resonate meaning with users, a company can truly show the market how Design forward it is. I’m confident that the types of products and services produced could change the world while helping profits to soar (by Design).

About a month ago I started ranting on my issues with App-madness and today I see that YouTube was listening.

Ok, so I can’t take the credit but I feel so very vindicated that Google/YouTube is doing some of the right thinking. The new mobile version of YouTube is great and there is nothing that app offers that would make me want to have it instead.

Ars Technica has done a review with some screen caps. Here’s to a whole new era of thinking with the hopes that we’ll be seeing more of such implementations soon and less of useless web appropriate apps.

The frame has probably seen the most dramatic shift from formalistic device to expressive canvass with maturation of the comic book artists who have harnessed the frame and the space around it to create dramatic and compelling visual narratives. Scott McCloud did a thoughtful analysis of comic book’s frame and gutter back in his 1993 groundbreaker Understanding Comics. I’ve read the book a few times since ’93 and this notion of the space between the frames has hit me as an obvious antecedent to “away times” of digital content experiences that shift in time, context, and form.

As with comic books, my interest in rethinking the digital frame sill respects the time element but is now an interval of pause rather than shift of temporal movement. A freeze frame. Granted, when re-engaging the experience time has passed, but the user has also moved through time and most likely (more interestingly?) into a different context. How does that effect the experience? How can designers manipulate and reinterpret that transition.

Frames of digital experience can be thought of as multiple small boxes within a larger box that encompasses them all (the “big-E” Experience). There’s a big facebook mother ship out there blocking the horizon of the internet with it’s girth, but I experience it in a short intervals of 5 minutes, within the frame of my little profile in a web browser, on a computer screen. The behemoth on the horizon is where the digital gutter exists and is exponentially bigger both temporally and spatially than the moments of experience themselves. In another example, I may consume 2 gigs of data in an hour of daily video consumption but there are practically unlimited gigs of data available twenty four hours a day. In fact on youtube alone,”it is estimated that 24 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute.” No user could possibly consume that amount of data, nor have I heard of anyone that wants to. Nonetheless it’s there, in the gutters.

That’s how I’m thinking about the “big-E” digital gutter, but now what about those more personalized “in-between” digital gutter moments. From starting a new TV episode on my computer during my lunch break, to catching a few more minutes on my mobile during the bus ride home, and then finishing it up after dinner in my living room on my television. I can understand the experience to be contiguous despite the very obvious frames and gutters, but at the end of the show, they’re somehow closer together, more seamless.

What’s more, the system is self aware enough to know which of the various frames (computer, mobile, TV) are active and roughly cognizant of who is viewing them and when. So how should/can those frames adapt? And what about those gutters? Right now we mostly assume the world inside the frame remains still until we re-animate it by looking through the frame once more. This often is not the case and certainly shouldn’t be. How can we as experience designers best take advantage of this opportunity? Updates are the most obvious, like email or wall posts when I have something new or a status has changed the system should reflect that, but what other opportunities are there for engagement or enhancement? It’s intensely interesting and rife with possibilities.

There’s so much room to explore what happens during the gutter-time and in understanding how the experience changes in light of the transition. With video on-demand experiences both the frame the gutter time can very greatly in duration and frequency from day-to-day, month-to-month, and user-to-user as well as device to device and I’m certain there are interesting ways in which to explore those gutters and many untapped opportunities for exciting experience innovations. It’s time we experience designers take some cues from our comic book artist cousins and begin getting creative with the frames and the gutters in the interest of more engaging experiential narratives.

My intention however is not to post a diatribe against Apple. In fact, Apple is not alone in this practice. Every emergent OS followed suit and created a store/market/whatever where end users and developers alike are wrangled into a proprietary and unavoidable little niche of the digital landscape. Why wouldn’t they? Given Apple’s success with iTunes and the App Store it’s been a tried and true strategy that has been copied by the likes of Google and Palm with their mobile OSes in hopes of fostering the same sort of brand eco-system and ultimately consumer loyalty (i.e. big money). This post is not against Apple alone, but I will heap my comments upon them as they started this whole mess.

Apps tend to break down into three main types – games, productivity, and consumption (such as shopping, news feeds, streaming media, etc). A good case can be made for developing the first two categories as native applications and are generally what we’re familiar with when we think of software on our computers. The third category on the other hand has typically been the purview of websites. Amazon.com, nytimes.com, youtube.com and all the other websites we’re used to browsing are all undergoing this alchemic transmutation into Apps. Why?

Some proponents will argue that having a presence in the “App Store” – which by the way, Apple has claimed is a trademarked nomenclature – and a shiny icon are reason enough. From a brand perspective, they want to represent. Others will cite that the speed of native Apps makes a noticeable difference in the experience. I find these reasons to be uninspired at best and at worst contributing to the App mentality. According to Wikipedia, there are at least 225,000+ third party applications officially available on the App Store. With an ever growing number it seems like irrelevancy is a more likely outcome, particularly if as a company, you already have a loyal web based audience.

I think that a viable case can be made for most games and productivity applications to remain as is, so they are excused, but all of the applications in the third category keep bugging me. This third category of media consumption and consumer behavior has no business being an application. It makes no little for consumers and no sense for creators. With the technologies that are currently out on the web (even excluding Flash – thanks again Apple) we as creators are more than capable of doing so very very much without an App. Why would any company make an App that repurposes their website rather than creating a mobile version of their site?

A competent mobile version of any consumption based website allows the content/product providers to break free of the Apple imposed App shackles. The web and web browsers are still free. Unless your business is flash based there is every reason to create a mobile website versus a mobile application. All the benefits of a website versus all the downfalls of a native application. There are no device limitations. No percentage of sales owed to Apple. On the web, it doesn’t matter if your customers are browsing from an iPhone, a Nexus One, or a Pre. Your site just works. Not only does it work, but if users are already existing customers, then they already have an account, login and preferences. From a development perspective, websites are updated immediately across all users instead of being dependent on users to download updates and maintain the App themselves. Small improvements in real time are quick and easy. No need to depend on long development cycles and incremental releases that your users may or may not install.

So with all that in mind, why the hell did Apps become so damn cool? Well, they were new, right? Consumers and marketers alike flock to new things. Particularly when those new things come from Apple. But, surprise! They’re not new. The reality is that “Apps” is short for applications, a.k.a. software. Yes that stuff we’ve been buying and installing on our computers forever. Now you may say, of course I know that. But just the same, the world at large acts as if Apps are some sort of new found Apple stroke of marketing genius. Ironically it is, but only in the sense of lining Apple’s coffers and establishing magisterial oversight. The only thing new about Apps is new found willingness to relinquishing control.

We’ve never had to go to an OS’s proprietary ‘store’ in order to buy or install software on our computers. On the consumer front, we’ve never been forced to shop at a ‘store’ where the maker of the OS gets to dictate what type of software is appropriate for our computers. Likewise, as creators and developers of new software we’ve never had to get approval at the corporate OS level in order to distribute our wares. It’s always been a free market. When and why did this shift happen so silently? Imagine if Microsoft had tried that twenty years ago. My hunch is that Apple is too cool to argue with. Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive successfully established Apple as a company that is literally too cool, too well designed to be wrong. And we as consumers have bought into that authority rather that relying on our own reasonable senses. So we just keep looking up on the pedestal to our brushed aluminum deity for guidance. And since we’re always looking up there, other companies like Google and Palm can’t help but look up too.

So here’s the thing. I’d love to see more and more companies expend the same amount of time care and focus on their mobile website offerings as they do with their Apps. I bet there is all sorts of novel and creative ways in which a website can deliver engaging experiences on a handheld device. It would be so much better for developers and users alike. Games and productivity are more than enough to keep the AApppp world raging and I’ve seen some really interesting uses of them in intensely inspiring ways, mostly in the category of just plain fun for games and for productivity, some great thinking around augmenting the physical experience with technology. I hoping that the dust around the ‘new’ concept of Apps is starting to settle and we’ll soon see developers and marketers making smarter decisions in these areas, but I can’t say I’m 100% confident now that the iPad and GoogleTV are poised to begin another outbreak of App-madness…

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.

There is a long standing tradition of this in literary criticism and especially religion. Don’t believe me just get a priest, a rabbi and an imam in a room and ask for a better understanding of any ‘persona’ in their common texts. Oh yes, you’ll be amazed how well each can reconcile the text with their dogma. It’s the same personalities manipulated through a rainbow of intentions, motivations, cause, effects, desires, dreams, goals and purposes. Most often the outcomes are highly disparate and rarely do they agree (there’s even a ton of inter-deonomiational debate across the their respective strata). But it’s the same text, the same persona, so how could there be so many differences?

That’s just it. We humans are awesome at interpretation. And we love to interpret based on our own needs, goals, hopes, intentions, etc. So when throw personas into the mix of our own goals of creating a successful design, guess what, when the peg doesn’t fit, we make it fit. Conversely, when the developer or the PM has a competing goal, they can make that peg fit too because they can figure out how to use the tool too. I mean it, we’re really good at making connections and convincing ourselves of how right we are (especially when useful to serving our needs).

I’ve had experiences where I resorted to personas in order to assist in a difficult product development process because there were multiple points of view all competing for influence on the design decisions. I turned to the persona tool for a better ‘objective’ understanding of the user and guidance in our process. Unfortunately, the personas did nothing to quell the internal debate and instead offered more fuel to the fire as all sides used the tool and shaped their pegs quite nicely. We were left more entrenched in our perspectives than when we started because the personas validated all of us.

There is a very real place for designers. As competent professionals, it is our task to develop empathy at a reflexive level. Like a photographer’s sensitivities to the subtle interactions of light and shadow and a musician’s perception for complex interplay between rhythm and harmony, empathy is a skill that must be practiced, again and again, until it is internalized and able to be summoned at will. Empathy is a far more effective tool in our design arsenal than personas. Some designers are gifted with a natural aptitude and need to hone it it, others must work hard to achieve it with every new challenge. As with any tool, skill comes with time, experience, wins and losses but choosing the right tool for the job is critical step towards success.

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.

TV has the cool notion of being an event (broadcast at pre-determined date and time) that causes viewers to gather, but we’ve traditionally done that passively, quietly, as we observe. That’s begun to change with more and more laptop computers and smartphones in the living room but now we can tie them all together. So now we have the very close network of individuals in a room, the extended person to person networks of our lives, the larger network of viewers of events, and the wide networks of the internet itself, all overlapping, digitally connected and participating around events. That’s massive. When we begin multiplying that by all the possible virtual connections and personal networks and media producers and media consumers and devices, the exponent is immense.

I can’t wait to see what happens when imaginations start taking over and we see (and help make) a new wave of applications that explore the new found wings of interactive television in what Google TV is promising to deliver.

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.

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.

The first virtual completely digital model was in downloadable versions of media which still afforded a sense of physical artifact because of the “space” they occupied on physical storage devices (ex. hard drive), but what about the more lightweight streaming media that faster bit rates have allowed. These items reside in “the cloud” and have a vaporous presence on screen only during the consumption period. When purchasing streaming media content ownership is permanent, but there is no artifact to comfort me about this transaction. Effectively a license to view ad nauseam has been purchased, but there is no physical entity to show for the money spent – only the promise of digital bits on a screen, stored somewhere else at the ready for when I push play.

There is a quite natural fit with both video rental and on-demand subscription type arrangements that differ from the full purchase scenario. With both rental and subscription models, there is already a sense of impermanence. Temporary access to items during a pre-arranged window of time and for a pre-arranged duration. Even in the physical world, when a video is rented from a local video store there is an expressed acknowledgement that the item will be returned and thus there is no thought that the renter will retain anything after the rental period has expired. The only take away is the experience of consuming the media.

Digital books are another aspect of this consideration that is growing with the continued popularity of the Kindle. This model is like the MP3 one made popular by iTunes and the iPod, requiring an initial purchase of a physical device that is contextually specific to the consumption experience and thus satisfies the need for an relational object. What about purchased e-book content that can be read on any device that supports the Kindle app (divorced from the device) such as a PC, an iPhone, or now the iPad? Is the satisfaction less palpable without the physical artifact for reassurance? The Kindle seems to be a sparkle of success outside the large shadow of the iPod in transitioning the popular mindset from physical to digital and hopefully both will help guide the popular thinking on the matter.

A big difference between the all of Apple’s “iThings”, the Amazon Kindle, and streaming media in general is that streaming media requires a constant connection to access owned content up in the cloud whereas the others store content locally. The increasing connectivity of the world around us with large data pipelines, Wi-Fi. and 4G renders this need less and less a concern, but it is palpable nonetheless as one can be (often intentionally) disconnected… and then what? Even after truly ubiquitous high speed connections are possible, there is still an understanding and acceptance that needs to be acquired for this sort of arrangement.

Like all new ideas there are pros and cons to the streaming model. For one thing, not having to endure or skip through the ever increasing amount of advertisements and previews that precede the main menu of today’s DVDs is absolutely refreshing. With streaming video a viewer selects a video to watch and it begins playing that video, nothing else. It’s simple, it’s direct and it’s pleasing. A downside however is given the ups and downs of internet connections these days, one is never quite guaranteed a high quality viewing experience. All too often HD content is downgraded to SD quality due to network traffic fluctuations. That’s never a problem with a DVD and even with today’s high speed internet, full HD streaming (1080p) resolution remains a thing of the future.

Considering all of this, I ask myself if I am as comfortable with the intangible as I am the tangible? My logical side says “yes”, but my purchasing habits say differently. I want to better understand this dynamic because I think that there is an essential notion that is in transition inside the minds of consumers given the changing world of technology and media around us. Personally, I love the endless flexibility of the purely digital. Tagging, organizing, searching, bookmarking, syncing, filtering and I will never have to buy shelves again, no matter how large my library gets. At the same time, there is a more comfortable sense of acquisition and ownership when I unwrap a new DVD and insert it on my library shelf, moving all other titles down to allow it a rightful place in the world. But the digital version is simply an thumbnail image on a screen. Why does that somehow feel less real?