Ad-overkill ruins ITV player UX

I was delighted to see Econsultancy pulling up the ITV Player for its overuse of frankly irrelevant and inappropriate pre-roll advertising. In this day and age, I would expect an organisation of the size and heritage of ITV to have a far better grasp of both technology and user experience, but it seems that the need to drive advertising revenues has overshadowed the fundamentals of providing an engaging experience for second-screen audiences.

Bringing online & offline together

Last week I wrote an article for the Tech Notes column in The Journal giving one tiny example of how marketers can unite their online and offline activities to create a single seamless user experience. This is a fascinating topic for me, and something that keeps me up at night scribbling in my Moleskine, so it was great to share a couple of ideas...

An iterative approach to UX design

So all great web design projects start out with that spark of unbridled genius. You're so convinced that your latest inspiration will be the answer to all your marketing prayers that you funnel your budget into it with gusto.

You spend weeks with a reassuringly expensive design consultant sculpting the perfect user experience from top to bottom, safe in the knowledge that it'll work. You're not sure how, but it will.

You share your vision with stakeholders who make enthusiastic noises, and push the project eagerly into production. After months of development, the finished site is unveiled to your waiting public. Then nothing happens.

Flash is far from dead, but it's got serious competition

One of our Riff Raff UI Developers, @byrichardpowell introduced me to rumpetroll.com this morning; An engaging and extremely unusual web chat experience created entirely with HTML5, Javascript and CSS3.

UX: Getting the climax right

Finding the right tones of voice

In marketing, we often hear the phrase "Tone of Voice" used to describe how a brand communicates with its audience. It's usually used as a way of defining the character of a brand in written or spoken language, and expressed as a combination of simple adjectives like "authoritative", "approachable" and "informal", and there is often only a single tone of voice dominating the entire space. But in these days of sophisticated customer experience, we need to be a little smarter about how we define our Tones of Voice (yes, plural) to communicate a more targeted message.

Web design & development jobs in the North East

We're looking for a PHP Developer, User Experience Designer and Technical Project Manager to join our growing interactive team, designing and developing scalable websites and web applications for a range of clients across the UK, covering everything from bespoke E-commerce and Content Management Solutions to Social Networking and On-demand TV Platforms across desktop, set-top and mobile devices.

Project Canvas: Project Clunky

I was privileged to be a part of the Future Tech 2010 Conference in Media City, Salford on Wednesday, surrounded by a broad cross-section of digital media and technology types, exploring the exciting new projects and initiatives launching across the North West over the next 12 months.

Should-be iPhone Killer

Technology just doesn't last like it used to. Take my iPhone 3GS for example; it's less than 18 months old and already it's a doorstop. Upgrading to the latest iOS pretty much ground it to a halt.

Trying to send a quick text message this morning, it took 21 seconds for the keyboard to open! I'm no Scrooge McDuck, but I would have expected such an expensive gadget to have lasted a little longer. Paying premium money for disposable goods just isn't on, so I'm looking elsewhere for my touchscreen fix.

Touchscreen vs Mouse

Mashable are running a poll to find out which user input device is most popular: Touchscreen or Mouse. When I posted my vote the mouse was blazing ahead, which seemed a little ironic to me.

Augmented Reality on Bing Maps

PokerStars online TV portal goes live

Almost a year in the making, from initial planning to final delivery, PokerStars.tv 2.0 was finally unleashed on a hungry public this week, raising the bar for online poker experiences the world over.

Those clever folks at Microsoft have done it again! (no, really)

Yes, that's one 'C' word I never thought I'd use to describe the company who brought us Vista, but whilst leaving the office juniors to plot the next thrilling episode of Internet Explorer, Microsoft have been beavering away on something I find genuinely exciting.

Chris Harrison, Dan Morris and Desney Tan, of Microsoft Research have come up with Skinput, a bio-accoustic sensing technology that allows the human skin to act as an input device.

Still in early prototype, an armband detects the subtle differences in sound frequencies caused when tapping various parts of your body to locate the impact, making it possible to determine which button was pressed. Wireless Bluetooth technology is then used to transmit this data to other devices, such as iPods and mobile phones. Absolute genius!

While Apple makes yesterday's technology palatable for the masses, Microsoft seem to be really pushing the boundaries of HCI with experimental technologies like this, Surface and Project Natal.

As a developer and designer whose career has been blighted by Explorer's buggy, downright anarchic interpretation of my work, I find it almost uncomfortable to say it, but maybe Microsoft is onto something here!

The Paradox of Innovative User Experience

As a User Experience designer, I face an impossible catch-22 on a daily basis. On one hand, I have an obligation to my stockholders and clients to create experiences that actually, genuinely work. Every time I craft a proposal, I commit myself indelibly to the delivery of a piece of work that will generate more revenue, attract more targeted traffic or increase social engagement with a brand.

All of these things are now easily measurable, and UX designers are just as accountable for their design decisions as any conventional architect or engineer. Design is no longer shrouded in mystery. It is no longer a black art, understood only by the sacred few. Everything I do, I do for a reason, and my design decisions are based on a careful balance of knowledge, experience, fact and a little educated assumption.

On the other hand, what makes me attractive to my potential clients is something very different. Most people require effective design in order to deliver a ROI that justifies the risk, but what they desire is something better; something different. Something innovative.

And herein lies the conflict. To design something that consumers can use so easily that it feels natural to them, removing any barriers to conversion or engagement, means engineering something that is inherently easy to use; something intuitive. Jeff Raskin defined the word beautifully in his (still valid) 1994 paper Intuitive Equals Familiar:

"Intuitive [equals] readily transferred, existing skills."

For those who can't be bothered to read the whole paper (and I recommend you make the effort), Raskin defines intuitive as the ability to use an interface without having to learn anything new. Familiarity creates intuition, enabling an end-user to immediately adopt an interface without further research or training. But innovation, by its very definition, demands the creation of something new and experimental. If that's the case, how on Earth do we innovate in intuitive user experience design? How do we create an interface that is both unconventional and familiar, all at the same time?

When put like that, it sounds like an impossible task, and I'm sure there are many UX designers who are happy to hide behind this conflict, as justification for remaining within their comfort zone. But you only have to look at some of the big innovators in technology today to see how this can be achieved.

Until recently, the conventional means of utilising mobile phone software was via a keypad and joystick of some description. This was the case for almost a decade (it may be longer - mobile historians, please correct me) until Apple released the iPhone in 2007, changing the face of interaction design forever. With the iPhone, Apple had created a truly ground-breaking user interface, whilst making it more intuitive than ever before, by rejecting current mobile conventions, and instead mimicking the way we interact with real-life objects.

We naturally prod things, we pinch and squeeze them, and slide them around to reposition. We don't naturally do these things via a proxy, such as a mouse, joystick or keyboard. These input devices are relatively new to our consciousness, and have been adapted-to over a long period of time. Multi-touch technology has allowed us to revert to a more direct interaction with the objects we see on screen, effectively removing technology (psychologically, at least) from the equation altogether, and putting the power back into our fingertips where it belongs.

So what can we learn from the iPhone? The lesson I take from this is that in order to innovate in the field of user experience, without sacrificing effectiveness through lack of intuition, we must first look at how our current understanding of the world has been constructed. Only when we can separate truly intuitive behaviour from acquired constructs, can we begin to design interactive solutions that revolve around what makes us human. And with the almost sci-fi advances in 3D tactile touchscreen and voice recognition technologies over the last few years, we're coming closer than ever to that eutopia.