Previously, iTunes media transfert was either a full sync, meaning you had first to put songs in a playlist then tell iTunes to sync it with the phone, or a full manual process, where you could drag and drop files, but would loose the power of using the sync options defined.

It is now possible to simply drag and drop songs from the iTunes list to the iPhone icon, which which prompt iTunes to immediately transfer these songs to your device.

iTunes 10 will list those songs under a new “Manually Added Songs”  group in the “Music” tab of its iPhone settings.

This new feature allow the best of both modes: full sync while still allowing immediate media transfer on demand. Sweet.

See it the new iPhone sync music settings screen on this screenshot.

PS. I discovered this by chance, and I can’t understand why Apples doesn’t announce such new features somewhere in their release notes.

Sponsored categories ask for example how to provide a demonstration on how a sponsor’s product / API can be used. For example “Best BBC. com hack”, or “Best Lonely planet hack”. There are also general categories “Best use of WebApp/widget”, “Best hardware hack”, and the weirdly phrased “Best User Experience / Service Design”.

Sounds cool? Yeah, kind of. But to me such competitions, hackday or hackathon tend to encourage the worse of the typical developer mindset, which is often antinomic to delivering a good UX.

Developer are gods

Developers have advanced skills that allow them to give life to applications: before their work there was nothing, and once they are done, there is something that works. They have the ability, unlike graphic designer or UX people, to create a functioning application on their own. This god-like power on software should not be underestimated.

But the issue is that too often, developer think that the important issue, no, the only important issue, is one of functionality. So the first thing they do when starting a project is jumping on their code editor, and when they manage to have the key functionality part working, they think the application is mostly done, only lacking a superficial layer of polish.

UX is more a differentiating factor than functionality.

This is what this kind of hackaton encourage: the idea that the basic functionality is the most important thing. Well this can very well be true if you are curing diseases, but in the world of software, there is a very strong chance that a competitor proposes or will soon propose the same core functionality. What will really make one product successful over another is its user experience. And you simply can not create a good UX in a day or two.

A frequent developer misconception

This is what Alan Cooper describes in “The inmates are runing the Asylum”) as the “dancing bear” phenomenon, typical of a developer driven mindset: too much focus is on solving a functional problem (“making a bear dance”). No time is spent thinking how to make it dance better, or even why it should be made to dance at all.

This remind me of the time some developer complained about the Siteoverflow.com website, and despised it saying basically he could redo the full site in a weekend. I recommend you read the full reply from Stack Overflow’s Benjamin Pollack, it is well really worth it. The gist of it: there is more than meet the (developer’s) eyes, and by seeing only how to solve the basic functional problem, you ignore all the refinement that make the site actually enjoyable to use, and ultimately successful over its competitors.

Another good insight is Brent Simmons’s “Anatomy of a feature”, where he discusses the inclusion of the “Send to instapaper” command in his RSS reader NetNewsWire. This is another post that was written to placate to developer comments saying “Oh, it’s easy, just a quick http call. I could write a script to do it in like 20 seconds.”
Except implanting this feature involve making a very long list on hard decision on how precisely this feature should work. A menu item? An Icon? How / when does it syncs?…
Eventually, the devil is in the details of the interaction design which end up taking much much more time than solving the basic technical issue.

And neither of those two cases seems to be doing any real User Centered Design, so they risk building their product for themselves instead of for the actual target users. A proper UCD process would have lasted very much longer than the time it took the developer to solve the main technical issue. But it would also deliver a better product, that delight its users.¹

Boys will be boys, and developers will be developers.

Is it an issue that developers love to take part in hackathon, or like to code something just for fun?

Of course not.

Developers will always play around with code, basking in the wonderful pride provided by seeing your application “work”. Instant gratification!
Playing around with new functionalities is one of the best thing about being a developer and this can be a good way to learn new APIs, and simply coding is making them better coders.

Developers and their skills are absolutely necessary to the development of software. We all need them to be the best at what they do, and hackaday, or coding for fun can help with that.
Nonetheless, we need everybody, especially developers, to understand that this is not the way to create quality products.

As always, I’d love to get your feedback on this, especially if you are a developer (or have been in a previous life), so please let me know what you think!

If there was any doubt about the audience being developers, just counting the number of ladies would remove it. I estimate the ratio to be close to 1 woman for 15 guys, a very far cry from the approximate gender parity of UX crowds.

The session were mainly technical, full of info about APIs, (in-)compatibilities, standards etc. Some UX session were also present, but I have to say I was a bit disappointed by them. It’s not that they were not good, far from it actually, special props to Bryan Rieger with his incredibly clean, beautiful, and effective slides. It’s just that given my background in UX and the MSc I just finished, none of this was really news to me: I was simply not the intended audience.

Like any good event, #ota09 got me thinking on a couple of points, that will be the basis of a few blog post.

First up: Hackathons, developer’s conceptions, and how it negatively affect good UX

Windows: Serials and activation

To give you some background, as “the one who knows computers” I’m always asked to fix others’ computers.
The last time I had to fix a family member’s Windows setup, I had to reinstall it. No worries, as he had bought a licence of Windows XP with his computer.

So I pop in the CD, start the reinstall process. Then it asks me to type in the serial number. The one that is on a sticker, UNDER the laptop. Ok, a few minutes later, that was done. Install finished in its own time. But it’s not over. I had to “activate” it. There’s a way to do it simply online, but it failed to validate my perfectly legal setup. So I had to make a phone call to an automated service, type something like 50 characters (on a phone keyboard, without seeing them, or the possibility to erase a typo!). Then the phone would speak to me another key, again of many characters.

This was not an enjoyable User Experience.

On the other side

Tomorrow marks the release of the new version of Mac OSX, called Snow Leopard. Apple had announced that it would only cost 25£ for users of the current version of Mac OS.

Since that announcement, I was wondering how they would enforce this requirement. Would the DVD only install on machines where Leopard was already installed, preventing clean tabula rasa instals? Or ask you to pop-in your old Leopard DVD for a quick check?

Apple’s decision was different (shared by uncle Walt) and very unusual in the software industry: they simply won’t check. They will trust their users/clients to respect the agreement. So you simply use you new DVD, and there you go. Oh, and there is still no need for a serial number for the OS.

This will be abused!

Yes, some people will abuse it and buy the upgrade version when they shouldn’t.
Yes, some people even just use a illegal copy from the torrents or use a single licence on many computer.

But as we all know, all the serials / DRM that are forced on windows users never prevented illegal copies. Cracked versions are easy to get, and using a torrented Windows is actually easier than a legal one since you don’t have tio deal with all this serial/activation.

So people who want to pirate still will if you use those protections. Except that this means you’ve made it clear to you loyal legal clients that you think they might be thieves, and you’ve forced to spent their always precious time entering endless strings of characters.

Is it a fair comparison?

You may say: “Hey that’s not fair! Apple make the vast majority of its money on hardware sales, so they don’t care if you pirate the OS, but Microsoft is a software company, and needs that cash!”.

This is true, but guess what: the end-user do not care what each business model is, and has no reason to. He only see how this affect his experience.

Take away

Getting rid of those protections won’t make much difference regarding piracy, but it will results in a much nicer experience, where the user feels considered and trusted. Those are things that count, and help to construct loyalty to a brand.

In the field of UX, you pretty much have as many job titles as you have individuals (each of these post it is one!), and it is very difficult, even for us, to clearly see what each of these mean.

Disclaimer: This is based on my poor recollection of the session, and may not be an accurate or comprehensive description of the presenters ideas. I also use those to share my own idea on the topic.

“UX Consultant” VS “UX Designer”

An interesting debate was the difference between “UX Consultant” and “UX Designer”. “Consultant” has a very wide meaning, which is not very helpful.
“Designer” present another issue, which came up because a couple of participants were less deep in UX than the rest of us, and provided a somewhat external outlook: many people do not fully realise what design means, or at least how we understand it (as “conceive”, or “define”). For most people, design means drawing.

Indeed, my Mac’s New Oxford dictionary says: “to design, verb [trans.] decide upon the look and functioning of (a building, garment, or other object), typically by making a detailed drawing of it”

So the choice is between one word that is so wide it doesn’t mean much, or something more accurate that will be misinterpreted by many (most?) non-ux people. Not a nice choice.

With a maturing field comes specialisation

The way I see it, the UX field is still maturing, and with maturation comes specialisation.

Ten years ago, the one and only job title regarding websites was “webmaster”. One title to handle everything. Over time, it became clear than a website required many different skills, and new titles were created: we now have very distinct roles as content writer, graphic designer, and web developer.

I see the same thing happening now with UX. Quite often we all do a bit of Information Architecture, a bit of Interface Design, a bit of User Research (etc…). In time, as the field mature, the teams will grow, and each of these task will be handled by a specialist.

“How do UX differs from marketing?”

A question along this line was also challenging.
This is another thing about which UX people tend to feel strongly about, yet often struggle to express why.

To caricature, marketing is often seen a lowly task about selling things in a very materialistic way, while UX is here to help users and make the world a better place, one web form at a time.

But of course, the difference is no so clear cut.

Both marketing and UX try to understand the individual better.
Both want to identify what the individual actually wants.
Both use similar tools: interview, focus groups, surveys.
Both can involve understanding and crafting emotional responses.

Marketing is primarily concerned about selling a product, so mainly before the sale. UX worries about how the individual uses a product, after the sale.

You could say that UX is about real needs, that are often unexpressed by the individual. But marketing would also says similar thing. We like to think the needs identified by UX are real and useful, while the needs that comes out of marketing tend to be artificially created (branding, product endorsement by celebrities etc).

But let’s not fool ourselves: while we take pride in helping the user, wich we really do, the reason we get paid to do UX is to generate more money, whether by having a better software that more people will buy/upgrade or a better conversion rate on a website.

How to answer “what do you do?”

This is not easy, especially when the person asking has only vague idea of what websites or software are.

One answer I gave was “I work to understand what people need so I can make their tools easier and more enjoyable to use”. This usually leads to an awkward stare (the unexpressed “this sounds wanky” that was mentioned durring the session). Sometime people are really interested and ask “what tools?”. To which I reply “could be software, website, planes, nuclear plants”. It’s not really convincing however.

I was reminded I once came up with a better way of explaining UX, exploiting the person’s own experience. I would ask “Have you ever struggled while trying to do something with your computer ? Or had to ask for help to program your VCR?”. Of course they always answer something along: “Hell yeah!”. Then I say “Well my job is to understand people and work on those those products to make sure this does not happend anymore”.

This may give them narrow and vague idea of what we do, but at least the are likely to see our profession as valuable, and well, less wanky.

The technology behind it sure seems impressive, but I have yet to see (or understand?) what concrete benefits it brings. I have not yet seen any use that would not have been filled by either email, IM, a forum, or google apps.

Wave is remixing all of those into something new, which is bound to be very disturbing as it will be in a uncanny valley where we think we know what is there (for ex. someone typing a message), while the reality is different from what we expect (you can edit you correspondant message while he types it).

Seems to me they try to have one single tool to achieve very different things, which is generally a recipe for failure.

Disclaimer: This is based on my poor recollection of the session, and may not be an accurate or comprehensive description of the presenter’s ideas. I also use those posts to share my own idea on the topic.

Johanna highlighted many issues with email, and there are not doubt many, but I don’t agree on all of the ones mentioned. For me the fact that my messages or love letters may be opened a century from now by my grand kids is not a benefit. My emails are private things, and I only want the recipient(s) to see. I can use public blogs, forum etc if I want to share.
However, I agree that the current situation has serious issues: much vital information in organisation is only present in emails, is not searchable by all who need it, and is lost when one person leaves.

A key point of Johanna’s presentation was about “orality”. But IMHO, not all correspondence should aim to be more oral.
“Words fly, writings remain”: I precisely use email when I want things written with no way to modify them, like when I want a trace of an expense approval from my boss.

Overall, I am not sure Google has really understood all the reasons why people use email, and were the strong points of email are. I would say emails are used for many different purposes.

Analysing the many characteristics (availability, intimacy, instantaneity, collaboration, multimedia, persistency…) of all our modern communication tools
is a huge task, but one that I feel should be accomplished to be able to assess Wave fairly.

I’ll probably write more about those topics in the future.

For a start I should definitely use it myself :-/

A barcamp with great people and very interesting session, all perfectly organised.
Oh, and free drinks in the sun next tot he river.

Barcamp?

To those unfamiliar with the concept of barcamps, it’s really simple.

The idea stems from the fact that in many more formal conferences, the most interesting parts are the coffe breaks, where lots of informal discussion organically come to life in every corner, and where you really get to exchange ideas. This full events like a coffe break.

So it is some sort of conference, but in this one, there are no speakers and no listeners: everyone is expected to present at some point. This simple idea set the frame of the full event: were are all on the same boat.

There are many sessions taking place at the same time, and for each time slot, you have to pick the one you’ll attend. The unfortunate side is that you’ll miss many sessions you would have love to attend. The good side is that it ensures that only people who really care about the topic are present, that the groups are small enough to allow discussion, and that a lot of different topics are covered.

Of course, the interest and succes of such event relies heavily on the people who attend it… luckily the UX community is second to none.

Community

The UX community is really amazing. This crowd is highly passionate, full of creative ideas and very friendly. It is very interesting mix of people.

This community is made of people who have a lot in common: obviously we all work (or study) in the broad field of User Experience, we care deeply about what we do, and we are always thinking about how we could do it better, even the ones among us that have been working in that field for years. We are similar enough that to have much commun understanding and passion.

However at the same time, we are also quite different: we come from all over the world (UK of course, Australia, Germany, USA, Korea, Italy, Spain, Malaysia, Czech republic, Poland, France… ), we have different backgrounds (graphic design, programming, psychology…), and we have different level of experience in the UX field.

This difference is absolutely key to an interesting event: it ensures each of us bring something unique to the discussion.

And nobody take “their” own way for the one and only way. Just the opposite in fact: everybody and everything is open for discussion, in the still quite fresh and changing field of UX.

Sessions

They were really really varied, including the classic presentation + talk, simple discussion, and games. I really like all of the one I attended, and they all presented interesting ideas that are still getting me thinking at the moment.

I attended one on mobile web accessibility, the research for a device to assit people on hikes, the diary of a madman about a developer’s move into UX, How to think about the box – a design game, one about the evolution of the users hired for our tests, google wave, UX and personalization, and one attempting to help us explain what is it that we do, and how we call ourselves. Oh and I gave my own on iPhone Apps UI.

I will try to write up about those in latter posts, to continue the discussion.

Hopefully, most of us will put our slides on slideshare, so we can have an idea of what we’ve missed. I’ll upload mine once I’ve edited them to include all the importants bits I’ve showed on screen or talked about.

Organisation

We humble participants felt like everything happend very smoothly, with very little effort. eBay /gumtree offices are great, the security team welcomes each of us in, every equipment is working everywhere, our tweets appear on a wall, sessions runs smoothly, tons of various food on the table just when we want it, cider appears in the fridge, and the local pub has an irresistible urge to give us free drinks.

Of course, that was only because the organisers did a great job: those sponsors and freebies didn’t fall from the sky, and lots of things actually went wrong and had to be handled (see Boon’s Indian food issues , but I’m sure there were more).

So tons of thanks are in order to Cennydd, Boon, Darci, Allison, Johanna and Desigan (finally I understand the meaning of those two words on our badges…), and all of those I forget.

Outcomes

I had an amazing time! It was a very welcome break from the burden of my MSc dissertation, and reminded me why I’m in this field in the first place.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet tons of friendly new people, thanks to the even being longer than you typical UPA event. And of course, I wouldn’t mind if all this networking somehow helped me in my job hunt.

Got tons of ideas from #UXcamplondon that I want to get out of my brain. This blog is meant to contribute to the conversation, so comments are most welcomed.

Hope you’ll like what’ you’ll read.

Also: this blog has been put together in a rush. I am supposed to be working on finishing my MSc dissertation, so some work has been delayed (theme, advanced configuration etc).