The Association of Alternative Newsmedia's 2012 Web Conference was held in San Francisco and attended by publishers, editors, and owners from over 130 of North America's alternative news organizations. Stefan Klocek spoke about how alternative news organizations can bring their content to the emerging platform of tablets in "The Revolution will be Portable: Understanding the Tablet Opportunity" session. He highlighted unique qualities of the tablet for local news consumption and gave an overview of how organizations with a cultivated and established brand presence can deeply engage with their audience. View Stefan's presentation below or download it.

It was one of those, “please, please, let this send,” kind of moments when you hope a weak airport WiFi connection doesn’t disconnect, a low-battery indicator doesn’t shut down your laptop — who knows where there’s an outlet in this airport — and your email actually sends to your million dollar client when the message popped up and your stomach drops: “Oops!”

Like some kind of creepy, American Psycho moment, a hardly-discernible, non-apologetic message from Gmail put this exact dagger into my heart and sent me wondering what went wrong.

Sure, of course, just lemme look up error #001. What?

Google’s Chrome browser gives off an even worse error message that doesn’t make things better, just a wanna-be-hipster-piece-of-software knocking off a Susan Kare classic laughing in your face when you’re frustrated:

Maybe this is part of some awful brand initiative. After all, Google is a place of smiles. An every-color-of-the-rainbow logo, and three square meals place to work with unbelievable benefits. But, then again, Google is hardly alone in this kind of “smile when you’ve fallen” approach to error messages.

Microsoft is sadly considering implementing the same, cutesy thinking in a revamp of their blue screen of death as a part of their otherwise exciting, new Windows 8 operating system:

(windows.staenz.com)

Oh, great. My 14 year-old cousin is writing error messages in Redmond.

Fortunately, Microsoft offers some advice. Just search for the error message, “HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED”…oh wait, this is the blue screen of death. My computer is totally effed.

Alan, Chris, Kendra, and Tamara joined Innova, Russia's premier game development studio, for design education sessions and industry events focusing on the future of gaming and technology in Russia and around the world.

Kendra led interaction design and design communication and collaboration sessions for Innova's designers and technologists. The team immediately began using their new skills, creating a road map to establish goal directed design throughout their organization.

We co-hosted sessions with members of the Russian design community focusing on the current state of design in Russia and the world and the future of interaction design and technology.

Now that we're back in San Francisco, we realize, after all the opinions, ideas and laughter were shared, we are as inspired as our newfound design friends in Moscow to continue developing world-class methods for user-centered design.

I just changed from a Wintel machine, which I've used for over 20 years, to a Mac. I had dragged my feet with Office 03 so long that people were starting to notice. I no longer could put off upgrading to the "new" Office interface.

Yes, I do not like the ribbon, but that really wasn't the problem. The real problem was that the changes Microsoft made to the Office Suite accomplished nothing and yet came at a high cost.

The new Office UI is very different but is not better. That is a complaint only old farts make (because they know the old ways), so Microsoft can just move ahead ignoring it. I wrestled with it for awhile, and then I figured, if I have to learn something new, why not learn Mac Keynote? I tried it, and found it was a modest improvement over PowerPoint, but that it didn't aggravate me so much because I no longer expected it to behave the same as the old version as I did with PowerPoint.

Pip Coburn, in The Change Function, says that users will change when the benefit of changing is greater than the perceived pain of making the change. That's the operative element here. There was no benefit and lots of pain. Microsoft didn't improve PowerPoint, they just moved the deck chairs around. That's pathetic and not the behavior of a market leader. FAIL.

Just for the record, I reject the argument that it is a zero-sum game between experienced and new users. That trade-off does exist, but only when physical manipulation is involved, such as twitch games, aircraft controls, and the like. Good UI is, in general, good for both experts and beginners alike.

I do not believe Microsoft's assertions that the ribbon is easy to learn. If you feed someone rotten fishheads for a while, then switch them over to a diet of fresh fishheads, they will be happier. You can then tout the statistical "fact" that "users prefer fresh fishheads," even though the truth is that they HATE fishheads. That, I believe, is how Microsoft gets its rationale for UI changes.

When the New York Times activated its highly anticipated metering system this week, there was no shortage of opinions on the matter. As opinionated people, the designers here at Cooper started to feel a little left out, so we put our thoughts together on the user experience of the new service. Enjoy, and chime in with your own thoughts and opinions below.

Suzy Thompson

Overall, I think they've done several things right, like the fact that home subscribers (even those like me who now only get the Sunday edition) get an all-access pass to the online content. Also, they're not throwing up a paywall over all of their content — folks can access up to a certain amount of content a month before you're asked to become an online subscriber. And they've thought about how to ensure that folks can read articles that someone has shared via email, FB, etc. We'll see how it goes, but I think that the iTunes store has pretty effectively proven that if you make it easy to do so and provide demonstrable value, people are more than happy to pay - even for something they could get for free elsewhere.

I do worry, though. Because the NYTimes isn't just a business. Their journalism is a public service that everyone benefits from. And unlike a burger or a pair of jeans, where some folks are willing and able to pay for higher quality and some aren't, and the provider can scale back production to match demand, journalism can't be scaled back and still maintain its quality. The fact that I view it as a public service is part of why it's so important to me to contribute financially — just like giving $$ to PBS. Sure, there are some who use it and don't pay for it, and I probably don't use it enough to justify what I pay for it, but I want it to be there and available to everyone. That, above all else, is what worries me about the paid subscription model. Because the prospect of a world in which only Fox News or USA Today can profitably succeed in the news business terrifies me.

Jim Dibble

I understand why the NYTimes is putting this policy into place. They are my go-to place for US and international reporting. We only recently canceled our NYTimes paper delivery — since I no longer work in Pleasanton, I don't have the long BART commute to read the paper. (Thank you, Cooper!). And it just felt like a waste of resources (trees, ink, and gasoline) to deliver a paper that we typically recycled without reading.

However, I'm utterly confused why readers have to pay more to view content on multiple platforms. In the morning and on BART, I read the NYTimes on my iPhone. At work and at home at night, I read the paper on my laptop. I'm not sure why I need to pay twice as much just because I'm using two platforms. I'm surprised that they didn't follow the kindle sales model, where you purchase a book and own it in the cloud, regardless of which platform you use to access it.

It would be great if they provided a way to ask for articles of interest to you. For example, if I'm interested in reporting on the Middle East, it would be great to be able to have a special category for those articles. It would also be great to have articles that assume that I'm well-versed in a particular region. For example, if I'm familiar with what has already happened in Libya, many of the new articles will review the recent history of what has occurred, so that I have to wade through information that I already know, in order to find out about the most recent developments.

Peter Duyan

So, after reading the “letter to readers” and looking at the subscription breakdown, I feel a little deflated. Initially, I was actually excited to pay the NYTimes for their digital media, and to help support them as they find a way to continue doing what they do best. However, I don’t like their subscription models at all for a very specific reason. I only read (almost only) the NYTimes on my smartphone, and I feel like I should have the option to pay for mobile-only content. If and when I buy an iPad, I’m pretty sure I would be interested in smartphone and tablet use, but still have little or no interest in the “online” content. Basically, I want to be a mobile-only user and that option isn’t open. From my perspective, they are missing the point if they don’t let their users pay for content on whatever device they choose.

Doug LeMoine

I think journalists should get paid, and I think publishers should figure out a way to make digital journalism pay. I don’t understand people who talk about metering like it’s some violation of their civil rights, and yet I’m also a nerd, so I must admit that I did Google “nytimes metering hack” yesterday (out of curiosity, really), and I found some very interesting CSS (that I did not install).

Still, I do have a problem with the metering service as the NYTimes has implemented it: It seems both too complicated and too stupid at the same time. Why are there so many different options? Why are there different prices for iPads and iPhones? Why is the digital thrown in for free with print? Why is the NYTimes.com version a required baseline for all plans? And why the heck is the Dealbook blog exempted from metering? The investment bankers have been bailed out by the middle class yet again, it seems.

I would bet that these “tiers,” if you can call them tiers, were an effort to try to create “choices.” But the way they’re broken out makes me think that they’re simply the configurations of devices and content that were easier to track on the back end. I would argue that it gives the impression of "choice," without really making sense as a set of choices.

I'll go one step easier with a user-friendly model: How about one price for print + digital, and another for just digital? And how about charging the investment bankers double for Dealbook? That would help the NYTimes recover some of the $40M they supposedly spent installing the metering system.

Golden Krishna

Adding a paywall is like moving newspapers from the online street corner to the concert hall. Journalists shift from being free street entertainment to performers in a luxury experience that viewers will likely expect to work smoothly and look beautiful. I fear that paywalls will shut the doors on the common, limit access to the kind of information that should be freely available to all, but I am eager to see the good design that results as papers compete for online eyeballs that are willing to pay for their services.

The recent post on Co.Design by Jens Skibsted and Rasmus Hansen, “User-Led Innovation Can't Create Breakthroughs,” echoes something I have said many times, and I agree with their conclusions.

The article has caused a furor in the interaction design community mostly because it has been misunderstood. That is less surprising when you realize many interaction design practitioners misunderstand their own practice.

Many professional interaction designers and other practitioners interpret the phrase “user-centered design” to mean they should ask the user what to make. This is not what the phrase means, and misconstruing it that way can lead to tremendous misdirection and waste. This is the error that Skibsted and Hansen highlight.

There is a large and growing body of evidence that users don’t know what they want, don’t know what the medium is capable of delivering, and are not quite incapable of imagining something new, useful, desirable, or innovative. What’s more, there is ample evidence that the users are entirely ignorant of their inabilities, yet will happily give their flawed answers with unequivocal emphasis.

Rather, it is the job of the integrated development team or, if in a siloed world, the interaction designer, to answer the question of what to make. Of course, the designer should avail him or herself of all of the intelligence available, which will naturally include observations and interviews of the user. But the results of those interviews is to the design solution as grapes are to wine: raw materials that must be transformed by expertise into a palatable product. The apparent conflict of interviewing users yet not following their suggestions is confusing to many undertrained practitioners, and their resultant miscues are what the authors rail against, as well they should.

I have addressed the dilemma of asking the users in both of my books, in presentations, and in various posts over the years. One of the most accessible is a brief and impromptu interview that was recorded several years ago. I had just delivered a talk at the Patterns and Practices conference in Seattle, when @scobleizer (Robert Scoble) poked his camcorder in my face and asked me several questions. The resulting mini-interview has been widely viewed on the Internet. What I said to Robert was very similar to the assertions by Skibsted and Hansen.

The Fast Company article has generated a furor on the interaction designer chat boards because the wording of the article is broad enough to be interpreted as a slam to the usefulness of all interaction design. I certainly disagree with that interpretation, but practitioners bring this criticism on themselves by their own less than rigorous practice.

Ikea and Apple may not ask their users what they want, but they sure work diligently to understand what their users want. There is a world of difference between the two.

That hot post on the Fast Company Design blog, User-Led Innovation Can't Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask Apple and Ikea, is both wonderfully true and dangerously wrong. I want to both make it required reading for all my clients, and also bury it underground where it will never again see the light of day.

It is deeply and importantly true that you should not build what your users ask for (or put another way, you should not ask your users what to build). At Cooper we call that “automating the misery.” One commenter on the original post reminds us of the Henry Ford quote:

“If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse.'“

If Ford had listened to his users, he would have bred faster horses and made better saddles, and he wouldn’t have put out a game-changing product. Many of our clients come to us with a history of producing bad user interfaces, and they can’t understand why when they have included every popular feature request from their users.

The reason for this is very simple: users are not designers or visionaries. We should no sooner ask them to design a product than we would ask them to write the code.

Where this article gets it very, very wrong is in the implication that being user-centered, talking to users, or understanding them at a deep level is not important or even antithetical to creating a game-changing product. Apple and Ikea are held up as the prime example of this. But both of these companies make products for consumers. Their target market is not too dissimilar from the designers themselves. They can get away with not talking to users because they already understand them at a deep level.

But what if you’re designing a product for a user very different from yourself? What if your user is a heart surgeon? An architect? An investment banker? In these situations designers can’t draw on their own personal experience for inspiration, and shouldn’t. (Though honestly it might be funny to see Apple’s take on a heart surgery interface.) As I talked about in my blog post on expertise, you can’t use your brain to design for a very different brain.

Users can only tell you what they think they want to achieve their goals. It’s our job to listen to what they say, detangle it, and design something that they love. To be in a position to do what you do well—design visionary products—for someone not like yourself, you have to understand your users. Once you truly understand your users’ goals, only then can you create game-changing products to help them achieve those goals.

The industrial age divided our world into white-collar and blue-collar workers. Those with white collars went to college, worked in an office, solved problems, and made decisions. Those with blue collars went to high school or trade school, worked in a factory, performed work, and followed orders. “Solve” was separated from “do”.

But in our contemporary world of knowledge workers, very little of it can be teased into separate “solve versus do”. Today, doing is an integral part of solving, and solving is an integral part of doing. We are all “no-collar” workers: smart, well-educated, solving problems, and performing work.

The successes by state-of-the-art practitioners in both agile development methods and UX have given rise to a desire for more effective collaboration. Once a programmer has seen what well-applied agile methods can accomplish, she soon begins to yearn for a better user-facing strategy. Likewise, once a designer has seen what good interaction design methods can accomplish, he soon desires to work with a strong development team open to collaboration.

Many advanced thinkers have already tried a first order solution: agile programmers have requested input from designers, and UX designers have attempted to squeeze their work into the timeboxed cycles of agilistas. The results have been promising, tantalizing, but somehow not quite there yet. It has become clear that while both UX and agile are effective methods, a combined “agile-UX” method will be something different from—something beyond—a simple addition of the two.

This past weekend, in a creatively messy office space in Tribeca, two dozen such advanced thinkers got together for the third installment of a working group dedicated to addressing this worthy challenge.

The group, which calls itself the “Agile UX Retreat”, consists of about 50 people, who borrow time away from work to participate. The group actively seeks and invites promising newcomers, but there is a core of twenty or so who attend every meeting.

At last week’s third meeting, the group shifted into a higher gear and made remarkable progress. They weren’t so much “post-agile” or “post-UX”, as they were “post-doctrine” and “post-hostility”. The thinking, speaking, and exchange of ideas, vision, and practice was not only of a remarkable quality, but it consistently transcended its component pieces. Beyond talk of design or agile, beyond talk of design and agile, the talk was of what the organization can be—and must be—when everyone in it is committed to the principles of user-centered, collaborative, iterative teamwork.

Much of the gruntwork of figuring out how this new organization works is being done by the “lean startup” folks, spearheaded by the likes of Eric Ries and Steve Blank. Lean startup has really only been practiced in tiny little startup companies, where, when you talk to the “product owner”, you really are talking to the product owner. While this is only a microcosm of the larger corporate reality, it is a valuable test-tube in which experiments can be conducted. In other words, we can learn a hell of a lot about how to run a big company by seeing how this stuff works in little companies.

But the core ideas of lean startup aren’t so much new as they are simply the beliefs of agile and UX, brought together effectively in a business context. Half of the lean startup’s principles are bedrock to agilists, while the other half are foundational to user experience professionals.

Not just the designers and not just the programmers, but everyone has to center their work on satisfying the customers. You need to have sublime confidence that the only way to deliver a successful product or service is by first delivering some version that is wrong, or at least, not quite right. That is, success on the first try is not within the capabilities of humans. Iteration and incrementing are integral parts of a post-industrial approach to product development.

At the union of “solve” and “do” we find the definition of the twenty-first-century business. Even though we are still at the beginning of this journey, it’s clear that we are finally on the right track.

Related reading

• Agile UX? Lean UX? Customer Development? A multiple discovery moment by Josh Seiden
• Changing the meaning of normal - Agile UX Retreat #1 by Johanna Kollman
• Thoughts on the February 2010 SF Agile UX Retreat by Jeremy Johnson
• Thoughts on the July 2010 Grand Rapids Agile UX Retreat by Carl Erickson
• A funny thing happened at the intersection of Agile and UX by Craig Villamor
• Why I spent my weekend talking Agile and User Experience, by Jeff Gothelf
• 7 Principles of Startup Happiness by Marcy Swenson
• My early thinking about agile development & UX
• My link round-up from an the first agile UX retreat

iTunes has a long history of violating the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. In past releases, iTunes designers have removed the title bar and borrowed the brushed aluminum look from Apple hardware.

iTunes 10, released yesterday, carries on the tradition of divergence. This time, the designers have toyed with the window controls. As you can see below, the close, minimize and zoom buttons have shifted from their conventional horizontal arrangement to a vertical arrangement.

I can imagine stylistic and practical explanations for doing this. The new layout has a better visual feel to it, and it uses the space more efficiently. Still, it's quite a bold departure from such a fundamental aspect of the Aqua interface standard. (The new volume control also violates the standards, but not quite so shockingly.)

Are we glimpsing a brave new world of window controls? What do you think?

No one can argue that social media hasn't had a significant impact on modern life. My current favorite example is the Zooniverse series of “citizen science projects” that bring people together to apply human brains to tasks in science that computers aren’t very good at yet, like identifying types of galaxies in Hubble images or craters on the moon. Supported and produced by the Citizen Science Alliance, this is social media at its very finest: Bringing communities of people together for the common good of humanity. The whole thing, I gotta say, leaves me a little verklempt.

On the other end of the ultility spectrum we have Cookie Bonus Solitaire, a little nothing of an iPhone solitaire game that cleverly bakes in cheating. It also incorporates robust social features like profiles and chat, achievements and leader boards, the whole shebang. I used to play Cookie Bonus Solitaire daily on my commute, but got irritated when there were constant updates to the social features of the program. Hello? Solitaire is not a social game, that’s why they call it “solitaire.” I finally deleted the game in disgust when it got to be too much, chalking it up to me just being some old fuddy-duddy who just doesn’t get it.

But, this is where I draw the line.

This is only acceptable in a home-care situation where people can keep track of the health and well-being of infirm individuals. Beyond that? No. Just no. Sleeping is not a social activity, and I say that as a married woman who sleeps alone only on business trips. What’s next? Social colonoscopy?

How did this happen? I can see it now: a conference room at SDI Technologies, a red faced manager pounding the table and demanding innovation. “How can we make this alarm clock more hip? What is it that all the kids are into these days? Social networking, right? How can we incorporate that?”

This, my friend, is where a brave soul should have spoken up. Not everything is social.