Entirely Knob Gags

Here at Sparrk I’m always working to make UX more accessible to clients. However with the market rate for UX Consultancy now well into the hundreds of pounds per day, UX can be a considerable investment for many clients, especially when so much has already been spent getting the first version of their product or service to market. Can they really afford to spend more money on getting someone in to change everything that’s already been built?

If that sounds like you, you’ll love my new service tier: The Do What Pinterest Does tier. Whenever you’re contemplating a new feature, you can leave a message on my voicemail, and I guarantee to respond within 24 hours to tell you to just copy whatever similar thing Pinterest is doing. Whether it’s copy, interactions, personality, business model or visual design, I’ll spend up to five minutes explaining how Pinterest does it and assuring you that you should do it the same way.

FAQ

How much does this service cost?

In order to address your needs as cost-effectively as possible, this service tier is priced per-call. You can be reassured that copying Pinterest is the right strategy for you for just £50 a time.

What if my business is nothing like Pinterest?

Don’t be ridiculous! Pinterest is getting loads of buzz right now. It’s so hot! How can a company that so many people are raving about be making poor UX decisions? Right, so obviously if you make all the same UX decisions as they do, you’ll do just as well!

But how can you know that the decisions Pinterest have come to are the right ones for me? Pinterest’s business needs, internal structure, necessary compromises, legal framework and development resource structure are a black box into whose workings we have no visibility! We literally don’t know how they came to those UX decisions, only what the outcome is! And that’s to say nothing of those factors we can see are clearly different - their audience profile, revenue stream, voice and tone and user goals are all nothing like what my company does! 

Blogs like TechCrunch, Mashable and TechCrunch are writing about Pinterest LITERALLY ALL THE TIME.

But Pinterest won’t be the hot new startup forever, will it? 

We are already working on the successor product, due in late May, tentatively codenamed the “Do Whatever [site which is being lauded as ‘the new Pinterest’ now] Does.” It was going to be Turntable FM but then yesterday I saw a thing (can’t remember whether it was on Mashable, TechCrunch or Mashable, sorry) saying Turntable FM isn’t growing as fast as some numbers made up by analysts said it should, so now thats out.

Will you continue to offer full-service UX? 

Absolutely, although I expect demand to decrease dramatically. For those clients who want the premium experience, I will still be available to create bespoke user experiences to address your company’s unique mix of users, needs and outcomes in holistic ways that are understandable, measurable and communicable. While this may end up costing you a little more than the Do What Pinterest Does Tier, it has an outside chance of making your product the next one that TechCrunch, Mashable or TechCrunch fall in love with, or even if it doesn’t manage that primary goal, it could in consolation at least make you more money.

A quick little bit of thinking out loud here…

Lion has been catching a lot of flack recently because of what some see as excessive skeuomorphism in Address Book and iCal. The leatherbound effect works better in Address Book because it just looks like the already leatherbound icon has opened up into the app. But in iCal it looks like design for design’s sake. Whether that is necessarily a bad thing is a topic for a long and involved post that will probably take me several more months to compose.

But then I think about my own design process and in particular how the search for the right metaphor often takes you down a few wrong turns before it becomes refined into the final visual language. Very often, because it’s an obvious route to take, that metaphor goes through a phase of being overly literal–”I’m showing a video, so I’ll put it in a frame that looks like a TV set” for (contrived) example–before it gets toned back or pulled altogether in favour of some other metaphor.

Apple is famously fastidious about its designs. Reportedly they prepare 10 pixel-perfect mockups for every interface they release (which means there are 9 versions of iTunes 10.5 out there that suck even more). And they’ve done skeuomorphism in the past in the form of brushed metal, which settled down in the calmer, more abstract Unified theme.

So my question is this - are these very literal metaphors actually an indication of Apple not applying the later stages of its usual lengthy design process?

There’s a wonderful (and sadly abandoned [However, see the update at the bottom of this post]) piece of software for OS X called MarcoPolo. It sits unobtrusively in your menu bar, and every few seconds it looks at the world around it. The physical world around it, that is - it looks at the surrounding SSIDs, bluetooth devices, USB devices, screens, printers and servers on the network - and from that, it works out where you are and then runs whatever actions you’ve defined for that location.

If that doesn’t sound like the most exciting piece of software you’ve ever heard of, then I regret to inform you that you and I are technically at war. I’ll explain why.

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London - Apple will introduce a new version of the iPhone which “has little wheels and can be driven like a remote control car, also you can customise how it smells” according to a new report from analyst Ben Jefferson from city firm Agamemnon Bonaster. Jefferson, who was visibly sweating while he issued the report, is one of twelve analysts in a department which has recently learned its headcount will be cut by 33%.

Having little wheels and being driven like a remote control car is seen as a vital feature for Apple to add in the thriving six-year-old smartphone purchaser market, according to Jefferson. “And,” he continued, “it will be fully integrated with that other thing that we said they’d add. Imagine the possibilities of a fully LTE-integrated phone that has little wheels and can be driven like a remote control car. Also, um, Siri? Yeah? Give me a break here guys!”

Senior analysts from Bonaster concurred, “Apple will lose its leadership of the smell-conscious market if they do not immediately bring out a banana-scented model. Historically, mature markets like this have seen seismic upshifts when olfactory satisfaction becomes a differentiator” said a statement from senior analyst Jen Befferson, “also we should definitely keep Ben Jefferson on, he’s way more accurate than that douchebag Bob Anderson who should be fired.”

Anderson, of course, is the author of last week’s much-publicised report, “Apple to introduce feature allowing your phone to pretend to be somewhere else so Ben Jefferson can’t tell you’re fucking his wife.”

Industry Analyst Analysts warned that bullshit feature predictions of unannounced Apple products are likely to continue generating buzz around companies that pull guesswork out of their arses, and therefore unlikely to go away any time soon.

I’ve spent the last week browsing the web using a bang-up-to-date NEWT browser. And yet, almost none of the videos I’ve been linked to have worked, and a couple of sites have fallen down horribly. Why? Because I don’t have Flash installed.

Since the rise of iOS, and latterly Apple’s decision to ship MacBook Airs (and indeed any clean install of Lion) without Flash installed for the sake of battery life, people have taken to arguing that you can largely live without Flash now. Standardistas (and I count myself as a Standardista) have crowed at the imminent ousting of this non-semantic, non-Standards technology. The Open Web can do multimedia at last!

What I’ve discovered this week is that Flash is far from dead, and, at least when it comes to video, the “Open Web” is far from open. Come down the rabbit hole with me and discover why…

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One of the things that most occupies me these days is how to do Agile UX. I’m speaking about it at UX People 2011 if you’d like to hear how far I’ve got with it. But I am aware there is a need for something higher-level than this. There is a need to explain why to do Agile UX.

I say so because I occasionally see tweets or hear comments at events along the lines of “who cares about Agile UX, just get the experience right!” Don’t worry about the process, I hear, just get it done. This isn’t the first context in which I’ve heard this sentiment. I hear it a lot from developers, too.

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