Future Practice Interview: Bill Scott

As part of our Future Practice webinar series, we’re interviewing presenters to give you a preview of what they’ll cover. Next up is O’Reilly author and Netflix Director of UI Engineering Bill Scott on the topic of interface engineering.

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QuickPanel: Digital Cocooning

With our eyes on our screens more and more, what’s happening to our public spaces?  Are they less congenial, less bustling, less safe?  A number of recent books, such as The Circle by Dave Eggers and Ambient Commons by Malcolm McCullough, cast a critical eye at an always-online society.  And in a tragic turn, a San Francisco State University student was killed in September while leaving a crowded train; passengers, engrossed in their devices, hadn’t noticed a man on the train waving a gun around.  We asked a panel of UX experts to weigh in on the ramifications of digital cocooning.  

With smartphones, we walk around with the capacity to be talking to, texting, or tweeting each other all the time.  Yet we’re missing out on what’s happening right in front of us.  Why does social media make us, in some sense, antisocial?

Christina Wodtke: Everyone is talking about our need to be connected all the time, but no one (as far as I’ve seen) is talking about our increasing cocooning of ourselves from each other. The police procedural constantly provides us examples of bad things that can happen to us, with shows like “CSI” illustrating that apparently safe people can become our kidnappers and killers. But to be continually hyper-alert is exhausting. So instead we put up digital “do not disturb” signs so we don’t have to deal with strangers, which makes us more vulnerable to significant harm.

They also shield us from the petty guilt of not helping our fellow humans who are less fortunate, such as the homeless, the beggars, and old folks in need of a seat. In San Francisco, where a recent shooting occurred, one is continually asked for money. Even the kindest of us can’t give to everyone who asks, so it becomes easier to hide.

‘Down time’ used to mean a chance to relax and look around. Now it’s considered ‘dead time’ that needs to be filled.

Randy Farmer: Attention is a scarce resource, and it can be dangerous to focus inwardly all the time.  I first noticed this before smartphones.  Airports used to be social/public spaces (and I liked to spend time interacting with people there) before cell phone and Bluetooth headsets.  Now, time spent at airports is seen as “down time” that could be more efficiently used for business/personal relationships (texting), so these public, “third” places are quickly losing their efficacy as a way to interact with the greater community.  And it’s only getting worse.  The FAA is allowing more use of electronics on flights, and all the parks in NYC have Wi-Fi.

“Down time” used to mean a chance to relax and look around. Now it’s considered “dead time” that needs to be filled.  Heads up has become heads down. Sad.

Brenda Laurel:  At the memorial of the 50th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, we saw King’s great speech at the Lincoln Memorial over and over again. I was haunted by a picture of what that moment would have looked like today. Everybody would be taking pictures or texting with their phones. Dr. King might himself have felt isolated. To paraphrase Cassius in Julius Caesar, the fault is not with our cellphones but with ourselves. This is a failure of civility—of plain old manners—as well as a failure of mindfulness. As interaction designers (paradoxically), I think we can make some interventions in this space.

What are some design approaches that could mitigate the effects of digital cocooning?

The iPhone already has a ‘do not disturb’ setting; maybe it’s time for a ‘please disturb’ setting.

Christina Wodtke: Design could help this problem in a myriad of ways, from having a “public place” setting that allowed only audio or only visual. When I run or bike, I only listen to porous audio like podcasts so I am alert enough to react to danger. Once we shut off our ears and eyes, we are utterly defenseless. The iPhone already has a “do not disturb” setting; maybe it’s time for a “please disturb” setting.

Design could also help in a much more significant way by reminding us of the humanity of our fellow passengers and making sure places like trains and subway read as safe so people would not feel such a strong urge to psychically hide. Ride a Skytrain in Bangkok. Bangkok has the same degree of homelessness and crime, same varied socioeconomic status of riders, yet the Skytrain feels safe and a only handful of folks hide in electronics. The trains are well designed, well maintained and comfortable, with many signs reminding you to give seats to children, pregnant ladies, older folks, and monks. As well, there is always a TV on, and while in Bangkok only shows commercials, I can imagine a world in which news or sports are shown as well, encouraging people to be eyes up. When places feel safe, we can relax and people-watch, and this makes those places even safer.  Jane Jacobs, in her amazing treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, points out that what makes a place safe is “eyes on the street.”  Our public transit needs eyes on each other to keep each other safe.

Randy Farmer:  Though technology has been developed to prod us into changing new potentially harmful behaviors (such as smartphones auto-disabling texting while moving in a vehicle), it’s no replacement for changing our culture.

We need to consider designing our environments to remind and teach us how to interact and consciously seek “down time.” Some businesses have taken on the role of etiquette guardians:

Brenda Laurel:  Both Christina and Randy make good points. I imagine “public interactives” that might allow us to see together our own public environments and gatherings in different ways. Mindfulness meditation apps already exist (for example, Smiling Mind and Take a Deep Breath). Beyond this, design applications or environment remind us to breathe and be present.

Do you engage with strangers when you’re in a “third space”—standing in line at the post office, waiting out an airplane delay?  Or, in those cases, are you grateful to have an electronic device at hand?  

Christina Wodtke:  Most of the time, my biggest fear is being put into that situation. I’m intensely introverted. On a recent flight back from Prague, the entertainment system was not working. When the food heating system also broke, my neighbors and I started talking.  We ended up connecting, but it took a shared misery. As well, it helped that I was playing a game on my iPad. The iPad is a big surface, easy to peek at, and games are inherently social. If I had been watching a movie, especially if I’d had headphones on, my seatmate wouldn’t have used the game as a social object to start a conversation. He was really interested in watching me play Frontier Rush, asked about how to play, and started to suggest moves I should make. (He was a man in his 70s whose wife was trying to talk him into an iPad. I made the sale that night.) I wonder if the post office or the airlines could create similar play spaces where it would feel safe to connect.

Our tools are teaching us a new kind of social helplessness.

Randy Farmer:  Recently I was in a fast-food restaurant and an older woman came in, looking lost and asking for driving directions. The twenty-year-old at the register was at a loss for helping her, even though I am certain he was carrying a smartphone. I was waiting for my order, so he asked me to help her.  I quickly loaded my maps app and told her the step-by-step directions (which she wrote with pencil on her physical map).  The cashier was grateful and a bit embarrassed that he didn’t know the directions (how would he, growing up without paper maps?) and that he didn’t even know how to handle the social encounter well enough to figure out that he had the solution in his pocket.

Our tools are teaching us a new kind of social helplessness, and also providing us an easy means for escape when we can’t cope with the fact we’re directly interacting less and less. This is a vicious spiral.

Social rules design has helped in the past and can help us today.  Our technologies can, and must, take a role in this, but we must start with the goal in mind.  We’ve started using tech for physical exercise, something that was also declining, and we can do the same for social health. One might imagine a Fitbit for socialization.  Or you could just get a t-shirt:

Sometimes excellent interaction design isn’t technological.

Brenda Laurel:  Randy, I want one of those. I do see many folks staring at their phones when waiting in line and the like. I love observing and talking to people in those situations, so I rarely bury my head. On the other hand, if the wait is two hours or something, I’ll certainly end up grabbing my iPhone. I agree with Randy that this is really about socialization. I don’t think we can design social “rules” (although we might model more civil and sociable societies in things like multiplayer games).

One of the best social times I’ve had lately was at the LGBT luncheon at the Grace Hopper Conference. It seemed like the usual conference lunch scene—sitting next to people you didn’t know, some of whom knew one another. But the “emcee” suggested topics for discussion and eventually we got into making comments to one another publicly on a variety of subjects. I felt the community draw closer, and I had special buddies throughout the conference because of that experience. At Grace Hopper I also learned about “lean in” circles as a way to enhance our engagement in discourse as well as community.

Sometimes excellent interaction design isn’t technological.

Like what our experts had to say? Guess what: you can have them bring their brains to you. Randy Farmer, Brenda Laurel, and Christina Wodtke are available for consulting and training through Rosenfeld Media.

Podcast: Making Conferences More Accessible with Darryl Adams, Intel’s Director of Accessibility

With the surge in popularity of, and need for, hybrid and virtual events, Lou sits down with Intel’s Director of Accessibility, Darryl Adams, to discuss how technology can make in-person and virtual conferences more accessible and inclusive to speakers and audience members with disabilities. He also speaks to how accessible conference design can be improved and fine-tuned for speakers with disabilities, and help those without disabilities feel more comfortable presenting. What kind of accessibility principles and design factors should conference hosts consider for audience members with disabilities and those without disabilities when setting up for in-person and virtual events? How does this technology increase engagement and diversity in attendance? Listen as Darryl and Lou touch on all these topics, and more.

Darryl recommends: Demystifying Disability by Emily Ladau

Darryl Adams is the Director of Accessibility at Intel.?Darryl leads a team that works at the intersection of technology and human experience helping discover new ways for people with disabilities to work, interact, and thrive. Darryl’s mission is to connect his passion for technology innovation with Intel’s disability inclusion efforts to help make computing and access to digital information more accessible for everyone and to make Intel an employer of choice for employees with disabilities.

Retiring an ebook format

When we published our first book back in 2008, we sold it in two and only two formats: paperback and a screen-optimized PDF. Both had been extensively researched, carefully conceived, and user tested. And we thought we were hot stuff for bundling print and digital from the very start.

Since then, the reading experience has changed dramatically. (To understate things dramatically.) In response, we rolled out printer-optimized PDF versions of our books, so customers could print them out more effectively. Then our books came out in iPad-friendly ePub format. Then, MOBI for the Kindle.

After the mad shifting of sands underfoot, things seemed to stabilize over the past year or two. A large portion of our sales are now digital only, and of them, ePub and MOBI files are the clear formats of choice for reading on mobile devices.

The odd man out? Our old-fashioned (four year-old!) screen-optimized PDF. And that makes sense—why use PDF, a format conceived for print, when there are newer formats designed to be used on your favorite mobile device? Additionally, publishing is a low-margin business, and producing a specially-designed screen-optimized PDF almost doubled our layout costs.

So, goodbye, screen-optimized PDF, and thank you. We’ll continue providing printer-optimized PDFs, as well as ePub and MOBI ebooks. When the ebook sands shift further, we’ll keep up. And our ebooks will remain DRM-free.

Please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions.

And as a reward for getting this far, you get to be one of the first to learn of our newest book, which just soft-launched a couple hours ago. Apropos of this discussion, it’s Rachel Hinman’s The Mobile Frontier. And here’s a 25%-off discount code to use when purchasing it: EASTEREGG (good for the first 25 people to redeem it).

Our ebook strategy: feedback, please!

We’ve been muddling over how exactly to support the burgeoning demand for ebooks. As a publisher, it’s a hugely confusing mix of readers (like Stanza), devices (like Kindle, Sony Reader, and the iPhone) and formats (like PDF and Epub). Our ebook strategy is a work in progress: we’d love your input on our current plan:

• So far: we’ve been providing our books as DRM-free PDFs that have been optimized for on-screen use (yes, we’ve actually tested the design with real-live users).
• Definite plan: We’ll soon start providing another variety of PDF (also DRM-free). It’s a printer-optimized version (toner-hungry elements deleted) that we hope will satisfy those who want to make their laser printers earn their keep.
• Does this make sense? Three ideas:
  1. Embed high-resolution images in our screen-optimized PDFs. We’re trying this now and it actually works pretty well when you use Acrobat Reader. The resolution is better than what you’d get from our Flickr feed, and you don’t have to go online.
  2. Support Epub, which works on the iPhone and Sony Reader. It looks like Epub files can be generated from InDesign, which is what we use to lay out our books.
  3. Wait on the Kindle: it doesn’t seem good at support books with lots of images and lots of color. Yet.

  Does this sound like a reasonable plan for a small publisher to take in Q1 2009? You’re the customer; please let us know!

Server migration on tap for this evening

Tonight, at around 7pm ET, the Rosenfeld Media web environment will move to a dedicated server at a new ISP. Given that our environment has many moving parts, it’s hard to imagine that things will be working perfectly once the change-over is made. So we’d greatly appreciate both your patience and your flagging any problems and letting us know ASAP. And if for some reason you can’t make a purchase via our shopping cart, you can still buy our books via Amazon. Many thanks!

Updated, 2pm ET October 5: Seems like we’re back up and running, and able to handle purchases. Our digital downloading, however, is not quite there. You may experience very long download times, or the download might time-out altogether. If this happens to you, just let us know and we’ll find another way to get you the file. Or just log back and try again in a day or so from now, when it should be working better. Thanks for your patience! Server migrations: can’t live with’em, …

Updated, 3pm ET October 13: Everything should be back to normal now.

Now supporting Readmill

Readmill is pretty cool—it’s a web service and iPad app for storing, reading and sharing highlights of DRM-free digital books.

If you like Readmill, you’ll like this: you can now download your Rosenfeld Media digital books to your Readmill account. Just go to your Rosenfeld account’s Download page and click the “Send to Readmill” link next to each of your digital books. That’s it! Enjoy!!

SUS: a good enough usability questionnaire

One challenge of survey design is whether to:

• use an existing questionnaire, or
• roll-your-own, or
• do some sort of hybrid.

One of the best-known usability questionnaires is SUS. Is it good enough?

I’m going to start by mentioning the advantages and disadvantages of reusing questionnaires, and then talk about SUS in more detail.
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Introducing our Advancing Research community workshop series!

Join the conversation about the most critical topics in research!

Although Advancing Research 2025 won’t take place for another nine months, we’re already hard at work researching and designing the conference program. Like last year, we’re kicking things off with a series of free, public (virtual) conversations on the topics most important to our field. These conversations are centered around themes integral to research, starring researchers just like YOU!

Stay tuned as we announce the lineup for each event, and register in advance to attend these free sessions!

Each free virtual workshop is made up of panelists who will share short provocations on engaging ideas to discuss as a group, as well as a leader in our field to moderate. If you’re looking for discussions that challenge the status quo and can truly advance research, look no further than our workshop series.

P.S. We’ll be drawing most of our Advancing Research 2025 conference speakers from those who present at upcoming workshops—so tune in for a sneak peek of what’s to come from #AR2025!

Some changes for 2024

2023 is done. Put a fork in it. Fini! And thank goodness.

Moving right along: we’ve got a couple of interesting things queued up at Rosenfeld Media HQ for 2024.

A community that’s easier to use, more wide-ranging in its coverage

First off, we’re making a major change to the Rosenfeld communities (DesignOps, Advancing Research, Enterprise Design, and Civic Design), combining them into a single Rosenfeld community. These curated communities have been educating and connecting, for free, thousands of UX and product people through monthly webinars and conversations, newsletters, and Slack-based discussions. Some go all the way back to 2017. Why would we change this?

Because you and your interests are evolving. So it doesn’t make much sense for Rosenfeld to invest in the same four topics year in and year out—especially at the expense of exploring new areas with you. And there are so, so many new topics on our collective minds (off the top of my head, climate UX, portfolio design, and everything AI).

Instead, we’ll publish one newsletter (more on that below), host a variety of free calls, and Slack discussions that cover a broader and more timely range of topics. We’ll continue to host curated DesignOps and Advancing Research-both videoconferences and Slack discussions—and we’re already entertaining hosting and supporting new interest groups within our consolidated community. (Have a topic in mind? We’d love to hear more.)

Long story short: the new Rosenfeld community will be easier for you to use and for us to maintain. And best of all, a more welcoming home for new topics that you want to discuss.

Reporting on Rosenfeld and more

Second, we’ve just launched the Rosenfeld Report, a new newsletter. “New newsletter” you groan? Who wants one of those? Well, as you’re already reading this, you probably do. In a nutshell:

• There’s so much to keep track of—even just the news out of Rosenfeld Media—that consolidating to one newsletter is a no-brainer. Now you’ll know where to look to keep track of our conferences, new book pre-order announcements and other deals, all the free community events we produce, and more.
• Each issue includes a handful of the most important things you can read about UX and product design, curated by Uday Gajendar. In other words, our newsletter will literally make you smarter.
• We’ll send it every two weeks—nice and predictable, so you can quickly scan it.

Having one newsletter will also reduce the number of announcements we send out overall. We’d like that, and we’re guessing you would too.

If you’re already subscribed to our other newsletters or announcement lists, you won’t need to do anything; you’ll just notice fewer, more useful communications from us. If you’re not, please subscribe here (and tell your pals to do the same). You can preview our first issue, which debuted December 5, here.

What else is happening at Rosenfeld? Lots of new books, a new conference, and the launching of our long-awaited membership service in the new year. I’ll dig into these in more depth very soon—and if you don’t want to miss any of it, be sure you (ahem) subscribe to the Rosenfeld Report.