From UX to Service Design at UX-LX

I’m heading off to Lisbon tomorrow to run a workshop at UX-LX in Lisbon called From UX to Service Design. It’s only 3.5 hours, so I’ll mainly be working with the participants on service design blueprinting.

I’m really looking forward to the conference, which has great lineup and everyone sense is a fantastic event put together by the tireless Bruno Figueiredo and his team.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on if you have a ticket or not, the conference and the workshop are both totally booked out, so there is a slim chance that you will be able to get in now. There is a waiting list though. If you are a participant or just at the conference, do come and say hello and, as Rosenfeld Media are sponsoring the conference, we have a 25% discount code for our book, which I can whisper in your ear! Or just keep an eye out on Twitter, because it’ll be there soon enough.

Service Design Drinks, Lisbon

I’ll also be giving a talk on the same evening, May 16th, at Service Design Drinks, Lisbon along with Jon Kolko, which I’m looking forward to. We’ll both do a short presentation and then we are simply going to have a chat with each other and the audience.

I believe this one still has some spaces. It’s all very informal and you can bring your own bottle(s). It starts at 19:45 and is hosted by the generous folks at FANQ. You’ll need to register on the Eventbrite link.

We have also discount code for attendees to this too, so collar me and I’ll let you know. Or, you know, Twitter…

Hopscotch is a new programming language/environment iPad for kids. I don’t have my iPad here right now, but I’m looking forward to having a go on this. It is probably too advanced for my four year-old daughter still (I’ll have to see how necessary being able to read or write is), but it looks perfect for school-age children. The quote from a child on the website sums it up nicely:

“I like it because it’s fun and you can make the characters do whatever you want and play it like a movie.” – Audrey, age 8

You can make interactive things too, I’m sure.

(Via Jeroen)

DeadC.net is a link shortening service with a difference. You can create a URL that can only be clicked upon once.

Of course, it’s only a re-direct, so someone can always copy the redirected URL, but useful for quickly sharing things "without being tracked," as the site says.

In many ways, this is horribly wrong, because it breaks the fundamental principle of avoiding dead links on the Web, but that’s the idea I suppose.

A rather last minute post to mention that I’m on my way to the EAD Crafting the Future Conference at the HDK, School of Design and Crafts in Gothenburg, Sweden today. The conference starts tomorrow, 17th April, and runs until Friday 19th April.

I’ll be presenting an academic paper, A nested set of meta-principles for service design (PDF), which ties together some of my ideas about interactivity from my PhD with service design. This will form part of the discussion in the Craft of design in design of service track.

The way this is structured is that all the other participants read each other’s papers before the conference and then discuss them there, making the best use of the face-to-face time. This is so much better than just going to hear people read out their papers and having little time for discussion afterwards.

You can download all the papers here. There are some really insightful ones, so it’s worth a look and they’re not all academically dry and theoretical either. Practitioners will find some useful insights too.

If anyone I know from the service design scene or from Gothenburg is around, send me a tweet and we can try and meet up. Or just come and say hello. I look like just that logo of my head up there an pretty much as pale thanks to this long winter we’ve had.

Draft is a way for writers to collaborate online writing in Markdown with version control. It’s very straightforward so far, which is probably a good way to roll. Export doesn’t seem to be working for me at the moment, but the plan appears to be to export to Dropbox et al and keep things in sync. That would be nice. It’s great to see these kinds of simple text-editor collaborative services starting to spring up outside of the Word/Google Doc ecosystem. It’ll be interesting to see how Draft compares to Editorially, which I am hugely looking forward to.

[Update: A few of these kinds of editors are appearing, including Dillinger.io and Markable.in]

Since Google is shutting down Google Reader, it seems pretty likely that Feedburner is going to get axed at some point too. So, I have decided to move Playpen’s RSS feed away from Feedburner. I want to experiment with a couple of different options and platforms for the site anyway and moving the feed back to my own domain services means I can take back control. This means I have the freedom to ensure the feed stays intact, regardless of what I mess around with, because I can handle redirections myself.

RSS Subscribers

So, what does that mean for you? I’m always grateful to my readership, so I hope I don’t lose anyone on the way. If you subscribed within the last few years, check your feed URL for Playpen and change it to http://www.polaine.com/playpen/feed/ instead of the old Feedburner one that starts with http://feeds.feedburner.com/.

I actually changed the link to this on my site about a month ago anyway, so newer subscribers might already have the correct feed URL. I’ll leave it for a month before I completely kill the Feedburner one and also get Feedburner to redirect for a while, but it makes sense to make the change now rather than wonder why the feed is no longer updating.

E-Mail Subscribers

If you are subscribed via e-mail, I will be moving the delivery of those mails across to MailChimp. You don’t have to do anything at all, but you will start receiving mails with MailChimp info instead of Feedburner info at the bottom. As always, you can easily unsubscribe if you are no longer interested.

Learn Layout is a great little site. I can code HTML and CSS, but not brilliantly and I don’t have to do it that often. When I do, I always have to re-cap on the latest developments. This tutorial site is just what I need:

I assume you already know what selectors, properties, and values are. And you probably know a thing or two about layout, though it may still be a rage-provoking activity for you. If you want to learn HTML and CSS from the beginning, you should check out this tutorial. Otherwise, let’s see if we can save you some fury on your next project.

I’m extremely happy to announce that our book, Service Design: From Insight to Implementation, was officially published today.

I wrote a welcome post about it over on the book’s home at Rosenfeld Media. If you feel like tweeting or blogging about it, that would be great. What really helps is a quick review on Amazon.com too – even just a short shout out and rating works wonders.

I’m really looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback!

Most of us have experienced a relationship in which the other person constantly assails you with their problems, yet when the tables are turned, their response is cursory before turning the conversation back to themselves. These relationships soon end or we put up with them because the other person is our mother.

I tweeted yesterday about judging the One Show Interactive Awards and, while I’m not going to comment on any individual entry, there is a tendency of advertising agencies to make a video with big production values, put it online with some social media gimmicks and call it interactive. This is not an interactive relationship. It’s someone shouting, “Like me! Like me! Like me!” They frequently violate a Golden Rule¹ that I’ve had for interactivity for many years that I also tweeted:

The effort required to experience something should be less than or equal to the payoff of the experience.

I learned this very early on in the stone-age days of “multimedia” authoring. Back when we were creating interactive experiences that needed to fit on floppy disks or CD-ROMs, CD-ROM drives had transfer speeds of 150-300KB/s. This meant you had to make some choices or divide up the content into smaller beats. If it takes three minutes for an interactive to load, you better be sure I’m going to play with it for at least that amount of time, preferably more. We quickly learned how annoying “skip intros” were. Not that this prevented them from being re-born in every new medium.

Despite faster technology, nothing has really changed. What happens with broadband and CPU speeds is largely the same as what happens with rubbish bins, hard-drives and roads. You just fill up the available space. If you buy more of them to deal with it, you just fill those up too, making cleaning up even more of a pain. Nothing beats dealing with restrictions by using less resources in the first place.

Unfortunately, with greater bandwidth available, agencies fall back on their traditional model. Make a cool video and then deliver it big, because now they can. Instead they could use the extra bandwidth and CPU speed to make the delivery of a smaller payload quicker and make the most of the Golden Rule payoff equation. That one-minute’s worth of fun interactivity has a better experiential value ratio when it is delivered in five seconds compared to it taking three minutes to come down the pipe.

The rule of, “If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it” generally chimes with the Golden Rule, but not always. Some things do need explaining and that is okay as long as they are actually complicated and we are going to use them a lot. Most interfaces are not worth the effort of learning for the things we want or, worse, have to achieve with them. Those kinds of tasks are often short-lived. It’s annoying to have to hunt for a tool palette or preference in Microsoft’s crazy Word interface just to turn off some auto-styling crap. On the other hand, we spend a long time learning to drive a car and having someone explain it to us, because there are many variables at play when we drive, we will drive for the rest of our lives and prefer not to kill people in the process. (Dear American and Australian readers: learn to drive a stick shift – it will make you a better driver).

For many people, this is why learning maths in school feels pointless. The effort versus daily usage seems disproportionate. Programmers often appear to be the antithesis of the Golden Rule, because they give the impression of enjoying the process of learning something very complex or writing a script to achieve a task that can be done with a few mouse clicks (I’m looking at you Dr Drang and Brett Terpstra). But the rule still holds, because either the process of working something out has a long-lasting skill payoff or the script that took a while to write replaces many multiple uses of the mouse-based version.

The Golden Rule works well when thinking about service experiences too. Many services involve highly asymmetric relationships. You can usually buy something or create a contract very simply online or over the phone in a matter of minutes, for example. This side is in the service provider’s favour. Yet when something goes wrong or you want to quit your contract, you have to wait on hold for ages for customer service or, if you live in Germany, contact the company in writing. On paper. Via snail mail. Then the response time is in the order of weeks, not minutes.

You can be fined on the spot for not having a train ticket, but it might take months to receive compensation if your train is cancelled. These all feel unfair because they are unfair and, like the “friend” whose worry dumping is a one-way street, you soon feel bitter and want to get out of that relationship as quickly as possible. Companies like Amazon and Zappos put a lot of effort and money into redressing this imbalance with great success.

If you go to McDonald’s the meal experience is low-grade, but delivered quickly. If your Big Mac takes a long time to arrive, there’s no point in going to McDonald’s. Conversely, it feels fine to wait for half and hour for your food in a good restaurant, because you know the risotto is being freshly made to order. The payoff is slowly savouring the meal, ideally with a fine glass of wine and great conversation.

The Golden Rule works for most media. It’s why we do the first or 99th page test on books, why films (usually French) are frustrating when nothing seems to have happened and suddenly the credits roll.

Well-written TV series exploit the Golden Rule too. Within the space of an episode we get the story payoff for that episode, but we also teased with the promise of the next piece of drama in the larger story arc. A dangling plot line requires some effort from us to imagine what might happen next, but it is only just irritating enough to leave us wanting the next episode so we can scratch that itch.

The effort versus experience equation is why making it easy to pay for music downloads trumps the effort of downloading it illegally for most people. It’s certainly why I buy much more music than I ever used to.

The rule works for games very well too. The best games are those whose rules are easy to learn, but the gameplay is engaging for hours. As Steven Johnson points out in, Everything Bad is Good for You², videogame designers stopped writing long instruction manuals and creating “training levels” some time ago. Instead, players are dropped directly into progressively more difficult action. Part of the pleasure of the game is finding out just what the gameplay is. In this scenario, the experience payoff is intimately bound together with the experience of gaining it.

And life? Humans are highly attuned to this kind of balance in relationships, whether work or personal. Like most animals, we instinctively make calculations about expending energy versus rewards returned, whether social or nutritional.

In our modern lives it is why a six-hour commute for a one-hour meeting is so irritating and why meetings are generally so toxic. It is why dysfunctional relationships take so much out of us and why people who are generous and open, reducing the barriers of interaction with them, are a pleasure to be around. It is why bank bailouts for people getting million dollar bonuses seem so unfair and why voting apathy is so prevalent.

The Golden Rule is really about getting the balance right at the “border between boredom and anxiety”, what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously explored in his research on flow³. It is the challenge of interactivity, games, TV shows, films, music, services, food, education, sex, relationships, society and life.

A quick cross-post from our Rosenfeld Media book blog. Ben, Lavrans and I are going to be doing (giving? What does one say…?) an O’Reilly Webcast titled Service Design: Designing cross-channel service experiences on Wednesday 14th March. It’s my daughter’s birthday, so it’s an auspicious date.

The O’Reilly site has all the details and where you can register. The time of the webcast is: 10AM PT, San Francisco | 5pm – London | 1pm – New York | Fri, Mar 15th at 4am – Sydney | Fri, Mar 15th at 2am – Tokyo | Fri, Mar 15th at 1am – Beijing | 10:30pm – Mumbai. Missing from that O’Reilly list is 6pm for all of you in Central Europe (GMT+1).

Those sharp-eyed among you will also notice that the icon of our book has changed from the “Book in Progress” one to one with an actual cover and this webcast should pretty much coincide with the launch of the book, so we’re very excited.

A big thanks to O’Reilly for taking part in helping us get the word out there. It will be particularly interesting to speak to the broader audience that O’Reilly have and we anticipate everything from, “Service Design? Been there, done that!” to “Service Design? Huh?”.

If you can make it, we’d love to see you online. Or hear you or see your words or however that works. Please spread the word with a tweet/+1/like.

I’m hoping the technology holds up – we’ll all be connecting in from different countries. If not, we can all spend 60 minutes shouting, “I can’t hear you!,” “No, you go on… sorry, what? Hang on, I’ll restart my machine.”