Simplify User Experience: Make It Physical

These days I spent most of my time thinking about user experience. I see increasing importance of getting the user experience right. As I discussed on my earlier post, I believe that good user experience is human-computer interaction designed to be so intuitive that almost invisible to the users.

I Had To Struggle With This Perfectly Functional
In-Flight Entertainment UI Built Pre-iPhone

If you are international traveler, you are now accustomed to seeing personal in-flight entertainment system. I just had a pleasure of sitting in front of one for 14 and half hours. When you are stuck on a plane for that long, perhaps it is expected that you'll learn how to navigate through different screens with controller.

Before touchscreen user interface, interacting with controller looked perfectly normal thing to do. If you want to move the cursor around, you use four arrow keys. If you want to select something, you first highlight it then press enter. That's how we've been interacting with computer, Nintendo, XBox, and Playstation. Things were perfect. Until iPhone came out, that was.

Get Federated Or Get Obliterated

About 15 years ago I was happy with my desktop applications installed. Computer was a glorified calculator, typewriter, and video game machine back then. When I powered up my desktop, I was either going to write quick proof-of-concept Pascal code, type up school reports, or play Doom. All executables and contents that I used was installed on my hard drive. Whenever I wanted to talk to friends, I picked up the landline phone and called. Whenever I needed references checked, I headed out to library.

These days computer has turned into all-in-one communication device. When I open my laptop, I immediately open my browser, check out the latest tech news on Twitter, read what my friends are up to on Facebook, and respond to emails. No longer I have to pick up the phone or drive. I just open my IM client to chat with my friends, or use Google to look up any fleeting question that I may have at any moment. I cannot possibly imagine using a computer without network connection. Computer without internet connection is as good as dead weight.

In this post, I would like to make a case that this increasing connectivity is not a trend isolated to computer networks, but applies to social networks as well. Urge to share things and get connected has deeper roots in our human nature. It is something that cannot be ignored, and must be harnessed to make the leap into next stage of networking.

How To Bootstrap Your New Social Network

What Can We Learn From Facebook and
Disappointing Google Wave and Buzz?

These days I seem to hear new social networking sites launching every other day: Social classified ads site Neezz.com, social site for college students CollegeOnly (I touched on them in my earlier blog), social group site The Fridge, open source privacy-sensitive social network package Diaspora, personal network site Path, etc. If you look at location-based social network (LBSN) only, there are dozens of them starting out following initial success of Foursquare. It seems like every website is either thinking about starting up a new social networking site or incorporating social networking feature into existing site.

This got me wondering. Is there any lesson that we could draw from failed social network attempt, such as Google Wave and Google Buzz? What strategies can we imitate from Facebook and LinkedIn's success? What should be the strategy for new social networking site to bootstrap themselves?

Lessons From Google Wave: Even If You Build It, They Might Not Come

Last week Facebook announced that it will expand its messaging service to provide conversation history, integration with IM, email, SMS, and Facebook messages, and social inbox that can filter messages by your social network. When I brought this up to my friends, one friend immediately chimed in and said he's seen these functionalities from Google Wave. I haven't been keeping up with Google Wave. I vaguely remembered hearing about Google Wave is about to shutdown as standalone project in coming weeks.

Data Visualization: Show Me Forest, Not The Trees

Too much light often blinds gentlemen of this sort. They cannot see the forest for the trees.
- Christoph Martin Wieland, German poet and writer (1733-1813)

Internet made all of us to be inundated with more information than we can all possibly consume. There are traditional news media reporting news, blogs and other opinion pieces produced by individual users. And as more people spend their time with Facebook and Twitter, more social media contents are being created by our friends and families. We are all being overloaded with more information than we can handle.

Stop Microwaving Your Brain; Don't Hold Cell Phone Against Your Ear

One of the global trends is explosive growth of cell phone users. In United States, there are 285 million cell phones in use as of Dec 2009 according to Wikipedia, and that's 91% of entire US population having a cell phone. Remarkably there are countries that have more cell phones than people. As of now (November, 2010) US may well be on the course to join these multiple cellular device countries with increasing Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad popularity.

Cell phone has clearly revolutionized the way we communicate, provided important tools for social networks, and became a lifeline to connect far-flung population in remote areas of developing world. It has become an essential part of our lives for all.

But there is growing concerns that indiscriminate cell phone use are jeopardizing public health. The cause for concern is cell phone radiation.

People, Natural Improvisers

Today I want to elaborate on observation that I touched on earlier, that is, people are natural improvisers. When we are faced with something that we want but not provided for, we apply our creativity to improvise to create our own solution within the confines of what system allows.

I'll give you four such examples to illustrate my point. While going through my examples, hopefully I would have made convincing case for you to consider my conclusion: Product design should be continually improved when sufficient level of unintended workarounds are detected.