Running shoes must be usable, but it’s their seductive design that really sells the product.

I’ll be delivering a new presentation concept about “merchandising” at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in New York this September 18th (and again two weeks later in Amsterdam at Euro IA). Not about merchandising as in the design of retail environments (offline or online), but about merchandising as in how products themselves are designed to make people want to buy them.

Many UX designers see “merchandising” as another flavor of marketing, and therefore see it as something different from, or even opposed to, good UI design. It’s the evil part of the product design process that says we need to put 100 buttons on the remote control so that they can put 100 bullets on the box, which in turn will help the product sell from the shelves in the stores.

Mozilla Labs UI designer, and former Humanized ninja Jono DiCarlo writes about this phenomenon in his thought-provoking UI manifesto “These Things I Believe“:

6. Is UI design marketing?

User interface design is not marketing.

Software developers loathe marketing, so if they think that UI design is marketing, then they will loathe UI design.

The qualities of software that make for a good advertisement or computer-store demo are not the same qualities that make software usable and pleasant to work with long-term, day-in day-out. Often these qualities are opposites.

A shopper may choose the microwave with more buttons, because it seems “more powerful”. However, the shopper will soon find out that it does the same thing as any other microwave, you just have to spend longer figuring out which button to push.

It is easy to fool people into buying something that is against their own best interest.

Don’t do that.

I’m not sure I agree with this entirely. The user experience designer’s job is essentially no different than what the industrial/product designer’s job has been for a century: To design products that people want to use. A product that is empirically hard to use but that people perceive as easy or fun to use because of delightful UI characteristics can be successful. A product that makes a lot of noise, takes up a lot of space, is expensive to maintain, and has a complicated interface might be extremely desirable and satisfying to many people simply because it makes them feel powerful using it, despite the measurable waste associated with the design.

A designer who neglects marketing concerns and designs a product that the target audience sees as undesirable (because, for example, it lacks a sexy list of features or a glossy interface) is just as bad as a designer who neglects production concerns and creates something that is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to build (to manufacture, program, whatever).

And unfortunately for us designers who favor elegance and simplicity, there is a large cohort of consumers and purchasers who feel a *lot* better about instead owning products that they are confident have the most buttons and bullet points, regardless of usability or even performance. You can probably throw many Windows Vista champions into this category.

If efficiency isn’t generally seen as important to a product’s users, then we designers who do think it’s important need to make our elegant and efficient products scream out to users “I am simple to use! And (in case you didn’t know) that’s a good thing! Don’t buy the competitor’s junk with all the bloated features — buy me instead and you’ll be happier!”

That’s a designer being a marketer, or even a salesman. But in a good way.

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Newstand by Berenice Abbott, 1935

In print design, the expression “above the fold” dates from an era where broadsheet newspapers were folded in half and piled up in stacks in front of newsstands, showing only the upper-half of the front page to potential customers. If an article or a picture did not appear “above the fold” on the paper, it might as well have been invisible to potential customers. Putting a sexy photo or a gripping headline “above the fold” was a way to drive up sales.

From the very earliest days of web design, that old term “above the fold” was appropriated to allow designers to discuss which page elements would be visible to users without their having to scroll the page. You see, way back in the 1990s it was generally accepted as fact that many everyday web users rarely used their browser’s scrollbar — it was even thought that some users didn’t even know how to scroll at all!

These days it seems hard to imagine millions of helpless computer novices wondering why so many articles on the web seem to end abruptly halfway through, especially now that everyone and their grandmother uses the web (well, except, apparently, John McCain). But things were different a decade ago. Many users had only owned computers for a few years. Few people had ever bought anything online or posted a comment to a message board.

Since then, however, it has become clear that people do, in fact, scroll their web windows quite a bit. Usability tests of all kinds have shown this. Our old fears of content below the fold being lost forever are no longer valid.

This does not mean, however, that “above the fold” is obsolete. It has just become a little more nuanced.

For one thing, despite the fact that users can and do scroll web pages, the first impression a web page gives a user is still critical. Before the user can actually get around to scrolling a page, they are already getting a instantaneous impression of what they see. This instant is dominated by the above-the-fold design elements. If you want something to grab your user’s attention, even on a subconscious level, it obviously helps to put it above the fold.

Also, when you are talking about those specific page design elements that appear on every page in a site — navigation, cross-promotions, related items links, etc — these items will appear repeatedly to the user every time they go to a new page. Again, being above the fold makes those elements more prominent in the user’s mind.

That being said, I still don’t see the fold as the critical factor in designing for web page prioritization. The underlying objectives of these two examples (to expose users to important content and features) is entirely achievable through other, traditional graphic design techniques other than simply placing things “above the fold”. Size, color, positioning, typography — there are ways of calling something out besides putting it at the top.

In fact, we should start thinking of “the fold” as something other than a hard line with an “above” and “below” portion, and we should stop thinking of the vertical positioning on a page as equivalent to priority. Scrolling up and down through a web page is a fundamental aspect of the web user experience, and there is much more to it than simply seeing what’s on top and then gradually seeing everything else.

When scrolling the New York Times web site, for example, the above-the-fold content (here shown as Zone 1) certainly contains many of the page’s most critical elements. But as you scroll through the page, the landscape changes. It’s not just a stack of elements of gradually-decreasing importance. Instead, the scrolling experience is punctuated by elements of clear high-importance: the video in Zone 2, the belt of featured stories in Zone 3. Even Zone 4, the page’s “links ghetto” has a distinct identity of its own.

Scrolling down the page, then, is an opportunity to view the page as an unfolding temporal event, not as a static snapshot.

I’ll often find myself in design meetings where someone says they want Element X to appear “above the fold”. Some designers may wince at the expression, but in reality the client is saying something fairly straightforward: They want Element X to be prominently displayed to the user. If the holistic page design can make an element stand out on the page while the user is scrolling the page, even if it is below the fold the design can succeed in that goal.

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I am thoroughly enjoying the debut crop of iPhone Apps — a welcome improvement over the (mostly) second-rate half-baked apps available in the Jailbreak era.

Here are a few imaginary apps and functions I wish I could be using right now.

1. Batch Sync

Most New Yorkers with iPhones will recognize this scenario: You get on the subway and decide to catch some headlines on NetNewsWire, or maybe you want to catch up on the last hour or two of tweets on Twitteriffic. But when you open up each app, you find yourself looking at the same headlines you were looking at ten hours ago — the last time you launched the app. And now you’re underground and it’s too late to sync.In fact, many subway commuters have learned to practice a little ritual where, on their way to the train station, they launch each of these apps one by one just to sync the data so that when they go underground the data will be there ready for them.

“Batch Sync” is my solution. It’s simple an icon on the Home screen that, when clicked, launches each and every of the apps the user wants to synchronize with the cloud.

I realize that this app is probably impossible unless Apple does it themselves: Wisely, Apple does not permit any third-party iPhone apps to run in the background, a privilege reserved exclusively for a select number of Apple’s own apps (Mail, iPod, etc). But I can imagine a scenario in which Apple permits third-party apps to run in a limited way in the background, under specific user request and control: First, they can only sync in the background — no other functions besides syncing is permitted; and second, only if the user grants those apps specific permission to sync behind the scenes (or on demand) on a case-by-case basis.

This could most easily be done via a Preferences panel (a checkbox list, for example, listing all apps that offer the ability to sync automatically. UPDATE: Allegedly Apple is working on this, but no current apps seem to use it.

2. WiFi Switch

I turn my iPhone’s WiFi antenna on and off fairly frequently (to conserve battery life, for example), and it’s a pain to have to drill down into the System Preferences every time I want to do it.”WiFi Switch is a simple app that will provide Home-screen-level access to toggle WiFi on and off. That’s all it does — you click it and it turns WiFi on, click again and it turns it off. The icon could even change color to reflect the current state.

In fact, I sense some promise in the general idea of having a Home screen icon that simply switches some iPhone service on and off. There must be other uses for such a model.

3. A Decent To-Do List.

All of the current options really suck, IMHO. They’re either bloated GTD-crazed apps where it takes longer to write down and classify most tasks than it does to actually do them, or they are misbegotten piles of bad visual design, non-standard iPhone UI elements, and thoughtlessly inelegant user interaction design processes. More on this later.

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At 11:01am Sunday morning, in 90-degree heat, I crossed the finish line in Central Park and completed my year-long goal of finishing the New York City Triathlon. I was exhausted and frustrated (more on that later), but at that moment, as soon as I stopped running and realized I was done, I was overcome with a profound visceral joy.

I’ve been actively training for the triathlon for a little less than a year, but it’s been an idle dream of mine for several years. Since way back in my teenage years I’ve been an sometime runner and cyclist. But last August I did a run/bike duathlon that was more than a little thrilling, and then, in September, I began training as a swimmer, a step that for all intents and purposes was the first step on the road to my first triathlon.

For those of you unfamiliar with triathlon (it is conventional to leave out the definite article), it is a race of various lengths consisting of swim, bike, and run stages, in that order. Between each stage, competitors are required to “transition” from the mindset and the equipment from one sport to those of the next sport as fast as they can. Triathlon lengths range from “sprint” distances (approx .5mi/12mi/3mi) to the classic “Ironman” length (2.4mi, 112mi ,26mi). The New York Triathlon is “Olympic distance”: approximately 1-mile swim, 25-mile bike, and 6-mile run.

For me this is a sort of fulfillment of a family tradition: My father is a runner and a high-school cross-country team captain, my brother and several aunts and uncles are long distance runners and certified marathoners, my stepfather is a cyclist who biked from coast to coast, my mother swims and bikes, her father (my grandfather) is a living family legend of long-distance running (completing many marathons at an age when most men play shuffleboard), and his wife, my grandmother, has been a competitive diver, swimmer, racewalker… and, yes, a triathlete. My effort was at some level dedicated to and inspired by them all, especially my grandmother. Thank you, family!

Ready!

The preparation for any triathlon, especially in the days leading up to the event itself, is elaborate to say the least. I’ve included a photo here of all the stuff I needed to pack for the race, from bike helmet and gloves, three different pairs of shoes, goggles and extra goggles, extra contact lenses, body lubricant (yep), water bottles with water and energy drinks of various sorts, and countless other little things — and this doesn’t even include the full-body wetsuit!

(In the lower left corner you will see the Field Notes notebook I dedicated exclusively to planning for the race.)

The triathlon is really a weekend-long event, with a check-in and briefing about the race on Friday, dropping off the bike and taking a tour of the transition area on Saturday, and waking up at 2:30am on Sunday to eat breakfast before heading over to the race site. During the week leading up to the event, it was increasingly hard to think about anything else. Every meal was carefully planned, every bedtime strictly enforced. The development of a sore throat Friday morning worried me far more than it normally would have. I don’t think I’ve ever been so conscious of how my body was working.

Set!

My car service got me to the start area at 4:30. The 3 hours between the time I laid out my gear in front of my bike to the time my age group (men 34-39) jumped in the water went by as if it were only a few minutes. During these twilight hours I was Twittering and uploading photographs to help distract me from the nervousness under the surface (you can check out my live Tweetlog here).

Next thing I knew I was in my wetsuit and walking down the gangplank with a hundred other men in their late 30s, listening to a megaphone telling us that we would start in 30 seconds.

Go!

I got in the water, heard the siren blare, and started swimming.

Before this, I had reconned the conditions in the water. The waves didn’t seem bad. The current seemed strong, but I knew it was slowing down. I didn’t see any garbage in the river along our race course, but I did see some nasty looking jellyfish along the shoreline. My summers in Cape Cod have innoculated me against the fear of most varieties of small icky marine wildlife, so I was pretty confident about what would be my first open water long distance swim.

Even the initial mayhem of the swim, with arms and legs kicking about like crazy (I was even kicked in the face and almost lost my goggles), I felt like things were under control.

But after only a hundred meters, things changed dramatically for me. I was suddenly and precipitously exhausted. I couldn’t hold up the pace I was accustomed to — I’d swam a mile or more in the pool dozens of times before and never tired like this. I was so winded I had to stop swimming and simply drift on my back for a few moments. In fact, this cycle characterized my whole swim — crawl stroke for a few minutes, followed by a few minutes of aimless drifting. The current that the earlier starting athletes enjoyed had by this time come to a standstill, so when I drifted it wasn’t even necessarily in the right direction.

In short, things were going pretty badly from the outset.

I didn’t figure it out it at the time, but later on, after the race, I realized that the sore throat I’d been wishing away had, moving southwards, matured into an acute bronchitis, constricting my breath as if someone were sitting on my chest. The rest of the triathlon would be shaped by this biological fact, but for me in the heat of competition I could only think to myself “What the hell is wrong with me? Try harder! Breathe harder!” It’s funny how quickly and easily we can blame our problems on our characters instead of our bodies.

Somehow, I finished the swim and staggered ashore. I learned later that others were not so fortunate: one man actually died during the swim. It’s unclear how it happened, but I am glad I played it safe and floated gently on my back (with wetsuit buoyancy assistance) whenever I thought anything didn’t feel right.

I knew I was falling well short of my target pace, but I didn’t know by how much. I later learned I completed the swim in almost double the time I targeted, but during the race I simply knew the bike stage was my chance to catch up. Still, I felt faint and winded as I climbed into the saddle.

Biking up the Henry Hudson Parkway, however, was a joy. I had fallen so far behind that, as a relatively strong cyclist, I was able to pass a great many people during the 25 miles, and managed to keep a pace very close to my objective, despite my shortness of breath. And cycling on a closed highway, with only a small number of riders around you, is a thrill that’s hard to describe.

In the final run, I again found myself in the same condition as I felt in the river: each burst of even low-level exertion would be quickly followed by gasps for air. As with the swim, I again found myself coasting — walking — for a great deal of the running stage.

Finishing!

Along the way, there were thousands of spectators and officials cheering the triathletes on. Most of the time I loved the “great jobs” and “doing greats”, but when I was drifting down the river on my back to catch my breath, or gasping for air and walking through Central Park, it was a little frustrating to be urged to a level of achievement I felt I just didn’t have in me. In the big picture, however, the sting of even these bittersweet encouragements kept me focused on the primary objective: to finish the whole thing, to try my hardest, and to never give up.

Similarly, the pre-race best-wishes from friends in the real world and via the Internet drove me on. The best part was seeing my family and a few friends staked out along the way. Some were following my performance via a SMS text-messaging service announcing my times as I completed each stage — pretty cool. But the best part was seeing my family with a home-made sign with my name on it.

When I finally crossed the finish line, I was surrounded by congratulations from the race staff. I was given a nifty medal, had my photo taken (all along the course, photographers from Brightroom.com took photos of athletes, many of which I’ve included on my Flickr set for the triathlon), and was given an endless supply of branded sports drinks.

Repeat!

Knowing that my performance Sunday was impaired by my health, I am totally psyched to do this again, and soon, to see what I can really do. I’m not waiting until next year. I’m looking for the next triathlon now. I’m hooked.

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The NeXT Cube and the Apple Mac Cube. Are they iterations?

Discussing his upcoming biography of Steve Jobs, author Leander Kahney describes Apple’s prototyping process:

It’s a process where they discover the product through constantly creating new iterations. A lot of companies will do six or seven prototypes of a product because each one takes time and money. Apple will do a hundred — that’s how many they did of the MacBook. Steve Jobs doesn’t wake up one morning and there’s a vision of an iPhone floating in front of his face. He and his team discovered it through this exhaustive process of building prototype after prototype.

Clearly Jobs wants to see his team exploring hundreds of prototypes of his products before a final version is sent to manufacturing. But when asked in a video interview about his experience hiring the legendary graphic designer Paul Rand to design of the NeXT logo, Jobs said he admired the fact that Rand (perhaps arrogantly) proclaimed that Jobs would only get one logo for his engagement fee. Rand would not show Jobs a menu of variations to choose from, nor would he show a selection of rough drafts and allow Jobs to provide feedback so that Rand could go back to the drawing board to produce a final candidate. There would be no process at all, no open exploration — Rand would simply give Jobs the best logo he could provide, and then Jobs could take it or leave it.

Why would Jobs admire Rand’s process so much when he runs Apple’s design team in exactly the opposite fashion? Is it simply a matter of Jobs being a sucker for Rand’s monumental ego (and, of course, his stunning track record) while still being a absolute monarch with his own internal team?

This touches on a bigger issue in the design profession: When should a design process spend time on a broad exploration of many options, and when should a designer or design team focus on perfecting a single promising idea?

My inclination is almost always to explore as many options as possible, only settling on a final direction when practical constraints force me to get busy finishing the product.

Of course, this is just one school of design. Clearly many other designers prefer to finish their explorative thinking early and to then invest the bulk of their effort on perfecting the product. Still other designers are simply incapable of coming up with more than a small number of ideas — or they are temperamentally prone to become extremely emotionally attached to their earliest ideas.

In which contexts is a quality-based process actually preferable to a quantity-based process?

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I am going to be speaking today, June 17th, at the OMMA Publish conference here in New York City, on a panel entitled “Optimizing for Performance: Adding Value to Your Site”. OMMA is focused on online media marketing and advertising, publishing several trade magazines and sponsoring several conferences each year in these areas.

My panel will discuss the seemingly straightforward topic of making media sites more engaging and (critically) more profitable. The session will cover the spectrum from tactical solutions — new features that increase stickiness and page views — to strategic solutions that fundamentally change what your media web site can be for the audience and users.

And then, of course, there is the middle ground between tactics and strategy, the recognition that all of the little things we do to improve the user experience and to delight the user actually add up to a strong overall brand experience.

This is my first conference in which I am not speaking to an audience composed almost exclusively of design professionals. While there will certainly be peers and colleauges in this conference, many of the attendees will be members of that elite, special class of individual I call potential clients. I’m usually a pretty good pitch man, so I think this will be fun.

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There is an institution in the United Kingdom called the Design Council. A government-funded organization, the Council’s mission is “to help UK managers become the best users of design in the world, supported by the most skilled and capable design professionals.”

This objective makes it sound like they’re a professional guild or advocacy organization, like America’s AIGA, but the Design Council differs in two ways: First, they are government-funded, which means there is no American equivalent. Second, they have no membership (or membership fees). The Design Council exists to help advance British design, period.

I’m not British, of course, but Rachel Abrams is. The Design Council invited Rachel to contribute an article to their bi-annual (and limited-edition print-only) Design Council Magazine about the role of the designer in the world of business, in particular on how designers can be influential in the higher layers of the business decision making process. This is a subject I have no small interest in, what with my debate a few months ago with Bruce Nussbaum at BusinessWeek and with my workshop session at this year’s IA Summit in Miami.

I’m honored to have been one of several people interviewed by Rachel for the article. My contribution was mostly to discuss how core design skills are applicable to macro-level business skills.

My favorite part of the article, however, is IDEO’s Mat Hunter’s observation that “The point at which an organisation moves beyond operational efficiency and problem-solving toward opportunity-finding is the point where there is room for designers to lead.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a designer playing an instrumental role in the direction of their business if the business is focused on solving existing problems and exploiting known opportunities. I wish I’d thought of that.

The article is not online, so (unless I get in trouble for this) you can view the article in PDF form here.

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UX Social is Olga Howard’s new initiative to investigate connections between user experience design and public policy. Recently Olga has been interviewing information architects about their views about IA in the public sector. She interviewed quite a few of us at last month’s IA Summit in sunny Miami.

Her interview with me is now posted for your enjoyment. While I’ve done no real professional work in the public sector (unless you count the Smithsonian), I did have some ideas, namely: The government is something we interact with inwardly and outwardly. We expect to receive some kinds of information from the government (I discuss New York’s awesome 311 service) and we we give other kinds of information to the government (such as census data).

On a personal note, listening to myself speak — much less viewing my own smirking face — isn’t always easy for me to bear. My “ums-per-minute” drops significantly after the first few minutes, thankfully. I hope you enjoy it!

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I’ve always loved Flickr, but I’ve never had the time to really use it as diligently as many of my friends apparently do. The Flickr Uploadr software always seemed a little wonky to me, and I didn’t savor the idea of sorting my photos locally in folders or in iPhoto and then having to repeat the process when uploading to Flickr. So my Flickr use was at best sporadic.

Recently I started using FlickrExport for iPhoto, and after only ten minutes with the trial version I was compelled to fork out the £12 (about $900 USD) for the registered version. FlickrExport simply adds a little panel in iPhoto permitting you to transfer your carefully-organized photos from iPhoto directly into Flickr. When you give your photos names or descriptions, the metadata is copied to both locations. Brilliant.

It’s amazing how a simple bit of software makes such a huge difference in my use of the Flickr service. This is a great example of the great stuff that can emerge from the ecosystem of symbiotic third party software. I really do anticipate keeping my Flickr account far more up-to-date and active than I ever have in the past, simply because now I can add my photos to Flickr immediately after adding them to iPhoto and without having to launch a separate program.

As usual, I am askrom. So go ahead, check out the pictures!

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