Yes, we still exist! Sheets of Silver, the band spawned from employees of IMVU is still going strong. Our lineup is still Marcus Gosling, Matt Danzig, Rob McLay and me, Greg Jagiello. (Trivia: all of us were at one point IMVU employees, but currently only Matt can claim that status.)

We've recently recorded our third EP, this time at Tiny Telephone recording studio in San Francisco, and you can grab it from the usual places, such as Amazon (dowload here: http://amzn.com/B004Y8W9DK) for about the price of feeding a starving child in Africa for a day. It's your call how you want to spend your money, but I think the EP is your best bet.

This session of 3 tracks was another analog recording and mixing session for us, using 2" and 1/2" tape. Great place to record, and we had the fantastic Jay Pellicci as our engineer -- highly recommended, as he's got a great ear, is very patient, and is a master of efficiency behind the board. He barely rolled his eyes whenever we wanted to use the house Hammond B4 on every song.

A VERY hearty thanks to honorary SoS member David Hostetler for coming up to SF to play bass on these tracks. Learning from only rough practice session iPhone recordings, with only a single rehearsal session session the day before the studio, he rocked each track using only an improvised bass guitar made of a broom and some undercooked pasta. And thankfully he was able to taste the incredible sandwiches from Pal's Takeaway during the session. (That's about all we could offer him for his time...hopefully we'll have a larger budget on our next world tour.)

There is also a remix project in the works! This should be great, and I suspect the results will far exceed the original tunes. Contributors including Mike Fisher, Steven Tracey, DJ Nick Garcia, and David Hostetler and possibly more. Thanks in advance, guys, hehe.

Oh, I have one Beg t-shirt, since large -- if you want it, let me know what your favorite song on Beg is and I'll get in touch and ship it your way.

Thanks for reading!

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This year is starting off great, and I'm very excited about the news that TripIt has signed a deal to be acquired by Concur in a $120mil deal.

I recall my first few working sessions with them, in their large shared office with a half-dozen start-ups. 6 people, working on modest desks made of doors laid across wooden sawhorses. Seems like just yesterday.

Pretty cool to see all the hard work on everyone's part pay off, so congratulations to all involved.

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Another personal project went live recently: an iPhone app that Steph and I designed called Whack-a-Larm for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The concept is a variation on an idea Rob McLay and I brainstormed. It is up on the iTunes store now:

It's an alarm clock with a simple game you have to play to stop the annoying sounds.

Steph created a revised Nexxtep Interaction site with more of a focus on the app, as we have a number of increasingly interesting and complex ideas we hope to build out over 2011. This app was basically a prototype for the process we'll use, as well as a real-world way to try out a 3rd party developer.

I'll be posting about the experience of designing and creating the app, as well as some of my experience promoting and supporting it. If I can figure out a way to earn some (relatively) passive income with it, great. But the real intent was to try and tackle some projects with a lighter attitude, some humor, and some authenticity -- something I don't see very much, but like when I do run into that attitude.

Thanks for coming by!

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My mom was working on two books prior to her passing away in November 2009, both on medical transcription. She had everything but distribution taken care of, including several hundred printed and bound examples with proper ISBN codes.

Needing a project (ha!) I decided to help bring her dream of being a published author closer to reality, so this weekend I found her book source files, tweaked and converted them to the proper format, and submitted the first of her two books to Amazon:

Dictation - An Art Within a Science

I also created some basic PR/marketing support, such as a Twitter feed and a Posterous blog. I plan on spending some amount of time each week trying to promote the book to medical transcription students. (I'm always open to marketing advice, if anyone out there has suggestions on reaching the right audience, btw.)

And because I know she would like it, I am donating the proceeds (if there are any!) to the Hermitage Cat Shelter in Tucson, where she picked up several of her fuzzy friends that worked along side her as she did home-based medical transcription.

So although it's not a huge accomplishment, I'm quite pleased to start 2011 off with this small project milestone and hope I can end it with a nice donation to the Hermitage. Here is hoping your year is getting off to a great start!

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I'm on the board of advisors for Citizen Groove -- a startup NOT located in the Bay Area -- and things are going well. Here's a nice article that came out recently:

http://www.inside-business.com/Main/Archive/Musical_Chairs_11812.aspx

Great team and a solid product with a paying customer...exactly the type of startup I want to be involved with. It's just a nice bonus that there is a music angle, and even more so that John is a heck of a piano player, even if he has been busy with CG recently.

And thanks to Weston Stander for introducing me to the CG team, good call that.

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I'm very much looking forward to Call of Duty: Black Ops. And I rarely (maybe once?) pre-order any games, and always avoid the big packages with tons of plastic crap that fills up my apartment.

But the Prestige Edition pre-order got through to me. Check it out:

Look for me on Xbox Live, gamertag Mint Octopus. I'm still playing CoD:MW2 so send an invite!

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This post compares two watches that I purchased, with a focus on the initial UX of setting the watch for the first time, using a real-world use case to get us all on the same page. As you may suspect from the post title, one of these watches was less friendly than the other.

The Use Case

OK, so imagine you are a surfer, sailor (me), or otherwise care about your local tides. Or tides away from home, perhaps an upcoming vacation destination (me)...or a spot you aspire to visit (if you set your dual-time to Tokyo or Paris but have never visited, you know what I mean.)

A quick trip to your local surf shop and you've a new watch in hand. But of course, it isn't set for your local tides -- instead it's set to some default location, perhaps the port in China it recently arrived from. You easily set the date and the time. And maybe you even got the daylight savings setting correct.

Now it's time to let the watch your location, so you can see correct tidal data. Here is how this step works for two different watches.

Watch A: Casio G-Shock G-Lide Surfing Watch ($100)

This took at least 20 minutes of research. Sadly, the watch tide display was completely wrong when compared to the real tide chart (easily found online) so I used trial and error until my chart matched the real one online. Not confidence inspiring, having so many possible points of error.

Watch B: Nixon The Lowdown Surf Watch ($90)

Conclusion

The Casio is simply hostile to whoever is setting it. What value is there in allowing a user to set a home location of the middle of China? Or even the middle of the Atlantic? Tides are irrelevant to our use case in both case. Sure, you can program any home location, but I'd wager that 99.99% of surfing and sailing worldwide happens at one of a couple hundred points on a coastline, well known enough to have a name. The Casio approach is a recipe for inaccuracy, and if you're sailing and get grounded, knowing that the tide is rising and you'll float away soon (versus knowing you are 5 hours away from moving and having to call for help) is a pretty big deal.

Therefore, the Nixon wins the first time user experience (FTUX) challenge for me.

(That said, it is not the perfect watch, and I'll keep and occasionally wear the Casio...just not when I need to know the tide.)

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The second EP from my band Sheets of Silver is available on Amazon!

Fun times in the studio recording these three tracks. In case you don't know, the members are:

• Marcus Gosling, bass
• Rob McLay, guitar
• Matt Danzig, vocals
• Greg Jagiello, drums

We're trying to get one EP per quarter recorded, so let's see if that actually happens. Enjoy!

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I've been using my 16gb WiFi iPad for almost 2 weeks now and overall it's greatly exceeded my (lowly) expectations, mostly due to a couple of key additions I consider requirements:

• 3G access via my Verizon MiFi is fantastic and a necessity for one of my major use cases: riding Caltrain for 80 minutes a day.
• Dropbox because of...
• GoodReader for iPad! With this app, I can browse my DropBox files, copy files locally to my iPad, view them (including formats Ike PPTX, PDF, AIF, and PNG), and even email them. This is huge and allows me to do actual work, and not just consume media.
• Evernote! Hopefully enough said.
• Nuevasync! This is a freemium service that I use to sync the built-in calendar app with Google calendar. Essential and my usage is free (also essential for my iPhone.)
• IMAP and LDAP! Not having to sync to actually manage email and contacts is fantastic. This is true on the iPhone via Mail, of course, but I care more with the iPad since I'm using it for lengthy, meaningful email interactions (vs. my iPhone emails of "@trn rite now n will folio up l8r")

I am often annoyed at the lack of Flash, since I love me some casual games. And minor issues with web apps that don't quite work right with Safari do come up now and again. But overall I am certainly glad I bought this device and expect to keep using it.

Sent from my iPad

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Obviously still early, but here are a couple of thoughts about the iPad.

- The on-screen keyboard is surprisingly usable in landscape mode. I'm using it to compose this and keyed in a couple dozen emails over the weekend. - It feels like a computer, and not very much l Ike a big iPhone. Screen size, overall responsiveness, and capabilities trick you into thinking of it as a net book, to the point where I was about to do my standard "new pc" installation checklist.

- My initial batch of app purchases came to about $40: SketchBook and some mockup app were half of that, with a couple of games. Also bought an ebook, but not counting that in that amount.

- Best digital photo frame ever.

- I was never very interested in the ebooks thing with the Kindle. The ugly device, lack of backlighting, single purpose utility turned me off completely. The iPad is much more appealing to me for books, though, and I'm already halfway through SuperFreakanomics, a $13 purchase.

- I hope the iPad is the Garageband of Apple tablets. Def want more capabilities in this form factor.

So overall, I'm impressed and for curiosity I'm using it as my daily commuting machine for a week. Last time I tried that, with an HP net book, I gave it up and that machine is covered in dust somewhere in my closet.

Sent from my iPad

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Very cool that TripIt received another round of funding -- $7mm more in this 3rd round -- to help them really attack opportunities in the travel space.

http://gigaom.com/2010/03/04/tripit-raises-7m-for-travel-logistics/

I worked with them as a contractor a few years back...love the team, love the product. I need to travel more so I can actually, you know, USE the product...the annual Vegas trip is always run through the Itinerator, but that's about the extent of my globetrotting.

Nice job, guys, keep up the good work.

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Over the last week, I've clocked just over 5 hours playing Space Miner: Space Ore Bust on my iPhone. A fantastic game.

What struck me as most interesting is that the core gameplay -- spin around in space, shooting asteroids, viewed from above -- is virtually unchanged from Asteroids, a coin-op game by Atari from 1979. That Space Miner got $2 and five hours from me is pretty impressive, since I have Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, and Heavy Rain on my desk competing for my attention. The basic asteroid-shooting mechanic is just fun, and I would have played it a few times, but the goofy storyline and credit-based upgrade system is what sucked me into a 5 hour experience.

I'd love to travel back in time to 1980, find myself queued up to play Asteroids, and whip out my iPhone and let the other me play Space Miner just to see my own reaction.

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This post is for interaction designers (IxDs) and the companies who use them, about hiring a full-time interaction designer vs. hiring a contractor:

Hire an interaction design contractor if:

• You have a single product manager (PM) today, either by title or de facto (i.e.: a founder.)
• You do NOT plan on taking that person off of the PM task in the next 6 months.
• You do NOT plan on adding another PM in the next 6 months.

Hire a full-time interaction designer if:

• You are transferring PM responsibilities within 6 months (i.e.: co-founder moving to biz dev, hiring a PM to take over.) - You are adding a 2nd PM within 6 months.
• You already have multiple PMs.

Why do I think this?
OK, bear with me on this one...for better or worse, I am getting into the weeds.

Interaction designers interpret the PMs business needs into a user interaction framework. The decisions the IxD makes greatly inform the mental model that users build around the product. A big chunk of IxD work is a form of instructional design, I'd argue...minimizing confusion around product features to help users quickly build their mental model. The resulting interaction model that users actually see can vary greatly, yet achieve exactly the same functional results. A simplified example is search: Google feels simple and easy to understand, Yahoo feels a little more complex, but they both offer search.

In instructional design theory, intrinsic cognitive load is the part of the learning that is inherently difficult, regardless of how it is presented to the learner. As instructional designers, we IxDs can, however, change the extraneous cognitive load the learner carries by using different presentation methods. Learning how to enter words in a box and hit "go" is basically the intrinsic cognitive load users deal with around search. But the Google vs. Yahoo example demonstrates a totally different handling of the extraneous cognitive load.

Dig deeper than this simple example, and you'll see that even things such as product pricing strategies, marketing decisions, and button terminology are all user-facing elements contributing to the overall extraneous cognitive load users face when dealing with a product. If the product pricing becomes a bit harder to understand, it can affect the entire mental model that customers have built around your product.

My hypothesis is that having a consistent treatment to the extraneous cognitive load across the entire product is a key element to overall success. And having demonstrated how interaction designers affect the extraneous cognitive load, I further propose that having an in-house, full-time IxD is one way to help ensure consistency in the UX in the face of change that is occurs when PMs come and go. If you aren't changing PMs soon, the risk is much lower that the product vision will change enough to affect the UX.

Who am I to think such a thing?
I've been a professional interaction designer for about 12 years, with
my time split about 70% / 30% between independent contracting (TripIt, Glassdoor are a couple of examples) and
salaried in-house positions (IMVU, where I am currently, for example.)

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(FTUX - First Time User Experience. I first heard this term during my first few days at IMVU, co-coined as a term by Matt Danzig and Marcus Gosling.)

User testing in a very small company is great, because using test findings to guide product design is a clear: potential customers give good feedback around marketing message, sign-up, and the FTUX (First Time User Experience) and early customers tell you how the product could better solve their problems. It becomes very clear that even the simplest product is only simple to the founding team, and you often chop away all but 2 or 3 key features to simplify the mental model, to ensure that customers understand that your product does indeed address their need.

Things get challenging when you add another product manager. The new PM owns a subset of the business and is responsible for growing it. So instead of a single editorial viewpoint on the UX, we now have two. Testing is now a little different -- you're working on two different projects, and user testing is often focused on just a subset of the entire product UX. Feeling that you already have feedback about your marketing message, you might skip that step in user tests with potential customers, and instead drop the directly into a new product feature to see if they can figure it out.

This post is basically to point out that the FTUX for a piece of the product is not the same as the FTUX for the 'real' product taken as a whole. I will touch more on this in a future post, but I think this point alone is pretty thought provoking for IxD professionals.

Other ideas I plan on exploring soon include:

• Testing product pieces (how it's different than testing the entire UX)
• Overall product FTUX strategies
• Managing product complexity (my developing model of cognitive load over time)
• Hiring IxD vs contractors (knowing when to make the switch)

Suggestions for the next post from this list (or otherwise?) Please let me know!

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For simplicity sake, we often take shortcuts, combining two ideas into one easier-to-grok concept:

• French-roast coffee
  This is neither grown nor roasted in France. Coffee is grown in various regions, including Columbia. Picked beans are roasted, with French Roast being the darkest on the roasting scale.
• Martini
  Gin and vermouth with an olive garnish? You are indeed drinking a Martini. Onion garnish? That's a Gibson. Vodka instead of gin? Vodkatini.
• LED displays
  Combine two concepts: LCD displays (a display technology), and LED lighting (one way to light up the LCD.) You've seen an actual LED display on highway 101 near Mountain View or at a Warriors game.
• Kobe beef
  Kobe is the most well-known *region* of Japan where the Wagyu *breed* of cattle are raised. We're getting into weird territory when talking about "US Kobe beef", since US Wagyu beef is a crossbreed of Wagyu and Angus cattle.

These are harmless examples: casual customers needn't memorize jargon, and minor technical inaccuracies are harmless. Apple markets an LED Cinema Display. I imagine 50,000 appletinis will be consumed today at various hotel bars around the globe.

So as an interaction designer designing complex systems for a casual audience, I try to leverage this tendency by pre-conflating challenging concepts. Say your application lets users create and sell t-shirts. The product manager (or requirements doc, or database) specifies a privacy setting for each shirt (private OR public) and a sales-related settings (ready for sale OR in progress.) The obvious UI is two fields, each with a pair of radio buttons to toggle. But one combo is useless: a private shirt that is not ready for sale.

I know from experience that customers take shortcuts here (from user interviews and trends in customer service questions.) Can we simplify the mental model here? How about a single "status" field with 3 options: private; public/hidden; and public/ready. I'd then test the comprehension of this concept against the other in simple user tests -- using paper or rough wireframes -- to learn if the simpler approach is nearly as good or better than the 2-field approach. (You can try this with already implemented code, but it often has deeper design roots than you expect, so be aware of all contact points for the concept.)

Caveat: not all systems should be simplified. If your customers are subject matter experts, they arrive with specialized vocabularies, taxonomies, and expectations. I'm referring mainly to casual consumer-facing systems of moderate complexity -- not the control UI for a breathing device at a hospital.

Apply this approach to a complex system and you can effectively "remove" 2 or 3 concepts which otherwise add to the customer's cognitive load. This can help on-board new customers and give you an edge over a more complex -- yet functionally similar -- product.

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I'm sure you are familiar with basic principle of the scarcity effect: people are willing to pay a premium for items they perceive as rare. From rare vintage cars that command 6 figure prices to a higher cost of gas when we the global flow of oil is pinched, there are plenty of examples of this in action.

There's another element, however, of the scarcity effect that I was unfamiliar with until recently. It relates to how satisfied we are with purchases of rare versus common items.

At the suggestion of Cary Rosenzweig, CEO of IMVU, I picked up Influence: The Psycholog of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini. An interesting read, albeit a bit dated -- no mention of the internet, for example -- that summarizes dozens of research studies on social influence. Cialdini cites a study demonstrating that in addition to paying more for something rare, people are considerably more personally *satisfied* with the item they paid more for -- even when they report the *quality* of the item is no different than freely available versions of the item. Restated: a average-quality product can not only be sold at a higher price when rare...it also results in a more satisfied customer.

So why would I care about this as an interaction designer for a start-up company? Consider how this might apply to business models that rely on user generated content. Allow me to greatly generalize: when content creation is made very easy and more content is created, by definition the amount of 'average' quality content increases. Introducing scarcity into the equation could help everyone: content creators could command a higher price for the same content they are already creating, and the overall satisfaction of customers might be higher, resulting in a better overall satisfaction rating for both the content creators AND the marketplace iteself.

So if you can't make better products, just make your average ones scarce -- you'll make more money and have happier customers. I'm only half kidding around, by the way.

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...at least if you work in a start-up. I consider usability to be a required skill for ALL employees at a start-up who touch the product: engineers, product owners, and designers alike.

This topic has been coming up quite often lately, most recently at an IxDA talk I attended recently. I was speaking to a woman who had moved to the Bay Area from somewhere near the Atlantic, and she was asking me how to translate her job title (Usability Engineer) into local parlance. My feeling is as stated above...unless you're looking to work with a huge enterprise company, there is unlikely to be room on the team for a person who 'owns' usability.

Exceptions are there, of course: if you work in a start-up that receives funding from the government, compliance with accessibility standards is required, and having someone on staff to ensure that all customer-facing elements conform is clearly important.

As an interaction designer, I'm def versed in usability. But frankly, I'm primarily designing to elicit specific behavior from customers and potential customers -- I break traditional 'usability rules' all the time, to the delight of both customers using the products I work on and the businesses I'm helping succeed.

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Maybe...but I'd suggest that their free training program has helped ensure that anyone picking up an iPhone or iPod Touch for the first time can use it immediately.

Of course, by 'free training program' I'm referring to the constant barrage of hands-on TV spots that show you exactly how to accomplish the most essential tasks in step-by-step detail, 30 seconds at a time.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/gallery/ads/

So it's easy: in addition to spending a fortune researching, designing, and building your device, simply spend an equal amount on informational marketing to ensure everyone knows exactly how to use it before they even have one!

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NOTE: This article is NOT for industry interaction design or product management veterans.  It is written for web designers who are working with a small startup team (5 or 10 people) and are asked to also do some interaction design.

I’ve been designing web-based applications for about a decade. For better or worse, the early process is nearly always the same: design a home page that conveys the brand positioning, then design pages demonstrating core product functionality.

You borrow patterns from more successful products, if such a product exists. Working on a photo-sharing app? Design a page with 25 photos on it, with pagination, sorting and filtering, and the like. A social networking site? Start with a friend list showing your top 10 friends, a feed of recent posts by them, etc.

Often these designs become the functional specs for engineers to work from in building the system. You need to illustrate how all sorting permutations work, how pagination works if you have 51 items in your list, how to handle a long payments history page, and all of the important permutations that have engineering implications.

Hopefully you soon have a solid working version of the site. It is optimized for a very particular user. I’ve tried to come up with a visual to show where it fits in:

This user gets to the product by entering a URL or from a bookmark. They have a history - a few connections, some contributed content, maybe a transaction or two.

Unless you are working with an experienced or savvy founding team, however, it’s often overlooked by the entire team that you have just designed and built a system for a non-existing person. There are MILLIONS of people who could potentially want what you’ve designed…but frankly, there are probably 5 actual users (usually the company founders and the engineering team.)

I hereby declare that the product design direction you take here is critically important.

Looking back over 4 years of working web-app startups, the companies I worked with who gained real market traction (TripIt and Glassdoor, in particular) took one path, while other companies took a slightly different path. Going from zero to thousands of active users in a rather short time helped those 2 demonstrate a clear market opportunity for their specific product to investors, who in turn funded them to further build momentum.

Some companies I’ve worked with focus next on the middle right of the chart, designing powerful functionality for hard-core users. But in my experience, the special sauce is focusing on one of two different user experiences: the SEO-optimized experience, or the viral loop experience. For this post I’m discussing the former.

The SEO-optimized experience

If your product is related in any way to keywords that users search for with Google (or your search engine of choice), designing an experience around that engagement method is probably the smartest next step you can take as a designer.

Like this:

1. …these users are merely investigating your product (to determine if they need it, compare it to other products, and hopefully try it.)
2. …they have no history to expose or manage on your product  (no friends, posts, or comments, and an empty profile, if a social media site.)

Exactly how you determine if there is an actual market for your product is a different subject. But, at the very least, just keeping these facts  in mind helps you and your team prioritize features and make smarter design decisions — I’ve worked with several startups who chose to design and build complex, powerful features for users they don’t even have, rather than focus on this much larger pool of potential users.

Here’s a real-world example of designing the interaction for these potential users who arrive from a search engine result. This is from Glassdoor, which I worked on with their very savvy team:

Here is how this approach looks to the end user:

1. A potential user, unaware of the existence of Glassdoor, searches for any job title + the word “salary” (”interaction designer salaries”, for example.)
2. A clearly formatted, obviously relevant search result comes up among the top search results.
3. The user clicks the link, taking them to a Glassdoor page - a list of “Interaction Designer Salaries” with a salary range scale for job position.
4. Wanting deeper data, the user clicks on a specific company or job title link for more information.
5. The user is then presented with the call-to-action, in this case a request to post their salary or a job review.

Obviously there are many moving parts in this approach that have little to do with the interaction design, such as customer development, SEO optimization, engineering, measuring relevant metrics, and much much more. But when working with smaller and less experienced teams, thinking about these issues can help guide your decisions where there may be little other real guidance.

I don’t have a good seque for this, but I strongly everyone to check out the Startup Lessons Learned blog of Eric Ries, which has inspired me greatly to share my experience with others through blogging.

Hopefully this has been informative and useful.  Please comment - your feedback and suggestions for improving this are greatly appreciated.

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Yes, TripIt has won yet another award — this time it’s The Industry Standard’s “Innovation 100″ awards, and they took first place in the Productivity category.

Despite the general economic downturn, I feel pretty confident that TripIt is positioned well and flexible enough to bend in the wind without snapping. Especially where business travel is concerned — it may decline, but it’s definitely not going away, and TripIt users are damn near fanatical about the service.a

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