Terry Blanchard

Alex Payne has written a wonderful article about why cross-platform development environments ultimately fail to deliver what customers really want; a great experience. Alex says:

This post is about platforms and doing the right thing by your customers. It’s about the one big thing that I think HipChat and some other great companies are doing wrong.

He nails the reason that cross-platform development tools and environments like Adobe’s Flash and AIR products are attractive from a business perspective but end up failing from the customers perspective. Ultimately, that circle of life will come back to haunt the business.

Many businesses are attracted to the idea of writing software once and deploying it across multiple platforms. From their perspective they have one development team, one code base, and one release cycle. What’s not to love?

That’s where most businesses stop their investigation. They fail to even think about what their customers want. They’ll quickly jump up and say, “What they want is our product on their platform. We’re giving them that!”

Yeah, but you’re giving them a turd and that’s insulting. I hear the next bit of verbal diarrhea spilling out of their mouth … and this part kills me.

“Well, at least they’ll have our product on their platform.”

Ouch. I think I just threw up a little while typing that.

What you’re communicating with a poorly-done AIR app is that your business priorities – namely, saving time and money – are more important than what your customers want.

Ironically paradoxical in nature because without customers there is no business.

Alex points out a few very well known products such as TweetDeck, Pandora, and Remember the Milk, where their users are begging for a native application. Sadly, the folks screaming for a native application for Remember The Milk have been flat out ignored by that company since 2007. Actually, that’s not ignoring them. That’s giving them the finger.

My team experienced a number of the usual problems one has with AIR applications: lousy performance, odd interface bugs, key combinations and UI elements that didn’t conform to our operating system. AIR apps exist in an uncanny valley between a web application and a desktop application, and the result is unsettling and annoying. Pretty soon, we were itching to go back to Campfire (via the native Mac client Propane), even though HipChat has better features and the promise of improved reliability.

Why are these cross-platform products so bad? Do users even know if a product is using a cross-platform development environment? Yup, they sure do. Users, even if they’re not geeks or developers like me, can smell a cross-development turd. I love how Alex wrote this:

Humans are gifted with extremely sensitive bullshit detectors. The average computer user may not internalize the difference between an AIR app and a native app, but he knows when something doesn’t feel right or work correctly. Your tech-stunted uncle may not ever request a native application with that terminology, but he’ll sure complain about his computer acting funny when he experiences the oddities of an AIR app.

Just read the comments at this site and you’ll quickly see the common threads:

• Slow
• Sucks up CPU cycles better than a Dyson
• Doesn’t conform/take advantage of native UI
• Lack of support for native OS features. Instead, uses the least common denominator solution that works across all-platforms
• Security issues

With comments like that, do you really think “investing” in that type of development environment is going to save you money/time in the long-run? Does this seem like the path to huge business profits and long-term customer loyalty?

Is it more expensive to create native applications across all of the different platforms? Yes and no. Yes, because it is an investment in the development of your product. No, because unless you’ve misjudged the market, this investment will more than pay for itself.

“We don’t have time” is the common excuse for delivering an AIR app instead of a good native app. Money, though, can buy someone else’s time. For a price, you can find a great contractor to build a native app for any platform under the sun. It’s an investment. Eventually, unless you’ve misjudged your market, the investment should pay off.

What should a company do when they don’t have the time, resources, or expertise to deliver a native application? You start by clicking on the link above.

Written by Terry Blanchard \\ tags: Adobe, AIR, Cross Platform, Development, Flash, Native

I’ve been seeing a lot of iPad usage around me. I know what you’re thinking, “Duhhh, Captain Obvious! You live in Silicon Valley and this is where Apple is headquartered. Yeah, I think you might see a few.”

Silicon Valley is loaded with top-tech talent. Devices and gadgets that only the top-talent stereotypes understand and thrive on is abundant around me. I don’t even blink an eye when I see Segway zooming by with a laptop strapped to the handle bars, touring it’s driver around the city while their Bluetooth stereo headset is connected to their smartphone, providing the audio portion of the tour, while also feeding directions to the Segway via it’s GPS.

Just another day in Silicon Valley.

There’s something different about these iPad sightings. One that pleasantly captivated my eye and brought a huge smile to my soul. These sightings didn’t involve your typical Silicon Valley geek. In fact, the stars of these sightings are usually the last people you would expect to see or ever associate with the word, “technology.”

And I love it.

I was having lunch with a colleague and noticed an elderly gentleman, well into his eighties, sitting at the bar with a Martini in one hand while streaming some NetFlix videos to his iPad laying down on the bar.

Is streaming new?
No.

How about the ability to watch videos on a computer, is that new?
No.

The type of person performing this task was.

Apple has done something magical here with the iPad. They bridged what many would say was an impossible chasm. All joking aside, we do everything we can to minimize the technology in the lives of the senior citizens closest to us. The remote control for the television can instill the fear of God into them when they’re looking for the volume or channel button amongst the 40 or 50 buttons on the remote control. DVR? Don’t waste your money, they’ll never use it because it’s a foreign and complicated mental model for them.

Another sighting. At my gym I saw an elderly lady on the treadmill reading a book. Not just any book. Her iPad was sitting in front of her with the Kindle application running and the font size was probably set at 96 points as I read along with her from the other side of the gym.

Watching these people use their iPad I didn’t see the awkwardness and hesitation you normally see from them when using a laptop or desktop computer. They were, dare I say it, “at ease” with it.

Why is that?

All of the typical items that frighten senior citizens who are new to using computers are not present with an iPad. Let’s start with the mouse. My mother won’t even try to use a computer because of the mouse. She couldn’t comprehend or understand what to do when the mouse reached the end of the mouse pad, but her cursor was only halfway across the screen to her destination. She didn’t make that mental connection between what was happening onscreen versus what the device she was directly manipulating had on one another. When I told her to pickup the mouse and move it back to the other side of the mousepad, she just stared at me blankly.

“Well, if I move the mouse it will move the doo-hickey thing on the television screen and I’ll be back in the same position.”

“No, Mom. That will only happen if the mouse is touching the mouse pad. You can pickup the mouse and if it’s not touching the mouse pad, the sensor on the bottom of the mouse won’t detect the movement and therefore won’t move the mouse on the screen so you can move the mouse without moving the cursor … never mind, just trust me.”

What we take for granted is pure magic to them. It’s a mouse for us, but it’s a 747 flight deck to them.

Removing that middle-man translation and adopting the touch screen is much easier for them to understand. Want to launch email, just tap on it with your finger. Done. They get that. That makes complete sense to them.

Another reason is software installation. The App Store on an iPad compared to shopping and installing software for a typical computer is night and day. Easy access to the App Store, seamless purchasing and installation without introducing more confusing questions and concepts such as, “Where on your hard drive do you want to install this new fancy software?” or “Make sure you have enough hard drive space on the destination drive before proceeding?” mean nothing to them.

App Store, tap to buy, screen automatically moves to the new application icon that is installing. Tap to open. They can do that. They get that. That makes sense to them.

And to get them started, you should pick up a copy of iPad For Seniors For Dummies for them.

Written by Terry Blanchard \\ tags: Apple, iPad, Senior

I was talking with a fellow UX professional and the conversation quickly turned into a discussion about design. It seems like every product or service has their, “don’t get me started” black-eye. No matter how elegant, wonderful, thoughtful, and well-orchestrated the product is, that bastard child always seems to be present.

Too often we measure the success of our designs by their best behaviors and ideal scenarios. Very rarely, if at all, do we use the worst case as a metric of success. It seems like we put the worst case into a dark corner of our minds and find comfort in the fact that it should be the exception, not the norm.

I’m sorry, but that’s just not good enough.

Acknowledging the flaws is the first step. The second step involves putting yourself in the persons shoes living through that experience. How do you make it right by them?

Garth Brooks figured this out. Before every concert he personally tours the venue where he is performing with a simple goal; Find the absolute worst seat in the house. Just like designs, every venue has one. Behind some structural pillar, or at the very top row furthest from the stage, etc. Once the concert begins he sends one of his crew members back to those seats with front-row tickets for those people. The people who paid with their hard-earned money to see him perform even if they were the crappiest seats in the house. The deserving fans.

Imagine their surprise when this happens. Their state of mind goes from, “Hey, the seats might suck but we’re seeing Garth Brooks perform live!” to “Holy shit! Garth Brooks just personally gave us front-freakin row tickets!” Garth doesn’t stop there. At some point during his performance he brings them up on stage and sings a song to them.

Best. Experience. Ever.

How does your design or experience work from the metaphorical back row?

Written by Terry Blanchard \\ tags: Design, Usability, Usage Scenarios

You would expect that kind of title from a designer, right? Who wouldn’t. So let’s back that up with a real example. The Motorola RAZR was one of the hottest selling cellular phones during the 2005 selling season and well into the 2006 season as well. In fact, it was selling at a rate of about four million units each month, or roughly 1.5 phones every second. If Motorola were to spend another million or two improving the design, they would make it back in a day.

In a single day.

Design is something you only have to pay once for your product. It’s a part of the fixed costs in the equation, not the variable costs. But it adds value to every unit sold. That’s what Thomas C. Gale, the famous Chrysler automobile designer who retired in 2001, meant when he said that,

Good design adds value faster than it adds cost.

I like this Thomas C. Gale guy. He knew what he was taking about.

Written by Terry Blanchard \\ tags: Chrysler, Design, Motorola, RAZR, Thomas C. Gale

I hate my furnace.

I really, really, can’t stand it. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever disliked anything as much as my furnace. Ever. What is it about my furnace that evokes such strong emotion and contempt for something that simply pushes air around my home?

Functionally, the furnace does everything it is suppose to:

• When heat is requested from my thermostat, it fires up the natural gas burners, warms up and pushes warm air through my ducts
• When cooler air is requested from my thermostat, it doesn’t fire up the natural gas burners and pushes the cool air from the central air conditioner through my ducts

All of these interactions have taken place with the thermostat. There is only one interaction that I actually have with the furnace, and they blew it. Big time.

Changing the filters.

While on paper this sounds incredibly easy, this is how engineering only to requirements instead of also engineering to usage scenario cause this type of frustration.

First, let’s talk about good furnace design. This was the type of furnace I had in my previous home. By the way, that’s not me in the hot-pink sweater. Had I known how good I had it with my old furnace, I might have taken a few pictures of this process. But I didn’t so I borrowed this one. Let’s review. No tools required, no disassembly of the furnace, you don’t even have to turn it off. You can “hot-plug” the filters. When you start to pull the filter out, it automatically switches off. It won’t turn back on until you install another filter. This also prevents people from running their furnace without a filter, which my previous owner did for his entire 8 year occupancy. That’s a whole different post. With this design, you can replace an old filter with a brand new one in less than 10 seconds.
Now let’s talk about the Frankenstein that is my current furnace. For starters, my furnace requires two filters, not just one. So my “filter budget” has just doubled. Let’s talk about that. Unlike the nice 90 degree angle filter in the good design above, both of mine sit at 45 degree angles to the air flow to create a “V” inside the plenum. Yup, I said plenum, not furnace. That’s the yellow part at the top of the furnace picture to the left. It’s where the air is brought into the furnace. It’s also where there are no access points to the filters except from the bottom up. Remember, there are two filters that need to placed in there. If you had x-ray vision, and I’m not saying that you don’t, you could look through the plenum in this picture and see the two filters sitting in a “V” position.

The picture on your right is looking up to one of the filters. This is where the fun begins. First off, you’ve got the return duct right there in the middle. Since that wasn’t enough pain to put me through, the brilliant minds behind this beast of a creation decide to mount the electronics on the right-hand side and the furnace and the pièce de résistance, the furnace motor behind the return duct.

Now that we’ve talked about all obstacles, let’s walk through my misery.

1. Remove the first filter. I’m not a big guy and I’ve got long, lanky arms. However, even with my long reach and fairly thin arms, I need to reach through that little gap on the left-hand side of the return duct, over the furnace motor, and try to pull down the first filter. To do this, I need to lift it up, pull the bottom of the filter towards the small gap between the left-hand side of the furnace wall and the motor. The gap is about the same size as the thickness of the filter.
2. Remove the second filter. This one is more difficult because it’s on the other side of the furnace. The side I can’t get to because of the electronics box. Similar process through. Reach long, lanky arm through the little gap on the left-hand side of the furnace, over the motor, across the bar that holds the bottom of the filters in place, carefully maneuver filter through small gap on left-hand side of furnace wall and motor.
3. Install first new filter. This is just the reverse of the first two instructions. Only it’s worse. Removing the old furnace filters I can be careless and rip them out, cut them on sides of the furnace motor, or better yet all the little nail/screw endings that marry the furnace outlet to the plenum. I can’t do this when I’m installing them.

Needless to say, after 5 or 6 fantastic, rust-filled, scratches all over my arms and hands, and an average of 15 minutes of my life spent fighting with this horrible furnace, I’m ready to strangle a kitten. Nothing puts me in such a pissy mood than that one, and only, interaction I have with my furnace.

This post was brought to you by the letter “D”, the number “7″, and how not to design a furnace.

Written by Terry Blanchard \\ tags: Furnace, Industrial Design, Interaction Design, Usage Scenarios