How not to be Shit!* Talk from a 'digital conversations' meet up in London. All about how there's a lot of rubbish made in digital agencies, but we might just be on the verge of something better. With slide notes added on screen *contains mild swearing.

1. *contains mild
swearing

2. We are all very good at congratulating ourselves in digital agencies, we give
ourselves awards

3. for our brilliant native apps!

4. we get very smug that we finally worked out content is important! it only took 15 years
HOWEVER get ready for deliberately provocative slide

5. Most of what ‘agencies’
do in digital is shit
right OK very clever, come on, really, surely it’s not shit.
there’s a clever softening message coming now.

6. nope, mostly shit

7. But that’s not surprising
But we shouldn’t feel bad, we are only 15-20 odd years in, we are still finding our way -
no new medium has ever found it’s true native idioms immediately, This was inevitable.

8. TV programmes made 20 years after the development of the actual networks networks,
(60 years after it’s invention) still mostly used the techniques of the stage - plays, light
entertainment, men behind a desk and sitcoms, with the audience ‘seeing’ through the
fixed camera’s eyes.

9. a language of television that wasn’t stage or film to evolve. AND IT TOOK TECHNOLOGICAL
ADVANCES TO ENABLE THIS, So - We are heading towards something better
I believe we are going to fix this. I ACTUALLY THINK WE ARE ON THE CUSP
But in order to not be shit We need to figure out what the digital world really means now for us not
translated through the medium of something else. I believe
TWO THINGS MUST HAPPEN

10. 1
We must figure out how to
NATIVELY design for screens

11. 2
We must understand how smaller,
cheaper devices are disrupting
old-school UX assumptions.

12. 1
So…screens
Hang on, we design for screens don’t we?
we stare at them all day, were getting to grips with different sizes etc.
We now do responsive even for small clients
Hang on, we design for screens don’t we?
we stare at them all day, were getting to grips with different sizes etc.
We now do responsive even for small clients

13. Really? what the fuck is this: why is it when I am working on a piece of kit made by the
biggest and most respected digital design company when I delete an mp3 digital song
do I still get a scrunched up piece of paper
obviously early on there had to be an attempt to translate a complex piece of your
computer’s file system into something you understand and can manipulate BUT

14. desktop
pages
files
banners
folders
tray
pen/stylus
but we let ourselves down: digital
designers and Technical:
1. computers themselves got stuck
in a ‘office paradigm’ rather than
communication or the home we took
a misunderstanding of human life -
the office is itself an imposition of
inappropriate structures. it’s not
something people like or do
naturally.
2. the web also had another
paradigm forced on it by the
moneymen, the web was bent into
being like things we knew in order to
impose display advertising on it.
because we needed to figure out
immediately some way of making
money from it, and that’s what we
knew.
the result computer and the web
were bent into being seen through
the lens of the desktop, the office,
newspapers and magazines etc.etc.

15. most will not remember this. Made in 1962- it is supposed to be set in 2062, best part
of 50 years from now: yet

16. meet george jetson, head of the family, first, he is the only bread winner
he drives his kids to school, his wife doesn’t work, takes his money and goes shopping
he carries a briefcase, goes to the office, sits at a desk and has no computer
The Jetsons had no internet, no mobile phones, texting, twitter, or social media. There
was no way of recording TV programmes. in the 1962 episodes they actually had a
computer but it filled an entire room.
“meet George Jetson”
they are a nuclear family, there are no black people no gay people, no single parents
and no inter racial relations. this was the far future imagined through a lens of 1962, it
is basically 1960s america with flying cars and a robot dog
THIS IS WHAT HUMANS do, they see new things through he lens of what they know.
we have always seen new things through the paradigms of the past,
this is what we’ve done with the world of computing, digital and the internet

17. we are starting to butt up against things that don;t
fit into that paradigm, of the desktop, pages,
wastebaskets
there are screens now appearing that don’t have a
parallel in that old way of thinking we are starting to
be forced to fix this, and I am not simply talking
about the flat design vs skeumorphism debate.
we are starting to see designs that treat
touchscreens, screens that are display and input
devices, collaborative screens - of all sizes and
shapes the exist on your phone, on you computer,
in your car, your tv, your thermostat for what they
are
showing completely different content from our
other communication channels and enabling tasks,
communication and ways of working that were
unimaginable 20 years ago.

18. it’s microsoft having a go, with metro and then surface - alright it wasn’t
perfect, but this is microsoft but they had ago

19. it’s you being able to translate languages direct from the google search
page, not having to go to results then to google translate, multiple pages
merging into a single application flow

20. it’s medium, for really trying to make a reading, writing and browsing an
experience that is a bit more screen native, for trying to make it as easy as
possible for people who have things to say to get it onto screens by
focusing on words, but words on screen, for providing just the right amount
of interaction.

21. and for Medium making the typing and publishing part feel NATIVE and
natural to screens for providing a really intuitive WYSIWYG user interface
when editing online, with various options for formatting provided as the user
runs over text.

22. it’s if this then that
one interaction for many sites, again breaking the pages and moving
around paradigm

23. sometimes it’s stupidly simple - like an animated gif, to show a complex
instruction process, better than words and a series of pictures ever could

24. 2
…smaller, cheaper devices
WHEN I SAY SMALLER CHEAPER DEVICES - we are not talking simply about screen devices,
but RFID, ibeacons I’m talking about devices that enable us to interact with the world and the cloud.
I'm talking about a fundamental change in the way we interact with device independent data.
But our UX thinking hasn’t caught up, because we still work in an agency structure that was
originally set up to write scripts for TV ads
so now that we're actually seeing real, viable, low cost products emerge and being used by
consumers, it's as if we can't really believe it—we're still stuck in our old school ways of thinking

25. so we carry on adding to this stupid shit - The fundamental paradigm of the app is basically exactly
the same as has existed from the dawn of computing: you buy a platform, a piece of software you
install, open and interact with directly, and then put away.
But now with the added stupidity of being designed to perform ridiculously granular tasks.
but thats the starting point for our thinking.
But now there’s a different model forming in which people work with multiple devices on the same
data, usually through the cloud. Which has the potential to change this model.
I’m going to take one example of travel apps, cos I worked on TfL

26. Example a the bus app I use - looks great doesn’t it, looks clever - but lets look at what actually
happens -
I open my device OS, then I launch a 3rd party app, this then uses something like Google to geo
locate me, cross references that with another database to figure out which bus stop I’m near, then
goes to another central source probably TfL to get the information to display. AT EACH POINT IT
GIVES AWAY MY DATA.
it LOOKS like it is cleverly showing me the bus stop display, but it is essentially a giant HACK
Now imagine

27. an entire world of smart devices that people will pass throughout the day. Bus stops, film posters,
shops will offer value by allowing people to interact with them.
now imagine there is a UX common language at a system level, so any user can approach any
node and be able to interact with it directly, without downloading a specific app.
now the bus stop itself is a node, it is transmitting the information directly. I don't need a 'bus app’. I
don’t even need to geo-locate myself. my phone doesn’t need to know where I am at all, OR GIVE
ANY DATA AWAY it just knows there’s this information to nearby and I want to look at it (which I
choose).
this explodes the classic concept of an app, and the idea of third parties, I only choose the precise
data I interact with in this case the bus stop itself

28. this is not mental, there are real world examples being slowly developed
a system here that works on windows phone to help visually impaired people around cities
designed by Microsoft it relies on a network of beacons attached to street furniture and is an
adapted version of one already on the market designed for cyclists.

29. Examples of dispersed data are not new, on a simple level - Twitter is not a website or an app.
It is an eco-system of content, people, and the relationship between them that’s then aggregated
and delivered to a range of applications and devices, from O/S notification centre to tweetbot or
flipboard, from the guardian to match of the day and location aware versions using rfid now being
used for concerts, exhibitions etc. you interact with twitter how you want to and on your terms, you
hardly ever go to twitter.com
Twitter eco system

30. we are seeing it in the briefs we get to solve now - The new science museum information age:
relies on centralised content, and the relationship between the parts of it
it can then serve this content differently based on what the user is looking at and where they are.
From a website, to museum screens to an app that knows where it is in the exhibition
and it drove the queen to tweet

31. What does designing for the web look like going forward? freed from designing destinations to drive
people to. Which was the dominant pattern for a version of the web that is disappearing.
When the number one way people use your content becomes a dispersed notification layer, for
example things like cards. We should be designing content and services which are now broken
down into atomic units so that it can work agnostic of the screen/platform.
when this can be used genuinely in any way as the native functionality is starting to be opened up
more and more to developers, NOW the idea of opening a huge series of apps one after the other
to do granular tasks seems ridiculously quaint

32. as quaint as the idea of a keyboard is to someone from star trek

33. As I said at the beginning one of the problems is that agencies are essentially offices - dealing with
office problems and relationships. If we went out and did more ethnographic research - if we spent
more time out looking at groups like teenagers and their online use through their devices we would
see a section of society already organised around this.
a group that doesn’t care about software, hard disks, RAM or wastebaskets, that hasn’t organised
their way of doing things around an office - their content is the social needs of their group - and they
have bent technology to fit in with the way they want to do things. they hardly open browsers or visit
websites and they do most of their interaction through the native layer of their device.

34. So to wrap up on a positive note - The first part was a deliberate set up, this was not meant to be a
pessimistic talk, I think we are on the verge of a new way of using the web. A new frontier.
eg. released in the last few days - Wildcard is a free “browser” that presents the Web in an entirely
new way. Instead of showing pages, Wildcard presents you with cards for everything, with search
as the starting point for discovering content.
it is the mobile web freed from the paradigm of ‘pages’. Will it work? time will tell, but the point is the
tide is turning and I think we are about to get much better.

35. Shamelessly stolen referenced sources
The Coming Zombie Apocalypse
By Scott Jenson, Frog design
What Screens Want
By Frank Chimero, Another Design
the-end-of-apps-as-we-know-them
By Paul Adams, Intercom
Everything we Know is Wrong
By Magnus Lindkvist
Various user comments
under the Jetsons YouTube video
This was a mashup of
ideas from people far
cleverer than me