Design by Google (a la Chrome)

Disappointed is what I would say in a word. In learning about Google's design process for their Chrome browser, I was certainly less than impressed at finding out about a fully agile development for software. Google happens to be in a lucky enough environment to have really smart teams and large enough where you can do a big software project that way. However, after having worked in agile environments, I find it causes more headache than help.

Things I learned at this BayChi talk:
1. Google Chrome renders HTML & CSS like Safari
2. There is no revolutionary content model for Chrome. It's an evolution as a faster browser
3. Rapid usability studies really helps in an agile environment if you can spare the resources

Here are my raw notes on the Google Chrome design process:
Designing Google Chrome
- Glenn Murphy

Functionality - Tab Isolation
- Core function, if one tab crashes, the other tabs keep running

Functionality - Omnibox
- Core function, combined Search and location bar

Why?
1. Speed & Reliability
- control their own Google application
- needed a better platform for these applications
- current browsers weren't fast enough so web apps would be 2nd class citizens

2. Better Framework
- Old OS -> Application -> Content
- Current OS -> Browser Application -> Web Application -> Content

Top features used by users in their browsers:
(researched in a one week period)
- Back 85%
- Reload 50%
- Open Bookmark 33%

UX Researcher - Rick Boardman
Cognitive Walkthroughs
Lab based studies
Longitudinal studies

Design Process
- no wireframes
- went to multiple iterations of mock-ups
- designed from final design
- all tabs belonged on the top because information flowed down from them [Arthur: it seems like they didn't really explore other options]
- This overall design was like a tabbed windows explorer. The frame is just glue to stick tabs together
- Thought: What if one of those tabs was iTunes? It should work the same
- Played with 60 types of tab variations and experimented with exact degrees. [Arthur: this was a trial and error and based off of their own judgement]
- Colour of tabs was chosen as something that was neutral but visible separation.

UX - Frame (Graphic designing)
- Frame: Experimented with multi-level tabs, single level would get crowded. Settled on half way between one and two level tabs. [Arthur: Did they test this?]
- Frame: The colour of the frame couldn't use the windows style b/c it would look strange. In research, they found frames in Windows are blue. For something to feel intuitively grabbable, it would have to be blue. Blue also blends into default windows backgrounds (as it should, so you can ignore it)
- Frame: Windows Vista you can ignore that blue b/c they have their own native version.
- Frame Testing: Using a small title bar, people were not able to find out how to drag the frame in user testing. Users aimed for the blue.

UX - Omnibox
- Testing found that users often type URLs into the search bar.
- So they wanted to combine it.
- Hardest to figure out was a single word search.
- One solution was a type-ahead drop down.
- In user studies they found that people didn't follow drop downs. Users look down at their keyboards to type.
- Solution: Search (and try to navigate in the background)
- It takes a while to figure out if that single word URL exists so the check happens in the background.
- Puts a message asking the user if they want to visit the URL www.pie.com
- Autocomplete helps people get to sites that they visit again. Found that users visit 10-15 sites per day.
- The engineers doing the functionality for omnibox was done with rapid iteration. [Arthur: This may be useful for really smart teams but in most cases, you can't iterate that fast]
- Some initial mockups of the type-ahead show more information. e.g. flight detail, snippets of sites, suggested words, history of your search
- They didn't want this list flickering around and typing around. They wanted the user to just finish typing in their query
- Would rather put this on a page so users could see this content and then use the back button

What's next?
- Extensions
- Wants to stop people from adding toolbars so it doesn't look crazy.
- If a user wants to add a toolbar we should let them. But the next exercise is to figure out how to allow the user to not create a mess
- Openness: How do you design in the open?
- Openness: How do we allow users to give feedback to Google yet not put it out in the open web?

Questions
1. Where are the PMs?
- They're scattered throughout
2. How do you QA if no one reads your design docs?
- The QA always watches the code and they design tests as the code gets done
- If an engineer writes code, they let people know it's there and QA catches up
3. Have you tried different graphics on the tabs?
- Yes, we have a large graphics design team
- When they spoke to "people" the angled tabs resonated better.
- Internal to the team, people were into angled tabs, people used to work at NeXT and they were comfortable with angled tabs.
- Chrome was in development at the same time it was designed. The height of the frame above the tabs, they played non-stop for about a year. Kept changing between 15-20 pixels. They would get feedback from people instantly, emails & IMs.
4. If content is new, how do things change with open source. Will it be grassroots change?
- I don't know. There's another team that is in charge of this
5. The Google toolbar is missing from here
- These are the things that belong as extensions
6. How is Blue a grabbable colour?
- We winged it.
- It's what felt natural
- We didn't run user studies
7. You mentioned dropping iTunes into a tab. Is this something you'd keep addressing?
- With the exception of powerpoint, everything i use is online apps
- sometimes I wish I could have tab management
- we're not planning on addressing, but we things tabs are a better way of managing content
8. Rendering
- Go faster on certain benchmarks
- On reliability we track how we crash
- Speed, we think we've met it
9. Render on multiple browsers
- didn't want to add an additional engine
- benchmark against safari
- there will be some pain in the start but we should be compliant with safari and anytime it's not please log a bug against chrome
10. You've put alot of emphasis on tabs. Did you think about the discoverability of tabs?
- Other browsers do an omnibox but don't surface it as much.
- Tab usage is 78% adoption in Chrome
- In firefox, they show 2 tabs on startup
- Some people don't use multiple tabs. People who are curious can find it.
11. Other complicated design issues?
- Users never notice anything you do. You tell them to notice the lock and they never do
- Even if you throw up a screen that says the page you are about to visit isn't the one you think, users will still ignore it.
- Users respond to the full-screen popup
- We're trying to figure out how to keep them safe without annoying people.
- Sometimes there are sites that have malware but I still want to visit them
- We tried to hide the Omnibox and it turns out you do. One of those reasons is for security. Our Google security team jumps on our backs everytime we send out mockups
12. Can you not ask us everytime you restart that you want to restore the tabs? How often were you doing testing?
- Initially we had a mandate to design a browser without any dialogs
- Aza Rafkin says that they're getting rid of it in Firefox 3.1
- Started user testing 1/2 way through the product.
- Testing intensified at the end.
- Cognitive walkthroughs happened anytime there was a question they couldn't answer
- Lab based studies were done at every implementation when they needed questions.
- These weren't new to many of us
- They were useful in settling arguments and they tracked user comments
- The comments they got internally look like comments they get out in the wild.

Beautiful video game campaign site

I came across a new flash video game site for an upcoming game called Dragon Hunters. It coincides with the release of a new movie by the same name. Although I'm pretty sure the movie is the precursor.
*correction: The movie came out March 2008, I assume the game was around the same timeframe*

It caught my eye with one of the most beautiful loading screens I have ever seen. It's a scene of free fall with about a dozen objects that move from the bottom of the screen to the top to give the illusion of motion. These objects are pieces of stone and clouds. The objects repeat in random order and distance from the front of the screen to make it seem like it's a long and continuous movie. Thankfully with a slow internet connection, I was able to catch the repeats as it took FOREVER to load the site.

IA review:
Once in the site, it's a very simple navigation. 4 items in the primary nav and 2 links off the site. The primary nav stays hidden until you roll over the top menu cabinet. Each of the items in the top nav require mouseover and click. Some of them are hidden from view and you have to move your mouse to the left or right to scroll the screen to get to them.

IxD review:
The site uses full screen to frame the display and allow the gorgeous graphics to be enjoyed. The scene tracks your mouse and moves with it letting you rotate the world to get to the different characters that represent movies, screenshots, wallpaper, or about. One of the neat ideas is the menu cabinet that hides the nav until you mouse over. The really cute part about it is that the dragon hunters sign tips left and right to add that additional sense of movement as you're exploring the world. The motion really helps put you into a 3d environment that shows off the great artwork that will be in this animated movie.

My guess is that they used Papervision3D to power the flash objects in a 3d environment. It's a brilliant technology that I first saw in the video game Mass Effect, who's site was designed by Freestyle Interactive.

The movie site is also quite cute although not as immersive as the video game site. One of the cute touches was a dragon's foot that comes crashing down through the screen and it shakes the browser window.

It's really a great example of how an elegant creative execution with attention to the tiny details can create an engaging, emotional experience online.

Clean bart train

I don't suppose that the picture can accurately show how clean this bart train is, but I just got on and the first thing to hit me was the smell of detergent. On public transit!

Must be my lucky day!
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Clean bart train

I don't suppose that the picture can accurately show how clean this bart train is, but I just got on and the first thing to hit me was the smell of detergent. On public transit!

Must be my lucky day!
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Financial crisis hurting the silicon valley

Came across an article on TechCrunch today the reported on the startups that will be affected by Lehman Brothers' bankrupcy.
I would assume that the popular sites, like my beloved Kayak will still stick around (someone will pick them up). But who knows what impacts it may have to other startups as their investment money dries up or not even arrives after it was won.

Continuing the zombie meme

Through a rather serendipitous link clicking on Google News, I came across an article on Zombie Feminism. On the surface, it's a review of a new horror movie called Deadgirl; one of the talked-about movies at the Toronto International Film Festival.

What I find intriguing here was in this editorial focused on the denigration of women and through this movie, this would be some type of retribution by a powerful woman. In this case a zombie. Although I'm certainly not unaffected by society's (especially asian) placement and treatment of women, the issue is one that's generally out of mine. In my interpretation, it's similar to how I find that most Americans have little understanding of world politics. They know there's a world out there, but are unaware of the issues.

Perhaps I'll see if there's some Halloween screening of it around here or I'll wait until 2009 when it hits a wider distribution. There's always room for some more meme expansion. (the feminism part, not zombies)

Back at designing again

It's that kind of day...

Financial meltdown = tech boom?

Hey if the Guardian is talking about grid computing, web services, and open source in the financial section, maybe we've got some rosiness to the Silicon Valley future.

Virtual dating (no, really virtual)

Every once in a while, something comes along that kinda freaks me out. Not really, really freaky, like this, but more incompatible with how I view the world. Today's bit of news is a new site called Webkare. It's a dating simulator for women.
Techcrunch reports that it hit 10,000 users and 3.5M hits.
I know guys are pretty simple creatures and it really doesn't take much to understand us, but I wonder if this site is more demeaning towards men or the 10,000 women that are using this site.
I should probably go and learn how to read Japanese to see what it's really about. It would be awesome if the site was really just a catchy pretext for women having an open social networky conversation around guys. Hmm... come to think of it, maybe that's a way to jump-start discussions. Lead in with something fun and cutesy and let the conversation be the actual value of the site.

Sunrise at Burning Man

An expression of beauty. Captured by a reporter from Vail, Colorado.

Roasting Plant in NYC

A friend of mine in Vancouver pointed this cafe out to me. It's a pneumatic system that pulls beans from one side of the room over to the front where it's ground and processed into espresso all at the touch of a Mac.

It's a soothing spot with light jazz music and the light rattle of coffee beans flying through plastic tubing. There are 4 seats here with power outlet making it possible to slide in with your MacBook Air and cuddle up with a fantastic coffee. I really mean cuddle since each spot has about 1.5 square feet of space. Modern coffee Manhattan-style.

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One year anniversary of Virgin America

I finally touched down at JFK after a slight delay in the air. This was my first flight on VA and I have to say that I was pretty impressed.

The in-flight entertainment was really the star of the show offering a large selection of music, live TV, and some old school games like Doom.

I may be a little more jaded than some of my fellow travellers about flying but it really seemed that everyone really appreciated the flight. I would constantly hear passengers complimenting the staff and asking about the service system. To top it all off the passengers clapped when we landed (and not out of fear for our lives).

Way to go Virgin, I look forward to making you my domestic carrier of choice
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Blue Bottle Coffee Beans

It may not be much but that's what it takes for me to get by. Yeah... I'm an addict
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Adaptive Path talk

OK, so this post is a little on the late-side, however, I figure better late than never.

I attended a talk at AP with 2 talks, "The Long Wow" by Brandon Schauer, and "Street Hacks" by Jan Chipchase and Duncan Burns. This possibly was a way of getting key influencers in front of the new AP book, Subject to Change. The book looks to be a good way of approaching design by user experience rather than traditional functional drivers. This book definitely goes on my Amazon Wishlist.
[Street Hacks will be in a later post]

The Long Wow - Brandon Schauer
In my opinion, this talk is one amongst many important conversations that helps codify a new design thinking in a highly competitive, agile, and globalised market. Design is an evolving process as culture and people change. It didn't stop in the 70s with the introduction of CAD, new methods such as spiral design or agile development grew out of our technological advances. I think we're closer to emotional design, where design is a multi-faceted approach to meet customers' needs, wants, and desires.
Brandon's talk focused on 4 main things to develop a stronger relationship with your customers:
1. Know your platform for delivery
2. Tackle a wide area of unmet customer needs
3. Create and evolve your repeatable process
4. Plan and stage the wow experiences

1) Knowing your platform may seem like a no-brainer but it may easily be forgotten. For example, the company Fry's is one of the top electronics companies in the bay area yet if you go to their online site, it's a complete mess. While a mess does (at times) capture the store experience, if their primary touch point is their brick and mortar store, the online experience should help support it, rather than hinder.
Brandon brought up an example of Nike+ iPod as a great platform for launching a great experience. My company recently helped launch a new product called MiCoach (by adidas & Samsung). This is one product that works as a great comparison, MiCoach has a similar and competing platform that one-ups Nike in terms of functionality and the ability to deliver these "wow" experiences. If anything, I think the marketplace will be better to have these 2 competing products to continue to provide outstanding exercise user experiences and the choice of products to match more customers.

2) Unmet customers needs can be one of the more challenging aspects of design. Brandon's example was an OXO measuring cup that accounted for a steep angle of viewing to the cup. So instead of having to lift the cup to eye-level to look at how much liquid you had, you could look down and see it.
As a design consultant, it's often hard to devise such solutions. Most often a client will come to me and say build me a website that does X. When really they should be asking, "I need to do A, B, & C, show me the best way to do it." It's sometimes a bit of a pipe dream to always engage strategically, but ultimately, it's what clients should be asking of their consultants. If you want something built, you can find some people to do it in a less expensive country. Come back to me when you want solutions.

3) Create and evolve your repeatable process is fantastic when you can do it. I particularly like AP's mental model process. Using a design process that brings in direct and indirect research, includes clients, and considers your users/customers holistically is a great way to identify problems & needs; essential before you start building.
Of course I've got my own tricks of the trade such as a customer lifecycle analysis (a slimmed down version of mental model). Persona development is another key tool. There are many others that should be done early & often in an experience-centric design methodology.

4) Plan & Staging wow experiences was one of the hardest things for me to wrap my head around. I completely understand why you would want to manage expectations in such a way. If you think about Cosmopolitan Magazine, they draw people into their content as a way of teasers that reward you for exploring more.
Being a consultant and thinking beyond one turn of the design circle is really hard because the money tends to run out after the first delivery. But without this kind of thinking, you're taking a roulette spin every time you re-design. Brandon certainly nails it with his example of Weight-watchers. You can go to the classes, or learn about dieting on the web, but their launch of On-The-Go services provides a continual Wow that you can use in-context of sitting down to eat (or diet).

My key takeaway from this talk is to direct people to the notes from this talk when we start getting bogged down with user-centric design and to get people thinking more about experience design.

Trashing Comcast

An interesting phenomenon is the squeaky wheel getting the oil. Michael Arrington of Techcrunch blogged about his Comcast going down.

I've had these problems with Comcast many times this past winter with poor performance or just plain outages in internet connectivity. Many complaints hit brain-deadening muzak or voicemail that never gets returned.

When a person like Michael Arrington complains, we can see that the powers that be at Comcast actually listen and go out to fix his problem. His internet status certainly lets him squeak far louder than I can. I wonder if we can democratize this easily so that us nobodies can collectively squeak too.

There's one option that I know of called Get Satisfaction. You can connect to communities and business to have your customer support needs answered. But sometimes it takes a more heavy-handed approach. I recently switched from AT&T to T-Mobile, after being a customer for 5 years. Large issues with customer service and network performance really prompted that switch. Now, if I had a large bullhorn (or was famous), I could have probably worked out some deal. However, if we can network some people in to shout at the same time, this could have the same effect.

There's a facebook application called Causes that lets you support a particular cause. Perhaps there's enough ire towards companies that this application can be cloned or co-opted to rail against companies that abuse their customers. Especially in monopoly situations such as Comcast cable.

Why won't facebook go away?

Well obviously since there isn't a stronger competitor, but right now we probably have an open slot for some competitor to come in. After all the negative press that Facebook has received at SXSW and and now with it's goofs with what is a country and what isn't.
I can't hate on just FB, Myspace and Hi5 would probably be worse if they were in the enviable position that facebook is in. At least FB isn't pushing porn like the other 2 sites.
After today's news, it looks like I'll have to wait a little longer for facebook to go under. Hong Kong investor Li Ka Shing just put up another $60 mil into the little Palo Alto company. I can see housing prices in San Francisco going up again...

SEM in different languages/countries

I'm sitting around and looking at some Japanese sites and musing about how you can drive people to your site. If you're going to pay Google for a keyword in Japan, do you have to do it 3 times for Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana?
Borrowing from wikipedia as an example, let's say I was advertising Marlboro cigarettes:
Do I pay for the keywords: Marlboro 煙草, Marlboro たばこ, and Marlboro タバコ. So that means paying for 3 ads and using 4 different character sets.
I'm going under the assumption that they'd use English for the word Marlboro from this example.
I guess this will be a pet project.

AIM & G-talk?

Since when was AOL instant messenger compatible with Google Talk? I must be really behind in my techcrunch

Global Gaming (in 7 languages)

I'm always impressed when a game reaches sufficient proportion to address the entire globe. A new game from uber game designer and UC Berkeley PhD student, Jane McGonigal has launched a game called The Lost Ring.

I'm pretty psyched about diving into this alternate reality game and practising my detective skills and probably my language skills too as I try to find out what happened to one of the lost olympic games.

Check it out! The Lost Ring

Another Paris Hilton in the works?

I'm always split between being utterly disgusted by pop culture and fascinated by how it can drive some of the most interesting & strange behaviour in people.

The call girl implicated in the Governor Elliot Spitzer scandal also happens to be a singer/songwriter in the R&B/pop genre. Within days of her being discovered with the now former governor, her music popularity is on the rise. Here's the link on Amie Street.

At least for the next 72 hours, she's going to have more press coverage than Hollywood starlets. If she can capitalize on this, she can end up having as great a music career as the infamous Paris Hilton.

Canadians interfering in US elections

I don't know how I didn't hear of this earlier. News about the democratic candidate's positions on NAFTA are few and far between. I had heard both Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama were both taking an anti-NAFTA position. However, after living here for several years and hearing absolutely no news about it, I figured the issue was more or less pointless. Also I know for most Americans that the fear about NAFTA really means fear of Mexicans.

The scant media from the US is that McCain & Clinton are attacking Obama over statements from his staff re-assuring Canadians that despite his stance on pulling out of NAFTA, Canadians need not worry.

So I finally get to reading CBC today and see an article about the Liberal party wanting the Conservative government to recall the ambassador over a suggestive statement about the US election (CBC.ca article).

Now I see that the CBC is reporting that all of it is wrong and that someone in the Canadian Foreign Ministry implied that the Obama campaign was making secret deals with Canada (CBC report on Youtube).

Personally I think that interfering with another country's election is reprehensible. This smacks of Austria's Heider's rise to power in 2000 (CNN special). Heider was able to leverage news that the EU was sanctioning Austria to reinforce his position as being a sovereigntist and defying the European Union and their actions to meddle in the internal business of their country. Maybe there's some secret handshake between McCain and Harper to discredit the Democratic party. Who knows, but this is not a place that I want my government to go.

Survey on Mac Users

Already a couple of days old but I thought it was funny.
http://gizmodo.com/357437/the-street-says-mac-users-are-pretentious-assholes-pc-users-are-cheapskates?autoplay=true

For the record, I do not own a Macbook, but I do have an iPod and am a snobby party of the Prii-nation (Toyota Prius)

New languages for Blogger

Floating across the news on Techcrunch let me see that Blogger is now available in Arabic. That news has wound up on Blogger.com's homepage too. Odd that they now say they're available in Arabic, Hebrew and Persian. I was pretty sure the language was called Farsi.

The article does cite that people blog at their own risk since some countries restrict the freedom of speech. I kinda figure that it's all breaking down now. Yeah, you'll have people who are thrown in jail for people typing article that rail against the state but if you take a look at China, I think we're already at a place where the genie is out of the bottle and you can never fully stop people from expressing what they want.

China still jails more journalists than any other country in the world put together, however, each arrest garners more support for free speech and reflects negatively on their international reputation. I have no reason to think that the same wouldn't happen to any of the other countries in the middle east. The young people will want to be more liberalised and express themselves online like all the other rich countries are doing. Even in KSA, they can see what people in Dubai are doing and they'll want to blog and express themselves too. It may take a while, but I'm pretty sure it's all inevitable as these countries keep increasing their level of affluence.

What is tanking anyways?

On those rare occasions I start caring about the origins of certain words that I use. The one that's come up quite often lately is the word "Tanking". A very a propos word when concerning the state of the American (and the rest of the world) stock market.

The source of all knowledge, Wikipedia (and it's sister dictionary site) say this about Tanking.

1. To fail or fall (often used in describing the economy or the stockmarket); to degenerate or decline rapidly; to plummet.
2. (Online RPG) To attract the attacks of a monster, so that the other people in the group can defeat the monster in question more efficiently.
3. To put fuel into a tank

Looking at today's stock market, I'd certainly say number 1 is the most common use of the term today. This morning the treemap was looking much more red.

A little aside here. I have no idea how to use the definition tag within blogger so I'll put the definition of a treemap here: "a visualization technique in which hierarchical information is displayed within nested rectangles, with each level of nesting corresponding to a level of hierarchical decomposition"

So the financial markets have picked up slightly. The Fed chairman has slashed interest rates to get the banks lending out money again. One will wait and see until this evening to see how well Tokyo and Hong Kong respond.

Thailand's Olive Tree

I'm reminded of Tom Friedman's book, the Lexus and the Olive Tree, when walking through a crowd of people all dressed in black for the Princess Galyani Vadhana's funeral. She's the King of Thailand's older sister and she passed away on the day that I arrived in Bangkok.

I never realised that tradition was so important for the Thai people and it was really evident in how well they revere their royalty. The Guardian reported that the government is spending $9 million on the funeral. There's a 15 day mourning period and company meetings, new years events, and corporate trade shows have been rescheduled or canceled.

Having grown up under British Commonwealth rule, I doubt we'd ever have any major mourning periods if anyone other than the Queen died. I can't see my country closing down for 15 days if Charles passed away. Nor the UK for that matter.

The value of a royal family as cultural/spiritual leadership helped Thailand get through military coups and the latest political meltdown with former Prime Minister Thaksin. I was told not to mention his name too loudly. Apparently he doesn't have that many supporters in Krabi and the police or military tends to detain people that talk about him. But with all the strife, I can see why you'd rather put your faith in a king than in a president.