Simplicity Ain't So Simple (Or Even Desirable)

After reading Donald Norman's insightful piece entitled Simplicity is not the Answer, I have been pondering the notion of simplicity as it exists in Libre culture. It is a very hot buzzword in Libre culture. Perhaps at least as hot as other worthless and empty terms.

Simplicity isn't Simple

What does simple mean? Has anyone stopped to ask that question around these parts? Simple, it seems, isn't so simple. Above and beyond the foolish assumptions and empty definitions, there has been a uniquely Libre lack of insight regarding desirability.

Is Simple Synonymous with Desirability?

Seems like a foolish question at first doesn't it? Everyone wants simple, correct?

If we scratch past the surface, we have some pretty compelling research to suggest that, in fact, notions of simple are not only horribly complicated, but also that the desire and appeal of simple is tied to extremely complex circumstances and contexts. Donald Norman cites a cultural context example:

"But in the Korean store, I found a German toaster for 250,000 Korean Won (about $250). It had complex controls, a motor to lower the untoasted bread and to lift it when finished, and an LCD panel with many cryptic icons, graphs, and numbers. Simplicity?
[...]
Why is this? Why do we deliberately build things that confuse the people who use them?

Answer: Because the people want the features. Because simplicity is a myth whose time has past, if it ever existed." -- Donald Norman from Simplicity is Highly Overrated

While simplicity within Libre culture is not only subject to grossly inept explorations, our culture typically makes the cardinal sin of avoiding the audience context. As Donald Norman cites above, there are clearly some disparate views on simplicity between cultures. Francisco Inchauste explores this further:

"In South Korea, for example, products like refrigerators are designed to appear more complex than non-Korean ones, even when the prices and specifications are very similar, because that complexity is equated with sophistication and value, and is thus a symbol of prosperity." -- Francisco Inchauste The Dirtiest Word in uX: Complexity

Of Hedonists and Pragmatics

If we subscribe to the idea that simplicity isn't quite as simple as some would have us believe, we potentially open the door for insight into when or if simple would be valued to the audience at hand.

When is simplicity desirable? For whom?

Simplicity, as we have seen in the above examples, clearly has a few roots in cultural context. As any reader of this blog knows, there are countless times I harp on the notion of audience. It is for good reason. Audience brings context. Audience determines the needs of the experience. Audience determines the facets of the design.

But what if we lock in on an audience? Is it possible to deduce when an audience may desire simple and when they may not?

At the topmost layer of Mr. Hassenzahl's work is the notion that there is a polemical division between Hedonistic and Pragmatic needs.

"The hedonic/pragmatic model of UX assumes that people perceive interactive products along two different dimensions. Pragmatics refers to the product's perceived ability to support the achievement of "do-goals", such as "making a telephone call", "finding a book in an online bookstore", "setting-up a webpage". In contrast, hedonics refers to the product's perceived ability to support the achievement of "be-goals", such as "being competent", "being related to others", "being special"." -- Marc Hassenzahl and others Towards a UX Manifesto (Page 10)

Of particular relevance to simplicity here is Mr. Hassenzahl's research notes an interesting axis between simple-complex and ordinary-novel.

"The model further assumes that people have implicit notions of the relation between particular attributes (e.g., simple–complex, ordinary–novel) and pragmatics or hedonics, respectively (in the sense of means-end-chains, see Reynolds & Olson, 2001). Simplicity, for example, may signal high pragmatics, whereas novelty may suggest high hedonics. Or to put it differently: Simplicity suggests fulfillment of do-goals, whereas novelty suggests fulfillment of be-goals." -- Marc Hassenzahl and others Towards a UX Manifesto (Page 10)

Simple Collides with Airplane Cockpits

CC photo by caribb

Thus far, there is at least a solid body of evidence to suggest that a complex weave of contextual and circumstantial factors dictate the desirability of Simplicity. Simplicity isn't always desirable. Simplicity is likely moored in cultural vantages.

Mr. Inchauste uses the image of a plane's cockpit to illustrate what complicated looks like. To an untrained pilot, a plane's cockpit is most certainly an intimidating view.

But given a very specific audience, in this instance a trained pilot, a plane's cockpit is a summation of a number of factors. The complexities of piloting a jet obviously dictate how many features are required. The historical and contextual needs of piloting jet aircraft dictate that there will be a given degree of similarity between various models.

Ultimately, the question facing Libre software design is "When is simple good and desirable?"

From Questions to Evaluation

Given the citations, it might be worth exploring a series of questions when designing a Libre application.

• Who is the application for and what is the cultural context? Simplicity may have reduced value in certain cultural contexts.
• What are the audience's needs? If the needs are of a be-goal nature, novelty might yield higher dividends over simplicity.
• What is the audience's level of expertise? Expertise levels drive needs and resultant concepts of simplicity.
• If the application is of a do-goal variant, is there a need for contextual similarity with other designs and why? Moving a jet pilot's controls to a different formation or layout will likely have an adverse impact on her notions of simplicity, if it even were a question at all.
• Has there been sufficient research on the particular audience? Concrete understanding of the needs and expectations of a given audience will help cultivate useful insights into how that audience experiences simple.
  

Don't Be A Cheerleader

If there is one thing that I'd like everyone to take with them after making it to this point in this post, it is the humble request that we stop being cheerleaders. Repeating empty terms and phrases is not helping us or our knowledge of design.

Investigate. Research. Think.

There are likely more than a few places in Libre culture where our designs are the equivalent of an unreduced fraction - overly complicated in communicating identical values. This post isn't about that. This post is about being considerate about context. It is about avoiding assumptions when we set forth in our efforts to design the future.

The problem is likely not at all about complexity or how we design around it, but rather in our inability to deduce when and how much complexity is required.

That question, again, starts with who. The answer starts and ends with that audience. Don't be an unsympathetic guesser and assumer. Be an empathetic and inquisitive questioner.

Leave those buzzwords and golden rules for those that enjoy chasing leprechauns.

Thank you all for reading.

Stop Making Applications, Start Making Movies and Video Games

One passing comment about music player apps and a music applet from hell, and I ask you:

Are we living in the 1990's?

Contextual Design

I believe design granularity to be very real. I believe that innovation can happen if we simply pull back and examine exactly what an audience is trying to do.

A music application is boring. It's a list. It's a text based bit of dribble.

An image browser is a stale misrepresentation of emotional experiences.

While there are contexts where purely scientific designs are far superior, such as within an industrial audiovisual pipeline environment, I ask you to consider the idea that for a vast percentage of audiences, images and music are emotional states. They are experiences.

They are bound to the subjective and tightly woven with high-level cognition.

Where We Are Now

We are stuck in list views. We are there because we have always done it that way. I need not provide you screenshots as you are well aware of the state of affairs.

This discussion hit fruition when Jay Sitter offered up a link from his past. I think it is on point in every respect. While discussing it, a comment of his lurked at the front of my brain.

"What innovations have we had over the last twenty years of music playing software? Horizontal hierarchy with browser panels? Cover Flow? Uh... lyrics? Auto-fetched album art? It's still a damn spreadsheet. We could change everything." -- Jay Sitter @ Kilobitspersecond

Indeed we could. In fact, I dare say that the brilliant and mind blowing innovation is already there sitting in front of us. It is camouflaged in extremely stale and inept art, design, and experiential choices.

Lyrics, Wikipedia, and other Emotional Stuff

When I first stumbled across a music player that pulled Wikipedia pages I was somewhat torn. On one hand I immediately realized that it was pure innovation. Brilliant really. But the drab "cram it into a web page tab box" was so utterly depressing I nearly cried.

The interconnected experience is upon us. We are living in a time where we can create dynamic content using all of the existing content provided to us. Some applications are already doing this, but they are doing it in a horrifically stale bread 1990's fashion.

How do we tackle this issue?

Defining an Audience

For this mental game, I'd like you to indulge the idea that we are designing a music playing application. Let's make some audience guidelines that will help steer the aesthetic:

• The audience for this application is a twenty-something viewer.
• The audience is a sophisticated Westernized cinematic language consumer. They are on the brink of a full second generation music video / commercial mind. They understand jump cuts and like language with the simplicity that their parents understood the cross cut.
• The audience has a diversity of music magazine mentality media upon them. SPIN, Rolling Stone, and MTV are now the aged grandparents of the music-wrapped vibes of contemporary sites such as Pitchfork and DrownedInSound. The language is well understood, after all, this is the second generation of digital ezines. It is the third in terms of visual music representations as innovated by MTV and other music-centric media giants.

Design Patterns

What images pop into your minds when you read this? When you know an audience, do you get ideas or stimulus on how to present the data in a meaningful representation? Does defining the audience make design choices more clear or more irrelevant than prior to the definition? Does defining an audience present stale-avoid-the-allergic-reaction design or foster creative and innovative excitement through possibilities?

What does music mean to this audience? Is it, as Jay suggests, a spreadsheet or is it something more? Is it an emotional state?

Organizing the Data

How does our audience desire their data? Are they looking for an artist by the song title? Are they looking for the artist?

Or are they looking for a mood? Is the music tagged? Can we leverage Last.FM-like data libraries against their needs?[1]

Is the music subjective? Was there an event that happened and the music gains more meaning through it? How does our application understand that? For the random playlist, does tangential circumstance such as weather play a role?

What does browsing emotion look like in the 21st century? It is a design problem that yields massive dividends to the group that provides an innovation solution.

Progressive Disclosure as Cinematic and Video Game Immersion

I wrote about the value of paying attention to adjacent industries quite a while ago. I stand by that argument.

Movies and video games hold the Holy Grail of what we seek. They have been doing it for years.

Make it emotionally compelling. Make it immersive.

What does our music application look like now?

What does browsing for an artist look like when we arrive at them? What does a song look like? Is it a stale-bread spreadsheet or cram-it-in-a-menu-itus?

What if now apply the existing concept of pulling dynamic content already present in other music applications but display it for our particular audience with the mindset laid out? What impact does our audience have on the aesthetic?

Images that flow. Gradual dissolves, zooms, and other transitions as you are browsing the content. Dynamic pull quotes drift across the interface as the audience browses their collection. Typographic explorations, as presented in those music magazines, reveal pull quotes and other interesting facts.

An explosion of deeply immersive and engaging mental resonance.

If you can take a screenshot of it, our design has failed as taking a still from a movie, a note from a song, or a sentence from a novel.

Unleash the Emotional Experiences Everywhere Like a Mind Bomb

In Libre culture, we are cycling over old ground. Again and again and again. Look at us. Look around us. Feel shame.

Archaic absolutist views on wallpaper designs. Emotionally vacuous icons that must-work-on-all-backgrounds-for-all-people-everywhere. Empty and callous interfaces.

That process of design has failed us miserably. It does not work. It is not usable. It is not useful. It is tripe peddled by snake oil salespeople. It is attempting to bake a cake that won't cause an allergic reaction in anyone.

We need to stop and break the cycle. Immediately.

Stop. Step back. Think.

Pick an audience. Design to it.

The innovation and brilliance is already there. It is sitting right there in front of us. We have sucked all of the emotion out of it, however, and it is hidden to all but the most astute eyes.

Someone will execute emotionally engaging and immersive design. Someone will be much lauded for the innovation and creativity of the presentation.

Some will ridicule the design for breaking from the past.

In the end however, it is only the future.

We never stopped to realize it was upon us.

Thank you all for reading. Our numbers grow...

[1] I firmly believe that opening up a given audience to new music also provides some much needed opportunity to provide optional monetization. If it meets a desire or need and provides potential monetization, it should be examined in light of the audience at hand. Audience first, always. But if the audience has a need that also happens to provide an avenue for monetization, it should at least be considered.

When Things Go Well

While it is an interesting exploration to disassemble something and attempt to diagnose why something is failing given its position in an art and design context, it is equally worthy to pay attention to something working.

The new Ubuntu alternate wallpaper selection is perhaps the best example of successful art and design work in Ubuntu yet.

When Things Work

The Ubuntu 10.10 wallpaper selection is in the repositories and available for perusal. They are, as of the time of this writing, as follows:

If we ignore the Purple -6 Vomit of Inducing Horror, I would suggest that this is likely the most successful presentation I have seen in Ubuntu proper.

Why Does it Work: Composition

The samples are all well composed when one pays attention to the guidelines of classical composition. Centre punching an object has a place, but sadly, in the last incarnation, it was misplaced.

In no other iteration of alternate wallpapers have we seen such a cohesive application of composition within the images. There are a few edge cases that are close, but the visual gravity of the items still tends to locate them closer to the classical notions. A huge gain if we compare against the images from the last selection.

Why Does it Work: Hue Range

Ubuntu has suffered the claustrophobic and suffocating consistency-for-consistency's sake vision for a number of iterations. This results in a plethora of "alternate" wallpapers that were nothing more than brown smears of brown smears. Last release saw some absolutely empty grasps at embracing the brand identity default colour.

Worthless. Empty. Vacuous.

This iteration of the alternates however, we are finally seeing the earmarks of intelligent selection. Gone are the worries of the blind Utopian Usability Pig, and instead, an engagement of the mind is starting to leak through.

We have a good range of hues in this selection. When we step back and look at them as a collection, we see a solid mixture and variance. A uniformity through variation.

Alternate wallpapers should be just that - alternatives. Offering a range of hues is a tremendous step in that direction.

Why Does it Work: Emotion

Thankfully, the pathetic abortions of worthless blurry garbage have been boxed and stuffed into the attic. Instead? A dog, a flower, a landscape. Something that engages the mind. Something that may actually mean something to someone. Even abstract impressionism, given birth in a very clearly defined historical context, had a key component that so many miss while they are creating blurry garbage - impression.

An engagement of the brain. A memory. An emotion.

For those that like alliterations, it is a purely positive progression.

Why Does it Work: Mise-En-Scene

The default selection of alternate wallpapers has a voice when viewed as a whole.

In an ideal world, it is a unique voice that reflects the ideology and emotional foundation of the brand identity. While we are still wallowing in some strange amoeba-like progression towards that in Ubuntu proper, the default wallpaper selection is clearly making strides alone.

As a group, the alternate wallpapers have more of a voice than the entire rest of the system.

In Summary

While it is easy to criticize something when things are struggling or the wheels on the wagon are square, it is quite possibly more difficult to notice when something is working well given the contexts.

The default wallpaper selection in Ubuntu 10.10 is, I believe, the strongest of any release thus far. While the rest of the brand identity is struggling to say anything, the default wallpapers have some unique voices.

Artistically and photographically sound, with a good use of the depth, colour, value, and composition, they are the most visually tight selection yet.

Is there room to flesh this out further? Likely. What would one do to elevate the default set of wallpaper alternates? Would it be nice to perhaps underpin the selection with subtle emotional cues? Yes. Would it be nice to offer some other refined and sophisticated communication into the mix? Yes. Is there something else to be had there? Quite likely yes.

That said, those are extremely optimistic questions. The bigger and grander "Where do we go from here?" or the "How can we elevate the game further?" are worth discussing in the proper circles with the proper mindset.

With this iteration of the wallpapers, whatever the dead weight that was dragging the selections down is clearly gone, and we are left with a set of wallpapers that should be applauded. In fact, I'd dare say that whoever was responsible for the selection is likely sitting alone at Canonical, as their vision is clearly going in a more healthy direction than whatever myopic team / individual has insisted on the default wallpaper.

I'd be so bold as to say that half of the problem with the vast majority of Libre art and design is the work itself. The other half is the fact that no one apparently realizes how utterly disturbing the work is. Sadly, the default wallpaper in 10.10 is still subject to that statement.

If the default wallpaper is deemed acceptable to Canonical, the entire art and design team and everyone involved in any capacity should be deemed as nothing more than a sham and charlatanism. It is an extremely loud statement. It speaks.

Get a vision. Get an audience. Get a voice.

From there, we can attempt to deliver emotion.

Better yet, when your corporate culture is blind, let the people with sight deliver the goods. The alternate wallpaper hints that there is at least one person at Canonical that values artistic and creative presence.

In closing, I'd like everyone that values art and design to unequivocally dismantle the notion that a default wallpaper doesn't matter. That someone should simply change it. Let's start treating art, design, presence, aesthetics, and experiential design with the same respect and credibility as the code in the kernel.

Nothing less is acceptable.

Thank you all for your time...