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from Bitcoin on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/60elrh/ibm_launches_enterpriseready_blockchain_service/
Google open-sources JPEG encoder that reduces file sizes by 35%
If you’re building an app or site that stores, manipulates or serves a lot of images, you’ll want to consider implementing Google’s new image compression algorithm, which promises to reduce JPEG file sizes by 35 percent more than other methods.
It’s called Guetzli, and it works with existing browsers and image processing tools. Google says it allows for small file sizes without compromising much on image quality by targeting what’s known as the quantization stage of the compression process, which is where algorithms can squish files but end up with poorer quality images.
“This event was off the charts”
Gary Vaynerchuk was so impressed with TNW Conference 2016 he paused mid-talk to applaud us.
However, it’s worth noting that Guetzli is slower than other options out there. Its psychovisual model “approximates color perception and visual masking in a more thorough and detailed way than what is achievable by simpler color transforms and the discrete cosine transform,” and the search algorithm that Guetzli uses to achieve this is slower than alternatives like libjpeg.
In the examples below, you can see the uncompressed original image on the left, libjpeg in the middle and Guetzli’s result on the right; notice how Google’s solution has less ringing artifacts in both examples.
The JPEG encoder is open-source and available for you to download and implement in your own projects from this GitHub repository.
There are a lot of scary things happening these days, but here’s what keeps me up late at night. A handful of corporations are turning our open internet into this:
These corporations want to lock down the internet and give us access to nothing more than a few walled gardens. They want to burn down the Library of Alexandria and replace it with a magazine rack.
Why? Because they’ll make more money that way.
This may sound like a conspiracy theory, but this process is moving forward at an alarming rate.
History is repeating itself.
So far, the story of the internet has followed the same tragic narrative that’s befallen other information technologies over the past 160 years:
the telegram
the telephone
cinema
radio
television
Each of these had roughly the same story arc:
Inventors discovered the technology.
Hobbyists pioneered the applications of that technology, and popularized it.
Corporations took notice. They commercialized the technology, refined it, and scaled it.
Once the corporations were powerful enough, they tricked the government into helping them lock the technology down. They installed themselves as “natural monopolies.”
After a long period of stagnation, a new technology emerged to disrupt the old one. Sometimes this would dislodging the old monopoly. But sometimes it would only further solidify them.
This loop has repeated itself so many times that Tim Wu — the Harvard law professor who coined the term “Net Neutrality” — has a name for it: The Cycle.
“History shows a typical progression of information technologies, from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.” — Tim Wu
And right now, we’re in step 4 the open internet’s narrative. We’re surrounded by monopolies.
The problem is that we’ve been in step 4 for decades now. And there’s no step 5 in sight. The creative destruction that the Economist Joseph Schumpeter first observed in the early 1900s has yet to materialize.
The internet, it seems, is special. It’s the ultimate information technology — capable of supplanting the telegram, telephone, radio, cinema, television, and much more — and there’s no clear way to disrupt it.
But the war for the commanding heights of the internet is far from over. There are many players on this global chess board. Governments. Telecom monopolies. Internet giants like Google and Facebook. NGOs. Startups. Hackers. And — most importantly — you.
The war for the open internet is the defining issue of our time. It’s a scramble for control of the very fabric of human communication. And human communication is all that separates us from the utopia that thousands of generations of our ancestors slowly marched us toward — or the Orwellian, Huxleyan, Kafkaesque dystopia that a locked-down internet would make possible.
By the end of this article, you’ll understand what’s happening, the market forces that are driving this, and how you can help stop it. We’ll talk about the brazen monopolies who maneuver to lock down the internet, the scrappy idealists who fight to keep it open, and the vast majority of people who are completely oblivious to this battle for the future.
In Part 1, we’ll explore what the open internet is and delve into the history of the technological revolutions that preceded it.
In Part 2, we’ll talk about the atoms. The physical infrastructure of the internet. The internet backbone. Communication satellites. The “last mile” of copper and fiber optic cables that provide broadband internet.
In Part 3, we’ll talk about bits. The open, distributed nature of the internet and how it’s being cordoned off into walled gardens by some of the largest multinational corporations in the world.
In Part 4, we’ll explore the implications of all this for consumers and for startups. You’ll see how you can help save the open internet.I’ll share some practical steps you can take as a citizen of the internet to do your part and keep it open.
This is a long read. So grab a hot beverage and get ready to download a massive corpus of technology history into your brain.
Part 1: What is the open internet?
“Number 31” by Jackson Pollack. 1950. Household paints on canvas.
There’s only one word to describe the open internet: chaos.
The open internet is a cacophony of 3 billion voices screaming over one another. It’s a dusty, sprawling bazaar. And it’s messy. But it has produced some of the greatest art and industry of our time.
The open internet is a Miltonian marketplace of ideas, guided by a Smithian invisible hand of free-market capitalism.
The open internet is distributed. It’s owned in part by everyone and in whole by no one. It exists largely outside of the boundaries of governments. And it’s this way by design.
This reflects the wisdom of Vint Cerf, Bob Khan, J. C. R. Licklider, and all the wizards who stayed up late and pioneered the internet. They had seen the anti-capitalist, corporatists fate that befell the telegram, the telephone, the radio, and the TV. They wanted no part of that for their invention.
The open internet is a general purpose tool where anyone can publish content, and anyone can then consume that content. It is a Cambrian Explosion of ideas and of execution.
Can these websites survive in a top-down, command-and-control closed internet? Will they pay for “shelf space” on a cable TV-like list of packages? Will they pay for a slice of attention in crowded walled garden?
We’re all trapped in The Cycle
Here’s a brief history of the information technologies that came before the internet, and how quickly corporations and governments consolidated them.
Originally anyone could string up some cable, then start tapping out Morse Code messages to their friends. The telegram was a fun tool that had some practical applications, too. Local businesses emerged around it.
That changed in 1851 when Western Union strung up transcontinental lines and built relay stations between them.
If small telegraph companies wanted to be able to compete, they needed access to Western Union’s network. Soon, they were squeezed out entirely.
At one point Western Union was so powerful that it was able to single-handedly install a US President. If you grew up in America, you may have memorized this president’s name as a child: Rutherford B. Hayes.
Not only did Western Union back Hayes’ campaign financially, it also used its unique position as the information backbone for espionage purposes. It was able to read telegrams from Hayes’ political opponents and make sure Hayes was always one step ahead.
Western Union’s dominance — and monopoly pricing — would last for decades until Alexander Graham Bell disrupted its business with his newly-invented telephone.
How the telephone fell victim to The Cycle
After a period of party lines and local telephone companies, AT&T — backed by JP Morgan — built a network of long-distance lines throughout America.
In order for the customers of local phone companies to be able to call people in other cities, those companies had to pay AT&T for the privilege of using its long-distance network.
Theodore Vale — a benevolent monopolist if there ever was one — thought that full control of America’s phone systems was the best way to avoid messy, wasteful capitalistic competition. He argued that his way was better for consumers. And to be fair, it was. At least in the short run.
Vale was able to use AT&T’s monopoly profits to subsidize the development of rural phone lines. This helped him rapidly connect all of America and unify it under a single standardized system.
But the problem with benevolent monopolists is they don’t live forever. Sooner or later, they are replaced by second-generation CEOs, who often lack any of their predecessors’ idealism. They are only after one thing — the capitalist’s prerogative — maximizing shareholder value. That means making a profit, dispersing dividends, and beating quarterly earnings projections. Which means extracting as much money from customers as possible.
AT&T eventually squeezed out their competitors completely. And once AT&T’s monopoly became apparent, the US Government took action to regulate it. But AT&T was much smarter than its regulators, and jumped on an opportunity to become a state-sponsored “natural monopoly.”
AT&T would enjoy monopoly profits for decades before being broken up by the FCC in 1982.
But the “baby bells” wouldn’t stay divided for long. In 1997, they were able to start merging back together into a corporation even bigger than before the break-up.
The end result is one of the most powerful corporations on the planet — strong enough to expand its monopoly from the land-line telephone industry to the emerging wireless telecom industry.
AT&T functioned like a branch of government and had extensive research labs, but with one major exception — it could keep secret any inventions that it perceived as a threat to its core business.
Voicemail — and digital tape, which was later used as a critical data storage medium for computers — was actually invented within one of AT&T’s labs in 1934. But they buried it. It was only re-invented decades later.
Imagine how much progress the field of information technology could have made during that length of time with such a reliable and high-volume data storage medium at its disposal.
To give you some idea of how much just this one AT&T decision may have cost humanity, imagine that a corporation purposefully delayed the introduction of email by a decade. What would be the total impact on the productivity of society? How many trillions of dollars in lost economic activity would such an action cost us? This is the cautionary tale of what happens you leave scientific research and development to private industry instead of public labs and universities.
You can still feel the legacy of AT&T’s monopoly when you call an older person from out of state. They will instinctively try to keep the call as short as possible, because they want to avoid the massive long distance fees historically associated with such calls, even though these no longer apply.
I thought this was just my grandmother, but it’s everyone’s grandmother. Entire generations have been traumatized by AT&T’s monopolistic pricing.
How cinema fell victim of The Cycle
Shortly after the invention of cinema, we had thousands of movie theaters around the US showing a wide variety of independently-produced films on all manner of topics. Anyone could produce a film, then screen it at their local theater.
That changed when Adolf Zukor founded Paramount Pictures. He pioneered the practice of “block booking.” If small independent theaters wanted to screen, say, the newest Mae West film, they would also need to purchase and screen a bunch of other lessor films.
This took away theater owners’ status as local tastemakers, and removed their ability to cater to their own local demographics. The result was the commoditization of movie theaters, and ultimately the rise of blockbuster cinema.
How radio fell victim to The Cycle
Shortly after Marconi — or Tesla — invented the radio, a massive hobbyist movement sprung up around it. There were thousands of local radio stations playing amateur programs.
In stepped David Sarnoff as the head of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). He was perhaps the most Machiavellian CEO of the 20th century.
At the time, RCA was making parts for radio. Conventional thinking at the time was that RCA should focus on hardware, and getting as many radio stations running and as many radios into homes as possible. But Sarnoff realized that the real money was in content. He helped popularize the National Broadcast Corporation (NBC) and focused instead on making money through advertisements.
Then Sarnoff approached the Federal Radio Commission — now the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) — and convinced them that since the radio spectrum was a scarce commodity, they should carve it up and issue licenses.
Soon, NBC was available in every home, and the local hobbyist radio stations were squeezed off the air. RCA was now vertically integrated — from the parts in the radio stations, to the parts in consumer radios, to the content being broadcast itself.
Sarnoff had talked with the inventors of TV, and knew that it would eventually disrupt radio. But he had a plan. To claim the invention of television for himself.
How TV fell victim to The Cycle
TV is different from other forms of technology here, in that it didn’t enjoy a hobbyist stage. With the help of the FCC, Sarnoff and RCA immediately locked TV down. The result was several decades where Americans had just three channels to choose from — NBC, CBS, and ABC.
This was the height of mass culture — half of all Americans watching the same episode of I Love Lucy at the same time. The popularity of television — combined with the lack of diversity in programming caused by this monopoly — had social and political consequences that haunt us to this day.
Will the open internet fall victim to The Cycle?
We’ve gone through the invention step. The infrastructure came out of DARPA and the World Wide Web itself came out of CERN.
We’ve gone through the hobbyist step. Everyone now knows what the internet is, and some of the amazing things it’s capable of.
We’ve gone through the commercialization step. Monopolies have emerged, refined, and scaled the internet.
But the question remains: can we break with the tragic history that has befallen all prior information empires? Can this time be different?
Part 2: The War for Atoms
“IBM Cable Ball” by David Lan. 2007. Cables.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law
As much as we may think of the internet as a placeless realm of pure abstractions, it has a physical structure. It’s not magic. And more people are waking up to this reality each day.
The internet is a series of copper and fiber optic cables that burrow through the ground and tunnel under oceans. We call this the Internet Backbone. Here’s what it looks like:
The internet is then further distributed through regional backbones. Here’s all the fiber that carries internet data around the United States. Red squares represent the junctions between “long haul” fibers.
The invisible workhorses of the internet: backbone providers
Six major companies control the backbone, and they “hand off” traffic from one another without any money exchanging hands:
Level 3 Communications
Telia Carrier
NTT
Cogent
GTT
Tata Communications.
Within the US, the backbone is mostly controlled by old long distance carriers, including Verizon and AT&T — who also control a two thirds of America’s $200 billion wireless industry.
These companies “peer” traffic through backbone connections controlled by other companies, or pay each other through “transit agreements.”
Despite the involvement of these huge telecoms, the internet backbone represents a fairly healthy market. About 40% of the internet’s backbone is controlled by smaller networks you’ve never heard of.
The mafia of the internet: the ISPs
The broadband internet market, on the other hand, isn’t healthy at all. This is the “last mile” of cables that plug into the internet backbone. And it’s full of ugly tollbooths, guarded by thick benches of lawyers and lobbyists.
This broadband internet market is controlled by just three extremely powerful — and widely hated — internet service providers (ISPs):
Cox
Charter (which recently acquired another ISP, Time Warner)
These two providers control 2/3rd of the wireless market. If you have a mobile phone, there’s a good chance you pay one of these companies every month for your data plan.
These ISPs control millions of miles of copper cables that they buried in the ground back in the 1970s, and satellites they shot up into orbit in the 1990s. They constantly breakthelaw, tie up regulators in lengthy court battles, and make it practically impossible for anyone — even Google — to enter their markets.
The ISPs do all this for one reason and one reason alone: so they can avoid free market competition — and the expensive technology upgrades it would require — while they continue raking in their monopoly rents from the 2/3 of Americans who only have one choice in their neighborhood for broadband internet.
For the past two years, the public had a weapon against these ISPs. It’s not one that can mortally wound them , but it has helped beat back their monopolistic tendencies. It’s called Net Neutrality.
How Net Neutrality works
The story of ISPs basically comes down to this: They used to make a ton of money off of cable packages. But people discovered that once they had the internet, they didn’t care about cable TV any more — they just wanted data plans and so they could watch YouTube, Netflix, or whatever shows they wanted — and they could also consume a lot of non-video content, too.
The ISPs don’t make nearly as much selling you a data plan as they used to make selling you a cable plan, though. So their goal is to return to the “good old days” by locking down the internet into “channels” and “bundles” then forcing you to buy those.
How do we prevent this? The good news is that we already have. In 2015, the FCC passed a law that regulated ISPs as utilities. This is based on the principle of “Net Neutrality” which basically states that all information passing through a network should be treated equally.
As part of its 2015 decision on Net Neutrality, the FCC asked for public comment on this topic. 3 million Americans wrote to the FCC. Less than 1% of those people were opposed to Net Neutrality.
After a hard fought battle against telecoms, we convinced the FCC to enshrine Net Neutrality into law.
The FCC’s Title II regulation created three “bright lines” that prevent ISPs from doing the following:
Blocking content from websites
Slowing down content from websites
Accepting money from websites to speed up their content
These rules made it so that no matter how rich and powerful a corporation is — and Apple and Google are the biggest corporations on Earth, and Microsoft and Facebook aren’t far behind — they can’t buy priority access to the internet.
Everyone has to compete on a level playing field. These tech conglomerates have to compete with the scrappy startups, the mom-and-pop businesses, and even independent bloggers who are running WordPress on their own domain.
Nobody is above Net Neutrality. It’s as simple a tool as possible for protecting the capitalist free market internet from monopolies who would otherwise abuse their power.
Now ISPs are treated like a utility. How are the packets being routed through a network different from the water being piped through the ground, or the electricity flowing through a power grid?
The water company shouldn’t care whether you’re turning on a tap to wash dishes or to take a shower.
The power company shouldn’t care whether you’re plugging in a TV or a toaster.
The ISPs shouldn’t care what data you want or what you use it for.
The reason ISPs want to get rid of Net Neutrality is simple: if we stop treating them like the utility that they are, they can find ways to charge a lot more money.
Here’s the former CEO of AT&T laying out his evil plan:
“Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!” — Edward Whitacre, AT&T CEO
What he should certainly realize is that everyone is already paying for internet access. You’re paying to be able to access this article. I’m paying to push this article up onto the internet. This website is paying to send the traffic from its servers over to your computer.
We have all already paid to use these ISP’s last mile of cables. No one is using these pipes for free.
But the ISPs see an opportunity to double dip. They want to charge for bandwidth, and also charge websites what the Mafia calls “protection money.” They essentially want to be able to say to website owners: “Those are some lovely data packets you’ve got there. It sure would be a shame if they got lost on their way to your users.”
Of course, most of the open internet couldn’t afford to pay this “protection money” to ISPs, so the ISPs would block traffic to their websites, cutting consumers off from most of the open internet. But the ISPs wouldn’t need to block these websites. All the ISPs would need to do is introduce a slight latency.
Both Google and Microsoft have done research that shows that if you slow down a website by even 250 milliseconds — about how long it takes to blink your eyes — most people will abandon that website.
That’s right — speed isn’t a feature, it’s a basic prerequisite for attracting an audience. We humans are extremely impatient and becoming more so with each passing year.
This means that in practice, if an ISP artificially slows down a website, it’s practically as damaging as blocking the site entirely. Both of these acts result in the same outcome — a severe loss of traffic.
Traffic is the lifeblood of websites. Without traffic, merchandise doesn’t get sold. Services don’t get subscribed to. Ads don’t get seen.
Without traffic, the open web dies — whether ISPs block it or not.
The ISPs have launched an all-out assault on Net Neutrality
With January’s change in US administration and the election of our 45th president, the FCC has changed as well.
The FCC Chairman Ajit Pai — a former Verizon lawyer — is now in control of the only regulator that the ISPs answer to. And here’s a direct quote from him:
“We need to fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation and job creation.” — FCC Chairman Ajit Pai
The ISPs won’t reinvest their “protection money” in infrastructure. They already have incredible monopoly profits. Here’s their net income (after-tax profits) from 2016:
AT&T: $16 billion
Verizon: $13 billion
Comcast $8 billion
Charter $8 billion
They have plenty of profit they could claw back into improving infrastructure. They’re choosing instead to disperse this money to shareholders.
In just two months, Chairman Pai has already done incredible damage to Net Neutrality. He dropped “Zero Rating” lawsuits against 4 monopolies who were in clear violation of Net Neutrality law. Now Comcast and AT&T can continue to stream their own video services without them counting toward customers’ data caps, and there’s nothing the FCC will do about it.
Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler did his best to reach out to Chairman Pai and convince him of the virtues of Net Neutrality. The two were scheduled to meet once every two weeks during Wheeler’s last 18 months in office. But Pai cancelled every single one of these meetings.
“You have to have open networks — permissionless innovation. Period. End of discussion. They’re crucial to the future.” — Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler
Part 3: The War for Bits
“Sweet as One” by Craig and Karl. 2016. Candy.
What does a post Net Neutrality internet look like? Look no further than the Apple App store.
There are two million apps in the app store, which shared a total of $28 billion in 2016. Apple takes a 30% commission on every sale, and made $8.4 billion from the app store alone.
Most of the remaining $20 billion goes to just a small handful of mobile gaming companies:
Most iPhone users download zero apps per month.
The minority who do bother to download new apps don’t end up downloading very many.
A vast majority of the remaining 2 million apps get very little traffic — and even less money.
The Apple App Store isn’t a level playing field. It doesn’t resemble the open internet it was built on top of. Instead, it’s an example of a walled garden.
Walled gardens look beautiful. They’re home to the most popular flora. But make no mistake, you won’t be able to venture very far in any one direction without encountering a wall.
First there was the original walled garden of the internet, AOL.
20 years later, AOL still has 2 million users paying them $20/month. There’s a lot of money to be made in building walled gardens and trapping users in them.
Then came Yahoo, which wasn’t a walled garden by design, but became one anyway because people were so new to the internet.
In the late 90s, startups raised money specifically so they could buy banner ads on Yahoo. It was the best way they could reach prospective users.
But Yahoo was a candle in the sun compared to the ultimate walled garden: Facebook.
A quarter of the people on Earth use Facebook for an average of 50 minutes each day.
And those 50 million people connected to Internet.org that Mark Zuckerberg is bragging about? Those are people from extremely poor countries who were given a choice: they could either pay for the open internet or just get Facebook for free. They chose Facebook.
The insidiously-named Internet.org was famously rejected in India — among other countries — where activists were able to raise awareness about all the things Indians would give up by accepting Facebook instead of the open internet.
The zero in internet.org un-ironically stands for Zero Rating, an anti-Net Neutrality practice that’s illegal in most western countries.
Mark Zuckerberg may mean well, but he’s rapidly destroying the open internet. In his ravenous quest to expand Facebook’s market share, he’s even gone so far as to build a sophisticated censorship tool so that Facebook can appease the governments of countries where it’s currently blocked, like China.
And Facebook is just one of several internet corporations who stand to profit from these sort of closed-source, closed-data walled garden platforms.
So what makes you think they won’t come to control the very internet they dominate?
Even as the costs of launching a website fall, the costs of reaching an audience continue to rise.
Facebook and Google account for 85% of all new dollars spent on online advertising. Everyone else — newspapers, blogs, video networks — is fighting for crumbs — the 15% that fell from Facebook’s and Google’s mouths.
Half of all internet traffic now comes from just 30 websites. The remaining half is thinly spread across the 60 trillion unique webpages currently indexed by Google.
If you’re familiar with the concept of a long tail distribution, you’ll recognize this phenomenon as an extremely fat head with an extremely long, skinny tail.
We blindly trust tech founders to be benevolent
You may think that the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Larry Pages of the world would know better than to abuse their power. But such scandals have happened in the past.
Reddit is one of the most popular websites on the internet. One of its founders recently put the company’s reputation in jeopardy when it was discovered that he’d been going in and modifying users’ comments in the database — essentially putting words in the mouths of people who were critical of him.
We are not only placing faith in the temperament of the elite handful of tech company founders. We’re also trusting that other actors — who ultimately take over these organizations — will be benevolent. Even when we know that their shareholders — or governments — can force them to be malevolent and do things that go against their users’ interests.
However you may feel about Mark Zuckerberg and his intentions, know this: Just like the “benevolent monopolist” Theodore Vale, who championed rural access to AT&T in the early 20th century, Mark Zuckerberg will one day retire. And the person who takes over Facebook will not be nearly as forward thinking as he is. Most likely, it will be some finance guy or sales guy (think Steve Ballmer) who will sell Facebook users — and their Exabytes of data — down the river.
In the future, our internet could become as locked-down as China’s
China has the most sophisticated censorship tools in the world. So much so that other authoritarian regimes license the use of these tools to control their own populations.
1.4 billion Chinese people are locked down in a closed internet, behind the Great Firewall of China.
The anti-Net Neutrality agenda that the ISPs are pursuing would require them to use a technique called Deep Packet Inspection. Without looking inside the contents of every packet, it is impossible for ISPs to decide which packets they want to selectively slow down.
This means that in addition to sending packets of data through their networks, ISPs would actually have to look inside each of these packets — and would quite likely record the contents of these packets. It would be expensive, but storing major chunks of the Zettabyte of information the internet generates each year is within the budgets of large corporations and governments.
Monitoring internet traffic at this level of detail would make pervasive censorship possible. This is one of the techniques China uses to re-write its history. And it works. Despite the advances in information technology, to this day many Chinese still don’t know that the Tiananmen Massacre happened. And when they do learn of it, it’s ancient history — sapped of most of its perceived relevance.
“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.” — Joseph Stalin
If the ISPs succeed and the open internet falls, corporations and governments would have a mandate to censor the most powerful communication tool in human history — the internet — in its entirety.
Part 4: Who controls the information? Who controls the future?
“Ascension” by Nathan Sawaya. 2014. Legos.
Whether these corporations are aggregating power through regulatory capture or by amassing exabytes of your data, they are steadily becoming more powerful. They are using their growing cashflow to buy up competitors.
This isn’t capitalism — it’s corporatism. Capitalism is messy. It’s wasteful. But it’s much healthier in the long run for society as a whole than central planning and government trying to pick the winners.
Capitalism allows for small businesses to enter and actually stand a chance. Corporatism makes it impossible.
If you’ve read this far, I hope you understand the gravity of this situation. This is not speculative. This is really happening. There are historical precedents. There are present-day examples.
If you do nothing, we will lose the war for the open internet. The greatest tool for communication and creativity in human history will fall into the hands of a few powerful corporations and governments.
Without your actions, corporations will continue to lock down the internet in ways that benefit them — not the public.
The most urgent task at hand is stopping FCC Chairman Ajit Pai from disassembling Net Neutrality.
Help us fight this war. Here’s what I’m asking you to do:
Share this article with your friends and family. I realize the irony of asking you to use walled gardens to reach your friends and family, but this late in the war, these are the best tools possible. Share this article on Facebook or tweet this article.
Only we, the public, can end The Cycle of closed systems. Only we can save the open internet.
Thank you for reading this, and for caring about the fate of our open internet.
Raspberry Pi just turned 5. Here’s a brief history of the world’s tiniest hobbyist computer. (5 minute read)
A chatbot that overturned 160,000 parking fines is now helping refugees claim asylum (3 minute read)
Thought of the day:
“History shows a typical progression of information technologies, from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.” — Tim Wu
In some reaches of the product development world there is a fascination with the idea that products can nearly design themselves through an iterative process of development, testing, and incremental improvement. This is what I call “design Darwinsm.” Design Darwinism often enters the product development conversation as an extension of a Lean, Agile, data-driven, or A/B testing framework.
The prospect of great products arising out of a primordial soup of nebulous product ideas and gradually evolving into great products without the need of designers is a stirring notion for some. The problem is, it doesn’t work. You can’t design by iteration and incremental improvement. There is no such thing as design Darwinism in the real world (except that which brings about the extinction of poorly-designed products).
Google: the grand experiment in design Darwinism
Google has famously rolled out dozens of “beta” releases, apparently hoping that iteration would turn them into great products. This massive, expensive, and ongoing experiment with the engineer-and-iterate approach to product development has not led to a portfolio of great products, but to a graveyard of failed ones. Remember these?
I believe these products failed because Google thinks great design can be achieved through iteration. Google (now Alphabet) could be regarded as the world’s greatest laboratory for design Darwinism with its tremendous resources and its engineering-led product management processes. But can you name any great, innovative product that has emerged from its iterative processes?
Yes, Google is extremely successful, and I give them full credit in “Google’s greatest design triumph.” But don’t forget (or maybe this is news): Alphabet makes almost all of its profits selling ads and loses billions on its other projects. Yes, ouch. Google can afford to lose billions experimenting with design Darwinism, but you, more than likely, cannot.
But wait, don’t design thinkers preach iteration?
Yes! Iteration is a great design tool. Design processes can benefit enormously from putting a concept, prototype, beta, or early version of a product in the hands of users, obtaining feedback, and adjusting the product to improve the user experience. This kind of feedback loop is helpful at every stage of the design process. But…
To mistake the design tool of iteration for design itself is a grave error.
Here are three reasons why:
1. Iteration cannot innovate
Iteration is by nature not innovative; rather, it is aimed at incremental improvement. It is not useful for discovering an unmet user need that can lead to a great product. That is what strategic design is for.
Jeff Bezos had this idea for an Amazon phone, the Fire Phone. It was fully 3-D enabled—very exciting. But consumers could not see how it would improve their lives enough to switch from their iPhones or Android phones. So the Fire Phone was dead on arrival when it was launched on July 25, 2014. According to a report by Fast Company, Bezos said six months later, “it’s going to take many iterations”…and…“some number of years to get it right.” That was over two years ago. How are those iterations going, Jeff? Real innovation comes out of great design from the get-go. If strategic design is missing from a product—that is, if users do not find the product meaningful to them—no number of iterations can save it.
2. Iteration can find usability problems, but it can’t solve them
The use of iteration and user feedback is especially good at identifying usability problems. Jakob Nielsen wrote a classic article on this subject. But the kind of feedback obtained in this kind of iteration cycle mainly helps to discover problems with a current design. It does not tell you how to solve those problems. Users are very good at letting you know by their actual behavior if they do not know how to use a feature of your product. But they are notoriously bad at being able to tell you how to fix your product. That is why some good folks spend their careers learning interaction design in depth and becoming experts at solving usability problems and creating products that feel simple and intuitive.
Iteration with user feedback is great for identifying problems with your design. It doesn’t do a thing to tell you how to fix those problems.
3. Iteration cannot create delight
I use emotional design to refer to those aspects of product design that help create an emotional connection with the user: form, color, graphics, images, textures, sounds, animations, typography, the wording of text, and so on. Designers who are experts in these areas can take a product that is already meaningful and easy to use and make it a delightful experience for users. The ability to create delight in these kinds of details is a special skill that cannot be replicated through iteration and testing. Yes, you can do A/B testing to find out if users are more likely to click on a blue or an orange button, but no amount of A/B testing is going to create a delightful product.
So…dispense with dangerous delusions of design Darwinism
As tempting as it may be to believe that products can virtually design themselves using a nifty engineering-led, Darwinistic process, such beliefs are misplaced and will not lead to the creation of great products. Rather, product managers need to:
Establish the soul, the meaning, the why of a product early on, using thoughtful strategic design.
Make the product usable through the skillful application of interaction design.
Make the product delightful through the handiwork of experts in various aspects of emotional design.
Design like a pro, as described above. You will dodge the debacle of design Darwinism and be on your way to creating great products!
And to help you design like a pro, click here to get a free “layers of design” list of top inspirational resources on strategic design, interaction design, and emotional design.
from Sidebar http://sidebar.io/out?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2Fthe-design-innovator%2Fiteration-is-not-design-668695445f76
Adobe, one of the world’s largest and most powerful software companies, is trying something new: It’s applying machine learning and image recognition to graphic and web design. In an unnamed project, the company has created tools that automate designers’ tasks, like cropping photos and designing web pages. Should designers be worried?
The new project, which uses Adobe’s AI and machine learning program Sensei and integrates into the Adobe Experience Manager CMS, will debut at the company’s Sneaks competition later in March. While Adobe hasn’t committed to integrating it into any of its products, it’s one of the most ambitious attempts to marry machine learning and graphic design to date. There have been efforts to use AI in the design world before—for instance, Wix’s Advance Design Intelligence and automated projects like Mark Maker, but Adobe’s is notable because of the company’s sheer reach in the design world. Although it’s just a prototype, it’s one to watch closely.
The as-of-yet unnamed new product is designed, first and foremost, to make it easier to customize websites for users at large-enterprise customers. When I viewed a demo, for instance, machine learning and AI techniques were applied to editing the Food Network’s web pages.
Instead of a designer deciding on layout, colors, photos, and photo sizes, the software platform automatically analyzes all the input and recommends design elements to the user. Using image recognition techniques, basic photo editing like cropping is automated, and an AI makes design recommendations for the pages. Using photos already in the client’s database (and the metadata attached to those photos), the AI—which, again, is layered into Adobe’s CMS—makes recommendations on elements to include and customizations for the designer to make.
According to Cedric Huesler, a product management director for Adobe Marketing Cloud who worked on the project, the idea is offering what he calls “human-augmented” design. The AI offers recommendations, which designers can manually override.
“The problem, obviously, is personalization at scale,” Huesler tells Co.Design. “We can repeat the same process just by providing different inputs”—once implemented, the machine learning tool is designed to let large-enterprise users quickly generate customized content. In the case of large-enterprise customers like the Food Network, Adobe says, partial automation lets them create customized web and mobile experiences for customers more quickly and more affordably than they could otherwise.
The AI is meant to make design easier for large projects. It includes both image recognition components that automatically crop or otherwise edit photos, and more conventional components that rely on text metadata for design decisions.
Huesler points out that, in the Food Network example, content could be instantly customized for users. For example, users whose activity indicates they are lactose intolerant or gluten intolerant will see different recipes and images highlighted. The machine learning product won’t actually handle the heavy lifting of reimagining an interface and making complicated UI or UX decisions. But it can, for instance, help quickly determine what photos and text content are ported onto pages designed for very small user segments.
“Every brand wants to do personalization,” says Steve Hammond, senior director of product of Adobe Marketing Cloud. “They want to make content relevant to individuals and audiences, but as you expand the audiences you’re creating content for, you face two bottlenecks: How do you create variations of content, and how do you create imagery for them?”
These bottlenecks, he says, are something that machine learning can help tackle.
Once again, an old theme in the world of machine learning is picked up here. In the case of web design and graphic design, machine learning helps automate tedious and boring tasks. The vast majority of graphic designers don’t have to worry about algorithms stealing their jobs anytime soon because, while machine learning is great for understanding large data sets and making recommendations, it’s awful at analyzing subjective things such as taste. Nonetheless, it’s important to note that tedious and boring tasks describe much of the entry-level work that’s done in the design world. It’s safe to bet that in the coming years, machine learning tools will be used for many of the tasks that entry-level workers do now.
Approximately 60% of the projects exhibited at Sneaks make their way into Adobe products as functionality improvements or new features. Whether or not Huesler’s feature or a similar one is integrated into Experience Manager or another Adobe product (which is always possible, given the company’s wide presence in the design world), the company is investing a lot of resources in AI and machine learning.
The functionality’s debut at the Sneaks competition, will be part of a wide display of experimental projects Adobe’s employees work on. Sneaks is a major event inside Adobe’s internal ecosystem—the company brings celebrity cohosts (past years included Carrie Brownstein and Thomas Middleditch; this year’s host is Kate McKinnon) each year.
Huesler’s proof-of-concept uses Adobe’s Sensei platform, which offers machine learning and AI frameworks for the company’s products. Sensei is already slowly working into Adobe’s popular Creative Cloud platform and other products; for instance, in Creative Cloud, it assists with image recognition and editing facial expressions.
In our conversation, Hammond was excited for the potential Sensei held for solving vexing design problems. He noted that one of the big problems facing Adobe’s corporate clients is offering customers uniform experiences across different platforms such as desktop websites, mobile websites, smart-home devices, advertising, call centers, and touchscreen kiosks. Automating the minutiae of design, he adds, makes things easier for these customers.
But at what cost? For now, artificial intelligence isn’t stealing any designer’s job—existing efforts are good at cropping photos and making minor visual modifications, and that’s it. But Adobe’s project is one of the first in a very new field. Expect more in the future.
from Sidebar http://sidebar.io/out?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fastcodesign.com%2F3068884%2Fadobe-is-building-an-ai-to-automate-web-design-should-you-worry
Priest Willis interviews me about freeCodeCamp and the future of education (40 minute listen)
Thought of the day:
“Everyone should have access to education. Primary education, secondary, university, and for that matter, post-graduate work. Those things are extraordinarily expensive today, but that’s an artifact of the infrastructure. We assume we need big buildings and fancy classrooms and things like that. I don’t think those are necessary. It’s fine to have those for some folks. But education should be universally accessible.” — Sergey Brin
In my last article “How to get a head start on design system”, I talked about how to start building a simple style guide when you lack resources. Today I’ll share more knowledge about the process of building a design system for complex products (such as SaaS web applications). And I’ll share some helpful resources in the end as well.
Why did we start
Back in early 2014, when I just joined Bypass, because our products were very complicated, there were tons of inconsistency across the board. There were different buttons, different inputs, different layouts of the same element, and different interactions for the same flows. We wasted a lot of time debating design details, just because there were no solid rules for our product. These inconsistencies also brought bad experience to our users: they caused confusion and made it harder to understand and learn the system.
On the development side, because of the variety in code library, it was hard to find the “correct code”. Sometimes developers just wrote new codes instead of reusing the old ones, which led to even more inconsistency. It was a vicious circle, and with our team growing over time, communication and product delivery got harder.
Problems we had
1.50 shades of grey: Since our products were very complex, it was always hard to keep consistency. There were many UI inconsistencies across the system, including different colors, fonts, font sizes, etc.
2.Lack of rules: When our designers were building a new feature, it was easy for us to get bogged down with the details. Even simple questions like “Which component should I use?” and “Should I guide users to a new page, or use a pop-up dialog instead?” became very time-consuming to decide on.
3. Poor quality of delivery: Because of the lack of design rules, it was very hard for different teams to communicate with each other. I used to put lots of “red lines” with detailed descriptions on my design, to provide as many details as possible to the developers. But it was not an efficient way to hand off, and sometimes developers did not follow all the details I put on my design.
Imagine that your team launched a new project and people were celebrating, but you noticed a bunch of design bugs. You must be as happy as everyone else was, no?
The happy you
4.Inconsistent code library: Because there was no rule, developers sometimes just grabbed what they found in the code base and implemented it in new projects. Some other times, they came up with completely new components with a different style, and this further complicated the code library.
5. User confusion: Our users needed a logic path to study the product and build a mental model about it. However, the inconsistencies we had made them confused and frustrated when they could not get their expected feedback.
How to build a design system
1.Start with the style guide
A style guide is the infrastructure of the design system, to know more details about it, you can refer to my previous article “How to get a head start on design system.”
*Optional: build a live library
Lightning design system
If you have a front-end buddy or you can code yourself, a live library can make everyone’s life easier. It’s an efficient tool for front-end developers to keep consistency, avoid mistakes and speed up the development process. Lightning design system and Angular material are good examples for live library
Find your front-end buddy who cares about design details. Then talk about the components in style guides with him/her, and find the best way to build them. Listen to your buddy, because sometimes your front-end buddy will have amazing ideas that you have never thought about. Then document the codes for each component, and make sure that developers can easily understand and reuse them.
Finding the developer who cares about CSS #uxreactions via @uxreactions
2.From style guide to design system
iOS design guidelines
During the process of building the style guide, you also gain more knowledge about the product. After the style guide is done, you can move on to include guidelines, principles, rules, and of course.
You can document very detailed rules. For example, you can have a section on “How to delete an object”, and the intro would be “Edit object, trigger edit panel, delete object, pops up confirmation dialog, confirm to delete the object, back to index with “Object deleted.” toast.”
You can also add “don’t” and “do” examples for each design pattern. It will help people get clear idea about how to reuse these components. And you can also describe in which situation, with what conditions, designers should use which design pattern.
Benefits of having a design system
Efficient tool for product people
Design system is a recipe that helps designers to run the “kitchen” smoothly. Buy using the same recipe, designers can keep offering quality “dishes” to customers. Designers can find what ingredients they have in the library, as well as when and where to use them. And it’s also a very good hand-off tool that can keep everyone on the same page.
Efficient tool for developers
A live library that has all global components can speed up the development process. It can allow developers to copy and paste codes, and help them to work easily, quickly and reduce bugs. Each developer can also contribute to the library to make it become an “evolving system”.
Smooth hand-off tool
As the company grows, cooperation and hand-off work become harder and harder. With the design system, hand-off becomes easily and smoothly. There are three groups of people who can take advantage of it.
For QA people, they know what to test, and whether the delivery matches with design rules. For designers, there’s no more debating about global interactions. Also, designers can work on other designers’ design file without any confusion. For developers, they can understand design files clearly, and build them out in a proper way.
Quality delivery, consistent UI & expectation
Thanks to the consistent components and design rules, we get high quality outcomes across the board. For our users, it’s easier for them to learn and operate. Now they can study the system pretty easily and get their expected feedback every time.
Once design system is implemented
Bringing a great design system to live is like this:
Redesigning a legacy application #uxreactions via @uxreactions
and everyone in your company is like this
Style guides resources & tools
The following is a list of resources I use to build our design system, and tools that very helpful for beginners.
Thanks for @Ignacio Giri’s comments on my last article about style guide tools. Consider about different usages, I will include some powerful CMS tools as well. If you have any config & front-end knowledge, these tools can help you and your team build live library pretty easily.
Github is a developer friendly tool to manage live style guides. Here’s a very helpful article talk about how to manage style guides with Github: Managing style guides at Shyp
Statamic is a powerful tool that could be used by both designers and developers. Once you install and study the proper way to use it, you can build a live library quickly. It is also powerful for you and your team to do version control.
If you are a designer who know how to work with HTML, JavaScript, CSS and any static content, Cloudcannon is the tool that can help you do things right. It’s kind of similar with the way you customize your personal website in Squarespace. And it’s powerful for agency designers who are in charge of tons of display websites at the same time.
Craft is a Sketch plugin that can help designers cooperate via a cloud design library. Designers can cooperate to build style guides and components symbol library with it.
It is the famous design guidelines that publicized by Google. It Includes introduction, style, motion, layout, components, patterns, growth &communications, usability and resources. It’s very helpful if you want to build your product in Google material style, or your team is using any material design frameworks.
Lighting design system is build for Salesforce SaaS product. It includes guidelines, components, design tokens, icons, and related resources. Designers can put component classes name on design deliveries, then developers can build the correct components easily.
For example, if a designer says : “I want to apply a light shadow to this card.” Then the card shadow spec in sketch is like 0px 2px 2px 0px rgba(0,0,0,.16). And they can provide the class name as $elevation-shadow-2on design mockups, it can help developers to build the exact card that designers want.
If you like my articles, you are more welcome to give me a ❤️ :)
from uxdesign.cc – User Experience Design – Medium https://uxdesign.cc/designing-design-system-for-complex-products-5ff2d3051fa1?source=rss—-138adf9c44c—4
Anticipatory Design: How to Create Magical User Experiences
by Miklos Philips
This morning the song “This Magic Moment” by The Drifters popped into my head for no apparent reason.
Those restless neural networks in our brains do funny things. They make seemingly unrelated, unconnected thoughts and concepts connect.
Slapping my forehead I said to myself: “But, of course…”
Recently I’ve been thinking about those magic moments in UX that happen when we’re interacting with our digital devices or services. We encounter perfect moments, when everything falls into place, in exactly the right way, at exactly the right time, as if it’s magic. It could be at your bank, in your car, a vending machine, or on your phone.
I believe the era of anticipatory design is here, or least within our reach.
Our limited GUIs are changing as a result of evolving technologies and input methods. It is an organic, natural evolution — we already take talking to our devices for granted!
For example, while driving we might say: “Dial Anna.” We ask Siri to start a timer or about movies playing nearby. And we ask Alexa to play music or order our coffee. Nonetheless, the metaphors and graphical elements established more than four decades ago haven’t changed that much.
The Past
Consider that Xerox PARC’s original GUI is 44 years old yet our user interfaces still look remarkably like it.
The Xerox Star workstation introduced the first commercial Graphical User Interface (GUI) operating system in 1973
Today, we’re still looking at two-dimensional screens and mostly use keyboards and mice for input; devices designed for interaction methods that were optimized for computers, not humans.
The machines we interact with — laptops, desktops, tablets, mobiles, vending machines, etc. — are still designed and built with mental models and technologies that are legacy systems from the past.
It’s as if we’re using interaction models from the Flintstones’ era in a Jetsons’ world; they still rely on a lot of interaction from users (input) to move to the next step and display useful information (output).
What is anticipatory design?
The application of anticipatory design is more important than ever if digital businesses are to simplify and facilitate the course of our digital lives.
In light of this, what is anticipatory design?
It’s output, without much need for input.
A world where our computing machines are designed for interaction methods optimized for humans, not computers. A digital world where we move from user intent that’s deterministic to probabilistic.
Huge’s Aaron Shapiro defines anticipatory design as a method of simplifying processes by responding to needs one step ahead of the user’s decisions, i.e. responding to user needs they haven’t expressed yet.
Anticipatory design in its finest form goes way beyond personalization.
For example, Netflix showing you movies to watch based on your taste preferences and history is personalization. With anticipatory design, the interface actually changes in the moment as you’re interacting with an app.
An example of personalization-not anticipatory design.
Anticipatory design would mean — in the case of online shopping for example — that the system would know and personalize an experience to the degree that it would feel like a magic hand guiding your experience. It would actually change the UI on the fly, eliminate any extraneous information, and only present the most relevant options in a timely, simple, and efficient manner.
This is not too difficult to accomplish today.
Let’s say someone is shopping for a very expensive guitar on guitarcenter.com. At checkout the site would automagically present “Ship to store for pick-up” as a default choice because it knows by observing the past behavior of other users, buying expensive guitars, that they would prefer to pick it up at the nearest brick-and-mortar store.
For another example, let’s pretend you’re shopping for a shirt on Amazon.
Amazon already personalizes a whole host of things for you and ought to know your size and color preferences since you have purchased shirts on the site before.
When going to the product detail page, it could pre-select your size, and show you navy, white and checkered shirts first, de-emphasize pink and yellow ones, and not force you to select your size every single time.
Why?
Anticipatory design’s promise is the elimination of friction and an increase in efficiency that would greatly improve user experiences, and in turn impact the bottom line. People return to products and services that deliver what they want when they want it.
Our daily interactions with digital systems have reached an unprecedented scale. Yet many of these interactions are stifled with friction and subsequent feelings of frustration.
There is a real need for customization and personalization on a grander scale that would delight users, and simplify their lives.
Take self-serve transportation ticketing machines, where commuters can refill commuter cards.
They’re still designed to be dumb — driven by user input in which everyone is taken through the same frustrating plethora of options.
One could easily imagine a much improved, more personalized system, where refill history could be stored on your card.
Instead of countless requests for input: select this option first, then select this other option, and so on, the entire interaction could start with you inserting the card you always refill and the system would immediately display, “Hello, would you like to refill this card with $20, using your Mastercard?”
The next step would be to pay and go.
It would cut down the time needed to refill cards by at least 75 percent, increase efficiency, move people along faster, and subsequently make them more satisfied.
This is already possible, yet I don’t know of a single ticketing machine that does this.
A “dumb” user interface that requires a lot of input vs. one that’s “anticipatory”?
Interfaces of the future
When AI becomes more pervasive, a higher degree of personalization will enable a higher level of anticipatory design.
Based on all kinds of user authorized behavioral tracking — purchase histories, preferences, etc., the system would recognize you, and with a high degree of certainty predict what your next choice might be.
The lack of anticipatory design is surprising given that technologies exist today that would make doing so not that challenging.
Some companies are already practicing early forms of anticipatory design. Two examples are Google Now and Uber.
Google Now
The Google Now app is one of the more ambitious evolutions of Google’s search software. The idea is simple — predict what you’ll want or need to know before you know you need or want it, and serve it up in an easy-to-read card-based format.
Google’s data mining capabilities are second to none. It knows who you are, and it can display cards with personalized, location-aware information, such as calendar events, local weather, news, stock prices, flights, boarding passes, hotel’s, photo spots nearby, and more. It also tells you how long it will take you to get home from work, based on current traffic conditions.
If Google doesn’t think you need something at the moment, it won’t be displayed. It’s the embodiment of anticipatory design.
Uber
In the Uber app, when you take a trip somewhere it will provide a return button on a subsequent launch of the app because there is a 90 percent chance you would want to return to your original destination. No need to specify pickup and drop-off locations. Brilliant.
The Uber app gives users a quick shortcut to “Return” when it’s launched shortly after completing a trip
The times they are a-changin’
Things are evolving to natural interaction methods.
In a not too distant future, our input will be more effortless.
We’ll have augmented and virtual reality with interaction methods, such as voice, gesture tracking, eye tracking, and speech. Google is already working on it. It’s called Project Soli.
Virtual Tool Gestures. Project Soli
Anticipatory design methods, assisted by AI and machine learning, will deliver experiences on an entirely better level.
How do we bring anticipatory design into play?
There is no magic wand, uttering “abracadabra,” so how do we design for those magic moments now? What are the steps we can take today to deliver those magic moments, using anticipatory design?
Sophisticated, personalized algorithms at work on Metromile create a sense of being anticipatory and incredibly useful to customers (prevent parking tickets)
Until we have incredibly sophisticated predictive algorithms, fully developed AI, and machine learning, businesses can mine existing data for personalization opportunities thereby reducing potential pain points and barriers.
They can also fully engage the user-centered design process, employ deep research, extensive user-testing, and use tools, like an open-source software library, for machine intelligence, such as Tensorflow.
Deep research will tell us a lot — contextual observation perhaps or ethnographic studies — where we could observe what users are inclined to do from moment-to-moment in their flow. We could map these user journeys step-by-step, and design the interaction accordingly.
The ideal outcome of applying such data mining and personalization, coupled with user-centered design methods, would create fluid and seamless anticipatory experiences that would please customers and generate loyalty by having things appear as if by magic.
It would advance the state of the art of user experience and create a win-win situation for both businesses and users, offering deeper customer satisfaction that positively impacts the bottom-line.
from Sidebar http://sidebar.io/out?url=https%3A%2F%2Fuxplanet.org%2Fanticipatory-design-how-to-create-magical-user-experiences-c6107530384c%23.dzjiayonu
Change is the only thing that stays the same. In the world of user experience design, this is especially true. How can we, as practitioners, keep growing our perspectives as existing platforms continue to evolve and entirely new platforms arrive?
What follows is a meditation on this question, specifically around the new platforms of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR)—and some ideas on how to keep your eyes on the rapidly moving target of anticipating the needs of our audiences amidst massive shifts in human-computer interactions.
How many people live in your whole town? County? State? There are 8.4 million people in New York City, for some perspective.
Whether we care, the success of Pokémon Go is a statement about how humans are interacting with machines. Not in the future, but right now.
Many people still struggle with the distinction between the new platforms, so let’s define them:
VR transports audiences to another world. It immerses them in an artificial environment generated only by technology
AR overlays digital content on top of the real world
MR seamlessly combines virtual and real-world objects
Here’s a quick sample:
OculusRift? VR.
Have a display in your car that projects onto the windshield? AR.
HoloLens? MR.
What does this mean for UX design?
Usability led us to user experience, which now leads us onward to experience design.
Having paid attention over the past 20 years or so, here’s my take:
The first 10 years → 1997-2007 → Usability design
In the beginning, usability design was all about reducing friction between the user and technology. Designing anything during this time meant the user was an afterthought.
Until the thing was in the wild, only then would someone (like me) say, “Oh, it’s not at all friendly to use. What can we do to improve that?” As long as the product met the basic business requirements, it was fine.
The past 10 years → 2007 – 2017 → UX design
On June 29, 2007, iPhones changed the rules. A single, agnostic piece of technology with more focus on the user than before. This has become the norm. Designing devices for users now comes first. Everything else comes second.
The experience of using a product or a service has become the new normal. Products have to be usable and engaging—and they have to inspire a sense of delight.
The next 10 years → 2017 – 2027 → Experience design
The best is yet to come. While most companies are still working hard to get user experience right, it won’t be enough in the years to come.
Emerging platforms like VR, AR, and wearables aren’t used in the traditional sense anymore. For example:
Nest’s self-learning thermostat saves you energy without you having to do a thing
Siri can send that text for you while you’re driving
Fitbit’s SmartTrack recognizes and records your exercises for you. You can keep track of your workouts without ever pushing a button
Alexa notifies us that it’s time to hop in the car if we’re going to make it to that appointment on time
The balance is tipping over to the experience side of user experience. VR, AR, and MR are raising expectations to a whole new level. In a year, things will have changed even more.
The future of UX design
The trend is less user and more experience. Designers are already shifting focus in this way.
So as a UX designer, how do you prepare for what’s coming? How do you stay relevant?
Get competent in the world of analytics. The tools are improving and they’re friendlier than ever to use.
Follow leaders like Magic Leap—they’re expected to reveal “Cinematic Reality” technology this year. Good things ahead. It makes for interesting reading, even if you’re not a science fiction fan. This science fiction is real.
Human-computer interaction used to be of great interest to me.
I hardly care anymore.
This field is changing faster than it can be studied. Look around you. Watch how others use technology. Pay attention to how you use it. Observations and conversations are more valuable than academic study. Remember, studies that are 6 months old are already at their half-life.
Follow the work of people like Donald Norman, Susan Weinschenk, and Jakob Nielsen.
Follow Mike Enger at Google VR. Keep an eye on what Leap Motion does—they’re leaders in hand tracking (a key component to get to natural interactions).
Last, but not least, visit The UX of VR for a fine-tuned list of other resources.
These people inspire me to do my best work. They’ll inspire you, too, into a future that’s exciting and very real, whether virtual, augmented, or mixed.
Chad Calease Dad, ludic, tinkerer, maker and make-believer, grateful for many gifts. Mom said there’s always one weirdo on the bus. But I can never find him.
