All things being equal, contextual inquiry is superior to user interviews. Sometimes drastically so.

So, what is contextual inquiry? Think of it as a combination of light ethnographic work and user interviewing.

Contextual inquiry involves observing people in their natural context and asking them questions to fill in the gaps of your observation. If I’m looking to create a more efficient point of sale system for grocery stores, I would observe someone using an existing point of sale system, taking notes on what works and what doesn’t work. Simply interviewing them without watching them use the system would yield much worse results.

Contextual inquiry would be an excellent way for us to discover ways to improve the checkout process at a grocery store from both the cashier’s perspective and the people buying goods. A user interview where you just ask people pain points is not going to be specific enough or in context enough to yield enough actionable data about that specific system or store.

On the other hand, if I am looking to build an application to help new parents track when their babies last went to the bathroom and wanted to make sure it was easy to use in real-world settings, I would observe new parents in their homes and wherever else they may take their babies.

This is a key point of contextual inquiry: The context of your inquiry depends on what and who you are trying to study. While you can conduct a user interview over the phone, you cannot do contextual inquiry unless you are actually in the real context of what you are trying to learn about.

You can also conduct contextual inquiry remotely.

This may be a somewhat controversial statement, but with people with white collar jobs where they mostly work at a computer (home, office, on the road, whatever), you can get a good contextual inquiry experience by having them share their screens on Zoom, Teams, or whatever and observing what they are doing. Ask them to go about their normal workflow and approach this the same as you would with in-person contextual inquiry.

The core of contextual inquiry is

• Observing

• Inquiring

• Documenting

We observe people doing different activities. Why not just ask them after the fact? People don’t remember every detail of what they do, and they will usually give you the high-level beats when you interview them.

By observing people, you’ll notice every little workaround they do to get an activity or task done. You’ll observe things about a person that they themselves might not even know.

Contextual inquiry tips and checklist

Record if possible

Always ask permission to see if you can record your contextual inquiry sessions. Video is preferable, as you can later review actions, but audio will also help, particularly during portions where you are asking questions. Recording can be immensely helpful for you when you want to review everything, but it can also help those who weren’t there for the session better understand what is happening. Remember to ask permission upfront and go over ground rules. Are there things you can record but others you can’t? Establish this first.

Below is a video of someone conducting a contextual inquiry. This observation in context will yield better data than a user interview out of context would. Notice, however, that contextual inquiry also involves asking questions.

Take detailed notes

Recording or not, take detailed notes. This is a combination of step-by-step notes about what a person is doing, direct quotes that are interesting, and observations about what is and isn’t working.

I always carry around a little Field Notes notebook in my back pocket along with one of my favorite pens. This allows me to jump into observations at any time, even if I wasn’t intending to do observations. I also use these little notebooks to help me sketch up different thoughts and ideas during contextual inquiry.

Take photos

Taking notes is helpful. Recording any direct observation or interview responses is also very helpful, but grabbing photos and creating sketches can help give you a sense of key issues and can help give you a better sense of place. Take photos of everything you can and make sure to label them when you are done so that you understand what you are looking at.

In addition, you can combine your photos with some of your observations and quotes to give you a better sense of what you have observed and learned. This will also be very helpful when you are sharing your user research with others. Even a simple Google Doc file that combines different artifacts from contextual inquiry can help put all of your data together.

In the grocery store point of sale system example above, having photos of what the system looks like, along with different screens and buttons, will help everyone better understand the problem. If your research uncovers a major usability issue with part of the point of sale system, having photos of the issue and of a real person working with that system will help you during the next phases of your work.

Below is a photo of a modern touchscreen point of sale system using an iPad. In this example, you are going to want to do a combo of activities with a situation like this. Take photos of key interactions during your contextual inquiry, observe what is happening, and take notes, ask clarifying and expansive questions, and record video if you can.

Photos of the point of sale system in action can help give your research a sense of place and will be very powerful when combined with observations and quotes.

Create sketches

What’s the difference between taking photos and creating sketches for contextual inquiry purposes? Photos are of things that exist today. Sketches can be of the way things should work.

Sketches can also be a way to annotate what is or isn’t working. Sketches can also be a way to create a conceptual model of what you are observing. Having a good conceptual model of how a current system works will help you create better recommendations and solutions later on.

I also often find that contextual inquiry and user interviewing jog my creativity. I begin to see the world more clearly, and I do some of my most creative work when exposed to these kinds of user research. I often start sketching up ideas while I am conducting the user research.

Your sketches should remain high-level, however, as you don’t want to collapse upon solutions too soon, but sometimes my best ideas come when I am witnessing a person use a product or system. If you wait weeks or months to start doing any sketching, some of what you learn may get lost in translation.

Prepare questions ahead of time

Just like with good user interviewing, you should put a lot of thought and care into any questions you might ask. And just like with good user interviewing, you should ask the same questions of everyone you are working with. If you don’t prepare questions ahead of time, the questions you ask will be ad hoc, and you won’t ask everyone the same questions.

It’s important when gathering good quantitative data that you are controlling for variables. One variable is that you ask everyone the same set of rigorous and thoughtful questions.

This doesn’t mean you won’t ask additional questions. This means that you will ask the same core questions.

In any user interview or contextual inquiry session, questions will come up that you’ll want to ask. Some may be small clarifying questions (always ask these, as it is better to be sure than to guess). A round of contextual inquiry will involve observing several different people, even if they are doing the same thing. Your follow-up questions may differ by person, because you may be seeking to understand something that is slightly different about this session than a previous one, or a person might be doing different things.

Just remember to work on your core set of questions ahead of time. Run them past other people to make sure they make sense. It’s even good to pilot test them on one or two users to make sure your questions work well and are helping you find out the information you need.

Test the tests.

It’s usually better to ask for forgiveness

Usually being the operative word here.

This advice does not apply to certain areas where asking for permission first is a must. Do not do any contextual inquiry in a hospital, for instance, without getting express permission and having a chaperone the entire time. But a lot of contextual inquiry is on much less privacy-focused areas or on more seemingly mundane topics.

I had one team last year work on trying to make improvements to a large dining hall at the University of Maryland. First, they just needed to observe how people used the dining hall, how everything was laid out, and just get a general sense of how everything worked. They took notes and photos.

This initial observational work helped inform the questions they were going to ask of people eating at the dining hall and of various stakeholders.

The university, for whatever reason, is skittish about people taking photos in the dining hall. I don’t know why, and I don’t care. But they kicked the team out.

Had they decided to ask for permission ahead of time, they probably would have been immediately shut down. Instead, they got the observation work they needed done, and then had to ask for forgiveness when they were kicked out. Forgiveness was granted.

This observational info was key, however, because they needed to understand the lay of the land for dining halls and nutrition at the University of Maryland. Without this observational work, it is doubtful they would have been able to provide a meaningful solution to some of the problems that their interviewing uncovered.

This team then identified students to interview who ate at the dining hall. They also interviewed people working at the dining hall. They were able to get all of the information they needed, but it required a dose of forgiveness to get it done.

For certain areas, such as anything healthcare-related, always ask for permission first. Asking for forgiveness is only for areas where there isn’t a rational reason for someone telling you no, but you might suspect they will tell you no anyway.

Doing this in stages may work best

Contextual inquiry doesn’t all have to be done at once. Sometimes it is best to split up the work into multiple stages.

Often observing first without doing any inquiry and interviewing helps set up the rest of the work better. Your initial observations will help you understand the problem space and will help you formulate what questions you might want to ask.

In the grocery store point of sale system example, you probably want to just observe people checking out at a grocery store and what sales clerks have to do for each order. You will also want to observe as much as possible in the store. You don’t want your user research to be too narrow early on, and observing people doing different activities around a grocery store helps you understand the entire system better.

Once you have done your initial observations, it is time to write questions and figure out what you need to take a deep dive into. You may realize that you need to do separate contextual inquiry on point of sales systems used by cashiers in standard lines, by the people who work in customer service, and on the automated, self-checkout systems. You may also realize that you need to better understand how items and prices are put into the point of sale system.

By first observing before jumping into the rest of this, you can make sure that you cover everything that needs to be researched.

Below is a student performing contextual inquiry on someone's grocery shopping. Notice how this goes from before the shopping trip, to observing during the trip, to a post-trip interview. It’s a good, quick demonstration of contextual inquiry. The only thing I don’t recommend is the parts where the video is sped up, as it’s good to watch some of that data at real-time speeds.

Meta’s new Ray-Ban smart glasses/AR glasses are impressive. I’ve got some early thoughts.

Meta is calling them Display AI glasses, but I’ve also seen them call them Camera Glasses (a terrible category name). I’ll refer to smart glasses, because it’s language that most people understand.

You are not going to be able to buy a computing device without some level of AI features built in, and these smart glasses require your phone anyway to work.

The difference between the different kinds of smart and AR glasses is very blurred (and everything has “AI” so that’s not its own category. They are all generally converging in the same direction.

1. Building in transition lenses was a very smart, practical design touch. People who wear glasses also need sun glasses. This is a no brainer to anyone who uses glasses. The lenses in these smart glasses transition from regular glasses to sun glasses if you go outside in bright light. This not only means they can function in both indoor and outdoor settings, but it also makes it much easier to see the screen in bright light situatoins. The ability to see clearly outside has been an issue for smart glasses. Also, people who wear prescription glasses can wear these werever they go.

2. People can’t tell if the display is on. This makes it very discreet and doesn’t make you look dorky. However, people won’t be able to tell if you are looking at something instead of them. This is probably the future, but are people going to get even worse at eye contact and paying attention? Will managers want their employees wearing these in meetings?

3. The neural wristband for hand control is clever and needed. This is similar to how you can control the Apple Vision Pro with hand gestures. The Meta smart glasses lack the sensor to do this alone, but the wristband gives that power. This allows users to navigate the interface without relying on voice and gives users more fine-grained control. It’s also a privacy win because you don’t need to invoke the smart glasses with “hey meta.” The days of invoking voice AIs with a verbal command are over. It’s a privacy and security nightmare. All voice AI should be actuated with a gesture or button press.

4. Captioning could be an accessibility game-changer. The smart glasses can provide captioning that you can read on the screen as people talk to you. About half of Americans watch TV with captions on. Clearly there is a need. Not to mention how useful this could be for translations when traveling.

5. Cooking directions and recipes might be the must-have feature today. Sure smart glasses work pretty well as a camera for documenting stuff, but phones have superior cameras, recording, and battery life. Here is a usecase that phones cannot match. You can get step-by-step cooking directions without having to touch a screen to progress (with potentially dirty hands) and without having to move your eyes away from what you are prepping and cooking. You’ll be able to see demonstrations of what to do while you are preparing the food in front of you. This kind of augmented intelligence and coaching is one of the things that smart glasses can do better than existing computing devices.

6. The glasses are still tethered. They require a phone to work. They rely on Bluetooth. This limits their use cases and potential. It also means they are a device in addition to your phone. So you have to ask yourself, what is this going to do better than the other computing device I already have with me? Smart glasses will enter their prime when they can replace smart phones.

7. There is no ruggedized version. Some of the biggest uses for smart glasses like this would be with home improvement, construction, hiking, working out, skiing, sports, etc. These glasses are not built for any of that.

8. They look pretty good, albeit chunky. Obviously, with today’s tech, they will need to be chunky to fit in the components and batteries. Meta and Ray-Ban have leaned into the current trend of chunky hip plastic glasses. For some people, these will look good. For others, they will look ridiculous and over the top. For smart glasses to take off, they will need to figure out how to deliver more styles to appeal to more people and face types. This chunky, rectangular style suits certain face types better than others. Many benefit from a more rounded lens.

9. These are probably the first smart glasses worth buying. Even if you are just going to buy them to see what the fuss is about and only use them occasionally, these are the first ones that are probably worth buying. Everything before now has been largely a tech demo. In hindsight, it is shocking that Google released the janky Google Glass 12 years ago. They were legitimately more than a decade off in terms of usability and utility. I tried them once and was shocked at how bad and useless they were. It was clearly just a prototype that needed a lot more iteration.

10. I’m not sure if smart glasses are socially acceptable yet. These are the best looking ones yet, but they clearly have cameras on it (will these be banned in gyms or other places?). Do people want to talk to people who have cameras on their faces? Would workplaces allow these to be worn?

And here are my favorite demo videos of the smart glasses so far:

Mark Zuckerberg introducing the Meta Ray-Ban Display

The Verge’s early thoughts

The iPhone Air is a show-stopper. It’s thin. It’s beautiful. But it’s still very much an iPhone.

The iPhone Air achieves its thinness by placing everything in the camera module on the back that Apple is calling the plateau. This is where the innovation is. The rest of the iPhone Air is a neat parlor trick, but keep your eye on what this can enable moving forward.

For a slab phone, this means you can make the rest of the phone very thin. It makes a nice conversation piece. It fits in pockets better.

It’s not a revolutionary device. But revolutions often start with little things that people don’t notice, because at its heart, revolutionary product design is about stacking iterations and insights on top of one another, setting the stage for delivering experiences that truly push things forward.

Take a look at this small camera module bump. It packs an entire smartphone’s worth of power and connectivity in a very tiny space that looks like it just houses a camera and a flash. Don’t forget that the A19 Pro in the iPhone Air is a very powerful chip that packs more power than many people have in their laptops.

There are at least two broad categories of devices that would benefit greatly from this ability to put all of the guts of a cell phone in a small place:

1. A foldable phone/tablet

2. AR glasses that don’t require a phone

Apple is clearly stalking the foldable phone/tablet market. They’ll release one when the tech is right and the screens aren’t janky. The iPhone Air shows us that we are almost there.

Apple’s foldable will have a small camera bump with all of its guts and then two thin slabs that are just filled with battery. It’ll be the thinnest, lightest foldable on the market. In terms of thickness, it’ll probably be somewhere around the thickness of a regular iPhone.

Apple also harped on all the new ceramic shield technology they packed into the new iPhones to make them harder to break and scratch. Both of which will be critical for a successful foldable, and a major weakness of current foldables.

On the AR glasses front, look at how close Apple is to being able to stick this module on the side of a pair of glasses. Remove the camera lens and sensor, and this plateau could be even smaller today. With a die shrink and another generation or two, Apple will be there. They can balance the weight of the module and the visuals by sticking the battery on the other side of the glasses.

Meta just announced some pretty interesting AR glasses. But they require a phone, and they will be limited to the kinds of data and interactions you can get over Bluetooth.

They are closer to a fancy Apple Watch (can show you notifications, directions, change music, send text messages, etc.) than anything really revolutionary (and they lack all the fitness and health benefits of an Apple Watch). The only way AR glasses become revolutionary is to be able to function complexly on their own without a phone and without worrying about the limitations of a Bluetooth connection.

AR glasses have to become their own computers. This is how all computing devices take a leap forward. AR glasses are not powerful today, but so were personal computers and smartphones when they first launched. As they became more powerful and didn’t need to rely on bigger legacy computing devices, they really took off.

Smartwatches function on their own, and they’ve become very useful and powerful because of it. Smartphones are powerful enough to be the main computer for many people.

AR glasses need to cross that Rubicon where they exist on their own and aren’t tethered to the limitations of tethering. When they become something closer to the power of Apple Vision Pro, but in smart glasses form, imagine the possibilities. The iPhone Air plateau is getting us close.

Apple and other manufacturers will also need to combine these advances with advances in battery tech to get there. Meta’s Ray-Ban Display is a very cool demo. Some people might really take to them. But when you get right down to it, they aren’t capable of being that useful because they require your phone to tether, and your phone has way more capabilities today (not to mention it is one more thing to charge and carry).

I know many people are being blown away by using the Meta glasses for the first time, but I strongly caution using a new device like this for a week or even a month. Many people are blown away by using VR for the first time.

And VR does have some great uses, but the initial experience using VR is often your most transcendent, and after that, reality sets in. VR has a lot of limitations and things it doesn’t do that well. The things it does well — certain game and fitness experiences, as well as immersive video — are impressive, but they are limited. There are only so many video games that are better in VR, and the amount of immersive video is really small. You’ll soon find yourself pulling out your VR headset a few times a month.

The real innovation, new use cases, and software only hit when a computing device can stand on its own. We are just a few years away from AR glasses being able to stand on their own.

So, when you hear people saying, “Who asked for this?” in regards to the iPhone Air, tell them it’s all part of the process. Product development and even revolutionary change are iterative at their heart. Apple’s ability to pack a CPU, GPU, 12 GB of RAM, cellular chips, a camera, and more into that tiny little camera hump is a huge deal.

Enjoy the iPhone Air today if you want a thin, pocketable phone, but get ready for the future. It’ll be here soon enough.

If you can understand and keep these five areas in mind when you are designing and developing products, you will deliver good products. Some products are really strong in one area but weak in others. Some products are strong in four of the five areas, and that may or may not be enough.

By looking at UX through these areas, you can see how products can seem designed well and poorly simultaneously.

I first encountered the five areas of UX in The UX Book by Rex Hartson and Pardha Pyla. The UX Book is basically a manual for how to do UX, and it’s the book that we use in user-centered design classes at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Even if you are a mid-career professional, having a copy of the UX Book around for reference is a good idea. I’ve taken some of the concepts that Hartson and Lyla introduced and expanded upon them. These are the five areas of UX and how we talk about and use them at work and in the classroom.

The five areas of UX are a core component of my design critique rubric. Having agreed-upon rubrics makes design teams a lot more functional, efficient, and consistent.

Usability

How usable is this product? Discoverability and understanding are two key areas of usability. Can a user easily discover key features? Once a user discovers key features, can they understand how and why to use them?

Good products have both. If a user can’t discover a feature, it doesn’t exist for that user. Users should be able to easily discover features without instructions, and once they do discover a feature, they should be able to quickly understand how it works and why to use it. If a user can’t understand how to use a feature, it also doesn’t exist.

There really is no such thing as human errors — just bad design. If a product requires a lot of training or manuals, it is not usable.

A highly usable product should both be easy to learn to use and memorable so that when the next time a user uses that product, it is already second nature.

The quality and thoughtfulness of the affordances and signifiers are another core part of usability. I explain affordances and signifiers in detail here. It’s critical that you understand these foundational design concepts.

Utility

Does this product or feature help me do something? Utility gets at the value of something. Don’t confuse this with usability. Usability gets at how easy it is to use a feature or product. A product can be really easy to use, while also having little value and utility.

A website with really good information on it has high utility. Wikipedia strives to be a website that focuses, first and foremost, on utility. Because its utility is so good, we can forgive some of the other areas of UX where it is a bit weaker (its usability and visual design should be better).

If you’ve ever purchased a product in a store that you thought demoed well but then quickly stopped using it when you brought it home, you may have used a product with high usability and low utility.

You have most likely used other products that gave you a lot of utility, but the usability could have used a lot of work.

Utility can be user-specific. Some people may find ESPN.com to have really high utility. If a user doesn’t like sports, ESPN’s utility is pretty much zero. Utility must be viewed from the lens of your users and the different buckets in which your users fit.

Functional Integrity

Does this product and its features work as intended? Is this product reliable?

Is this product well made? Is it free of defects and bugs? Does it have a high level of fit and finish?

You can have a product that has high usability and utility and is still a drag to use because it crashes a lot or key features don’t work as intended.

This is an area that a lot of product designers don’t get. They think bugs and defects are the realm of engineers, QA people, and others. That’s not true. Being free of defects and bugs is a core part of making a good user experience.

You can design a great product, but if the engineers, manufactures, or someone else introduce a lot of bugs or defects, a product is not well designed. User experience goes far beyond product design.

This is why design, engineering, and other disciplines need to work closely together. It takes a village to make good products. This is also why you must get buy-in to stamp out bugs and defects because otherwise, your hard work will be overshadowed.

Functional integrity also refers to how consistent a product is. One of my core concepts for good product design is that a product must be both internally consistent (consistent with itself) and externally consistent(consistent with other products from the same company and consistent with well-understood concepts).

Visual Design

Is this product visually appealing? Is it edifying to use?

When given two identical products, people will prefer the product that has a superior visual design. People will pay more money for a product that looks and feels better. People will believe your product is better built if it has a good look and feel.

People will even conflate how good a product looks with how professional it is. The converse of that is that a product with poor visual design can be considered amateurish or even spammy.

You can make a product that nails every other area of UX, but if it looks and feels like a scam or spam product, people will assume it is.

Visual design without usability and utility is not very valuable, however, but don’t let your designs get too myopically functional. Make people happy with your designs. Surprise them.

What I have found is that when you boil a product down to its essence, focus on the function, and really strive to solve problems for users, you will naturally create a good visual and tactile experience. The thoughtfulness of getting a product down to its essence and core will help you focus on the visual design.

Visual design is not about decadence or extraneousness. Extraneous flourishes and features are a hallmark of bad design.

A lot of people think of my team as the team that makes things pretty. But making things look good is only one out of five areas that we do. The core of what we do is make products work well, and our visual design should be an expression of that.

Persuasiveness

There are a few different ways to view persuasiveness. The most basic is the ability to complete conversions. Think of an e-commerce website. A website can be really usable, have high utility, be free of bugs and defects, and be beautiful, and still not be well designed.

How?

If the job of your website is to get people to buy products and people aren’t, you have a persuasiveness issue. An e-commerce website that fails to get people to buy products can’t be considered well-designed.

In reality, if an e-commerce website has issues with persuasiveness, it probably has usability issues too. But the persuasiveness can go far beyond that. How good is the copywriting? Are there product demos? Is the checkout process as frictionless as possible? Does the company offer a great delivery and return process?

When I think of e-commerce experiences, there are a lot of decent ones. There are only a few great ones. The great ones, such as Amazon.com, nail persuasiveness.

Persuasiveness is also the ability to get people to use your product and do key tasks. The reason this is important is that even if people buy your product if they stop using it, they won’t be likely to recommend it to other people.

The other day one of my students was telling the class about a smart water bottle she bought that is designed to get people to drink more water. She found that it hadn’t increased her water intake, and she didn’t even bring it to class that day.

The product did not persuade her to use it. Since she is not regularly using it, she is unlikely to recommend it to people to buy.

Using the five areas to critique product design

We use these five areas combined with our overall rubric to decide if one of our products or someone else’s is well designed. Sometimes it’s a really hard decision, because a product may have usability issues, but offer some really strong utility (smart home technologies fall into this area, where they are hard to setup, but once you get them setup they can add a lot of value to your life).

Other products seem to nail everything, except they are really buggy. The thing is, if a product has enough functionality integrity issues, it cannot be considered well designed and people will not want to use it.

Imagine if your smartphone crashed a few times a day at completely random times. No matter how much you loved how the phone felt and looked and how much the software and connectedness helped you out, you would look to switch to a different smartphone or maybe even consider going back to a simpler phone.

You might be thinking what about information architecture and other core areas of UX? Information architecture is reflected in these five areas. If your website has poor information architecture, it won’t be usable.

The same logic applies to other important UX and design topics.

I hope this hopes you understand how to use and apply the five areas of UX. If you want, mention a product in the comments, and I will walk through how it does in the five areas of UX.

HCI, design, and other similar programs should offer a one-credit course on how to build a portfolio. I'd love to teach it. Why? Because I see so many portfolios that are completely ass-backward.

Don't mistake me. A lot of the work is fantastic!

You should always start with the finished product and then work your way back, not the opposite, which is how most portfolios are. The core problem is that a lot of people aren't comfortable selling themselves. But that's what a portfolio is. It's a marketing and sales job.

As a quick aside: You will become a better designer, product manager, engineering leader, etc., if you spend some time learning sales and marketing. Spend one month trying to do inside sales with no leads on 100% commission.

A good portfolio and case study should follow one of two methods:

1. The inverted pyramid from journalism

2. Product marketing, similar to what Apple does on their website

Both methods focus on the most important information first and then work their way back. The big difference here is that the inverted pyramid approach would be more copy and more about telling a story. The product marketing approach would be more visual and might be broken up into discrete sections.

Regardless, both are the opposite of what I see in most portfolios.

Do you know how many times I have seen a portfolio piece or case study start with a photo of a wall of post-it notes? Did you also know that they also look the same? People are getting bored and leaving.

It's way too much process and not enough results. People who want to work with you want to see results. In the inverted pyramid approach, you will cover the who, the what, and the why.

Who worked on this project (who did you collaborate with)? What was the final result? Why is this a good product or feature? What did you contribute? What was the response from users?

In the product marketing approach, you are going to market this feature or product and your work on it to people. This is why it is great. This is why people love it. And anyone reading this should want to work with me.

Spend some time looking at the best product marketing websites in the world. Notice how Apple first gets you to want to buy the new iPhone and then explains how they built it and all the new tech that went into it?

Once you finish making people froth at the mouth with your work, then you can explain the process. Maybe you started with some How Might We's, then, made your way into affinity diagramming, then started crazy 8s, and then you busted out the voting dots.

Now if you are going to discuss your methods, they should be in service in selling yourself. You use these rigorous methods because they produce better, more consistent results that drive X, Y, and Z outcomes for users and the business.

It's a marketing and sales job and many of the people you are selling to don't even know the ins and outs of what a good process looks like. Focus on what they can understand.

Apple TV+ is by far the highest quality streaming service on TV with several shows you could make an argument are the best show on TV.

There are very few bad Apple TV+ shows. The service also has several original movies that are fantastic. If you just subscribed to Apple TV+, I think you’d be very happy. And it’s one of the cheapest streaming services around! The thing is, almost no one subscribes.

It has become a running joke that Apple has yet another amazing show or movie coming out that no one will see.

This isn’t just hyperbole. Netflix receives more minutes viewed in a day than Apple TV+ gets in a month.

People are blaming marketing, and Apple could probably spend more on marketing their shows and movies, but the bigger problem is that people are confused about how to watch them.

The problem is the naming. Apple has sold the Apple TV streaming box since 2007. It’s one of the oldest and best-known devices for streaming video content and music (and now video games).

A lot of people think you need an Apple TV box to stream Apple TV+, when in fact Apple TV+ works on all kinds of devices and TVs — Roku, PlayStation, Xbox, every major TV platform, etc.

The + in the name implies that this is Apple TV taking to the next level. There are all kinds of services you could imagine doing just that. In reality, there is very little relation between Apple TV and Apple TV+ beyond the fact that they both can (but don’t always) involve video content.

If Apple rebranded Apple TV+ to something like Apple Primetime and did a marketing campaign around it, it would probably quickly get more subscribers, and people would be more likely to see the fantastic content they are producing.

The pitch for Apple Primetime is pretty simple. Incredible content. But not so much that you get overwhelmed and have decision paralysis. Fair price. Watch it anywhere.

You’ve probably heard of Ted Lasso, and it’s a great show, but it’s not even one of their best shows. I would rank Slow Horses and Foundation as the top two shows on TV on any service or channel.

A big part of product development is the go-to-market strategy. Great products and features die all the time because the strategy wasn’t conducive to success. Product naming and positioning are big parts of that.

Both market and user research would have made this confusion evident quickly. You can’t just rely on gut instinct when naming a multi-billion dollar service, particularly when you have other products that could be confused with it.

Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) is one of the most popular tech reviewers in the world, and people have been suggesting he knows so much about products from reviewing them that he should build his own. Well, he just did so.

And it makes no sense.

His big product idea is the Panels wallpaper app for $49.99 a year. There is literally nothing in that sentence that makes a lick of product sense.

There is no market for wallpaper apps. iOS and Android come with several very good options. People can use their own photos as wallpapers and backgrounds (which phones are very good at taking these days). A user can literally download any cool-looking photo they see on the Web and use it as a wallpaper. Hell, you can ask AI to create all kinds of wacky and cool-looking wallpapers.

Beyond the lack of market, the pricing model is ridiculous. The small niche market there may be for wallpaper apps is not going to be one where people pay a lot of money upfront. The two options here are to make the app cheap, so why not a price of something like $1.99 a year ( or a buck a month if you want to be bold)? Go for the mass market and hope that people love the wallpapers you sell.

The other option is to make it free, and every wallpaper costs a set amount. These two pricing models would help a lot. As you can see from them, however, there is not a lot of money in this idea. I suppose you could make it free and ad-supported, but this suggests you believe that users look to change their wallpapers so frequently that they’ll view a bunch of ads. The economics of free, ad-supported require quite a volume of traffic.

The Panels app does let you get wallpapers for free by viewing ads to unlock low-res versions, but that sounds like a preposterous idea. I have to go the app store, download an app, watch an ad, and all I get for my trouble is a pixelated wallpaper?

This app idea seems to lack any sort of user, market, or product research to back it up. Understanding demand signals and how to find them are a crucial part of creating new products. Reviewing products won’t teach you any of these lessons.

In fact, reviewing products on YouTube and using social media to generate traffic can teach you a lot of bad lessons in how to build actual products. YouTube and social media encourage and reward controversy. They encourage clickbait headlines and images. None of these things will help you sell a product (but they may help you generate a lot of ad revenue).

Tech Journalists and reviewers have a lot of opinions. They often feel they get what makes a good product. But one of the things I have seen over the years is that they are often just wrong.

Brownlee’s response doesn’t offer a lot of hope for learning. Building in public doesn’t work if you don’t do the rigorous work to build something that people want. Building in public can be a good way to get additional feedback cycles and ignite a fire under the product development team to move quickly to fix issues, but building in public is a very poor way to find out what to build in the first place and how to position it in the market.

Because reviewers have never built a product and never done the research, prototyping, and testing, they have no idea what users actually want. A reviewer is a user of one. Even if you like or hate something, that doesn’t mean the market agrees with you at all.

I firmly believe that tech and product reviewing would be better if more of it were performed by people who have built and sold products and not by reviewers and journalists without experience. When I review products, I use a rubric to help guide me (a rubric based on my experience building products and in teaching human-computer interaction).

Here is what I would have done differently:

1. Market research to understand the market size and dynamics

2. User research to understand how users would want to interact with this product and what payment models worked for them

3. Prototyping and testing of several different options to get feedback on

If you don’t have the skills to do this, you can hire consultants to help you out.

A lot of people skip research, validation of market, prototyping, and testing because they cost money. But, guess what, building products is expensive. The research part of it saves you money in the long run. It also saves you from embarassing yourself.

Reviewing products teaches you how to be a critic. There is a market for all kinds of critics. People are willing to pay for critics or consume ads to pay for critics.

Being a critic doesn’t teach you how to build products. You can learn, but you won’t learn from reviewing products.

The Homer Simpson car is what happens when you let a layman build a product without any rigor.

The big HomePod is back, but does it solve the issues that I raised when Apple killed it in 2021?

It does not.

The new HomePod is cheaper by $50, and competitors like Sonos have raised all their prices since 2021. The HomePod is competitive in price as a standalone speaker or as a stereo speaker.

If all you care about is listening to music and you are deep into the Apple ecosystem, I’d recommend both the HomePod and HomePod Mini. They sound very good for the price, and they look great.

If you care about more than just music, Apple is still not providing an ecosystem that is competitive for the full range of audio needs that users have.

I own and recommend a lot of Apple products. There is almost no one in my life that I would recommend HomePods to.

One product, even if it’s new and improved, does not make a product ecosystem.

Apple doesn’t provide a home theater option

Where is the HomePod soundbar?

People are getting bigger TVs and watching more high-quality content at home. The need for surround sound that is easy to use is big.

Soundbars are everywhere, but many of them are terrible, ugly, and harder to use than they should be. Apple knows how to make good-sounding, attractive, easy-to-use speakers. This is the sweet spot for soundbars!

Apple lets you pair two HomePods together to virtualize surround sound. This is not nearly as good as one of the many other options out there.

There are two ways Apple can solve this.

Apple could release a soundbar that could be paired with HomePods as surround speakers. This would provide a flexible system that people could grow with. Soundbars are insanely popular, and because TVs are so flat with such tiny speakers, they are basically a necessity.

Sonos sells three soundbars, and all of them are well-tuned for both music and TV/movies, and they allow people to add more speakers over time to grow their system. With a lot of wall-mounting setups, a soundbar is the only good option.

A simpler solution, however, would be for Apple to mimic what Sony does with their popular HT-A9 system, which uses four speakers (and a sub) that provide 7.1.4 Atmos sound. It sounds and looks great.

The HomePod speakers are fairly similar to what Sony is doing with these speakers.

HomePods already support Atmos and have up-firing drivers. Why doesn’t Apple let you pair four together to get a proper surround sound experience?

This is, again, a lack of Apple's understanding of how people listen to audio at home. The No. 1 place people listen to audio is in their living rooms, where their TVs are.

Unless Apple can properly support TV/movie watching, people are not going to seriously consider HomePods.

Does Apple expect people to have one set of speakers for watching TV and movies and another set for listening to music? Does that sound like a winning product line?

Where is the subwoofer?

Apple won’t be serious in the home theater/TV-watching space without a sub. Low-frequency effects in movies — the rumble and feel of bass you get in a theater — are not possible without a sub. The HomePods have good bass for their size, but they are pretty small. Apple needs to be realistic here.

A sub would also improve music listening as it would offload the lower-end bass from the HomePods. The HomePods are bass-forward. Perhaps too bass-forward, resulting in muddy mids.

When a Sonos speaker is paired with a sub, the lower-end bass goes completely to the sub, and the other Sonos speakers become clearer, with richer mids. Sonos’s sub products are also transformative to the TV and movie-watching experience.

What would I do?

1. Allow four HomePods to be linked together like the Sony HT-A9s to provide a proper surround sound experience.

2. Release a subwoofer to link up to HomePods to provide deeper bass and to offload bass demands from the HomePods, which will make mids cleaner and crisper. Everything will just sound better with a sub.

3. Look into releasing a soundbar if the HomePod line actually takes off. I think the four HomePod setup is the most logical place to start, but a lot of users love the outright simplicity of a soundbar. And for people wall mounting their TVs, the best, perhaps only, option is a wall-mounted soundbar to go with it.

Yes, it’s nice to start building a website or multimedia project and just see where it goes, but starting with rapid prototyping can help weed out bad ideas or help improve good ideas that are hampered by poor implementation. With paper prototyping, a rapid prototyping tool, anyone can make a prototype of an interactive design.

Paper prototyping is one of the core ideation and prototyping tools that we use. These ideation tools help us ensure that we are building thoughtful products that meet user needs.

If a project can’t survive the paper prototyping stage, it almost assuredly would not be a good product once built. Paper prototyping saves money and time. And paper prototyping, as opposed to just making static mockups with paper or Sketch, allows real users to test your website long before you get to the Sketch and eventual programming stages.

Paper prototyping is also a way for non-designers and non-technical people can be involved in the design and development process. A lot of people have great ideas, but they can’t build the final product. But not everyone needs to be able to build the final product.

Bringing more people into the design and development process leads to better products. Innovation should not be the province of a small group of people, and paper prototyping can help democratize design, development, and R&D.

A little background: Paper prototyping is a popular tool in the human-computer interaction field and became popular when major tech companies began adopting the technique. Now it is a tool you see throughout companies of all different sizes.

Paper prototyping is a user-centered design method. User-centered design involves users in the design process and can help lead to products that users prefer. User-centered design, however, is not about asking users what they want and expecting them to be designers, but rather it is about involving them in the design process and getting feedback.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford (maybe)

People at that time didn’t know they wanted an automobile; they just knew they wanted faster and easier ways to get around.

That’s the essence of user-centered design and usability testing. We observe people using our designs, interview them, give them surveys and use our expertise to figure out designs that meet those needs. We’re not asking people to design their own products.

Fast, cheap, and early usability testing.

You can never do enough usability and product testing, and testing gets more expensive later in the design and development process. Testing is best done throughout the entire design and development process, but you should get started early. Getting users in early can help avoid major mistakes that take a lot of time and money to fix later. Or, worse, major mistakes that never get fixed that mar a product forever.

Wait until your new website is built to test it with users? User testing will take time and cost a lot of money, and it may be difficult to make substantive changes. If you wait that long, you may build in serious usability issues that may never get fixed.

Imagine you spent months building a new website, and you are already over budget once the website launches. You didn’t do any user testing before it launched. Well, where is the money going to come from to make fixes to the website? Building in user testing from the beginning will save you money and ensure that major mistakes are avoided. Start with paper prototyping.

Conducting user testing with paper costs very little money and can lead to changes that make the final product much better. Need to rethink your website navigation system totally? It’s a lot easier to do that with paper than with a live website with complex code to rework.

The biggest thing you are testing with a paper prototype is interaction design. What happens when a user clicks on that button on your website? How does a user find and buy a book in your online bookstore? How does a person sign up for your newsletter?

Wait, how can paper simulate interaction design?

How do you simulate the experience of using a website with paper? There is no keyboard, mouse, or trackpad. One of the designers of a paper prototype serves as the computer and responds to user taps. Below you’ll see some videos where people are acting as the computer during a paper prototype usability test.

A user taps a link with her finger, and a person acting as a computer places a new piece of paper to simulate navigating to a new part of the website. This can also be used to simulate JavaScript popovers.

The video below shows a paper prototype for a blood testing kiosk. Paper prototyping doesn’t just have to be used for websites and multimedia features, but that is the way most of you will end up using paper prototyping. The test below shows how several people used this prototype and includes an interview portion at the end with users about their experiences.

I like that the testers even gave the test takers a credit card to use to further make this prototype seem realistic. You’ll notice that several users were tested for this prototype, and it’s highly recommended that designers test their prototypes with several potential users. How many tests are enough?

If the first usability test with a user shows a show-stopping bug, stop testing and fix that with your paper prototype first. There is no sense in testing an obviously broken design again. But let’s say your prototype generally works, and you’re looking for ways to improve and iterate your design. I’d go with at least three users.

You might be thinking, why not 10, 20, or more? This should not be the only time you are testing your design. You’ll want to save some of those users for future iterations of your prototype, especially as you work your way up to medium and high-fidelity prototypes. If you have a large pool of testers for every phase of your design, going with 5–10 each time would most likely be more illuminating.

This video shows the most impressive paper prototype I have ever seen. It’s a paper prototype for Hanmail.net, a Web mail service. Paper can simulate fairly complex user interfaces and interaction methods.

The (basic) tools of paper prototyping

• White printer paper

• Pens

• Markers

• Glue sticks

• Clear tape

• Construction paper

• Post-it notes (various sizes can be handy but not required)

• Tab dividers (make excellent navigation elements)

• Scissors

• Clear plastic sheets (this allows you to easily composite items together)

• Foam core or cardboard (for making easels and frames)

These are just the basic tools. You can also print graphics and other interface objects with a computer, but that isn’t necessary. You can use physical objects as well to help mockup elements.

A lot of people don’t recommend using rulers. I’m not dogmatic about this, but it’s important to keep in mind that you’re not trying for perfection here. You don’t want to slow yourself down by trying to make every line straight. It’s more important to spend your time getting feedback from users than it is to make a low-fidelity design look a little better.

Eventually, your design will become higher fidelity, and that’s the appropriate time to care more about making sure the visual aspects look as good as possible.

How to conduct a usability test with a paper prototype

• Find users — These should not be other people working on the project. People with as little knowledge as possible about your design and work will provide the best feedback.

• Assign a person to be the computer — If you built the design entirely yourself, you’re the computer that the person interacts with. You’ll want to grab a friend to record the testing sessions so you can watch them later. If you have a team, assign one person to make your prototype respond to user inputs. This is also known as Wizard of Oz testing.

• Record the test — Recording a test is recommended. This doesn’t replace observing the test, as you’ll see below, but there are several reasons to record a usability test. You can refer back to it later. You can show people who didn’t observe the test how it went. If you’re trying to convince someone that a design needs to be changed, showing them a video of users struggling with a design is a great place to start.

• Conduct the test — Explain what users are supposed to do. Give clear tasks and scenarios. Let’s say we were testing Amazon.com. Here is a scenario you could give a user: “You are a big fantasy book fan. You just heard a new illustrated edition of The Hobbit came out. Find the book, put it in your shopping cart, and buy it.”

• Think aloud — Have users think aloud while going through your test by speaking what they are doing and thinking. Are they confused? Why are they clicking on this? What do they expect to happen when they do that? This will help you understand what they are thinking while they use your prototype. It will also help you formulate questions to ask them when they are done.

• Observe — Even though you are asking users to think aloud, they may not say everything you need to know. Users may be struggling with a site, and yet they tell you they think it is relatively easy to use. This can be because users want to appease you or because they don’t want to appear not to be able to work a website. Regardless, observe what is happening. You’ll learn a lot by seeing how well users can complete various tasks with your prototype. Remember, you’re testing your design, not the user. I always make this clear to users.

• Debrief — Ask users what they thought of the prototype, what they thought went well, what they thought didn’t go well, how they felt using your prototype, etc. If you notice a user struggling with a part of the prototype, specifically ask them about that.

• Create a list of issues to fix — Based on the feedback that you got from users and what you observed while watching users, create a list of issues to fix. If there are a lot of issues, you may want to modify or create a new paper prototype. If it went fairly smoothly, it’s time to create a higher-fidelity prototype and get additional user feedback later.

Testing early and often saves money and time. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Welcome to the Better Design roundup, where we look at the most interesting stuff in design, product development, tech, and policy over the last week.

Please submit tips and ideas to me on Twitter @pwthornton.

Business models and the Enshittification of products

This piece on the the Enshittification of of TikTok is good stuff:

“HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

“Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders, and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.”

This is the core issue with starting a product or company where your business model is not aligned with your customers. Business models always wag the dog.

People complain that Apple charges a lot for its products (read: it charges enough to make a profit off the products themselves), but Apple’s business model, where a user pays for a direct good, is part of why Apple products have remained good and keep improving.

Apple’s business model is aligned with its customers. This is a more radical idea than you think.

It’s in Apple’s business model to continuously improve its products and customer experience. For Amazon, TikTok, and many others, their business model is directly at odds with continuing to improve the customer experience.

Nothing survives first contact with users

Product design guideline: Well-designed products require little to no training

Screen overlays, walkthroughs, helper text: If you have to explain a design, it’s probably not that well designed.

Very few products deserve to be complicated enough to require training. Medical equipment, airplanes, sure. Your random B2C website? Absolutely not.

Use thoughtful empty states, gentle onboarding, progressive disclosure, and other techniques to help people understand how to use your product. There is no better way for a user to learn how to use the product than using it. Utilize your product itself and its data and features to help people learn naturally how to use your product.

Here are more guidelines for thoughtful product design.

Voice AI defeats voice biometric password system

Meta introduced a new paid verification subscription service for Facebook and Instagram

This is actual verification, not the easily-scammed version that Twitter has. Whether this should cost money is one thing, but there is a need for this.

$11.99 a month for this service seems rather robust, but I am also not the target audience for this. Influencers who use Facebook and Instagram to make money and brands are the two biggest markets for this. If this service results in fewer scrams and impersonations while also bringing in some revenue, it’s a win-win.

Twitter Blue, however, is a bad product that has less than 300,000 subscribers.

We don’t need to do research

Poll of the week: Are you going to buy a VR headset this year?

Are mainstream users finally going to buy into VR? The Sony PlayStation VR2 is huge for mass market adoption. Apple’s upcoming headset could also be a game changer.

I do not own a VR headset, but Sony and Apple have me considering it much stronger than before.

Twitter ads are… not good

Elon is planning on shifting how Twitter does ads. Twitter ads have never been good, and they have only gotten worse since he purchased the company.

I disagree that Twitter should mimic how Google does ads. Twitter is not a search engine. People don’t come to Twitter to search through huge data sets.

I honestly have no idea why Elon think it makes sense to look to Google search over social networking competitors for ad market inspiration.

Twitter’s foundational problem is that users are too anonymous and are not talking enough about their hobbies and interests. Twitter needs to create features that allow people to connect with like-minded people in less public settings. This will encourage more deanonymization and will make it easier to target ads.

Twitter has developed a product that is far too passive for the average user. The vast majority of people using Twitter are just reading tweets. They need to find ways to get people to talk and connect more.

How did China come to dominate the world of electric cars?

China realized that they weren’t going to out-compete or even compete with established automakers of gas-powered cars. Chinese leaders decided to invest early and heavily in EVs and batteries. Other countries that haven’t made the same investments are falling behind because of it.

Before most people could realize the extent of what was happening, China became a world leader in making and buying EVs. And the momentum hasn’t slowed: In just the past two years, the number of EVs sold annually in the country grew from 1.3 million to a whopping 6.8 million, making 2022 the eighth consecutive year in which China was the world’s largest market for EVs. For comparison, the US only sold about 800,000 EVs in 2022. Thanks for reading Better Designed! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

“They realized … that they would never overtake the US, German, and Japanese legacy automakers on internal-combustion engine innovation,” says Tu. And research on hybrid vehicles, whose batteries in the early years served a secondary role relative to the gas engine, was already being led by countries like Japan, meaning China also couldn’t really compete there either. 

This pushed the Chinese government to break away from the established technology and invest in completely new territory: cars powered entirely by batteries. 

This is a good lesson for any company or country — lean into your constraints. China leaned into the constraint of not being able to be competitive with internal combustion engines. That leaning in directly lead them to their dominance today.

User interviewing isn’t just chatting with people. It’s not just asking them what they like and dislike. User interviewing is about trying to get to the core of what a user is trying to do and what their problems are.

User interviewing needs to be approached with proper rigor and respect. A lot of people think a user interview is just an informal chat with a person to run an idea or prototype past them. This is false. That is garbage.

User interviews need to be rigorous. The questions need to be well thought out and purposeful, otherwise you won’t get data worth acting upon. The only thing worse than no data is bad data.

User interviews are a foundational user-centered design method that is best early on in the process, before you have an idea and prototypes. Usability testing and other methods are better for getting feedback from users on prototypes later on in the design process.

User interviewing is also not about asking people want they want you to build or do. It’s not even about asking them what they want.User interviewing is also about learning what a user is trying to do and understanding what is and isn’t working for them.

If you ask users to design your products for you, you’ll end up with the Homer Simpson Car.

User interviewing is a good method for figuring out users’ problems. User-centered design and design thinking are all about making sure we identify the correct problems and then figure out how to solve them for people.

The first part of the double diamond of design is to figure out what the true problem is. Product managers and others will often give you symptoms, not the actual problem. User interviews can help make sure you are even solving the correct problem.

You’ll notice that working with users is my first guideline for thoughtful product design, and user interviewing is a great way to work with users.

Here are my core tips for user interviewing

Don’t ask leading or directed questions

Leading questions can take a few different forms — all bad. The most obvious form is a leading question designed to elicit a specific response.

If you are asking those kinds of leading questions, you aren’t ready for user interviewing, or you are not open to honest feedback. But a lot of other leading questions are because people almost get nervous about asking stark, non-leading, open-ended questions.

Instead of just asking the question, people will ask the question and then suggest a possible answer or two. A common, benign example would be, “Got plans for the weekend? Maybe watching some football?”

What happens is that you have prejudiced the answer by priming thoughts in a person’s mind. You want answers to be as expansive as possible. This means don’t provide users with possible answers.

But in this example, we have now primed a person to think about football. They will spend a noticeable amount of time thinking about whether or not they are actually going to watch football, and if so, they’ll tell you about it.

People do this all the time. It’s almost a nervous tick like they can’t just ask a stark question. Embrace asking stark questions. This is a user interview, not a chat with a friend.

Don’t ask people what they want

Users don’t know what they want. Don’t ask them for suggested features or solutions. They’re not professional designers.

Focus on trying to find out users’ problems and what they are trying to do.

Your questions should not be, “what would you like us to do?” Rather they should be, “what are you trying to do?”

Think of this possibly apocryphal example from Henry Ford:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Proper user interviewing would have discovered that people may have wanted faster forms of transportation or more reliable ones or ones that don’t require so much feeding and upkeep. They may have also needed ways to move bigger and heavier things.

Users aren’t designers. They can’t conceive of the unbuilt. Our job as designers is to find out what people’s problems are and then build the future.

Ask open-ended questions

Open-ended questions, especially when you are doing foundational user research, are key to finding out what people are trying to do and what their problems are.

Avoid yes/no questions, which I detail more below. You want to ask open-ended questions because they yield expansive responses.

Also, avoid vague words. Vague words are open to interpretation, which might lead you to be misled by someone’s response. For example, asking a user, “is this a useful feature?” could give you bad data.

What makes for a useful feature? Many people will answer that question from the lens, “I’m sure someone will find this feature useful; therefore, it is a useful feature.” But that’s not what you were trying to find out. You want to know if this particular user finds this feature useful.

Instead, ask something like, “is this feature valuable to the work you do right now?”

This is a very similar question, but it has two key distinctions: It is explicitly asking a person if this feature is valuable to their own work, and it is asking if it is valuable right now. Valuable is also more specific than useful.

A lot of things have some degree of utility for people, but being valuable goes beyond mere minor utility.

Don’t ask yes/no questions

Occasionally, you may need to ask a yes/no follow-up question for clarification, but in general, user interviewing is specifically to get expansive responses. Asking yes/no questions will rarely yield good, detailed, expansive responses.

You may not even intend to ask a yes/no question, but if you give people the opportunity to respond with one word, they often will.

For example, you may ask, “do you send text messages,” thinking that the person will respond that they do and then detail what kinds of text messages they send and to whom. But it’s actually very likely they’ll just respond with “yes.”

Instead, if what you are trying to figure out is what kinds of messages they send and to whom, you need to be direct. “What kinds of text messages do you send?”

If the person sends text messages, they’ll detail what they send and why. If the answer is that they do not send text messages, they’ll tell you that, and there is a good chance that they’ll explain why they don’t send text messages.

Don’t make assumptions. Ask stupid questions.

You can miss a lot of key information if you don’t ask basic questions. This often happens because you assume you already know the answer.

Also, basic questions are a great way to ease a person into an interview. I tend to start every user interview with basic questions that a user doesn’t have to think much about. This will get them talking and comfortable. And, hey, maybe I’ll learn something I didn’t know before.

For instance, we start user interviews with a question like, “What does your organization do, and how does your role fit in there?”

I largely know the answers to these two questions, but I’ll often learn additional details and nuances that I didn’t already know. This may come in handy for follow-up questions or when I’m putting together the user scenario. It’s also an easy question for anyone to answer, helping to make them more comfortable.

Have a set of questions you use every time

For your user interviews to be methodologically valid, you need to use the same base set of questions every time. Do not wing it, and just ask random stuff when you interview people.

Coming up with a good set of user interview questions can take time. It sometimes takes me hours, and I have a ton of old user interview scripts to look to for inspiration. I may also test a script out on a few users and refine it before taking it out to a large set of users.

Our user interview scripts range from about 15 questions to upwards of 40. This will depend on how complex the product is or if we are doing an interview about the entire product or just part of the product.

Previously I mentioned that user interviews are more valuable earlier on in the user-centered design process. I find that when people don’t have a good set of questions and are kind of just asking generic stuff, it’s because they are using it later on in the product development process, just trying to see if they can get people to say that they think a prototype is interesting.

Ideally, you want to test a prototype with an actual task list to verify that users can do what they need to do with your product. You will follow up that usability study with an interview and survey, but user interviewing cannot take the place of testing. An interview alone is not an appropriate way to get feedback on a prototype.

Ask the same question from multiple angles

A lot of people need to be deep in a user interview before they can really get to the core of what they think. I have found that asking the same general question from multiple angles can yield a lot more useful data than just asking it once.

The key to doing this is to spread these questions throughout your user interview script. Putting them back to back to back will not go well. Rather you want to ask the question once, ask a bunch more questions to get the person thinking deeper, and then ask a similar question from another angle to see if you can get deeper information. You may repeat this one or two more times.

I only do this with a question or two that gets at the heart of what we are trying to discover with this user research.

Never mention other users

This is another way to prejudice answers from users. Never mention how other users find using your product.

Here is an example: “A lot of people say it’s easy to use this search engine. Do you agree?”

You’ve just told them that a lot of people find this easy to use. Basically, you are asking, “are you smart like these other people, or are you dumb and unable to figure this out?” Of course, a person is going to respond that they agree!

Instead, ask a simple, stark question like this: “Describe your experience with this search engine.”

Notice how this question is also open-ended and can go in a lot of different directions. The version that mentions other users is a closed question that is basically a yes/no question.

Ask follow up questions

While you should ask the same set of base questions with every user, you should also ask follow-up questions if they can help clarify what a user has said and if they can give you additional insight.

If it makes a lot of sense to ask a follow-up question immediately, I will. Other times, a user will say something that makes me think of another question I want to ask, but I don’t want to interrupt the user interview script.

I’ll write down what I want to ask and then ask it later on when it makes more sense.

Make note of the questions that don’t work

Some questions are duds. They may not elicit much information. Other questions just confuse people. Occasionally you may have a question that causes people to react negatively.

Even if you commit to not swapping out a user interview question during a round of user interviewing, you should make note of which of your questions don’t work so that you can make sure not to use them in future user research.

Embrace silence

One of the reasons that I insist on always taking notes or filling out empathy maps while I interview people is to force myself to slow down. Even if I am with a dedicated note taker, I also take my own notes. This is critical.

The reason is that if an interviewer has nothing else to do besides ask questions, she will move too quickly and often not let a person fully think through an answer.

Embrace awkward silences. Do not fill them. Never make small talk during this.

Most of the time, the person being interviewed will fill the awkward silence with more info. I often find the best information comes out during these silences.

Find something to do while you interview people that force you to slow down and process information.

Don’t be afraid of the truth

When you look at the questions a lot of people ask of their users, it’s clear they are afraid of the truth. User interview questions should cause users to think and reflect, and that may mean they have some rather negative things to say about your product.

If you find that your user interviewing is not yielding a lot of good data, it may be because you are afraid of the truth and you are asking a lot of softball questions.

Don’t be afraid to ask really direct questions, such as, “what do you like least about this product?” Or, perhaps even scarier if your product has a subscription component, “if you were to leave us, what would be the number one reason?”

You want to know the truth. Ask uncomfortable questions.

Be neutral

If you can’t, user research isn’t for you.

If you are doing user research as a consultant on someone else’s product, it’s pretty easy to be neutral, but many people struggle to be neutral when it is their own company or product.

This is one reason a lot of product managers don’t make for good interviewers. They are too invested in their own work and will often look to conduct research to validate what they have already done — instead of doing user research to find out the truth.

Part of being neutral is not defending your product or company when someone says something during an interview. Your job during a user interview is to be a psychologist intently listening to someone’s problems and not a PR person looking to spin everything.

Ask a user to show you

If a user mentions something interesting that you could actually see, have the user show it to you. I was recently doing some user interviewing about the reporting capabilities in one of our products, and a user mentioned that they take the data from our product and have a designer create a custom report instead of using the built-in reports.

Seeking to understand better why this is, I asked the user to send us the report they have their designer create and also the report with the same data as it comes out of our system.

The data in both versions of the report was the same. But the user wanted a very stripped-down, layperson-friendly version that we didn’t offer. Seeing both versions side by side as we talked through it was invaluable.

This is also why interviewing people in person is superior to remotely. When you go in person, a user interview can begin to morph into a kind of light contextual inquiry.

One at a time if possible

Focus groups are fairly worthless. Try to prevent your user interviews from devolving into focus groups.

Ideally, you are interviewing one person at a time. Sometimes a company will want you to talk to a few people at a time, and you may not be able to talk them out of this. Group dynamics will take over, and you won’t get an accurate picture of everyone’s true feelings, but you should at least get an accurate picture of at least one person at that company’s true feelings.

Interviewing 2–3 people at a time from one company isn’t that bad. It will, however, make transcription incredibly difficult. You will also need more note-takers and more people to help out with empathy maps and user scenarios.

One key tip is to encourage everyone in the room to answer the question. Don’t let one person speak for the whole room.

Record the interview if possible

Not everyone will agree to be recorded, but you should always ask and try. Audio recordings at a minimum. Video is even better.

Video is particularly valuable if there is a chance that this interview turns into a light contextual inquiry where a person starts showing you how they use your product (or similar products).

Recording interviews means that people who didn’t attend the interview can see and hear for themselves.

Take detailed notes

Recording or not, I always take very detailed notes filled with direct quotes.I don’t reference the recordings regularly. I record interviews mostly for other people to listen to or watch. Recordings are also needed if you want to transcribe the interview.

Good, detailed notes, complete with direct quotes and tagging of key themes, will make synthesizing the data later on much quicker.

We also make empathy maps and user scenarios for every user interview we conduct. We try to do these live during the interview, if possible, but having detailed notes to refer to immediately after the interview makes this process much easier and faster.

Synthesize findings and make recommendations

The synthesis of your findings and the recommendations you provide are more valuable than the raw materials you have created. Most people are not interested in reading your notes or listening to a recording.

What people are ultimately paying you for is a strong synthesis of all of the data you collected and actionable recommendations. This synthesis should come with actionable recommendations. This is the first step to converting user research to change.

It used to be that people made 100-page reports of findings. No one wants to read those. Don’t make one.

What I have found that works the best is a deck of findings that has a lot of bullets and annotated screenshots/photos. I may also provide a written executive summary memo of my findings for people who want to read over something relatively quickly and get the lay of the land.

We also create synthesized empathy maps and user scenarios from all of our rounds of user research. These are other high-level, digestible artifacts that non-user research experts can understand and utilize.

Welcome to the first weekly Better Design roundup, where we look at the most interesting stuff in design, product development, tech, and policy over the last week.

Please submit tips and ideas to me on Twitter @pwthornton.

When does it end, exactly?

For all the talk of computational photography, and Apple has done fantastic work there, you can’t stop basic physics. Apple keeps putting bigger sensors and bigger lenses on their cameras because they let in more light and produce better photos.

As long as people want to continue to use their phones as their main camera, expect camera bumps on phones to keep getting bigger.

Looking at this chart, it seems unlikely that smartphones will stop focusing on photography capabilities anytime soon. This is probably one of the biggest blockers to making foldable phones and tablets a bit hit.

Playstation VR2 is a big upgrade if you can get over the cable

The early reviews of Sony’s Playstation VR2 are in, and it’s a huge upgrade with much better visuals and motion tracking. The hardware looks and feels great, and it is much more consumer-friendly than most existing VR.

First, games are a clear use case for VR (hanging out in work meetings, not so much). And Sony is a great maker of video game systems and games.

Second, the PlayStation VR2 is set it and forget it. You don’t need to worry about having the right computer setup to get the most out of this.

That pesky wire is the only holdup, but so far, no one has delivered an elite experience without a wire to more powerful hardware. Can Apple change that later this year (and will Apple care enough to release great software on their headset?)? The wired setup that Sony uses accomplishes several things (ample graphics power, no need to charge the headset, and much lower costs).

No integration is ever seamless

Don’t trust people who tell you otherwise.

Microsoft’s approach to accessibility takes it to the next level

Accessibility is for a lot more people than you expect. Everyone benefits when we make products accessible. Most of us, even if we don’t have or acquire a permanent disability, will have temporary or situational disabilities. We will benefit from accessibility affordances.

You can also get huge product wins from making your products accessible. One example is producing a transcript for your podcasts. This makes them accessible. Do you know what else it makes them? Searchable both on-site and via search engines. Huge win.

Saying no is a skill

And knowing when to utilize it is critical.

I agree that it is critical to say no to things, and this is one of the biggest things many of us struggle with. We want to push further and further. One of the best ways to do that, it turns out, is to do less work — but better.

Still, sometimes, the backlog has stuff you want to get to, but won’t be able to for a while (and then maybe priorities will change).

Where do you stand on the great backlog debate?

This is going better than at least 50% of Lean Product MVPs

How to conduct user interviews

If you want to learn how to do user interviews or how to get better at them, read this primer.

Leading questions can take a few different forms — all bad. The most obvious form is a leading question designed to elicit a specific response.

If you are asking those kinds of leading questions, you aren’t ready for user interviewing oryou are not open to honest feedback.But a lot of other leading questions arebecause people almost get nervous with asking stark, non-leading, open-ended questions.

Instead of just asking the question, people will ask the question and then suggest a possible answer or two. A common, benign example would be, “Got plans for the weekend? Maybe watching some football?”

What happens is that you have prejudiced the answer by priming thoughts in a person’s mind. You want answers to be as expansive as possible. This means don’t provide users with possible answers.

But in this example, we have now primed a person to think about football. They will spend a noticeable amount of time thinking about whether or not they are actually going to watch football, and if so, they’ll tell you about it.

People do this all the time. It’s almost a nervous tick, like they can’t just ask a stark question. Embrace asking stark questions. This is a user interview, not a chat with a friend.

One of the first things I do in all of my classes is show this clip of Homer Simpson trying to design a car. I’m serious.

It’s a great lesson in how not to build a product.

Watch it, and then let’s walk through why it has so many great lessons for product design and development.

One of the things that makes the Homer Simpson Car clip so interesting is that Homer has real desires in a car that are perfectly reasonable. As designers, our job is to figure out people’s problems and desires and translate those into great products.

Homer wants a large car because he is a family man with three kids and two pets. He’d also like ways to not be distracted by his three kids while he is driving. He wants places to put his drinks.

Homer often struggles to find his car when he parks in a large parking lot. Homer wants a car that is pretty quick because he wants to feel alive every now and then in his suburban dad life.

All of this is great feedback from a user. Understanding the problems Homer faces and understanding his life is a great way to inform design. By utilizing contextual inquiry and user interviewing, we can find out the problems that people like Homer face and synthesize that data, and translate it into actionable requirements to build again.

Where the Homer Simpson Car implodes is that it lets a user actually design the car. Homer is not a designer. He has no idea how to design anything.

So it ends up that Homer has really bad solutions to his problems. He can’t take sensible requirements and make them into good product design. Almost no user can. Don’t let users design your products for you.

But good product design is not about letting your users design your products for you — it’s about solving users’ problems and making their lives better.

A lot of you are allowing Homer Simpson to design your products

“Whhhhhhhat?” I hear you saying. The ability to translate feedback from users (after gathering it in a methodical way) and translate that into requirements is a real skill.

Never ask your users what to build. Ask your users what they are trying to do.

Homer wasn’t wrong

It wasn’t Homer’s fault that the car he designed turned out so badly — it was the fault of the company that asked a random person off the street to design their product. A lot of you are letting Homers design your products and then blaming them when things turn out poorly!

Don’t ask random people to build your products. Take ownership over your own work, and take ownership on your users being successful.

Our most important job as product designers is to take ownership of the success of our users.

How can you avoid building the Homer Simpson Car?

Before you ask, observe

Start off with contextual inquiry. Watch people go about their lives and do their work. After you observe, start asking questions.

Rock your user interviews

User interviewing is a great combination with contextual inquiry. You observe, and then you ask questions. The key to good user interviewing is to ask good, probing questions. Never lead the user!

Translate your user research into thoughtful requirements

Synthesize your research and then translate it into thoughtful requirements. When you synthesize research, you should also be abstracting it. Build your requirements around solving problems for users. Focus on activities.

Activities go across users and often even cultures. Design for activities by translating your research into the core activities your users are trying to do.

Follow a well-defined rubric when designing new products

This is the rubric we use, and here are the guidelines for good product design we follow. It helps get everyone at the company to speak the same language and understand how we define good.

If you can understand and keep these five areas in mind when you are designing and developing products, you will deliver good products. Some products are really strong in one area but weak in others. Some products are strong in four of the five areas, and that may or may not be enough.

By looking at UX through these areas, you can see how products can both seem designed well and poorly at the same time.

I first encountered the five areas of UX in The UX Book by Rex Hartson and Pardha Pyla. The UX Book is basically a manual for how to do UX, and it’s the book that we use in user-centered design classes at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Even if you are a mid-career professional, having a copy of the UX Book around for reference is a good idea. I’ve taken some of the concepts that Hartson and Lyla introduced and expanded upon them.

The five areas of UX are a core component of my design critique rubric. Having agreed-upon rubrics makes design teams a lot more functional, efficient, and consistent.

Usability

How usable is this product? Discoverability and understanding are two key areas of usability. Can a user easily discover key features? Once a user discovers key features, are they able to understand how and why to use them?

Good products have both. If a user can’t discover a feature, it doesn’t exist for that user. Users should be able to easily discover features without instructions, and once they do discover a feature, they should be able to quickly understand how it works and why to use it. If a user can’t understand how to use a feature, it also doesn’t exist.

There really is no such thing as human errors — just bad design. If a product requires a lot of training or manuals, it is not usable.

A highly usable product should both be easy to learn to use and memorable so that when the next time a user uses that product, it is already second nature.

The quality and thoughtfulness of the affordances and signifiers is another core part of usability. I explain affordances and signifiers in detail here. It’s critical that you understand these foundational design concepts.

Utility

Do this product or feature help me do something? Utility gets at the value of something. Don’t confuse this with usability. Usability gets at how easy it is to use a feature or product. A product can be really easy to use, while also having little value and utility.

A website with really good information on it has high utility. Wikipedia strives to be a website that focuses first and foremost on utility, and because its utility is so good, we can forgive some of the other areas of UX where it is a bit weaker (its usability and visual design should be better).

If you’ve ever purchased a product in a store that you thought demoed well but then quickly stopped using it when you brought it home, you may have used a product with high usability and low utility.

You have most likely used other products that gave you a lot of utility, but the usability could have used a lot of work.

Utility can be user-specific. Some people may find ESPN.com to have really high utility. If a user doesn’t like sports, ESPN’s utility is pretty much zero. Utility must be viewed from the lens of your users and the different buckets your users fit within.

Functional Integrity

Does this product and its features work as intended? Is this product reliable?

Is this product well made? Is it free of defects and bugs? Does it have a high level of fit and finish?

You can have a product that has high usability and utility and is still a drag to use because it crashes a lot or key features don’t work as intended.

This is an area that a lot of product designers don’t get. They think bugs and defects are the realms of engineers, QA people, and others. That’s not true. Being free of defects and bugs is a core part of making a good user experience.

You can design a great product, but if the engineers, manufacturers, or someone else introduce a lot of bugs or defects, a product is not well designed. User experience goes far beyond product design.

This is why design, engineering, and other disciplines need to work closely together. It takes a village to make good products. This is also why you must get buy-in to stamp out bugs and defects because otherwise, your hard work will be overshadowed.

Functional integrity also refers to how consistent a product is. One of my core concepts for good product design is that a product must be both internally consistent (consistent with itself) and externally consistent(consistent with other products from the same company and consistent with well-understood concepts).

Visual Design

Is this product visually appealing? Is it edifying to use?

When given two identical products, people will prefer the product that has a superior visual design. People will pay more money for a product that looks and feels better. People will believe your product is better built if it has a good look and feel.

People will even conflate how good a product looks with how professional it is. The converse of that is that a product with poor visual design can be considered amateurish or even spammy.

You can make a product that nails every other area of UX, but if it looks and feels like a scam or spam product, people will assume it is.

Visual design without usability and utility is not very valuable, however, but don’t let your designs get too myopically functional. Make people happy with your designs. Surprise them.

What I have found is that when you boil a product down to its essence, focus on the function, and really strive to solve problems for users, you will naturally create a good visual and tactile experience. The thoughtfulness of getting a product down to its essence and core will help you focus the visual design.

Visual design is not about decadence or extraneousness. In fact, extraneous flourishes and features is a hallmark of bad design.

A lot of people think of my team as the team that makes things pretty. But making things look good is only one out of five areas that we do. The core of what we do is to make products work well, and our visual design should be an expression of that.

Persuasiveness

There are a few different ways to view persuasiveness. The most basic is the ability to complete conversions. Think of an e-commerce website. A website can be really usable, have high utility, be free of bugs and defects, be beautiful, and still not be well designed.

How?

If the job of your website is to get people to buy products and people aren’t, you have a persuasiveness issue. An e-commerce website that fails to get people to buy products can’t be considered well-designed.

In reality, if an e-commerce website has issues with persuasiveness, it probably has usability issues too. But the persuasiveness can go far beyond that. How good is the copywriting? Are there product demos? Is the checkout process as frictionless as possible? Does the company offer a great delivery and return process?

When I think of e-commerce experiences, there are a lot of decent ones. There are only a few great ones. The great ones, such as Amazon.com, nail persuasiveness.

Persuasiveness is also the ability to get people to use your product and do key tasks. The reason this is important is that even if people buy your product, if they stop using it, they won’t be likely to recommend it to other people.

The other day one of my students was telling the class about a smart water bottle she bought that is designed to get people to drink more water. She found that it hadn’t increased her water intake, and she didn’t even bring it to class that day.

The product was not persuading her to use it. Since she is not regularly using it, she is unlikely to recommend it to people to buy.

Using the five areas to critique product design

We use these five areas combined with our overall rubric to decide if one of our products or someone else’s is well designed. Sometimes it’s a really hard decision because a product may have usability issues but offer some really strong utility (smart home technologies fall into this area, where they are hard to setup, but once you get them setup, they can add a lot of value to your life).

Other products seem to nail everything, except they are really buggy. The thing is, if a product has enough functionality integrity issues, it cannot be considered well-designed and people will not want to use it.

Imagine if your smartphone crashed a few times a day at completely random times. No matter how much you loved how the phone felt and looked and how much the software and connectedness helped you out, you would look to switch to a different smartphone or maybe even consider going back to a simpler phone.

You might be thinking, what about information architecture and other core areas of UX? Information architecture is reflected in these five areas. If your website has poor information architecture, it won’t be usable.

The same logic applies to other important UX and design topics.

I hope this hopes you understand how to use and apply the five areas of UX. If you want, mention a product in the comments, and I will walk through how it does in the five areas of UX.

Understanding what affordances are and how they help map people’s mental models to a product is key to good design. But if you are like a lot of my students, the concept of an affordance is easier said than done to understand.

First, I would recommend you read chapter 1 of Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things. He does a very good job of detailing what an affordance is, but even after I assign this reading and go over it myself, many students struggle to understand what an affordance is.

The proper discoverability and usability of affordances and signifiers is a key part of my guidelines for thoughtful product design. If you don’t understand what affordances are and how to utilize them, you won’t be able to design products that are usable and good. I’m going to try my best to explain what an affordance is here, but if you have further questions, send me a note on Twitter.

An affordance is not a feature

A feature may rely on an affordance to work, but a feature itself is not an affordance. Many students and beginning designers make this mistake.

Affordances are relationships between a physical object or a digital one and a person. Affordances help determine how an object can be used. The key is that affordances are relationships.

Look at the word affordances. The root is afford. Affordances help people understand what actions an object affords.

A chair, for instance, affords the ability to be sat on. People instinctively understand how this affordance works because chairs have bottoms and backrests shaped for the human body. This makes the primary affordance of sitting for a chair perceivable.

Affordances can both be affordances (to help us do something) or anti-affordances (to prevent us from doing something). They can also be visible and invisible, but for an affordance to be effective, people have to be able to perceive it.

Imagine a chair that people struggle to perceive how to use it (see below). A lot of affordances are not properly perceivable, and thus they are poorly designed.

This chair from Magis doesn’t look like a chair to most people, and thus many wouldn’t try to sit on it. We can sort of forgive this because it is meant to be a piece of art as much as anything else (as long as some other clearer, more accessible seating is nearby).

It does have an affordance for sitting, which is why this ultimately works, but the affordance is so hidden from people that I could imagine a sign near this saying, “take a seat if tired.” The affordance here is that the concave top of this magic top is roughly shaped for the human butt.

Norman is famous for the concept of Norman Doors, which are doors that people don’t know if they should push or pull. It’s incredible when you think about it. Doors are one of the most basic and foundational designs in human history.

Countless buildings have so completely f-ed up doors that an advanced, intelligent species don’t know how to use.

This is really bad design!

Doors like this often come with signs that explain to a person to push or pull, and many people incorrectly call these signs affordances. These signs are a band-aid for poorly conceived affordances.

“We put a sign on the door to give people an extra affordance to understand how to properly use the door.” This is incorrect. Signs on a door are signifiers, not affordances.

I call these band-aid signifiers. They exist simply because the affordances are poorly designed. If a product has band-aid signifiers, it is poorly designed.

The other key affordance on a door is the hinge. Being able to see the hinge tells you which side of the door swings. Some doors have hidden hinges, which can make discovering how to use that door difficult (or in some cases, can hide the fact that it is a door).

More modern and challenging examples of affordances

But doors are a really easy example to explain affordances with. How about some more challenging modern examples? Let’s walk through some examples to flesh this out.

A lot of what you may have thought are affordances are, in fact, not affordances. Icons on a phone are not affordances. The primary affordance of a smartphone is the touch system itself.

One of the reasons that smartphones have taken off so rapidly and that you see people of all ages using and enjoying them is that the affordance of a touchscreen allows for direct manipulation by a person’s finger. You just pick up the phone and start tapping and swiping away.

Icons that appear on the screen interact with that affordance. The icons and labels that go with them are signifiers that help users understand affordances. I would argue, however, that each button on a touch screen device has an invisible affordance the size of the tap target that is being taken up on the screen.

The icons, text and other stuff you see on your smartphone screen that help you understand what to do with your smartphone are actually signifiers. I’ll go more into detail on signifiers in a future post.

Touchscreen smartphones have provided an easier mental model for a person to understand than desktop computing, which relies on a mouse as the primary pointing affordance. My one-year-old can use an iPad. She is nowhere near being able to use a Mac or PC because using a keyboard and mouse requires a lot more abstraction to understand how these affordances map to the actions on the screen.

Is the touchscreen the only affordance on a smartphone? Many phones also have another primary affordance of voice interaction, which has generally been underutilized with touch devices.

This affordance would be invisible, and thus, it’s not perceivable without some training or prompting. Because voice interaction is not the main affordance of smartphones, this isn’t as big of a deal as it could be, but if smartphone makers want their voice interfaces to be more widely used, they need to make using them easier to discover and understand.

I have yet to see a smartphone that has some visual way of demonstrating that you can talk to it. I know my phone has Siri because of all of Apple’s marketing around it, but because this affordance is not perceptible in normal use, I forget to use it.

Apple doesn’t even have a signifier that shows up on the phone under most usage. Imagine how much more you would use Siri if there was at least an icon on the home screen for it.

Phones also they also have physical buttons that are shaped like the tips of human fingers, inviting users to try them (physical buttons are very discoverable when done in moderation).Below is an example from Apple’s Home app, which allows users to control smart homes features.

Smart homes can be the intersection of many kinds of affordances

This is the Apple Home app, which lets users control smartphone features.

The primary affordance for this app is the touch system of the phone. Each button is an implied affordance, but the visual representation of a button is a signifier. Some may argue that everything on this screen is a signifier, but every signifier maps to an affordance, and thus we cannot argue that a signifier is acting without an affordance.

What is a signifier? A signifier helps a person understand how to use an affordance. Signifiers are a way to tell people what is possible.

Apple’s Home app and Homekit (the technology that powers the Home app) is on the cutting edge of systems that have a lot of layering of affordances. With this technology, you can control the lights in your house with three primary affordances: Physical switches, touchscreen app, and voice control.

This layering of affordances is what makes smart home technology like this so much more usable and enjoyable than standard lights, for instance. If you don’t have the layering of affordances, however, it can be really frustrating. Just controlling your lights with a smartphone app would be less usable than physical wall switches.

Sometimes, in the case of a push sign on a door, signifiers are covering up for poor affordances and designs. Other times, in the Home app example, the signifiers are the main event. The signifiers are what help users understand how to use Apple’s Home app.

Phones usually have physical buttons on them (at least in 2019), which are affordance as well. iPhones, for instance, have two stacked buttons on the side for raising and lowering the volume.

These buttons are shaped to be the size of human fingers, which lets a person know that you can interact with them with their fingers. The fact that the buttons are stacked vertically also helps a person understand that the higher one is for raising the volume and the lower one is for lowering the volume.

Here is one last example. This amazingly well-designed Zojirushi travel mug has very thoughtful affordances and signifiers.

Once you hit the open button, you have an affordance for a mouth-shaped opening to drink out of.

I hope this has helped you better understand what affordances are. Well-thought-out affordances (and signifiers) will be the difference between your designs being usable or maddening.

While A/B testing can be a powerful tool in the right hands, it can also be an incredibly dangerous tool in the wrong hands. And I think most product and tech teams don’t have the sophistication to pull off A/B testing properly.

I wrote last week that You can’t A/B test your way to product transformation, and Tony Fadell explains why in his new book Build:

“A/B and user testing is not product design. It’s a tool. A test. At best a diagnosis. It can tell you something’s not working, but it won’t tell you how to fix it. Or it can show you an option that solves one hyperlocal issue but breaks something else downstream.” — Tony Fadell.

That final point is so critical. A/B testing done poorly will result in runaway butterfly effects, where these small tests lead up to big, unknown changes long term in your products.

A/B testing is what you should do once you know the product design — once you have the vision. If you don’t know the vision and why you are building something, you shouldn’t be anywhere near A/B testing.

Fadell also talks about how user panels/focus groups aren’t very useful. You can’t ask users what to build (but you can ask them about their pain points). Why? Because they can’t conceive of what has never been built before.

I highly recommend Fadell’s new book Build to anyone looking to either learn how great products and experiences get made or to learn how to get better at product development. It’s one of the best product and business books I have read in years.

This Sonos Roam Bluetooth speaker survey came across my desk today, and it uses a very unique scale that I don’t think makes a ton of sense.

Surveys can be a powerful tool when building and refining products and services, but they can also yield bad data and insights if they aren’t done well. I’m going to quickly walk through some of the issues with this scale and survey and how I would have handled it differently.

Plenty of people may do something a few times a month or year but not do something 1-4 times per week, particularly an activity like listening to music/audio content outside of the home without headphones. This is the first place this scale goes sideways. A survey scale needs to allow for people to answer the survey accurately.

I personally use my Sonos Roam mostly while at home. I only use it outside of the house when I travel, and I do not travel on a weekly or even monthly basis. If I select between 1-4 times per week, that is a significant overestimate of how often I use it outside of the home, but I can’t select that I never use it outside of the home because that’s just not true.

Sonos also asked about how often you use the Roam at home, so there was no assumption (and there shouldn’t be) that the Roam is mostly used on the go. The Roam may be a Bluetooth speaker but it is also a premium speaker that retails for $179, works on wifi for better audio quality and reliability than Bluetooth, has built-in voice assistant support, and connects to other Sonos speakers for multi-room audio.

The survey also didn’t ask about how you use your Roam outside of the home, which I think would illuminate a lot about how and why people use their Roams. And I think it would yield better data than just trying to parse how often people are using their Roams at home and away.

Understanding the why of why users do something is the most critical thing. If you knew that I use my Roam outside of the home only when traveling or on vacation, you’d know that my usage pattern outside the home wasn’t very consistent.

I also think 7-10 times per week and more than 10 times per week is splitting hairs. This scale and some of the other scales that other questions had was really splitting hairs, and I don’t think would yield very good or actionable data. And if you can’t get actionable data out of your survey, why do it?

Beyond the issues with the scale itself, the survey responses overlap. If you listen to your Sonos Roam four times per week, do you select “between 4-7 times a week” or “between 1-4 times per week?”

It’s important to have people not involved with your survey test it out first to make sure there aren’t obvious mistakes like this.

The other thing I noticed was that the survey response scales varied wildly by question. When doing a survey, you want to use as similar as scale and response type between questions as possible. I’m not going to post the entire survey, but the response scales were so varied that you’d have issues with methodical validity.

For this particular question, I’d like to see a scale more in line with this:

1. Multiple times per day

2. Daily

3. A few times per week

4. A few times per month

5. A few times per year

6. Never

There is no overlap in survey responses, and these responses allow for normal usage patterns to be accurately captured. Ironically, the scale in the survey will both lead to less accurate responses while also giving a false sense of precision. A lot of people not well versed in survey methodology, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this survey were created by a product manager or business exec with little research experience, think that numerical responses are better.

More accurate responses are better. And my scale can be reported out numerically. i.e. 40 percent of Sonos Roam users report using their Roams outside of the house a few times per week.

You could further tweak this scale, but overall it’s much clearer, and people taking the survey will be able to provide more accurate responses quicker. It’s also important to keep in mind that you don’t want people to be confused or have to do a lot of thinking when taking a survey because both of those are great ways for people to stop taking the survey.

Google's new Gmail design is out, and a lot of people aren't happy with its haphazard, non-cohesive design.

How does a product as big as Gmail from a company as big as Google come out looking like this?

Google famously has a culture of A/B testing (including testing upwards to 50 different shades of blue against each other to see which yielded the most search clicks), and I believe this explains why the product feels like a collection of non-cohesive optimizations.

Before I delve deeper into this, I want to drive this home: You can't A/B test to product transformation or to a new product. A/B testing cannot build a foundation. A/B testing can help you go from good to great.

Many orgs are focusing on too many micro-decisions, often powered exclusively by A/B tests. The test results often don't mesh well together. There is far too little UX research being conducted. Micro tests end up replacing product vision.

A/B testing can be great! But you can't over-rely on it, and you have to ensure you are controlling for one variable at a time (and that you understand what the data is actually telling you). You still need a cohesive product vision. And any good research regime has both robust quantitative and qualitative research capabilities.

A/B testing is best at optimizing a strong product vision and design. That strong product vision must come first.

A/B testing can also be a way to test out wildly different product designs to see the impact a new design direction will have. This is particularly true in conversion-heavy situations, like search listings or an online store, where you don’t want to risk taking a huge revenue hit on a new divergent design.

But when A/B testing is used as the guiding light for product development, it leads to a lack of cohesive product design, particularly when you have several agile teams working independently on the same product, all conducting their own micro experiments. This leads to unusable products that leave users unhappy.

Now, if you are Google, maybe you can get away with this. But if you're not Google, you cannot and should not do this.

You don't get a product that looks like the new Gmail unless you want it to look like that. I bet no one at Google literally wanted the product to look like this, but products reflect the product development processes that create them. If you have a process with a lot of disparate agile teams working without a lot of oversight and coordination with a culture of A/B testing everything, you will end up with disjointed products.

I would also be extremely careful A/B testing different shades of the same color against each other. Different displays display colors differently (and displays are becoming more accurate over time). Different lighting conditions make people perceive colors differently. And the conditions in which people are using computing devices is changing over time.

Both Google and Bing A/B tested to find the “optimal” shade of blue for their search results. And yet, their tests yielded different results.

Do not mistake this post as suggesting that you shouldn't have robust A/B testing capabilities. You should. But that's not nearly enough.

I may be mildly addicted to Lanebreak on my Peloton.

What is it? Think Guitar Hero meets spin class. People love videos games and challenges, and I don’t know why more fitness devices aren’t learning from video games.

If people are willing to do something as dumb and pointless as spending countless hours learning to play fake guitar, imagine how much time they’ll be willing to spend if they are actually accomplishing something. Lanebreak is legit. There is a big market here.

Peloton has had a very rough year and a lot of bad news (mostly related to over expansion and poor operational management). Lanebreak’s release was the first good news in awhile for the company. And, frankly, it’s a heck of an experience.

Peloton has been too focused on hardware (and marketing) and not nearly focused enough on software. Lanebreak should have been released much sooner than now, because it’s exactly the kind of software they should be investing in.

If Peloton is smart, they’ll create more games and experiences like Lanebreak, and they’ll focus more on software and ecosystems. Peloton’s hardware is nice, but their ability to build an elite experience is going to be with software and ecosystems. Heck, I think Peloton might be able to charge extra for games (or at least season passes with extra content and challenges).

I enjoy the instructor-led classes, but having another way to ride can be a nice way to keep up interest in riding day after day. Lanebreak classes are as short as five minutes, and if you just want to grab a few minutes of exercise when you have time in your day, they are easy to pick up and do than other rides.

I've been regularly hitting new PRs (personal records) with Lanebreak, and other Peloton users tell me the same. The lack of instructors allows you to focus more on your performance. The other thing that Lanebreak does better and different than Peloton's instructor-led classes is that you know how long each interval will last.

There is never any mystery of how hard you'll need to go in a particular part of a Lanebreak class. The Peloton UI does not contain info about how long intervals are when you are in instructor-led classes, which means that people often have to shave some of their performance off to make sure they get through the interval.

If you know you have 20 seconds left on an interval, you can give it your all for that 20 seconds. But if you aren't sure if you have five seconds or three minutes left, it can be hard to give it your all.

In this gif you can see how intervals work in Lanebreak. You visually know how much more you have to do and you get an increasing score to encourage you to ride harder.

I’ll have a feature review of the Peloton UI and overall UX, and while I think it is better than most connected fitness experiences, it still could get a lot better. The lack of data around how long intervals are and which Power Zone you are supposed to be in during Power Zones classes is a weird usability oversight.

Lanebreak classes are hosted in the cloud, so the bikes don't have to do anything other than send some cadence and resistance data to cloud servers (and this means they could probably sell the classes to non-Peloton equipment). But this does make me wonder why the Lanebreak tracks aren't more interesting and varied.

Hear me out on this one: What if Lanebreak tracks looked like Mario Kart tracks. What if!

I know making better looking and varied tracks would cost more money, but the Lanebreak tracks all look the same and are fairly bland.

Also, what if there were daily, weekly, and monthly challenges to compete? What if I could challenge my friends to the challenges? What if we could set up competitions?

Where is the social aspect of Lanebreak? This is a big miss.

Lanebreak does offer a good variance in difficult. There are four difficulty levels and each level has different branches with varied difficulty you can do. Riders can progress from beginner to expert (and expert is extremely hard if you are wondering).

I’d like to see a true custom difficulty tier added in based on a person’s functional threshold power (FTP) score. This would allow a custom progressive overload programming to help users increase their FTP scores and physical fitness in a methodical way. This is how Peloton’s existing Power Zone training works and why not bring Power Zone training to Lanebreak and other games?

Power Zone training is the best thing going on the Peloton, and oddly not marketed enough by Peloton, but the Power Zone classes can get monotonous over time. I always take a break in-between blocks of Power Zone training. Having a Lanebreak way of doing Power Zone training would help keep me engaged.

Lanebreak is a true minimal viable product. What it does, it does well. And it doesn't do a lot of stuff.

This is the proper way to do MVPs. Lanebreak doesn’t have a lot of features or depth, but it does what it does well. It’s better to have half the features and nail them than have double the features and half-ass all of them.

If Peloton can keep iterating on this, they'll have a massive hit on their hands. If they basically stop iterating and just add some new rides every now and then, they'll miss a huge opportunity.

Going from an MVP to a bonafide hit is the big challenge for product teams. Peloton has climbed the first big mountain by releasing a great MVP. Now it is time to scale mountain number two by releasing a strong 2.0.

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Another day, another writer is complaining about how you can't use Apple's Magic Mouse while it is charging.

This is the most tired and lazy design criticism on the Internet today. Let's walk through why that is.

The charging port is on the bottom of Magic Mouse, which means the mouse has to be flipped over to be charged. And you can't use an upside-down mouse. 

But is this really a big issue? No.

It's just not a big issue. 

The idea that one of the core design constraints of a wireless mouse should be that a user can use it while tethered to a wire is silly. It's a nice bonus if you can use it while wired, but the entire purpose of wireless mice is that people don't want to use wires.

I find wires get in the way of mousing. I can't stand wired mice. I have never used one of my wireless mice with a wire.

If I wanted to use a wired mouse, I'd use a wired mouse.

But it's also a silly complaint because there is so much that the Magic Mouse does poorly from a design perspective.

Let's look at how the Magic Mouse performs in the five areas of UX (usability, utility, functional integrity, visual design, and persuasiveness). 

The Magic Mouse is the best-looking mouse ever made. It's not close. It's an object of beauty.

From a visual design perspective, Apple nails it. 

I have also found it well made and free of bugs and defects. Its battery lasts a long time (longer than most mice). Occasionally it can be finicky with scrolling and gestures due to its lack of physical buttons and scroll wheels. I'll dock Apple a bit on functional integrity because of this, but overall it's pretty solid in this area.

The Magic Mouse also allows horizontal scrolling and pinch to zoom, both of which can be useful for creatives. The Magic Mouse is much higher than most mice from a utility standpoint.

The Magic Mouse also gets excellent battery life, and it charges quickly. On top of that, Apple warns you if the battery is low. 

The kind of wireless mice I can't stand and that I won't use again are the ones that use replaceable batteries. I wasted so much time in the office looking for replacement batteries when my mouse battery went. These mice also generally can't tell you the charge state of the batteries, so they go out without warning.

Using the Magic Mouse was positively luxurious in comparison. Once a month, I'd charge it overnight, and I'd never have to worry about the battery. If I forgot to do this, I'd charge it for a few minutes while getting coffee and be set for the day. It was easy and simple.

I see many people buying and using them, so it is persuasive enough.

But it all falls apart with usability. And I don't mean the upside-down charging!

The Magic Mouse is an RSI monster. I used to use the Magic Mouse and now can't use it for a few minutes before my wrist starts hurting.

It is incredibly unergonomic. There is a reason that other mice are not nearly this flat. There is a reason that no one is trying to copy the form of the Magic Mouse.

So, while the mouse offers creatives more controls via gestures and horizontal scrolling, it's a hard mouse to use for long periods.

This is a classic example of how a product can be very good at most areas of UX, but if it completely botches one, the whole thing falls apart. I do not recommend the Magic Mouse. Its usability issues sink the entire experience.

I highly recommend vertical mice for people who need to use mice for long periods every day. I use the Logitech MX Vertical. It's my No. 1 mouse pick.

I also use a Magic Trackpad with my left hand. I find that it gives my right wrist a break, and it also allows me to take advantage of gestures and horizontal scrolling. It's the best of both worlds.

Apple's Magic Trackpad is the opposite of the Magic Mouse. It's a home run in every UX dimension (if you like using trackpads). If you are a creative who uses a lot of MacOS gestures, I'd consider getting a Magic Trackpad, even if you also want to use a mouse.

There are a lot of people who like the Magic Mouse. It's beautiful on your desk, and its gestures and horizontal scrolling are genuinely helpful. But for many people, the form of the mouse is too much to bear.

The Magic Mouse is a profoundly uncomfortable mouse for many people, and even if you don't find it uncomfortable today, it may be putting you on the road to RSI.

Here's the rub: To enable charging while in use, the Magic Mouse needs a redesign, but if you like how the Magic Mouse looks and feels, a redesign to allow charging while in use would change that.

Do I consider the Magic Mouse well designed? No. But no matter what Apple does to its charging, I will not consider it well designed. It needs a new form.

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