Almost every weekday, I travel down San Francisco’s Market Street. If you haven’t been down it, almost half of it is given over to flop houses, boarded-up shops, strip clubs, low-rent clothing stores, liquor and crappy convenience stores. Every time I take the bus down this main thoroughfare, I wonder, how can it remain like this? Real estate in San Francisco is outrageously expensive, and Market Street is tourist central. It’s always shocking to me, a resident. I can only imagine how it appears to Midwestern Suburban Family on Vacation.

I suppose it is one thing to read Kevin Lynch’s seminal book The Image of the City. It’s another thing to live it.

In The Image of the City, Lynch celebrates the empty lot as a place of possibility. In the same way, not every neighborhood in a city can be clean, yuppie, gentrified Pacific Heights, or even the nice but funky Haight Ashbury where I live. Sometimes you need the edge, the grit, the humanity. Sometimes (and for some, often) you need to grab a 40 or have some raunchy fun, and if everywhere is sanitized, where are you going to do that? The urge for such thrills isn’t going to disappear, no matter how many laws are passed or how many city clean-ups are enacted. The stuff just moves elsewhere; it doesn’t go away.

It’s the same with products. No matter how heavily engineered and controlled your design is, someone somewhere is going to tamper with it and push it to do something you didn’t think could be done with it. Things get hacked, whether we like it or not.

There are edges in both cities and products. We either live in denial or we acknowledge their necessity. The edges are places where unusual things live, things outside the mainstream. Things we often need, even if we don’t know it. New ideas. Forgotten ideas. Artists. Musicians. And, yes, junkies, sex workers, the homeless, grifters, the person who smashed your car window. The edges often teeter on chaos, and this can be dangerous and exciting.

So while I may never like Market Street, I do understand it, and its place in the city. Supposedly, the light and darkness are both alike to God.

I’ve been reading with wonder and fascination the comments about Yahoo buying del.icio.us. So many of the del.icio.us users seem to feel that because they used the service (for free), the service owes them something. This is, of course, absolute bullshit.

As I’ve noted before, services are different from physical products. If a better service comes along, people will quickly switch to it. How much do you owe former search engine king Altavista? Nothing. Had a better bookmarking/tagging tool come along, all these gripers would have moved their del.icio.us bookmarks over to it, no question. Services by their nature are ephemeral; they change and mutate over time. Don’t like it? Make your own service that you can maintain yourself forever.

Users of web services should remember that, unless you are paying for the service, you’re getting something for free that really isn’t free. Someone else has footed the bill for server space, bandwidth, development time, maintenance, etc. The service owners are paying for that, and the users, no matter how invested in the service they are, are not the owners.

This is not very Web 2.0 of me, I know, and perhaps I’m tainted by seeing what it takes to set up and a run a web service. It’s not easy and it’s expensive. Services like Flickr and del.icio.us, in order to scale, often need the resources (money, bandwidth, developers) that only a Yahoo or its ilk can provide to keep the service running well and to add or improve features. Imagine if Starbucks coffee service tried to serve millions of people with four people. For free. It doesn’t work. This is the nature of services, for good or ill.

I might as well come clean. I just signed a book deal with New Riders to write a book on interaction design. It’s tentatively called Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices, and the fates willing, it will be published next summer.

The book is meant for new(er) practitioners and students, although I’m making sure to throw in some high-end stuff for experienced designers as well. The book is drawing heavily on the curriculum I devised for the class I taught last year and the year before, and will cover not only web and software, but delve into devices and services as well. I think it will be the most holistic look at interaction design, issuing from a design perspective, on the bookshelves. At least, I hope it will be. Wish me luck writing it!

There’s some information you use daily (where you live). There’s other information you use occasionally (your parents’ address). There’s information you use rarely (who played Blair’s cousin Geri on The Facts of Life) (Geri Tyler). Then there’s the information you don’t know you need, information you might need in the future. How do you go about gathering that?

This is the appeal of intelligent agents.

I have a new essay on Adaptive Path’s website: The Web 2.0 Experience Continuum. It’s a little out there, but kind of interesting.

Back in 2000 when Boxes and Arrows began, it was a great source of knowledge for user experience practitioners. Since then, my feeling is that the type of material that’s typically found there has disseminated onto blogs, mainstream publications, and longer books on these topics. Blogs especially have likely been the ruin of many an online magazine, as writers skip the middleman/editor (sometimes to their (and our) detriment) and publish their work themselves.

This is certainly true for me. My last B&A article “Writing Smart Annotations” was in March 2003…a few months after starting my blog. Since then, most of my thoughts on design have gone into my blog, as have those of many of the early contributors to Boxes and Arrows. My list of design blog feeds is well over 50 now, and it’s more than enough reading on the subject matter on any given day.

Why then another online UX magazine, UXmatters? With Boxes and Arrows seemingly struggling to find content and its way in the new blog-centric world, do we really need another online magazine that covers the same thing? The audience and potential authors hasn’t grown significantly enough to warrant two in my opinion.

Online magazines like Slate and Salon exist and thrive (sort of) because they are able to offer premium content, written by paid writers and edited by paid editors, that no one else has. That no one else has. In this era of blogging, editors of the UX online magazines need to find the premium content that no one else has. They need to do the things that bloggers usually can’t do. Things like longer interviews with luminaries, and long, ground-breaking essays. This is, needless to say, very hard. I wish them both luck.

I’m going to reiterate Saffer’s Law again: it’s easier to create a content aggregator than it is to create content. I’m adding a corollary: It’s easier to replicate the form of something than its content as well.

Philips’s researchers have created HomeLab, a 24-hour testing facility designed like a house so the scientists can observe people interacting with prototypes in a “natural home environment.” From the website:

Philips HomeLab looks and feels like a regular home with modern furniture in every room, Van Gogh prints on the walls, and even a fully stocked kitchen. While no one lives at Philips HomeLab, temporary “residents” can stay at the facility for anywhere from 24 hours to two weeks, depending on the type of research being conducted. During their residence, individuals or families will go about life as usual, while interacting with the new technologies Philips has installed in the facility…Philips researchers will carefully watch how their tenants are living with these technologies 24 hours a day through tiny cameras, microphones and two-way mirrors that are hidden unobtrusively throughout HomeLab.

This is utterly ridiculous. Locking people in a house for “24 hours to two weeks” Big Brother-style while you observe them is simply not good research. You are not going to get natural results in an artificial environment, no matter how realistic.

The first core principle of ethnography is: You go to them. They don’t come to you and live in a lab for two weeks.

Now granted, they aren’t trying to do ethnography per se. They want to see what happens after the “newness” factor wears off with a new technology. This is an admirable goal, but wouldn’t the money for this lab have been better spent finding research subjects and installing the prototypes and observation equipment in the subjects’ own homes? Only there are subjects going to feel more natural–because they are in their familiar environment, not some lab made to look like a house.

The trend these days, even in usability testing, is to do it in homes, using the subjects’ computers. You get a sense of context then, and the subjects are more relaxed because they are on their own machines. This HomeLab is just adding a veneer of authenticity on top of artificiality. Don’t these people watch Survivor?

While not the worst conference I’ve ever been to, DUX 2005 was a disappointment. I think three things worked seriously against this conference: the location, the format, and the chosen content. Which is to say, almost everything.

Social networking is as (if not more) important than the program itself, and every effort should be made to foster those connections. And I’m not just talking about formal receptions. Fort Mason is a great location, but not for this sort of event, especially considering there was only one track at the conference. If you didn’t like the topic, there was no place close by (in the same physical space) to hang out in, and nothing really outside of the conference within walking distance. Everything in San Francisco was either a long walk or a car/taxi ride away. Not ideal for interactions around the conference.

One track programs are an interesting idea, but don’t work with a large group with no common theme. If you don’t like the session topic, you are stuck either doing nothing or sitting through something bored. A little variety is great and makes the conference seemed crammed full of good stuff. It also makes for more varied conversations (“What was that session about? Oh interesting…”).

I heard many people complaining about the five minutes of time each speaker got. Me, I frequently found that to be a mercy. It’s only when someone is a good presenter with interesting content that you want to give them more time. And I’m sad to say that I found that happening with only a handful of the chosen presenters, like Maren Costa of Amazon, Jane Murison of the BBC, and Jan Chipchase of Nokia. Granted, I missed a few sessions, so unfortunately I didn’t see everyone.

For a conference about design, there was very little talk about design. The five-minute format lends itself to much more of a show-and-tell format than to in-depth case studies. And that’s too bad, because DUX is supposed to be the practitioners’ conference (although there were certainly a handful of pure academic projects that were better suited for CHI or something).

Now, lest you think I’m just a hater, I have great sympathy for those responsible for DUX. It can’t be easy trapped between all those organizations, not to mention that the “peer-reviewed papers” format puts you at the mercy of both the submitters and reviewers for your content. Perhaps for a non-academic conference, you could dismiss with those for choosing sessions? A better solution is one where the conference has a curated theme and hand-selected presenters, like (allegedly: I’ve never been invited to either) TED or Design Engaged.

We need to use some of our tools on ourselves and our products (like this and other conferences) occasionally. Aside from the spotty wireless, the DUX conference format could have been from 20 years ago. We should figure out what attendees want (their goals) and then figure out the best ways of achieving those–the best form for this sort of conference. My guess is it won’t be seven people on a stage talking about seven different projects, switching every seven minutes.

In Erving Goffman‘s legendary book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, he identifies three social norms for conversations (“facial engagements”): opening, maintaining, and leave-taking aka ending the conversation. Instant messaging is great for openings (“Accept this message?” and the little ping) and maintaining (the open window, the noises), but is terrible about leave-taking.

There is no good, standard way without seeming rude to end an IM session. In person or on the phone, we usually give some indication (“Bye!”) we’re ending the conversation, but with IM, that’s not typically the case, at least not with my conversations. Thus, by the end of the day, my screen (unless I am using Adium with its tabbed IM sessions) is littered with conversations that have simply trailed off long before. Just closing the window seems rude, especially if the person on the other end sees you have disengaged with them.

I’m not sure if a solution needs to be designed into IM clients, or whether after a few more years of IMing becoming mainstream, social patterns will work themselves out.