I’m attending DUX 2005 for the next three days and will be one of the hosts for the Adaptive Path Studio Tour. Hope to meet old and new colleagues there!

Yes, I know this entry breaks blog time…

People are developing desktop applications that run in browsers. There’s email, word processing, IM, even spreadsheets for heaven’s sake. While I think these are pretty cool and technical marvels, I also think they’re dancing bears: it’s not that they do it well, it’s that they do it at all.

Here’s the business plan for most of these types of applications: “It’s just like your desktop, but using the power of the web, you can do it anywhere.” Umm, no, that isn’t the real power of the web. The web’s strength lies in collective actions and data (e.g. Amazon’s “People who bought this also bought…”), social communities across wide distances (Yahoo Groups), aggregation of many sources of data (RSS feeds), near real-time access to timely data (stock quotes, news), and easy publishing of content from one to many (blogs, Flickr). Few of these desktoppy applications take advantage of those things because at their core, they were designed for a different medium, a solitary computer.

Besides, in this era of laptops, wifi, web-enabled phones, and Blackberries, being able to have your spreadsheet at an internet cafe is becoming more and more an edge case, not the norm. It certainly isn’t enough of a differentiator to make me move from my desktop apps to the web.

All this time spent porting over desktop apps to the web would probably be better spent building web-native applications, that do take advantage of the web’s strengths. Instead of looking to the past, why not to the future?

There’s a moment in just about every project when you have to do something ridiculous to appease someone: a design direction to try that you know is going to be totally unworkable, an extra presentation for a big boss, some model or power point slide to explain the obvious, or a really unnecessary meeting. Luckily I’ve heard a great new phrase for this sort of silliness, to be used when it arises: “Dance for Grandma!” It’s usually accompanied by rhythmic hand-clapping. Brilliant.

Want to start a Web 2.0 company? Here’s the keywords you need to sprinkle through your presentations:

• social
• tagging
• network
• collaboration
• user-generated content
• RSS
• API
• platform

I’ve heard or spoken to at least three different companies lately who do “social networking software” and all three meant something totally different by that term.

As I mentioned in an earlier post on Service vs. Product Design, services are easier to replicate and improve upon than products. Similarly, I think services, especially web services, are easier to create and improve upon than content. My new law, Saffer’s Law, is this:

It’s easier to create a content aggregator than it is to create content.

Hundreds of aggregators can grab content from the New York Times, but it’s much harder to create the content of the New York Times. It probably wouldn’t be hard (at least on the front-end) to make a better auction service than Ebay: the trick would be to move their millions of users (and their content) over to it. Just ask Amazon Auctions.

Now certainly creating (and constantly maintaining and upgrading) a great service is no easy task. But at the center of most web services is a kernel of content (this can be user-supplied) and that has to be good or the service is junk. You wouldn’t trade from an online brokerage if their stock quotes were bad. You wouldn’t go to Google if their search results sucked.

Similarly, at the center of most offline services is a product, and if the product sucks, no great service is going to save it for too long. If Starbuck’s coffee tasted like Maxwell House, you wouldn’t buy very much of it.

In the cavalcade of hype around Web 2.0, we shouldn’t forget that a focus on services at the expense of the content that helps fuel them, could leave us with some very shallow services.

While I like marketing-readiness of the term Web 2.0, a part of the metaphor doesn’t ring true to me, namely this: in software, version 2.0 is a replacement for version 1.0; you usually don’t keep version 1.0 around. With Web 2.0, however, Web 1.0 (and 1.1, 1.2, etc.) are still around and likely will be for a long time. Web 2.0 isn’t replacing what we have, only supplementing and augmenting it. And living alongside it.

All this AJAX stuff is pretty cool, but we shouldn’t forget that one click away is still certs.com…

Robert Reimann, one of the people who literally wrote the book on personas, once mentioned that one of the most important elements of a persona is the photo of the person. My personal experience confirms this: I long remember the names and pictures of old personas long after I’ve forgotten other (probably more important) details about them.

A persona’s picture gives a face–literally–to the data, and choosing the right one is a combination of science and art. The science first.

I’m probably giving away my greatest secret here: Yahoo Personals are the best place online to find pictures for your personas. Why? Because there is an extensive amount of criteria they have that you can search by, for one thing. Looking for a 40-year-old lesbian Native American woman near Cheyenne? No problem, here’s about 20 of them, in a photo gallery for you to peruse. Another thing: people look their best in their photo personal ad, even if that best isn’t all that great. There’s a wide range of humanity to choose from.

The main difficulty in using Yahoo Personals is that you’re never sure of the size of the photo that people have uploaded. It might look fine onscreen, but be too tiny for print use. I’ve spent a lot of time frustrated after having found the perfect photo for my persona only to find out it’s too small or of too poor quality to use in print.

Also be sure to pick photos with a fairly neutral background and with no one else in the picture. In most cases, you want the focus of the photo to be mostly on the person’s face.

The art of choosing a persona resides in how two things relate to the data: what s/he is wearing, and what his/her expression is. Clothes tell a lot about a person (or, more accurately, what perceivers assume about the person): what they value, their socio-economic status, career, and a host of other things. Expression conveys attitude. How does the person approach the world? Cautiously, joyfully, angrily (yes, there are some angry photos in the personals!), hopefully? With expression, you can capture how your persona is going to approach your product, and that expression may say more than everything else you’ve written on the page.

It helps if you believe it too. The picture has to look like someone you could have talked to (or did talk to, if you interviewed people remotely). If it doesn’t seem like one of them, throw it out. There’s plenty more where that came from.

One final note about persona pictures: don’t get cute with them. The fastest way to have people dismiss your personas is to put in ridiculously beautiful/handsome people, people holding puppies, celebrities, you, your teammates, etc. It might be funny or clever for a moment, but that’ll fade and your personas will have lost all their power to remind us that it’s not about us, it’s about them.

I’m finding myself having trouble keeping up with all the RSS feeds I have (109). Which isn’t a huge number, but considering some of them are news feeds, del.icio.us popular, and group blogs like Boing Boing, it’s ending up being about 300 entries a day to read. Even at only a minute an entry (and some take much longer to mull over), that’s five hours of reading. Every day.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have five hours a day to read and process 300 chunks of information. There needs to be a better way to manage and control RSS feeds. As Herb Simon told us back in the 1960s, there’s no lack of information, just the human limitation to process it all.

Here’s some things I’d like to see in an RSS reader:

• the ability to widely vary the amount that a feed is accessed, anywhere from several times a day to once a month
• the ability to designate something as a temporary feed with a limited shelf life, so that after a designated period of time, it vanishes from my list of feeds
• the ability to determine which feeds will display as an “unread” feed in my dock (I wish I had this for email as well)

If anyone knows of a Mac feedreader that can do even some of these things, let me know.

All the cool kids, when not talking about design thinking, are talking about service design these days. In case, like me, you’re not one of the cool kids, service design is “the field concerned with the development of services to meet specific needs” (Shedroff) focusing on “customer experiences in industries such as retail, banking, transportation, healthcare, business-to-business enterprises, and education” (IDEO). John Thackara in his book In the Bubble makes the claim that we’re moving away from designing things (products) and towards more services, more joint ownership of things. And certainly even traditional product companies like IDEO seem to be pushing service design hard.

Me, I like the idea of service design and, with some 70% of the US economy being driven by services, it’s definitely needed. But I’m not quite ready to throw out product design yet. I agree that making less things, less useless things, is good for the environment and for our general mental health. But while I can strongly like a service (I heart Tivo), I don’t think it’s the same type of attachment that forms to a physical product. For one thing, services are intangible and apt to change. Services mutate, stagnate, and shift depending on the people supplying them. The experiences at McDonald’s and Starbucks can vary wildly, and those are two very controlled service processes. My grandfather’s lighter, meanwhile, will always (barring catastrophe) be the same. I own it, and there’s a big difference between renting a house and owning one. If a service better than Tivo came along, well, I might change. But I won’t trade in Wally’s zippo for something better. I have an attachment to it. Even if my grandpa had used Tivo, it probably wouldn’t stop me from changing to a new service if something awesome came along.

Another thing that seems to get overlooked in all the talk of service design is that most services are chock-full of products. Signage, physical devices, web sites, phone services, lighting, etc. are all part of a typical service ecology. Granted, there are fewer products made, but they are products nonetheless, and typically specialized products made specifically for that service.

It’s bitchingly hard to split product design from service design, especially on the web. Most non-content websites provide services, delivered over the internet instead of in-person. Ebay, Google, Yahoo, online brokerages and banks, travel sites, etc. are all providing you a service, or are part of a larger service, as in the case of Netflix. Users don’t own the website (obviously), they just use the service. Which, as I explained above with the zippo lighter vs. Tivo, makes most websites pretty vulnerable. If a search came along that was better than Google would you use it? Be honest. Which is one of the reasons why companies like Google and Yahoo give us stuff like toolbars. It’s easier to switch services than to get rid of a thing, even a digital thing.

I also have to wonder if service design isn’t really systems design in new clothes. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It means there’s more focus on context, on the entire system of use. Nothing is created and maintained in a vacuum. People use products in an environment, as part of other, larger things (the system). All service design is, really, is designing this whole system of use. Most interaction and industrial designers (at least the good ones) do this already. So perhaps service design is defined mostly by the types of contexts its delivered in? If so, I hope we’re not ghettoizing it; all design could be improved by the sorts of systems-thinking that service design is doing.