Listening to what matters

A while ago on this blog I wrote about the joy of doing work that mattered, with a nod to Tim O'Reilly for the inspiration. It was near the beginning of 2009 and felt like a New Years resolution.

At the beginning of this year, I need another resolution, similar but crucially different.

Listen to what matters.

In the intervening years, the background noise of chatter, comment, opinion, advice and alarm has grown beyond my expectations. 120m Facebook users then, a billion now. Twitter had registered less than a billion tweets ever, now it's 16bn a month.

It's hard to filter out noise and only ingest information that will be helpful. If you're pushing out into new areas of work, how can you tell the experts from those who just talk the talk and have a lot of followers? How much time should you spend finding and processing all this information?

My 2013 resolution then is to listen to what matters and ignore the rest. I'm going through my social and web feeds, bookmarks and Flipboard settings, and purging the marginal voices, letting those who remain be heard more clearly.

And trusting my judgement.

Next generation digital discovery

A few years ago we were asked by the British Library to imagine how research would work when everything was digital. No need to come to the reading rooms any more.

We worked for maybe two years building prototypes, working with curators, academics and researchers and doing some serious analysis in to work patterns, use of tools and interface expectations.

One output from that was the Growing Knowledge exhibition held in 2010-11 at the BL where some findings were presented and questions asked.

But we were convinced that there was a need for a fully-fledged piece of software for the next generation of researchers. It had to:
- work anywhere including tablet and phone
- be as easy to deploy as possible
- be flexible for users and customisable for clients
- provide a great set of research tools
- interface with all sorts of existing tools from Twitter to citation software

We've called it iNQUIRE and it's now available for your institution. There's more here and take a look at the first project we're just completing with the Bodleian.

Suspending Disbelief – the Dubious Role of Skeuomorphism in Software Design

The above is the title of a piece I wrote a couple of months ago for a project at the Tate - Transforming the Artists Book.

I was prompted to look at it again with the news that Scott Forstall, head of iOS has been fired from Apple. He is the guy that presumably champions interface designs like this:

An unholy alliance of overstretched metaphor and vanilla XCode button design.

Set that against the Windows 8 UI:

I just wonder if Scott Forstall was sticking to his skeuomorphic guns, and Tim Cook saw where Windows 8 and Android were going and decided that Scott's path was a dead end?

Anyway, here's the article...

My first job in what was then known as multimedia was for a design agency in 1991. One of the early jobs we did was an internal multimedia brochure. This being just after the 1980s the boss still drove an Aston Martin and wanted the interface to look like the dashboard of his car. So that’s what we built. You pressed buttons to go to various sections and the speedometer showed where you were. Steering wheel, walnut dashboard, indicators – this interface was a complete re-creation of the MD’s car. He loved it. Everyone else hated it.

Skip forward 20 years, and we see a strange revival of this sort of design, that includes the apparently unlikely participation of Apple. In iOS we see a shaky wooden bookcase to contain all your iBooks, a facsimile of some sort of notebook for Notes (complete with ripped edges to the pages) and a frankly bizarre green baize look for the Game Center.

This approach to interface design is known as skeuomorphism, or making one thing resemble another. More simply expressed it could be seen as the use of metaphor in design.

In 1991, the use of skeuomorphism was rife. Buttons lit up, had beveled edges and depressed when you clicked them. Backgrounds were made to look like paper, wood or glass. Aston Martin dashboards were still a rarity however. All of these devices were designed to familiarize users with a new world of interaction. Prior to the invention of “multimedia” driven by the use of software such as Hypercard and Macromind Director, users interacted via command-line interfaces or the early versions of Windows and Mac OS. How then to assist people in navigating this new multi-dimensional world of content? The easiest way was to appropriate devices people were familiar with and use them in interface design.

The last 20 years have made us comfortable with multi-modal ways of navigating content, and, for the born-digital generation, their ability to grasp seemingly-complex interfaces comes with a very short learning curve. Why then do software developers persist with this use of metaphor?

In 1997 we started to develop Turning the Pages – three-dimensional digital facsimiles of normally rare and valuable books. We would film a curator turning the pages of one of these books, use this footage as source material to develop a millimeter-accurate three-dimensional model of the original and then code it so that, when the users fingers swept across a touchscreen, the pages would turn. It was so realistic that staff at the British Library once found an elderly lady vainly swiping all the glass cases in the Treasures Gallery. She had spent too long using Turning the Pages and thought none of the books were real.

Why did we do this? Why not present the pages, folio by folio, flat on the screen? Our answer was that most books are about content. You buy them for the words on the page. Some books are about the artefact itself – the beautifully bound and the immaculately typeset. But some transcend the state of “book” and become icons. There is no other Lindisfarne Gospels or Domesday Book, no substitutes are possible. One of the earliest books we worked on was the Sherborne Missal, which allegedly has more medieval miniature paintings than the whole National Gallery. People wanted to engage physically with this object, to pick it up, to turn the pages. Because of it’s value and fragility they were not allowed to. Many very valuable books are now not even on display all the time. For six months a year they are “rested” for light, stress on the spine or binding and sub-optimal atmospheric conditions. So our attempt at digital facsimiles is a deliberate response to the frustrated needs of museum and library visitors to experience the original. We have been asked many times whether our software should be used to display magazines or print books. I simply don’t see the value in this. Continuing to use metaphor in this context seems a lazy approach to interface design when the folio ceases to have any meaning other than as a container for words that originated in a formless medium like Microsoft Word.

Why then does the use of skeuomorphism still exist in design? I believe it is because the wheel has turned full circle. We moved from a cartoonish use of metaphor, to a brutal exclusion of the decorative, the beautiful and the playful as espoused by usability experts such as Jakob Nielsen. The almost universal adotion of such principles spoke of a lack of confidence in developers for over a decade, but now, with a broader, more casual user base, increased confidence, and an iterative approach to design that readily allows for change, developers have re-discovered their playful side and introduced fun into a visual world that had become too austere.

For most books though, I think there remains a huge intellectual challenge to re-imagine their form for a digital age. The Kindle edition remains a largely slavish copy of the codex unbound. The first steps in a new direction have been taken by Apple with their iBooks Author software, allowing books to change and re-flow in portrait or landscape form, and for the ready inclusion of all sorts of media.

But of all the challengers for the re-imagining of the book interface, it might just be that we see Microsoft as the unlikely champions of a new approach. Their approach to the design of Windows 8 shows that they have been through a rigorous rethink of what an interface might be like, and the result is modern, pared down, triumphantly usable and surprisingly elegant. Were they to take this approach to books, perhaps in conjunction with their relationship with Nook, the results might give everyone a reason to denounce skeuomorphism for good.

Except maybe us.

eBook Fun and Games on Windows 8

Here's a short video of the things we did for the eBook Treasures Windows 8 app, making use of the stylus and the gyroscope built in to the tablets.

Our eBookTreasures Windows 8 App

So this is what we've been working on for the last 6 weeks or so. One of the first Windows 8 apps.

The previous versions of our books were (and are) sold in the iBookStore, and I had a revealing conversation with a client the other day. He was trying to demo one to a colleague and spent ages rootling around on his iPad looking for it. He couldn't find it as he was looking for an app. It didn't occur to him that we'd built it as an iBook.

With visual books like these, people just think of apps. So we built them one.

There are other advantages too. As well as aggregating all our books in one place, we can add features like gilded pages catching the light when you tilt the tablet, annotation on the page using a stylus, pinning a book to the start page, our own version of whispersync and much more.

We're really proud of the app and I think the sort of content we have sits very well with the minimalist interface design encouraged for Windows Store apps.

The app is free, and A Medieval Bestiary from the British LIbrary collection is available for free download within the app for a while. Other books range from £1.79 to about £3.49.

There's a link here to the Windows Store. If you are on another OS (kind of probable right now...) you'll just get a web page. But with a predicted 1m installs of Win8 a day, I'm hoping that the link will be useful for you someday soon.

Windows 8 pt2 - second guessing the future

As developers and publishers we have to make regular bets on where different platforms and devices are going to be in the next year or two. I don't look further out than that, as I mostly think things are too volatile, and if I can't turn our little ship around in that time frame, I'm not doing my job.

So I was interested to see some new Forrester research into predicted market shares in 2016.

For Windows 8, Microsoft are talking a lot about a unified experience across tablet, desktop and phone. With the phone piece, I think they have a way to go, but I can see the tablet/desktop differentiation blurring.

For the Win8 app we just built, we made a bet. We'd rather be a big fish in a small pond that's growing fast than a small fish in an enormous pond. This used to be called first mover advantage. Our app will be published in the Windows Store in the Books and Reference category. I expect around 250 apps to be there on Friday, so we should get some attention. Discoverability won't be a problem, even if overall numbers might be. Contrast that with the Apple App Store, where there are currently 28,255 book apps. We'd be buried.

Now the bet wouldn't make any sense if the Windows Store doesn't grow, but we know that Microsoft will sell 350m Win8 licenses a year if they track the progress of Win7. If you combine that, with the increased relevance in the tablet sector that Forrester highlight, and mix in people's habituation with buying from online stores and I think it will grow.

Which isn't to say we aren't building an iOS app as well, of course...

Windows 8 - Brilliant and/or Flawed?

I've been spending the last month or so working on a Windows Store app, and, as a result have installed the OS on a tablet and desktops. I'll come to telling about the app in a week or so when it's live, but the experience of using Windows 8 in anger has been interesting. And it's a tale of two halves.

On tablets, Win8 is a gamechanger. iOS is a slick OS and an iPad works great for the tasks we've grown accustomed to using a tablet for like web browsing, mail, gaming and some note-taking maybe. But how many people do you know who've ditched their MacBook and run only on an iPad? Pretty tough to do that, what with missing or hobbled key apps, small HD, no USB etc

The Win8 experience has made it possible or even likely to run a slate as your only computer. USB and HDMI out means you can plug in your monitor and keyboard, SD card slot means you can drop in another 64Gb of storage at low cost, and you have a full fat work PC. But then you come to the OS experience on a desktop. And I have to say there's a learning curve. In an attempt to develop one OS to rule them all, the erstwhile Metro UI elements mean you'll be scratching around for a while even trying to find things like Power Off and Control Panels (or maybe that was just me). Navigating the UI with a mouse is perfectly possible, but it feels like eating grains of rice with chopsticks.

In a touch environment, the whole thing makes sense. The UI makes iOS look dated, the UX elements that aggregate feeds into the Start page make life easier, and the fluid touch interactions that take some learning (from within any app, just swipe from the top of the screen to the bottom to close it) soon become intuitive. Shifting back, iOS felt clumsy, jabbing at buttons the whole time. Snap View even works well, running an app just in part of the screen while you get on with something else.

So I think Microsoft is to be applauded in trying to bridge this divide - one OS for all you do. There will be a vocal minority (majority?) who will not learn how to get the best from the OS and hate it because it's not Win7 (or even XP). But for those who give it a couple of days and realise they can run everything from one device, it's a gamechanger. Apple showed us how to build a tablet. And maybe Microsoft have shown us how it grows up.