Websites are not applications (...usually)

One of the increasingly blurry lines in the online world is the concept of websites vs. applications. Since the rise of the iPhone and its app store (and the corresponding app markets for platforms such as Android and Blackberry), the word "app" has rapidly spread into the mainstream. This is largely a distinction of marketing -- an "app" is really no different from what we've previously called "programs," "software," or even "games." But it also has started to overlap with the definition of "website."

For example, think of something like Google or Facebook -- these are websites. But they can also function as applications -- tools that you use often. And indeed, both have released "apps" for platforms such as the iPhone. But whether you use them in "app" format or "website" format, they function pretty much the same. The primary difference, really, is that an app is catered to the particular device you are using (although, with browser detection capabilities, a website can cater itself to your device as well).

The problem with this increasing overlap is that a lot of companies are misunderstanding what it means to have an "app," and they don't think about why other companies even have (or need) apps in the first place. I suspect a lot of people see the "social media" revolution and the increasing dominance of smart phones, and think they need to get in on it -- Make an app! Integrate with social media! Create user profiles and personalize based on each individual person! It's a marketing mantra that seems sensible -- reach your customers where they are rather than forcing them to come to you. So if Google and Facebook are websites, and they have apps, if I have a website, I should have an app too, right?

Well, no, not necessarily.

The fact is, most websites are NOT social media hubs or tools. Most websites are standalone pieces that people may visit once in their whole lives, or perhaps once every few months or so at a maximum. You might visit a furniture website when shopping for a couch and never come back. Maybe you need an exterminator and find them online, and then you never need them again. Perhaps you're going on vacation and check out a spa online at your destination, which you might never visit again. These are websites that deliver value at the time you use them, but you're not going back again very often (if ever). You're not going to make that exterminator's website your home page. You're not going to download the spa's app. And you're probably not going to set up a personal profile at a furniture studio's website.

But what about your favorite pizza delivery place? Your bank? Your favorite local clothing store? You might visit all of those places often, and would benefit from apps, profiles, or other long-term connections. Here's a few questions to ask yourself before you start thinking you need to be investing in these alternate methods of customer connection.

1. Do you provide a service or sell things that people tend to purchase frequently -- and can they make those purchases online?
If yes, you might benefit from an online profile that lets customers save their payment info and other preferences. You might also consider a simple mobile phone app that does the same thing.

2. Is there a useful (free) tool that you could provide online or via an app that your customers would use often and find valuable?
If yes, then you might benefit from providing an app or online tool. For example, I worked on Tide's "Stain Brain" website and app -- it gives tips for removing small stains on the go, which keeps Tide in the customer's mindset without requiring them to pay anything to use the app.

3. Does your business interact with the community in a way that engages people in a non-customer role (e.g., you sponsor a charity event with participants who aren't necessarily customers)?
If yes, then you might benefit from branching out via a stronger social media presence -- people are happy to support a cause by posting about it on Facebook or sending messages on Twitter to ask their friends to donate or help, and your name gets out there in the process.

If you can't answer yes to any of the above questions, there's a good chance you may not be in need of apps, social media, and user profiles. Any of those avenues done wrong can actually harm your image -- a useless app ends up looking like little more than an ad taking up space on your phone, a Twitter feed that is never updated just looks like you don't care about your business, and adding a user profile for a site you may rarely visit just frustrates the visitor and may serve as more of a barrier than a convenience.

So while everyone is shouting about the next wave of "customer enablement," keep in mind that it's not just whether or not you have an "app" -- it's a matter of whether or not that app (or profile, or Facebook page, etc.) actually offers any value to your audience.

Pointless "innovation" (the new iPod Shuffle)

Before I began this blog, I attempted a different style of blogging elsewhere that was intended to focus more on good/bad examples of design. My first example of good design was the iPod Shuffle. The multi-colored clip-on items were only a little bigger than a postage stamp and I loved them. They were perfect for the gym, or if I wanted to ride the subway in town for a night out without having to stuff my pockets with an iPod.

Today Apple announced the new version of the Shuffle. It is not all that drastic a change, and there are some new features I like, such as the ability to hear the song/artist name spoken to you while listening and the addition of controls to the headphones.

But most of the other changes seem either pointless or actually negative.

• The Shuffle is now even physically smaller than before -- but was anyone even asking for this? The previous Shuffle was tiny as it was -- it weighed less than an ounce already. I can see the benefit in reducing weight with slightly larger objects, even something as small as a cell phone can benefit from being a few ounces lighter. But when you are changing something to be tenths of an ounce lighter, will anyone care?
• There are now no buttons on the Shuffle itself. The idea of adding inline buttons to the earphones is great -- but making that the ONLY way to interact with the device is a mistake. You are now requiring your audience to use only specially designed earphones with the device.
  
• The size of the storage has increased to 4GB. There really isn't any harm in adding more storage, but for many people the 1GB (or 2GB) was probably sufficient. And the new 4GB is over 60% more expensive than the old 1GB. Is that price increase worth a memory jump that many may not need? For now, the old 1GB version is still available, but it will undoubtedly be phased out.
  
• This is purely cosmetic, but -- why only silver/dark gray options for colors? Apple has an affection for clean lines, which I love, but when your object is about half the size of your pinky finger with no buttons or interface on most of the surface, you risk going from "sleek" to "lifeless." A little color would at least allow some personality.

I have to wonder, why did Apple bother? The voice reading of tracks was a very nice touch, but otherwise there is little innovative here. In terms of convenience, the size of the Shuffle was no longer an issue. The area probably most asking for innovation is the headphones now -- wires still get tangled, they are aesthetically unpleasing sometimes, and can get caught on things. Why not focus their innovative efforts on something like making wireless earphones standard? And if that is a difficult goal, why even bother at all with tweaking something that was already extremely effective as is?

The shackles of innovation

It's a word that has lost virtually meaning due to its constant repetition: innovation. Any number of industries must hear this word all the time -- it seems like the single most important thing to just about everyone. Is your product, or site, or approach innovative? If not, it might as well be worthless. Everyone is trying to "think outside the box" (a phrase so cliched at this point that even putting it in quotes doesn't give it the ironic distance it deserves). There is a widespread assumption that the status quo is bad, the way we do anything today is inferior to some "new" way we've yet to discover, and the search for this "new" way should trump all other efforts.

I can't agree with any of that. Striving fervently for innovation strikes me as severely misdirected effort, not because I believe innovation is bad, but because I think it is a side effect, not a goal unto itself.

The biggest problem with focusing solely on innovation, in my mind, is the assumption that current ways are bad -- it is starting with a ground floor decision to disregard all the prior work done by those in your field to get you where you are today. It is certainly true that previous work may have been done based on faulty information, incorrect assumptions, and other ill-advised decisions that could have brought things to a highly imperfect state today. But it is by no means a guarantee -- in fact, the opposite could also be true. Your product/site/whatever could be the way it is today because of highly reasoned research and testing that led to it being extremely solid and well thought-out. Unless you know all this background already, you can't really claim that innovation is necessary.

Focusing solely on innovation also sidesteps what should probably be the true goal of any project - to make the best product/site possible. A thorough process will explore the tried and true ways as well as newer, more innovative approaches. In many cases, more standard, "non-innovative" methods may prove to be the best fit.

Let's say you create a new site or product and all your testing and research leads to a conclusion that your best bet is to rely on well-established techniques. Had your goal been solely to innovate, this project would be a failure -- you've created nothing innovative. And yet, you've created the best possible product/site for your users -- the only problem was that it didn't involve creating anything truly new, just using existing principles to their greatest effect. How could that be bad?

Now let's consider the converse situation. Rather than seeking innovation, your goal at the start of a project is solely to create the best product/site possible. You do your brainstorming and research and find that the best solution is one that DOES in fact use a new, innovative approach -- it is thoroughly supported by your testing. No one would call this project a failure, and by focusing on making the best product/site possible, you've now overdelivered by also finding an innovative approach in the process. Innovation was not the goal -- it was icing on the cake.

There are a lot of reasons why innovation is still such a prized asset -- it's sexy, it sounds good, it shakes designers out of their boredom -- but these are not enough to warrant prizing it above quality. Think you've got a better way to do something? By all means, explore that new method and see if it works better -- but be willing to recognize the value in also learning that it's possible an existing method is still superior.

I should mention that this post is partially inspired by Scott Berkun, who I saw speak at the UI12 conference in Cambridge, MA, in 2007. He spoke about the "myths of innovation" and mentioned, for example, how innovations are often accidents, and he also talked about how the word "innovation" has indeed lost a lot of meaning over the years. I don't claim that this post represents his opinions at all, but his talk came back into my mind as I worked on a recent project that was driven by a client's desire to innovate. Check out his blog, it's got some good stuff.

Why isn't usability common sense?

One of the things that has always amazed me is just how many books there are out there about every imaginable web-related topic from programming to strategy to marketing. And of course, there are plenty of books about usability and all its related fields.

Let me emphasize for a moment that I'm talking about BOOKS -- big thick tomes, hundreds (sometimes thousands) of pages long. I can't entirely fathom why they are all necessary. How much can you really say on any of these topics? But, I recognize that there is obviously a market for these books and I'm sure many find them incredibly useful. On that end, I chalk it up to a difference of approach -- most of what I have learned has come from experience and small chunks of learning, but I can certainly appreciate that others learn in a different way.

But the one thing that strikes me is just how much of this knowledge, particularly when it comes to usability, should be common sense but isn't. Certain things require research to determine, and may not be entirely obvious. People scan web pages in an F pattern. The first two words of a list item should carry the informational weight (even if it means poor grammar). Most people find websites via search engines. None of those things are all that surprising, but they're not the kind of things you'd expect the average person to know off-hand.

But what about some of the other, more "obvious" aspects of usability? Tiny fonts are hard to read. Straightforward, descriptive language is easier to understand. Human beings are creatures of habit. All of these things seem like they should be self-evident -- the last of those three is even a common proverb. But take a look online. The web is rampant with sites that use extremely small type, writers bury their content in made-up jargon and unclear, confusing prose, and many designers view it as a personal challenge to always break from traditional designs and interfaces in favor of flashy, unexpected interactions.

If you asked a construction team to build a house, but told them it should have no windows, the door should be a round porthole the size of a hula hoop, and the ceilings should be 4 feet high, you'd be called crazy. But, technically, it would still be a "functional" house, and it would certainly get some attention. A lot of websites seem to fall into this category, often because they are old and poorly made just due to a lack of skill/investment, but some newer websites even fall into this trap, as high-end designers seek to create showy, "interesting" sites that draw in the eye but fail when it comes to actual interaction.

Is it that these common sense ideas aren't common sense after all? Is there an innate drive among designers to always push against commonly-held perceptions? The challenge of anyone with an eye on usability is to recognize that the desire to question the status quo is enormously valuable -- but the ability to look critically at your own "innovative" ideas and recognize when change is a negative is possibly even more beneficial, and is certainly undervalued.

Don't blindly accept "the way things are," but don't abandon common sense in the name of innovative design.

Dominant Design

One of the most interesting concepts in design that I've come across covers all sorts of media, and that's the concept of dominant design. My understanding, in short, is that something is a "dominant design" when it becomes so ubiquitous that it is virtually impossible to replace it with an alternative. A good example is the QWERTY keyboard. There was certainly logic behind its creation (although the rumor that part of the design was based around being able to type the word "typewriter" using only the top line of keys is sure to make any usability person frown), but I've heard that testing other layouts has shown that there are, in fact, better ways to arrange the keys. But if you try to sell a computer with a non-QWERTY keyboard, you will fail. The design is too omnipresent to be challenged.

I find this issue particularly interesting lately because it seems a lot of things long considered dominant design are being challenged. The most compelling example I can think of is how the standard gasoline-powered car engine is now being challenged mightily by hybird, electric, and fuel-cell alternatives. The whole "green" movement is having an impact on dominant designs in a number of other fields too, from architecture to food to energy production (one of the most fascinating stories I've heard is how some engineers are attempting to collect the energy generated by footsteps in a building's lobby and use it for power -- a wonderful example of conservation, if it is achievable).

In the world of design, trying to "break the rules" is a perennial goal of many designers. Tell a designer something has to be a certain way and they almost always will want to do it a different way. I met many creative folks at my last job who were always trying to come up with new and "exciting" ways to handle website interactions - a headache for me from a UI perspective as generally "new and exciting" translates to "confusing and annoying" to users. Designers may love change but most people hate it, and many actions are so ingrained that trying to break those habits is generally not worthwhile.

But that doesn't mean that challenging a "dominant design" is a bad idea. It's just important to make sure it's being done in a way that doesn't put off users, and that the impetus for change is coming from the point of view of "there's a better way to do this" rather than "I just want to be different."

Designs often become dominant for very good reasons, and in a pinch, it's generally safe to assume that if everybody else is doing something a certain way, it's fine to follow suit. But stepping back and heading to the drawing board from scratch occasionally is definitely a worthwhile exercise. You may end up realizing that the "standard" way is the best way after all, but it's worth making the occasional challenge to dominant design. You may just end up finding a better way after all.