Hello, Today.

Lately, I've been thinking about a few aspects of our society I think would benefit from some updating.

These aspects are mainly mental health and basic economy.

Mental Health

Nowadays, there is still a lot of competition and other factors that lead people to act defensively and treat mental health significantly differently from physical health.

This happens on both patient and doctor side. The patient is inserted into a culture that doesn't recognize mental health issues as well as physical health. And also, mental illness is seen as much worse than physical, not understood and a door to exclusion for the patients.

One example would be depression, although recognized, the symptoms and peer reaction is often negative, perhaps because it's the total opposite of what one most commonly seeks in life: happiness, fulfillment, stability.

From the doctor side, the tendency is to treat this example as a simple disease, to be cured with medicine and perhaps a few sessions with a psychologist. A quick, standard solution, albeit inappropriate. Often not enough attention is paid to solving the life context that is causing this ailment.

But to me, the only issue with mental health doesn't occur only when there's a disease, injuries occur often, and in my opinion, they are often not recognized or treated properly. They eventually grow up to an illness such as the previously mentioned depression.

My worry is that these injuries, of more often occurrence, negatively impact relationships, both personal and work.

They stop people from feeling fulfillment, happiness they so much seek. Think how many times you retained yourself from talking the truth because you were afraid of injuring a peer, knowing they'd never developed resistance to that injury, wouldn't know how to deal with the situation and act in a defensive manner, injuring both you and that person.

This generates a lack of trust, honesty, which ultimately hinders us from improving ourselves , from cooperating and achieving higher goals.

You see this all the time, wether if it is when you didn't tell the neighbor you disagree that her cats have priority over the local fauna, or you stopped yourself from telling the right person you disagree with the recent actions of the company and instead chose to abandon the group for a new, unknown where you think those issues aren't present, opposed to being honest and face the reaction.

Basic Economy

My other worry is economy. As we know it, the economy is incredibly ancient and inappropriate to the days of now.

I am hinting of ideas popularized by the zeitgeist movement, Star Trek or The Venus Project.

Our economy, the values it sits upon, haven't been kept up to date with our achievements. Achievements in science, both technological improvements to resource generation and understanding of the human nature - what drives us, how we work and the realization that we are not on the top of the universe and live in a minuscule rock lost in the pocket of an immense giant.

My point is: you don't need to live in the 24th century to see how much needs to be improved, how much we need to change. Stop being driven by our animal instincts, we are much more than that, we are aware of those instincts, we are the only known animal capable seeing what we are made of and sculpt it.

You really don't need to be from the future to know this, the fact is that people like me know it, but this knowledge is also abused and used to control behaviors on a daily basis.

The most blatant nefarious use of this information is done by advertisers, they abuse known biases such as the fact we don't have granular validation rules for an entity, that is to say that if Aston Martin as a company were to use Office360 we are likely blind to see that AM is a car manufacturer, not an expert in what's good for your business infrastructure.

Wrap Up

It is an incredibly complex subject, especially the economics.

This is just me letting off steam and hopefully connect to more people with similar concerns, hear your opinions.

If you haven't, I recommend you check out the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation's first season, titled: "The Neutral Zone", where you get to see a very emotional culture clash between us and the future where money doesn't exist and mutual respect is a given.

Designing for Glass

These are just really 101s for when designing for Glass.

Design for the platform

As with any other platform, you should design especifically for Glass and not port over an existing experience.

This platform features a unique, low resolution display, that's always in the field of vision of the wearer.

It has advanced sensors such as GPS, Accelerometer, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio, internet connectivity isn't guaranteed.

It's even more personal and accessible than a mobile phone, requiring only a head tilt or voice command to interact with.

Don't get in the way

In a device as personal, present, you need to be extra careful not to get in the way of the wearer.

Interaction with the Glass is immediate but limited.

Voice controls and internet connectivity may fail, touch pad requires a free hand and might not respond when wearing a regular glove.

Golden rule is: be passive, unobtrusive. Limit the need for input, limit output - be vewy vewy careful with notifications, remember your app will co-exist with many others, and if everybody's shouting for attention… it's Glass-induced insanity.

Keep it relevant, timely

Basically: don't nag the wearer. People don't like being nagged (who knew!), especially when the information is irrelevant (people really go mental with this one: why are you showing me this!? Aww cute kitty, wait… throws Glass onto the floor stomp stomp).

Remember: with access to the wearer's eyeballs, comes great responsability.

Be predictable

No unsolicited Adventure Time clips. (okay, maybe one)

Seriously, just follow to the platform guidelines, the wearer will have less to learn if apps behave the same, know what to expect and don't have any surprise interactions requiring expensive cognitive load (comes in short supply) and input.

Bonus

Experience design bonus: This is a unique platform, with a priviledged place in the wearer's life, don't just copy experiences, create something that's only possible with the Glass. Be a good app citizen, consider how your app will exist in the larger ecosystem.

Wonder how will an unmediated app ecosystem fare on such platform, its implications on the end user experience, product perception.

Adaptability Awareness: an introduction

TOC

1. Introduction
2. Cultural Adaptability
3. Moravec's Paradox
4. Examples in life
5. Democratization
6. Foundations
7. Relevancy to UI Design
8. Conclusion

1. Introduction

Our inherent cultural adaptability lowers the cost of a task, but it doesn't necessarily eliminate it.

We use this ability all the time, from seemingly simple tasks like using your phone to complex ones such as piloting an aircraft.

Due to our limited cognitive resources, we unconsciously create and make heavy use of heuristics, shortcuts to solve these problems.

This cost avoidance mechanism comes itself …at a cost. Heuristics still need to be learned, and our brain isn't naturally keen on forgetting them.

Being an unconscious process, it means that we are not naturally aware of when heuristics are being learned or used. We might also not realize that not everybody shares the same heuristics, and that due to their acquisition price and importance, we exhibit resistance to change them and that fact hinders innovation.

This article talks about how this lack of awareness impacts innovation, hinders the democratization of technology that would otherwise enable people to have better lives, or simply add more diversity to our culture.

Some relevant reading:

• Heuristics according to Wikipedia
• Types of heuristics
• Bounded rationality

Leveraging Priming with Skeuomorphism

TL:DR;

Priming is a very powerful cognitive bias, there's a lot of research done about it where it is evident that it can change our behaviour, without even us noticing it, and you need very little to do so. It is part of the unreadable areas in our brain and is most efficient when we're in autopilot mode, as when were reading a book - where we don't think about how to use the book, or when we're performing basic actions, or when were driving and our brain also needs to automate non primary functions. Skeuomorphism is a way to leverage that automated part of our brain and leave the other part free to do what it's best at: actual processing and reasoning. We are also a bit sensitive to the cognitive load of our rational side of the brain, making sure it remains comfortable and free is essential for a pleasurable experience. I advice the reading of books such as You Are Not So Smart for a quick injection of all these important cognitive biases.

The Setting

Setting the environment, mood, there might be no real advantage or perception of the improvement, but the absence of this element will definitively have an effect, think iBooks shelves vs a synthetic list of books. One is functional, the other triggers an automatic response in the majority of people.

The Function

You could say our brain is lazy, or you could say it's addicted on efficiency. Either way, it loves heuristics. It automatically uses pattern recognition in order to know which heuristic to use, and that's its preferred method for solving problems: leveraging existing knowledge, save precious computing time and time itself.

The Delight

Other than function and setting, the design can also be used to delight the person, create a more memorable experience. This can be done in two ways: make the function so easy to perform that the person feels empowered; and surprise, give your experience that unexpected nuance that will surprise and be memorable, because as we know, the brain notices and remembers things that don't match a pattern much better. Just make sure you're making people remember the delight they got from the experience and not the effort they had to go through to get to your experience.

The Temporality

This is one of the greatest pitfalls of leveraging heuristics, there is the possibility of getting too attached to a specific context, heuristics of a specific era. A simple example would be leveraging the heuristics around a tape player, younger people might not know the original device and its characteristics, why does it have 2 rotating drums, tape, and are the controls intemporal?

This approach might give us a very good advantage, but requires maintenance whereas an abstract UI doesn't. But, to be honest, every design, app, is a child of its time, perhaps not meant to serve the future but the now.

The Error

App design is not based around the visuals, never was, never will be. We are creating tools, form needs to provide affordances to function*, otherwise you're creating error. You're breaking expectations, creating frustration and that's never the experience we want to provide.

Unfortunately, this happens quite often when people implement skeuomorphism into their designs with only the visual in mind.

Conclusion

As with many things, there is no single answer to the value of skeuomorphism. It is not an essential part of application design, not all apps need to be designed in this way, but we need to have our both minds in mind. The emotional and the rational, one requires us to think about something, and the former is a very advanced part of us that actually enables us to achieve more by leveraging heuristics about how things work, abstracting that complexity for us, leaving our rational mind to focus on more important things.

Skeuomorphism is about distributing cognitive workload evenly across our cognitive centres.

Also read:

• A Former iPhone UI Designer Defends Apple's Fake Leather Design Philosophy
• What Skeuomorphism Is (And Isn’t)

A Different Point of View on HTML

It seems that with the latest 5.0 update, the Facebook for iOS app has moved away from HTML into Native code, this apparently is causing some confusion in judgement regarding what a mobile web app can be under the false assumption that the only variable here is the platform.

I'm going to make this post short as it's just a clarification on what I believe that's really going on.

In one sentence:

Code is what you make of it.

What does it mean?

This means that, in my opinion, the assumption that Native and HTML can be judged on the same terms is incorrect.

It seems that very few people realise that HTML has a completely different nature than Native.

To put it simply: HTML is an open platform, Native is specialised and gives you training wheels, which is good.

HTML is open

By open, I mean that HTML can be used to deliver websites on desktop and small screens, apps and games for the same targets.

Each of these tasks requires a very different mindset, traditionally, any beginner can create a website and the difference won't be as obvious as if the same person tried to create a mobile web app, or even a mobile-first responsive website.

This is what's happening with mobile web apps, we're seeing people who are used to create web sites and web apps for desktop venturing into the world of mobile, and, unlike native, they're starting from scratch, or worse, with assumptions coming from their experience with desktop.

The perception is that Web is the same on any browser and screen, this isn't true but there's nothing to stop people from thinking and acting otherwise.

Native is specialised

Now, with Native, you already have dozen of frameworks and suggestions on how to code your app.

It's like coding a CMS from scratch VS using something like Drupal, where you have a clearly defined API, documentation, modules, loads of abstraction even for things like creating a form or communicating with the database, and that happens for a good reason, that happens because it abides to good software patterns.

The Native mindset is used to these patterns, things like delegates, modularisation, worrying about memory usage, distributing load, they're way more common in this mindset.

What Facebook did

Judging from their blog post, Facebook seems to have moved away from HTML and at the same time implemented many of these patterns but in Native code, now, it's a bit weird because that's what the web app was needing.

Conclusion

I'm not necessarily saying X is better than Y, the main purpose of this post is to provide a different more sane point of view on this discussion.

There are things HTML isn't very mature at like 3d, video and audio, perhaps layout as well in some situations.

And to the defence of Native, providing all those frameworks and guidance is really a great thing, it's what the Web needs: specialisation.

Web needs authoring tools for use cases such as animations, 3d. Remember that these tools are what made things like Flash so popular, the ease of creation, accessibility.

It also needs libraries, better, not more. Better APIs, less rendering engines or improving the existing ones, but that's another topic.

To finish: let's not oversimplify this, there are situations where Native is better, others where HTML is the best choice, but don't hasten your judgment.

And of course, lemme know your opinions, as always.

[Update] @nathanbarry wrote a really good article on the UX improvements the new Facebook for iOS App provides. It's interesting to notice the changes are technology agnostic.

Apps and Brains

I keep bumping into great content featuring the late Steve Jobs.

Today I watched once more Steve Jobs's 2010 D8 Conference interview, it's a little like watching a very old movie or reading an book you read as a child and having a slightly different perception of it because of who you are now.

I remember it happening with Calvin & Hobbes, which I read as a really young boy, and to some extent with the interview I mentioned above.

Somewhere along the interview, around the 01:06:08 mark, Jobs admits he doesn't know why people aren't searching as much on mobile as they are on the desktop, but instead they're using apps to access information.

Now, these days I'm much more interested and aware of psychology and how we think.

Of course, you might say that using app to accomplish each task you need to doesn't scale, while debatable I won't go into that topic.

Instead, I think the amazing Mental Notes card deck (and the fact that we have them spread throughout the Ribot studio), made me think:

Do people use apps because of what someone call the Chunking effect?

Chunking but perhaps also aesthetics and behaviour.

These latter two help improving the perception of a tool and can make it feel more reliable.

We all hate when bad surprises prevent us from getting 'there'.

Also, could it be that chunking helps perception of task completion progress?

Think about it, Googling something is a process without a predictable outcome, only a desired one.

With time we have learned to trust it, but it is a generic search tool where many different objectives share a common start.

Think about Youtube, you can easily search google for youtube videos only, yet, most people don't.

There might be a number of reasons such as: Youtube's reputation, establishment as a video platform (identity), weak association between Google Search and Youtube content.

The fact is, you can search Youtube from your url bar the same way we do with Wikipedia: ' wiki'.

In case of Wikipedia, and why using Google as the start of a search for Wikipedia content, it's probable that they don't have a strong identity as most of their visitors don't usually see the wikipedia homepage, plus their search isn't very proeminent at all.

But going back to apps, each day I'm more and more aware of the importance of feedback provided by the tools we use, and in ways you wouldn't normaly think or be aware of.

In the hardware world, I doubt many people consciously notice the difference between an Apple headphone jack and some other jacks that don't take feedback seriously.

I'm talking about small things like the click you feel when you plug the cable in, assuring you that it is indeed plugged in.

Now, with feedback and task completion in mind:

It could be that searching for an app, opening, tapping search, typing and knowing that what's gonna be returned is indeed the kind of thing you're looking for ( but not necessarily the what ), might provide a greater reward to your brain than a generic search experience.

It's contradictory that multiple apps would provide a better mental model for knowing where to get the information we're looking for though.

But at the same time, a generic search tool lacks identity, a connection between objective and starting point.

I can be totally off here, and more than one principle might be at play here, I can think of a few others that might play an important role as well, such as: contrast, anchoring, priming, framing, etc.

Anyway, would love to hear your thoughts on this, maybe using Branch? @lmjabreu

On Thought Interfaces

Thinking about it in pragmatic terms, the system will need to distinguish between thoughts and normal brain activity and commands, intended actions.

So, the interface will require a trigger, to know when to listen to commands, this is an interesting challenge.

On many other interface types, there is always a feedback mechanism, to assure the user the action was completed, gesture was recognised, etc

With thought control, what would be the feedback mechanism? Sound? Will there be one? Will the person trust the system blindly and just fire away actions?

We're talking about abstract actions here, moving an arm provides direct visual and perhaps sensor feedback, but taking a picture, sending a text is a bit different.

If feedback come into play, thought interfaces will be, at least initially disruptive, you won't need to move, but you will need to concentrate in it and friction will perhaps be enough to distract you from your main task.

Another use case for thought interfaces is the passive monitoring of the users thoughts, thinking about how good yesterday's Affogato was? Well, Facethought will let your friends know you'd love them to bring you one while you're inside Small Batch Coffee.

Cultural barriers are obvious with this latest option, people won't feel comfortable with this kind of urges being shared and perhaps don't want to manage them because of their nature.

Another thing to consider is a hybrid interface, technology like Disney Research' Touché could provide a way to reliably denote intention in a very frictionless way such as touching your chest twice, blinking - which perhaps can be easily identified by the thought interface as well.

So, here's to imagination.

Why We Aim High

TLDR;

Our brains are very lazy things, unless we we exercise them, learn, adaptation is going to be harder and harder as it gets used to the easy way. In our industry, we can't afford going through the easiest path, we need to be disruptive, we need to push forward.

Grey Goo Machine

Our brain is constantly trying to optimise every task we assign to it.

It adapts, it learns.

For a certain task, the cognitive effort is reduced the more times we perform it, but the effort is never null.

The learning process has many intricacies, part of them is the frustration of not being able to achieve results as fast as method X - previously learned and stored, is able to. Your brain doesn't like frustration so it will always try to pick the shortest known viable path to task completion.

This path finding process has a tendency to be optimised as well, so, if it can be skipped, it will be, and it'll use, as mentioned above, the shortest known path.

Your brain just wants the reward of achieving a task as fast as possible, no matter what.

Think games.

Quick gratification is essential to the success of a mainstream game (1).

With that also in mind, let's talk web development and developers in general.

Everybody loves automation, the effort to reward ratio goes off the charts when it comes to automation tools, you're able to perform thousands of tasks with a single or no command, and that's awesome, but has its perils as well.

I'll cover that in a future post, for now let's just talk about quality.

Change

Our industry moves faster than anything else out there, it has unique interactions, unique communities, unique metabolism.

It's intrinsically connected to hardware and software industries, and as they move so does the web.

Form factors, browsers and screen hardware changed our approach to delivering our product: the experience, we package it up in a future friendly way as agnostic as possible to how it will be accessed, made possible by the software we have at our disposal.

This new approach provides a better experience to the end user and isn't entirely necessary as a general rule.

There's nothing like it, to my knowledge in other industry: our tools changed, our process changed, our product changed, and it will change again very soon.

On the human level, many of our previously optimised tasks will have to be thrown away, your brain won't like it because it doesn't always understand the motives - originated in the higher cognitive areas, to do it.

I believe intelligence - in it's classical definition, has nothing to do with it. I believe, however, in a definition of intelligence where this ability to adapt is key.

I also believe the more specialised you are, the harder it will be or you to adapt.

"More addicted to known paths your brain will be." - Mr. Yo.

There's a sensitive balance, a sweet spot between specialisation and lack of it.

I've learned from experience how genuinely amazing innocence and naiveness can be.

One might say these are qualities essential in a team, and companies where skill and experience is the only aspect sought after in an individual are inherently poisonous to innovation, new approaches, new perspectives. Although, we're not talking in Boolean terms here.

Much more could be said about this topic, but let's talk about Quality.

Quality

I am of the opinion that aiming high is essential for one to remain relevant in this industry for multiple reasons:

• you'll have fun with what you can achieve with new technologies
• you'll prevent your brain from going numb
• your work will benefit more people and will be less likely to disappoint
• in the real life, you don't create in vacuum, there will be external factors pushing down the quality of your work, so aim high to prevent negative return - be careful with this statement, aiming high doesn't mean perfection or quantity, it's a target where the quality is in perfect balance with results.

Aim high, remain path-agnostic, reward yourself but also question yourself.

Love what you do, it's the best way to remain relevant, to stay hungry, stay foolish.

Enjoy.

Footnotes

(1) the greater the reward, the more people will invest into achieving it. Based on observation, I've noticed people have a preference for smaller, more frequent rewards though.

A Haptic Question.

I wonder, when will our screens gain the ability to provide super detailed haptic feedback, enough to mimick known and unknown textures, how will that feel?

• What will Twitter, Clear, Facebook, the Lock Screen feel like?
• What will be the impact of high quality haptic feedback in the way we perceive and use our phones?
• Will the rest of the technology fall behind and fail to provide a full and convincing experience?
• What will be the impact on the UI of the application, the size of the buttons, represented textures, will there be a preferred texture?
• Will you be able to identify certain groups of apps by their predominant texture?

Imagine the ways we could explore that feature: increase the friction of a list when it reaches a limit.

God I can't wait to try that out.

Scaling Down, Going Local

TL;DR: Perhaps it's good to resist the temptation of scaling up our companies and instead remain small. There are many known upsides to this, but the one I think is often overlooked is the increased variety and local value, uniqueness, that's generated by such small companies. This post is about local+passion.

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Thinking about companies, in "Small Giants", we have many examples of small companies, but the truth is that those companies are by definition - due to their nature like wineries, food shops, etc; local companies unable to scale without increasing their resource consumption and staff count.

As companies grow they end up having to serve themselves, not just their clients. The Comms overhead increases, requiring patches and fixes like forced knowledge sharing, status meetings, planning meetings, big project management efforts, more. In opposition to that, small companies possess natural knowledge sharing, very frictionless information flow and decision making, status awareness and decentralised project management.

Another funny thing that happens is that even when you place an individual from one of those said small companies on a bigger company his advantages fade away as the processes in place nullify his natural management skills and eventually turn him into a mediocre bee like the rest of the cogs in that company. It's really about context, things don't exist in isolation, small companies have a unique ecosystem that allows for it to exist as it is.

In the web industry it's a different story. We can do business with anyone in the world without scaling up due to the nature of our work, there are no physical constrains and the work we produce is usually, but not necessarily, digital. Meaning the production and delivery of the goods we produce is completely virtual.

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Local leads to small, small leads to local?

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In web, you can 'harvest' the benefits of contributing to your local community even when your client is an international charity, regardless of their size, although, you'll have no knowledge of their community and that could perhaps hinder the quality of your work. Then again, a small web company can ignore borders and oceans and simply move into the community to better understand it, but it's obvious this will bring extra costs to both sides and is far from perfect.

So, given that, I guess breathing and working local IS the way to go if you're looking to more efficiently and effectively benefit your clients in this situation. Time is money, but time isn't quality, and money isn't necessarily quality, it's all relative and subjective.

An individual with a passion for his job will deliver greater quality for the same time/money a passionless worker would. Passion is a drive that enables you to excell at what you do, work will flow naturally and blend with your life, you'll have more dedication, more data points and valid experience if you shave passion.

Imagine a designer who only thinks about design at work, disregards all that's around him while at home, in the street, the billboards, the copy in it, the websites, the way things work. This designer will have a limited experience, focused on whatever work comes in his direction, and even if he's a freelancer he doesn't breathe design. Lessons may come from unexpected sources, a billboard is a way to experience the work of other designers, look at it, think about it, wonder what can be improved and what's improved in relation to his own approach.

By living his passion he'll be better connected to the knowledge that's around him. This is true wether you're a designer, developer, baker, cook, flight attendant, it's true in many many contexts.

A flight attendant for example, he or she, will eventually travel in different companies other than his own, and even when flying on his own company the value of passion is high, that person will be able to experience the other side of his job, be aware of what annoys passengers, what can be improved, and although an airline can't operate at a small scale,

as small as some people defend a software company should be, there is the possibility of his own company to listen to feedback from 'the bottom'

, would only make sense and has testedgood results in the past in the food industry when employees of a big supermarket chain were given the voice to suggest improvements to their business.

Boy, we started with local and are now into passion.

Case Study

Queer Lisboa Pro-bono film festival website and mobile app by Quodis

Would a large company, on a budget, with no relation whatsoever with the film festival, be able to deliver as good results as a company that's based on the same city where the festival occurs, and where one of the designers is a good friend of the organisers?

Being this close allowed them to know the possible difficulties that people will have to reach the venue, by knowing the venue itself they were able to better structure the information around the film schedule, reducing any possible confusion regarding the layout of the place and room names, but having a close relation to the client they were more compelled to go the extra mile and deliver a custom tailored solution that fits the client' s needs now and with room to improve in the future, reducing long-term costs because they know closely the clients roadmap and future needs, by being a local and having attended previous editions of the festival, the designer had first hand knowledge of what went wrong and what can be improved in future editions and may have a role in eliminating the problems with very low friction.

This is a very romantic view, but it's a real one, this isn't a made up story. You may argue that this doesn't scale, but I say it doesn't have to, that's what we're advocating here, small companies doing enough work for them to live comfortably and having big impact on the people they work with.

There's work for everyone, and if there isn't, no problem, it's a small company, it may be flexible enough to adjust itself to deliver something else that's being demanded, the market will adjust itself.

Work will be better distributed, instead of having big companies gobbling up big chunks of work, it should be evenly distributed over smaller, more competent companies that will deliver in less time and with higher standards.

I haven't addressed one thing: standardisation, this is what enables bigger companies to deliver on budget: cheaper, okay work. This may work on other industries, but it doesn't work in web, unlike the automotive industry, where standardisation made a huge difference and success, the web is a constantly evolving industry. Standardisation will only take you so far, and if we're only focused on delivering, we would have to stop innovating, stop improving at this fast pace in order to be able to standardise our production.

It's a trade off in the end, common to other industries, even with standardisation you either deliver cheap or quality goods, and there's room for both of course, but the good quality ones can change people's lifes. It is also true that what was once premium quality will eventually become the norm, but in order for that to happen, there are many pieces that have to be moved, and they go beyond process, standardisation, skills and will vary hugely between industries.

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This is sort of a rough draft, decided to publish it 'cos life's too short to worry about misinterpretations of this article.

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Note: HULK says: communication, interaction between companies, local communities = GOOD

Easier to see what works, what doesn't work, exchange experiences, loose the fear of change.

"in business, specially in global (non-local) how much do you TRUST your client, how much PASSION will you have for his business, and how much VALUE are you delivering if this client is 1 out of 1000"