Stacy and I decided to no longer be the two remaining people in America who hadn’t read The Da Vinci Code. For our midwest road trip, we loaded up the iPod mini with the audiobook version, our companion between cities.

The book, to put it simply, is a hoot. And I don’t mean that in a good way. It’s easily the most clumsily written narrative I’ve worked through in a long time. While Brown clearly has a facility for clever tricks and puzzles, the man cannot write character or dialog to save himself. We gave up counting how many times a character would say, “What in the hell…?!” or “What the devil…?!”

Sharing the audiobook afforded us a Mystery Science Theater 3000-like experience. While the outrageous plot points received scorn, the bulk of our wrath was directed to narrator Paul Michael’s performance of the characters. If you’ve read the book, you know you’ve got Americans, French, Spanish, and the British… And Mr. Michael ends up playing all of these comically broadly, with accents that only Dick van Dyke could love.

I don’t think I could have handled actually reading the book (well, not without skipping large swaths), but I was surprised how much fun sharing the audiobook could be. What perhaps surprised us most is that, over the course of the week, we didn’t finish the damn thing. The unabridged version runs 16 hours (!). It took the full four hours on the plane ride home to finally top it off.

This morning I stumbled across the Wikipedia’s entry on the book. It does an admirable job of providing context, explaining some of Brown’s in-jokes, and debunking the premise upon which the book stands.

Al’s Breakfast in Minneapolis was shockingly good.

And, more photos, including nekkid papier mache chicks with unicorn heads, on Flickr…

If, as my posting volume has declined, you’ve found yourself desiring more commentary from my genetic stock, you can click over to my dad’s blog. Movie reviews, idle thoughts, actually, much what you expect of a Merholz, except he won’t bore you with talk of design and user experience.

Stacy and I are on the road for a week or so, beginning and ending in Chicago.

Photos on Flickr.

San Francisco, and much of the Bay Area, defies logic with an increasingly costly housing market in the midst of what is still a regionally lackluster economy. What the housing prices suggest is that this is an area where people want to live, and are willing to pay hefty fees for that privilege.

In an essay in today’s SF Chronicle, Joel Kotkin labels San Francisco an “ephemeral city,” and the article’s subhead sums it up: “San Francisco has lost its middle class, become a ‘theme park for restaurants,’ and is the playground of the nomadic rich and restless leeches living off them.”

This move toward ephemerality is happening all over the globe, wherever cities are becoming too expensive for the median to live. London, Boston, Washington, D.C., Manhattan, and ever greater swaths of Los Angeles are able to truly support one of two types:
1. moderately wealthy couples
2. 20-something types with jobs who don’t mind living 3 or 4 to a flat

Such evolution is kind of depressing, since cities thrive on variety. Narrow demographics lead to stagnation.

The thing is, it’s not clear what could be done in San Francisco. It’s geography limits its residents and residences. And now that the world has gotten small due to air travel and telecommunications, the act of moving is not much of a limiting factor. And so those who can afford to, choose exactly where they want to live. And so the desirable cities end up filled with the wealthier-than-average. Who then end up pushing out those earning average, and turning cities into theme parks for the well off.

Kotkin has written other pieces dealing with these themes:

– The Rise of the Ephemeral City
In this he talks about the foolishness of cities such as Cleveland and Philadelphia to become “cool” cities in an effort to combat downward trends.

Kotkin expresses displeasure with ephemeral cities for losing their core, their heart, for no longer being creative centers.

When talking about cities that work, Kotkin cites Phoenix. Yes, Phoenix is increasingly popular. Yes, you can afford housing there. But the reason is that Phoenix, well, isn’t really a city. It’s a suburb of itself. It’s “affordable” because it can expand for miles, and so land is relatively cheap. Comparing Phoenix to San Francisco is comparing apples to oranges.

I also take issue with the larger economic and environmental cost of Phoenix (or Las Vegas, or similarly rapidly growing cities). They’re a huge drain, requiring massive amounts of external resources, particularly water. And they are automobile-centric.

I’m having trouble getting a read on Kotkin, and I can’t find criticism (positive or negative) of him. His politics make me uneasy, as does his attribution of religion as a laudable guiding force for our cities. And the idea that he cites Singapore as the city that most exemplifies his criteria for greatness suggests a comfortablity with authoritarianism.

6 months ago, I wrote a post on annotating space, wherein I believed that del.icio.us provides a valuable model for thinking about how people would bookmark the physical world. A student(?) at ITP has started Found City, which enables “folk mapping,” which, seems to be just that — applying del.icio.us to physical space. Seems to be New York specific for now…

Crossing the blogs the last few months were a couple examples of stunt product design. While design agencies might think this is a good idea, a way to get some press, and design without that pesky restraint of clients, the solutions provided tend to be wholly unsatisfactory.

Pentagram did themselves no favors their imaginings of future Apple products, which seems mostly about playing mp3s (a Podwatch! A wireless iPod! a vPod! a phone that plays… mp3s!). Nadav’s comments (“surprisingly weak”) summed up what I heard elsewhere.

Getting notice of late was Slate’s sponsorship of redesigns of the new food pyramid. They invited a bunch of hotshot designers to submit ideas. For some reason, the blogosphere has been far kinder to this effort. (I’m guessing it’s because it’s more fun to make fun of the government.) In looking over the proposed solutions, though, they, too, are “surprisingly weak.”

Perhaps the most bizarre entry, given that the government’s pyramid was faulted for being non-intuitive, is the following image from Stone|Yamashita:

Maybe it’s because Stone|Yamashita doesn’t really do consumer-facing graphic design, and maybe the CEOs to whom they speak love quirky elements like footprints, but this drawing is almost a parody of self-satisfied graphic design.

So what purpose does this exercise serve? Slate wanted to provide a poke in the eye of the USDA, but the government walks away looking okay, because their designs aren’t so bad, in comparison. If such leading firms are producing such shallow efforts, why would a potential purchaser of design spend their money on it?

Last week, my colleague Janice wrote an inspiring essay entitled, “It’s A Whole New Internet.” She addresses the zeitgeist of excitement around web development, talking up tags, Ajax, developer idealism, and the like.

One thing missing from her essay is any mention of design for mobile devices. Three or four years ago, all signs pointed to mobile being the Next Big Thing. I fully expected the mobile design community to have the starry-eyed excitement and energy that the web design community had in 1996, 1997. And that mobile design would genuinely excite people.

Why hasn’t that happened? Why haven’t any mobile and device design innovations had the same level of engagement, interest, and excitement that Ajax and folksonomies have had? Where are the passionate back-and-forths about the implications of mobile device innovation?

I fully recognize that this may just be me. That maybe I’m not witness to the communities speaking passionately on these issues. But I’m surprised that such discussions haven’t gotten more mainstream by this time.

I did some searching around, and the amount of quality discussion on developing good user experiences for devices is surprisingly low. The bulk of the discussion seems to hover around utilizing web standards so that your site can be viewed in mobile browsers. That strikes me as fundamentally uninteresting. I did, however, come across two very thoughtful pieces that suggest we must fundamentally reconsider design for mobile devices. It’s not just about making things smaller:

Mobilize, Don’t Miniaturize is an essay by Barbara Ballard making clear that the approach to designing for mobile is not to take an existing app and try to make it work for a very small screen, but instead to understand the context of mobile use and utilize that for applications specific to mobile.

In a similar vein,Design For Small Screens(PDF) is a presentation by Marc Rettig wherein he states near the beginning, “It’s about more than just screen size.” Filled with lots of good photos.

I’m watching The Life of Brian DVD, and on the commentary track, Eric Idle just went on about how he loves testing films in front of audiences, because it allows you to shape the film in response to an audience, in the way that live theater will shape their production over a series of performances. He says,

“We would always have previews of our movies, a lot more than they do here, in Hollywood… Previews tell you a lot… when you first do a cut, you do what you think is funny. And then when you show it to an audience, they tell you what’s funny. The more you listen to what an audiences is telling you, the more you can cut it to how it would be if you were performing it live… The intelligent process is to show it to smaller groups of people more frequently, rather than to one or two large groups of people in a valley who then fill in forms… [In America] they don’t give it enough time to move towards its audience, and to listen to what its audience is telling it back, because of the economic pressure of getting it in and out…”

One of the things that has been hard for the “usability community” to accept is that usability is not really interesting in and of itself. And that usability isn’t really a goal, and it’s definitely not the end-all be-all. Usability is simply a quality. It’s an important quality, but just one of many. And it definitely doesn’t warrant being a “discipline.”

I’ve begun to think the same thing about “user experience.” In a prior post, I wondered if user experience is dead. I wondered this for a few reasons:
– the people who were “leading” the discussion about user experience were doing so back-asswards
– there is a seeming lack of energy behind the concept of “user experience”
– people feel passion for disciplines such as “information architecture” and “interaction design,” but if “user experience” were to go away tomorrow, no one would notice.

Perhaps the best response to that post was Dave Rogers’ “Is UX Dead?” And in that post, and elsewhere, I slowly realized that “user experience,” too, is nothing more than a quality. When user experience is discussed by people outside the profession, they talk about a site or product offering a good user experience. When Kottke writes about Google Maps and user experience, he doesn’t talk about Google’s user experience designers — he talks about how the sum of elements leads to a “useful user experience.”

This–this feels right. User experience is not a discipline, or an approach, it’s a thing, a quality, an emergent property between a person and a product or service.

This puts me in direct opposition with Jesse’s diagram. Those aren’t elements of user experience. Those are elements of web design. Performing those elements well should lead to offering users a quality experience, yes. But “information architecture,” “interaction design,” “user needs,” etc. etc. don’t comprise the user experience. A quality user experience is comprised of things like desirability, usability, enjoyability, utility, delight, satisfaction, etc. etc.

The UXNet Development Consortium, therefore, misses the point entirely. It’s trying to solve the “user experience” problem through professional associations. Professional associations don’t solve anything. They provide a valuable service gathering place for individuals engaged in similar practices. The development consortium is attempting to develop a “community” of “user experience professionals.” All it is is providing a platform for navel-gazing and rehashing. It is moving nothing forward. The outcome of the consortium is pretty much no different than what was discussed at the 4th Advance For Design, in 2001. Has so little changed?

The problem with the development consortium and its approach is, frankly, that it’s too small, condescending, and elitist. Not intentionally, mind you. Not in spirit or motive. I know many of the folks involved, and they’re good, passionate, upright, and they’re doing what they can to make the world a better place. Still, the nature of the enterprise, suggesting as it does that User Experience belongs to this group of groups, strikes me as condescending.

User experience is everyone’s responsibility. It is not the special province of interactive systems designers. The scope of people involved in helping supply a quality user experience is so vast, that you cannot draw an interesting circle around it and say, “that’s the community.”

The only reason that “user experience” is associated with interactive systems designers is because Don Norman didn’t want his group at Apple relegated to pushing pixels in the “user interface.” As he wrote in an email to me:

I invented the term because I thought Human Interface and usability were too narrow: I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with a system, including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual.

Since then, the term has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to lose its meaning.

User experience should not be just about interactive systems — it’s a quality that reflects the sum total of a person’s experiences with any product, service, organization. When I walk into a store, I’m having a “user experience.” When I call an airline to make a reservation, I’m having a “user experience.” And innumerable elements contribute to affect that quality of experience.

So what can we do? We can move forward by talking about what goes into developing quality user experiences. We should never talk about “user experience design” — there is no customer or user-facing design that doesn’t involve a user’s experience. But we can talk about how our methods, processes, approaches, mindsets, and understandings can contribute to improving the user experiences of the products and services people deal with.

This is what gets me excited about DUX. I know I dissed it in my prior post, but that was less the concept of the conference than the seeming foot-dragging in getting it going. Now that DUX2005 has been announced, and a preliminary call for entries posted, it’s time for us to talk about the work that we’ve done, and how it’s made people’s lives better. The conference is very purposefully titled “designing for user experience,” recognizing that user experience is a quality, not a discipline. A very important quality — in some cases the most important quality.

(Yes, I know that DUX is put on by the same professional associations that I excoriated. DUX is actually put on by individuals, who utilize those associations for their logistical assistance. I hazard to guess that DUX could be as popular if not affiliated with any organization, but maybe a little harder to work out contractual details with venues, etc. etc.)