Products are people too – Matt Webb

“anything I say I get a hundred times back in ideas and conversations.”

areas that have affected Webb a lot in the past n years:

social software, adaptive design, engaging technology.

Social software

In the excitement of making web applications, we’d forgotten that people aren’t computers.

• Groups behaviour varies with size and time.
  • New mailing lists behave differently to old, for instance.
• Individuals, relationshpis and discussions come in many types
• The ‘rational person’ model is incomplete.

Emerging market phone handsets

• Nokia 1200, for China/India, built from observations in these villages.
• Shared phones – multiple address books
• Rented phones – the phone has preset call/time limits
• External screen for clock, and a dedicated torch button.
• And they’re super cheap.

Adaptive design

• Design is never a finished job; bits are slow-moving.
• keep surface layers of change
  • Stewart Brand, tho.
• design products to be adapted.
• cf wikis
• APIs allow for fast-moving adaptive layer on top of the service.
• Adaptive APIs in hardware – Canon copier with Java layer; means you can customise interfaces for different offices.

• Pixelchix – interconnected toys, traditional – you can work into play any way you want
• Hardware api lets you extend the thing as demand happens.

Engaging technology

• computers inside toys rather than on desktops.
• our brains are hard-wired to
• Jermaijenko – dangling string. (when it’s not moving, you don’t know it’s there, it disappears).

Perturbation thoery

• All these things say “these are things you need to know about how people work.”
• Mathematical problem that you can’t solve because it’s too big…
• P theory says: break it down into the big main bit you can solve precisely.
• Take an object, and layer this in – make it social, make it adaptable, make it engaging. Layer it in.

But maybe we can’t treat these design solutions as minor perturbations; maybe they’re so big they need to be built in to begin with.

• Products are intended to work in the marketplace, often sold to people with incomplete knowledge on them.
• People have to choose to buy one thing over another.
• Product must be mass-manufacutered and mass-consumed.
• Other constraints that product designers have to design for: shelf demonstrability.
• (Products should be taller than wide, too, so you get more on the shelf.)

It might be important a consumer believes they know how a thing works, even if they don’t, even if it does way more.

Experience design

Instead of design, design for the story you tell with the product – the experience hooks. The first time you see a thing, the first time you turn it on, the first time you show it off to friends/ family.

• volkswagen ad – engaging for experience design (the act of driving at night, rather than act of driving a volkswagen at night) [poetry is Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas, music is Solaris soundtrack]
• Apple design for experience hook – unboxing.
• People put a lot of money into the product; they value taking it out. If they’ve paid attention to the first hook, we assume they’ve paid attention to the rest.
• B&H Silver Slide – social smoking – associating itself for an experience hook we don’t normally notice.
• But these hooks don’t necessarily make the product better.

Maybe B&H are not selling nicotine, but encounters with strangers and conversations with friends, which is a product I’d buy.

• Creating new experiences, new uses.
• We don’t just use products, products use us. We, in our products, live in the same world, act in the same world, with our friends.

Products are not our servants, nor we theirs

• The relationship is symmetric – they exist over time, we meetthem, we hang out, we spend time together.
• Maybe there’s another way to design products, a way that doesn’t have “design for a purpose” first.

Products are people too

We shouldn’t make intelligent agents or put faces on them. It’s just better to assume that products have wills and act in the world than to assume they don’t.

1. As users, we already treat products as social actors, and buy other products that fit in with them – it’s only as designers we’re negligent. We’ll end up designing products we’ll get on with as users, better.
2. We can use human approaches to solve this problems.

So now we just need to answer the question: what makes something a person? And we can apply that to people or products.

The question of “what makes people people” is crazy complicated! So many possible answers! [cf Human Universals, in my delicious stream]

• baby talk
• gossip
• magic to win love
• tickling
• overestimating objectivity of thought
• self as neither wholly passive nor wholly autonomous
• socialisation includes toilet training

So I spoke to the I Ching.

Things people do:

Chitter-chatter

• They gossip!
• What if products got gossip?
• An alert light on everything, to alert me.
• But instead of lights, what about sending me messages to my mobile phone, gossiping at me… but if I don’t read it, it should disappear. I can just listen-in, overhear.
• What if products learned off our elders and betters? Portable gadgets that defer to what the older, more experienced gadgets, already know/do?

Aside

Calvino, reaching up to a low-passing moon, propping up a ladder to go onto the moon to gather moon-milk [Calvino, Cosmicomics]

Ambition

• people have ambitions
• we’re more comfortable with things we know the goal of – wandering salesmen, etc
• we’d be less annoyed with products if we knew it had higher goals.
• Crispin Jones watches – watch shows a mantra; alternates between positive/negative statement. you might learn to avoid looking at the watch at certain times of day. [mrjoneswatches.com]

Tidying up

This is Matt’s familiar sport-as-tidying-up-metaphor; football, snooker

Tennis is two people disagreeing about who touched it last: you tidy up! No, you tidy up!

• Treat things more like cleaning up.
• Tidying flat whilst making a timelapse video turned out to be a motivator. (Tom Coates)
• How about making actions more like games, etc?
• Making patterns with shake and vac, for instance.
• Shake and vac with big pieces, and you have to pick them up in a certain order – VAC MAN [boom-tish].
• highscore chart on vacuum cleaner, ranked against similar sized flats, and do it with RFIDF, and compete with your flatmates.
• software that gives you more features as you use it better – tagging and levelling up. challenges you to tidy up well.
• email response barometer – scores you at how well you empty your inbox.

Conclusion.

• “Products are people too” is a handy heuristic
• How we live with products
• How products live with one another

People-watching is its own reward.