Escape routes from dead end Design careers

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Entering the design profession is sometimes like love at first sight, but it can also be something you simply want to do and learn to respect. Design is one of the most popular fields for people to move into from other professions.

Design has been called many things in the past, but even as a definition it’s referring to a multitude of activities across times. Within the design profession there are people who are more creative and some that are more scientific in their approach. Some people can draw, other can write, and some can think, but designers have to study all of these and continually try to be better at them all. At this given point of time the most popular design roles are UX, UI, and Graphic Designer and I’m focused on these when I refer to ‘design’.

In this article I will explore the reasons for transitioning in and out of design, the have baked approaches that companies have developed towards sustaining designers on a career path, and the developing skill set of the designer who aspires to be an executive.

Transitioning

In my article Are you boxed in? Getting to beyond professional roles and job titles

I talked about the main drivers behind people who want to go through the process of changing career.

Within a person’s work life the two main key problems are interest and progression. Interest is hard to maintain now that we work for 55 years on average. It’s impossible to be interested in the same field for that long. Progression is another stumbling block because within those 55 years the thing that keeps the best people alive is constant change and challenge.

Source: giphy.com

You would think that the design profession supports multi-disciplinary people, but it doesn’t.

Transition from another discipline to Design

Many software developers, economists, and lawyers have transitioned into the design profession. Changing career usually leads to a temporary step down in salary and status. I’m not sure about the statistics but I’ve personally met more people who have downgraded their salary to ‘design level’ than people who’ve upgraded. The main reasons I’ve heard are all linked to the fact that design is essentially social. People transition into design because they want to do something they love (and it can be cool at times).

I have found it quite hard for a developer to excite a CEO, or even friends at dinner, with the things they do. A developer expects to get a project done fast, but built properly and, of course, to come up with meaningful ideas to solve problems. The difference between the designer and the developer is that the developer is usually solving problems that are quite complex, have a lot of interdependent issues to deal with and must understand a lot of abstract, technical stuff. Whereas the designer is usually solving problems that people can see, and they solve them by talking to people and testing it with people. This is something that people find easier to talk about over dinner, something that everyone can have an opinion on. That’s why design problem solving can be more exciting for the CEO, a marketing executive, and people in general.

For many people being a designer is a dream: very few try to learn more about how to live that dream and even fewer succeed at living it. I have learnt that when something looks easy, it probably means I know nothing about it. The design profession suffers from appearing easier than it is, but once people dive into design, its complexity unfolds. Design is a social role. Designers talk to people, do ethnographic research, user testing, build stuff fast, launch, fail and learn. It’s a diverse field and that means it should be open to people from diverse backgrounds.

Transitioning from Design to another discipline

People in design usually love it, so if they are ‘leaving’ the field it happens because of three reasons:

  1. They don’t like the fluff, and they prefer to answer to a clearer set of instructions. I call it the “either it works or it doesn’t” attitude.
Source: giphy.com

2. Designers sometimes discover that they are really good at their craft, or art, and want to be their own masters.

Source: giphy.com

3. They have power and economic aspirations, but in their organisation being a designer means they continually need to fight their corner and educate others about the value of design.

Source: giphy.com

* By mentioning changing career away from design I’m only referring to designers who were professionally doing design. Looking back at my BA, and even my MA, the average percentage of people who learnt design alongside me and actually are working as designers is 50%

Let’s look at the design profession roles over the past few years…

The ever-changing professional design environment is where the problem for the cross-disciplinary person starts.

Here are some of the jobs that come within the design category:

Graphic designer, Human-computer interaction, Interaction designer, Designer researcher, Motion designer, UI designer, UX designer, Product designer, Design manager, Principal designer, Design Ops, Head of design, Creative Director, Director of Design — and that’s without adding Intern, Junior, Mid-weight, Senior, Executive and Global to each level. Two-thirds of this list are roles that were invented in the past 10 years. As you know, ‘Design’ is quite a new discipline, and as I grow older, I see more and more job titles that were created to sustain the 45-year-old designer, most of which never existed before.

I was recently exposed to this Progression.fyi by Jonny Burch which aggregates career ladders and measurements for designers inside enterprise companies. Looking at many of these companies’ ‘ladders’ it is obvious that this is still a work in progress and that a lot of that progress is being made by designers who need to invent their own career path while at the same time trying to get more leadership roles.

From Todd Zaki Warfel’s lecture

You can argue that design is not that new. It exists in commercial art, architecture and interior decoration, and the marketing and branding agencies established it as a profession many years ago. As the years pass many big tech firms started forming their own internal design agencies, as design departments which therefore adopted the hierarchy. But, I would argue that working for an agency with a fast-paced project versus working on a setting within the security settings submenu for a whole year are two extremely different experiences.

The leading Silicon Valley companies have a different take on this phenomenon. Companies like Google et al solve the issue of a traditional hierarchy within a sector by stripping away fancy titles and just call employees, “Designer’. ‘Manager’ or ‘VP of something’. You can see examples of this in many people’s LinkedIn profiles where they have gone from Senior Creative Global Director to UX designer.

The differences in ‘roles’ are often dependent on who the designer defines as their client. Is the client a Head of Design who has the mandate to enforce good design work, or a person from the marketing department looking for an inspirational piece of design? The brief, the client, the environment, the time frame and focus are the things that completely change the depth to which a designer can dive.

But design is everything: it is vision, research and ways of shifting the organisation — right?

Even though the designers are doing a great job of selling themselves within organisations today, their future is still moot. The plethora of jobs that were created in the past 10 years shackles designers to a slow career progression. Companies don’t have any new roles to give to these people: they can’t promote them to management, but they want to retain them, so they invent a new role. Yet the role of the adult designer might result in bathos. Maybe in 20 years, there will be a CDO (Chief Design Officer) role in big companies, but as long as there is no such role I foresee designers struggling and feeling unchallenged, especially when they are aware of their real potential.

How many are there? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_design_officer

What prevents designers from taking leadership roles?

There are areas and roles outside of design that unfortunately only great designers consider. For example, many designers see ‘Business’ as a Pandora’s Box that they are afraid to open. Development (coding) is another area that many designers ignore. Personally I’m extremely interested in how things are being built because it affects what I can and cannot do as a designer at a later stage, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Many designers choose to focus on the vision and design things without any constraints, such as use case or budget. In leadership it can never be just about the ‘vision’; it’s about the business and measuring your results. It’s about setting up goals and achieving them while taking responsibility for specific outcomes. Especially in leadership the role of the design educator never ends. Very much like a CMO it needs to be reinforced with proofs, that’s a different story.

To be an executive you need to be a leader and a part of that role requires widening your knowledge about all areas of the business. Ideally at any point of a designer’s growth path they need to interlink with other departments but it amplifies the further up you climb up the ladder. At that point the discussion should include passion and sense, deep understanding of the user, but also of the the technological stack, the organization’s DNA and the business goals. The best people to do that kind of job are people who have a richly varied experience: multidisciplinary people who sometimes have a background scattered around different professions, but can weave a sense and a story into their decisions and career progression.

Design doesn’t have an expiration date and I truly believe in design leadership. I think that every company should have an equivalent to Chief Design Officer in management. However I think that in many companies talented designers will have to go through product or marketing roles in order to uplift design and change the management’s perspective on what design is and how closely it should be aligned with business, product and development.

To the future CDOs 🥂

Are you boxed in? Getting to beyond professional roles and job titles

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Every time I have had to look for a job, I have found myself having to box myself into an application template or a job spec. To cover every possible instance, I used to make a couple of CVs, tweak my LinkedIn, produce multiple portfolios and a few different cover letters as standard procedure. I’m not the only one.

I have never walked the acceptable route. At university, I studied two specialties, rather than one, which was the default school scheme. I was into coding, which almost no one else was, which meant I had the wonderful chance to work for my teachers and learn their design practices while I applied the code to make them a reality. It was very clear to me then that design is not enough to make things real, and it was only later I learnt that development and design are also not enough: I had to learn more about business.

I don’t believe in linear growth; I believe in exponential growth (like a startup). I believe cross-disciplinary teams are strong, and the same is true for cross-disciplinary people. However, it’s not easy to convince people of that. I live in hope that the new world will see these kinds of people as Da Vincis, rather than as “unfocused”, which seems to be the typical response.

Titles are misleading

When filling in an application template, or writing your CV, we’ve been taught that titles are important. I believe titles are worthless, because they don’t trust indicators of what people do. It’s better to rely on descriptions of work, and even better to have references. What’s good about titles is that the discipline is encapsulated in the title. It’s easy to tell the orientation or that person, or which profession they belong to. Still at the end, what counts and what’s trusted is only real feedback from trusted contacts.

Changing jobs

Sixty percent of people claim they would change a career if they could start over. and 51% of twenty-somethings already regret their career choice (Source: School of Life, 2008).

Career Route

People might think that a change in someone’s career perhaps suggest that they weren’t good at the previous role, or that they are unfocused, but I strongly disagree. There are many people who transition from another discipline to design and vice versa.

According to the Bureau of Labor (2017) people change jobs an average of 12 times throughout their working life, which means they usually stay in each job an average of 4.2 years. In addition, in the early years 25-35 of the career trajectory, each role lasts around 2.5 years and when they reach higher roles it’s around six years.

change job 12 times in your life

Changing a job is not the same as changing a career

One in every 10 people in the UK considers changing their career (Guidance Council, 2010). According to the 2015 and 2016 data from the Current Population Survey, about 6.2 million workers (4 percent of the total workforce) transferred from one occupational group to another. Are we making it easy for them to do that? And why do they want to do it? And another question is; why do so many people think that changing career is ‘madness’, whereas changing your job is quite ordinary?

change career

Why not stay in a ‘career’ and be an ‘expert’?

I am a musician, but like many others, most of us are not on stage alongside Beyonce. Most of us don’t even make money out of music. We’re hobby-professional musicians who do other things for a living, but we still maintain our love and understanding of music. Some might argue it’s a purer way, one that reflects our truth, freed from ‘the industry’ so our music can be loved by people who really value it.  Am I better than Jay-Z? Probably not. Would I be if I would have done it 100% of my time? Maybe. Would I be as successful as he is? Who knows.

Granted, making money out of music is harder than most of every other profession, but is making money out of your skills enough? Or is music more about making your own ‘art’, and surely the amount of people who get paid for that is tiny! Even if you can make money out of something you love, surely you’ll have aspirations, to grow bigger, to learn new things and not to do the same stagnant thing over and over again.

Most people can’t be experts

 

My point is, to be an expert is hard and only 2% of people in each field can achieve that level of mastery while others suffer from boredom (after 2 years doing the same job), lack of challenge and lack of progression. This leads to mediocrity, and eventually redundancy at the age of 55 when that person can’t find a job anymore, because they don’t have other skills and they are so worn out that they haven’t learned anything new professionally in the past 10 years.

And this leads me to say – once an expert, not always an expert. People move on, time doesn’t freeze and people who once were the tip of the spear could just as well now be stuck in the ground somewhere. The only thing that lives is organic growth. How many people made a one hit wonder, had a short career as a model, launched a successful startup and then had many other failures after? Most! I applaud the lessons of history and learning from biographies and stories, but it’s an over-simplified admiration for a set of events that can never happen again.

The only things that people like to do again and again are things that were designed to make us addicts or ones that are instrumental to our survival.

So, when you’re searching for a new role and you feel like going cross-disciplinary, but are worried about how an employer is going to view your career so far, and how you’re going to deal with the questions about why you haven’t stuck in one role for a decade or more, take a look at these questions and think about how you might answer them.

Here are some questions worth asking yourself

  • How long do you think it takes to master something?
  • What happens to mastery if you neglect it and go and do something else for a while?
  • What is the difference between being 80% good at many things, rather than being 100% good at just one thing?
  • How does it feel to do many things (same things) for a long time?
  • How does my 100% compare with some other person’s 100%?

Within a person’s work life the two main key problems are interest and progression. Interest is hard to maintain now that we work for 55 years on average. It’s impossible to be interested in the same field for that long. Progression is another stumbling block, because within those 55 years the thing that keeps the best people alive is constant change and challenge. And, since challenges grow as you rise up the ladder, the compensation should align with it. Not only because the cost of living is rising, but mainly because it’s the main way to drive human beings in a positive way.

Not everyone is ambitious. Some people stay unhappy and won’t do anything about it. Some will always be unhappy no matter what happens or what they do. But in a workplace, when you see these amazing people that drive your business forward, the entrepreneur or super dedicated employee, you should help them. Help them to learn more, help them change career. Be open to someone with a CV that shows a career change. You might think it’s better for your business to have someone who did something all of their life, but the time span of doing a particular job has nothing to do with the quality of the output. It’s better having diversity in a business, with people from all kinds of backgrounds, rather than disqualifying them. Humans have a desire to evolve, and that’s the benefits of that are what you’ll get if you hire a person who doesn’t neatly fit into a box.

 

What happened Gmail?

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I’m a Google Inbox user, and since Inbox for iOS hasn’t been updated to match the screen size of iPhone X (which seems quite a trivial thing to fix) every time I saw an update on the AppStore I jumped for joy thinking that the fix was coming. Each time I was disappointed and instead it was bug fixes, security, and the awful removal of the feature to ‘Swipe up/down’ to close an email that was replaced by a back button. I was left wondering, what’s going on? What is that team at Google doing? Then came the new Gmail and I realized that the resources had been shifted towards that. Optimistically, I tried it yesterday but unfortunately, it’s disappointing.

It is true that some nice, cool features have been introduced including: confidential mode (not really private), security features (a worthy inclusion), offline mode (amazing), Self disappearing emails (cool for my Inbox’s storage, not sure it’s not a gimmick from messaging apps like Telegram though), emails you cannot copy / print (unless you screenshot them), surfaced content in email, snooze, smart replies, and nudge (features that come from Inbox and are truly good), and side panel (don’t get me started).

In reality, they’ve done amazing development work but the design, and especially the user experience, got left behind in my opinion. Creating value is the core of UX and that’s probably the reason why people are still using hideous experiences like eBay, but Google works to a much higher standard than eBay. Google are the creators of one of the best design systems every created in tech, Material Design.

Here are the three main areas where I think the new Gmail misses big-time:

Orientation

Google is a search company and their goal is to map and organize the world, but unfortunately, they can’t organize our emails. For example, the other day my wife said she couldn’t use Google Drive anymore because she had run out of space and didn’t know how to free up more space. It took me some time to find the reason. She had 17,542 emails hidden in the Promotion and Update tabs, which ended up being 6GB.

Another example, how often do you have unread emails but you have no clue where they are? The solution to finding them is to search for Unread.

“Try them all”?

Google are doing a great job in findability, using the search box, but a poor job in surfacing what’s relevant for the user. Google know that they are doing a bad job at orientation and interface design. The number of ways in which you can organize your Gmail are proof of that. From Priority inbox, to Important, Unread, Automatic Tabs like Promotions and Updates, Labels, and Filters — they have tried a lot of things and kept them all within Gmail too. The only place where they made a good decision, in my opinion, was inside Inbox. I know many people who didn’t like Inbox and I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it’s doing a better job in every category I’m about to mention than Gmail is.

Material Design

When Material Design was introduced in June 2014 by Matías Duarte it was a historic moment for design. Google Material Design opened opportunities internally and globally for design standards, guidelines and a new way of creating design. Material Design is based on basic principles of papers, shadows, and elevation. It also added motion design as an important wayfinding mechanism for orientation across all of Google’s products. Sticking to basic principles helped reduce complexity and increase focus.

Gmail was never fully Material Designed though, and the new version is even further away from the design language that made Google and Android so good. For example:

  • The Compose button in Gmail got this weird, unexplained Lego-like treatment and kept its place rather than becoming the floating action button. It’s a wild dream of someone who thought it looked fancy.
  • The New G-Suite button is weirdly pixelated and has nothing to do with Material Design either. It looks like senior people in the company just said: “Make my logo bigger”.
  • If the user decides to shrink some of the gazillion menus around the core reason for opening Gmail, they will see a series of unexplained icons. That is unlike many other Google services, which just let a minimised menu disappear. As a user, if I choose to get rid of it, I don’t want any relic of it for the time being. The hamburger button closes menus across all of Google’s services including: Inbox, YouTube, Analytics etc. but not in the new Gmail.
Material design menu in Inbox vs the new Gmail menu

• Drop-down menus within drop-down menus and the inbox types we spoke of before. The copy is especially entertaining: “Try them all, keep what fits”; aka “We have no clue what works and we couldn’t decide so we passed this decision to you” (instead of placing it in settings).

  • Menus, menus, and some more menus.In many of them you have unrelated actions.
Menus

For example: In the top menu you have (from left to right)

  1. Hamburger button — to shrink the left menus.
  2. Gmail logo — to refresh the page.
  3. Search bar — for searching in Gmail.
  4. Apps button — to go to other Google apps.
  5. Notifications button — from other Google apps.
  6. Profile picture — to manage your profile.

So they are at the same level and look the same, but on the left what you have is drop-down menus that take the user out of Gmail, while on the right and center are actions that relate to Gmail.

From a business perspective I understand that there are more people using Gmail than Calendar, Keep or the new Tasks, but the way Google has attempted to bring people into the fold and have them use add-ons and the rest of their products is just crazy. It’s a designer’s nightmare and it transports me back to the 90s when only developers were building web apps. Why do I mention the 90s? Well, it’s because it happens to look very similar to Outlook, AOL, and Yahoo, all from this era. All of these services still work amazingly well, but it’s not accurate to call what Google has done new. It’s the same thing in a new box, with the same problems and over complexity. It comes as no surprise that companies like Slack succeed by solving these problems.

Starting to look a lot like this — which gets even worse on mobile

“Google has 4 million people paying for G Suite right now, compared to 120 million Office 365 commercial users….1.4 billion people are using Gmail, compared to 400 million on Microsoft’s Outlook.com service.” (The Verge)

There is more functionality and design here than on an airplane dashboard.

Innovation

Cross-selling, merging, and doing a Frankenstein is not innovation. Moving features from one service to another is also not innovation. Even though it’s impossible to innovate every year, I would hope that within one of the core products at Google there is a willingness to innovate. When I hear of a redesign I’m always excited, and I’m still excited about the fact that something has changed with Gmail, even if it’s not enough to get me to go back to using it.

Here are a few of the innovations that are needed:

  • A good method for telling users what’s important to read and what can wait for later.

• A way to help users handle the amount of emails they get.

• An efficient way to categorize, filter and search content.

• New ways of passing information (from media types, to supported files for preview).

• A tool to help users fix mistakes they’ve made, such as sending someone the wrong email, or spelling something incorrectly.

• Providing an efficient way of sending big files (Drive works to some extent, but it’s cumbersome in many cases).

• Allowing users to handle their business better through Gmail (e.g. sign documents, approve things, review things).

• Allowing users to design their emails in a better way.

• Letting users know if someone read their presentation and what parts interested them (DocSend).

All of these are focused on the core usage of Gmail: communicating with information. Ideally, you don’t need emails to schedule a meeting because emailing is slow, complicated and sometimes requires too much coordination. That’s why you have tools like X.AI (Amy), Calendarly and Doodle. Tasks are also way better informed by chatter rather than an email.

Google’s product manager Bank said, “Inbox is the next-gen, early adopter version, whereas Gmail is the flagship that will eventually get the best new features”. If Inbox is the next-gen then why isn’t it updated on iOS? If Gmail gets the best features does that mean it will become a pile of features without real focus for the true purpose of what an email service is? When does Gmail remove things that don’t work, or at least hide them?

In the new Gmail, instead of innovation, there was aggregation. A KPI hungry complexity. I’m sure this design will rattle up numbers, but I’m also sure it’s not iterating to address users’ problems.

Where will ads live? The answer: Hardware

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There are countless businesses that build their value on the back of ads. Shamefully it became the default reaction to “what’s your business model? Advertising”. Because of this, ads became more hated than ever. Yet there is barely any supervision for the content that is in ads. With the absence of supervision in this space there is a major opportunity: To grab the last touch point, and make it useful and workable for the customer. Let’s dive in.

Trust the medium?

Newspapers are a medium, a format that ads are distributed through. As well as charging companies to place adverts, consumers paid to read the papers, and therefore to see the adverts. Before the rise of the internet, the monopoly over information that people wanted to read made it feasible to charge the two sides of the market, the customer and the advertiser. Newspapers were better the more distribution they had.

As power accumulated so did money. Norms started appearing, and with them a code of conduct. Many of the people who worked in the information business were creatives. For example: journalists, editors, and photographers. This led to the creation of unions, enforcing the code of conduct and ethics. People ended up buying the newspaper for its name which symbolized some sort of truth. Authors were relentless in their pursuit of the truth while telling a good story. Today most people don’t know where an article came from “I just saw it on Facebook”, let alone who wrote it.

People spend less writing time per article today in comparison to the past. Articles are distributed through undifferentiated platforms and mutate according to the platform. Likes are dismissive, comments are mostly superficial – three words or an emoji. Mini boredom is solved by minimal non-obligatory interactions and people have short attention spans.

Ads kept their place in this world, dollars follow attention and distribution, not ethics. Ads moved where the information did; after all, ads are also some sort of information that someone wants to provide. An ad’s trustworthiness is created by grabbing attention and using public / attractive figures. These address the truth or utopia, whims of dreams.

Trust the distributors?

It is always said that when you control the distribution you can control the knowledge. Only in the past there were more layers to filter ads, based on the content that editors wanted to correlate with their brand and standards. But a paradigm shift happened, the choice now belongs to the people. Your friends can post whatever they want to and companies can target whoever they feel like. Because of scale, there is less of a critical eye being cast over what is exposed to the public.

The other day a friend of mine wanted to publish a campaign on Instagram. He filmed his music studio, but upon uploading it the Instagram algorithm claimed that text appeared in his video, thus blocking the campaign. In response, he requested that they look at it manually because it, in fact, didn’t include any text. A few days passed and they approved the campaign. AI is not smart enough to even determine whether there is text in a video, I don’t expect it to judge the content anytime soon.

Big money was always in the game. Many newspapers and media companies are owned by political bodies. That’s exactly the reason that today if you pick up The Guardian you know what to expect, and the same is true if you watch Fox News. Most platforms don’t have anyone editorial, or legal, looking at anything that comes online. Until recently nobody was interested in standardizing ads, their content or their mechanism.

Trust today’s solutions?

Throughout history, many people have tried to avoid specific types of content, ads among them. One of the key marketed benefits of having a remote control was to skip a channel when ads are on TV. When VCRs arrived people recorded shows and fast-forwarded ads. People loved the concept of controlling the content. Today cord cutters also prefer it to cable TV because they want to see what they want to see without ads. In fact they care less about where the content came from, and are more interested in just consuming it.

As an example, Netflix built on the lack of care shown by customers and so did cable companies. But now TV companies try to differentiate themselves because they do care about exclusivity, and therefore want to create a lockdown mechanism. Once it is strong enough, I believe that even paying customers will see ads again.

2016 was a big year for Ad Blockers. As the number of people who installed an Ad Blocker rose above 20% the advertising industry and the distributors realised it’s a big problem. The reactions varied:

  1. Block every user that has Ad Blocker from watching any content
  2. Make a paywall for content without ads and give away some content for free
  3. Show parts of the content
  4. Beg for users to remove their Ad Blocker
  5. Say they ethically request users to remove it so they (the distributor, content maker) can support themselves.

But only halfway through the year, new voices arose calling for ads to be standardized. These voices looked at the problem at hand. With today’s accurate tracking and personalization, why would people block ads? The answer is that ads are a jungle full of clickbait ads, spam, viruses, ads that hurt the user experience and take over the whole screen, ads that play sudden loud music or open unwanted windows, the list goes on.  So they decided to try and work on standardizing ads, and at some point, they will have some teeth. But in the meantime…

People discovered Ad Blockers and even if there were some ads they didn’t mind seeing, they just wanted to get rid of it all completely because the bad and interruptive ads outweighed the good and targeted ads. Ad Blocker was such a hit that it caught both Apple and Google’s attention. We can already see seeds of their work in updates they did recently.

Apple’s cookie tracking blocker mechanism in IOS 11’s Safari has reportedly cost media companies around 200 million dollars. Google is bringing an integrated ad blocker to Chrome. Probably to block everyone else’s ads and prioritize their own. They are both trying to prevent users from choosing services like adBlocker Plus.

This kind of service makes its money by allowing specific ads to go through the filter. This allows them to get paid, it’s their business model. Do we trust Google more than we trust adBlocker Plus? I really don’t know, but it seems like it’s a good idea to be able to avoid a monopoly on this front. It seems that the EU is also eying this area.

 

Who to trust?

Privacy and ads seem to be an especially good opportunity for aggregators that have a leg in the hardware world. Why? Because hardware is the actual touch point for the customer. You could argue that you watch Netflix on TV but I would argue that you watch TV!

For many years hardware companies took the wrong steps to catch up with startups and software companies. Among these wrong steps, we have the cases of bloatware (adding unnecessary apps to your phone, hoping that you will use them), and creating competing software that wasn’t good or innovative enough etc. But now it seems companies like Apple and Amazon understand that they will never have a better app than a competitor that is working on it exclusively. By becoming a smart aggregator, and applying regulations and ethics, the last touch point can become the only touch point.

Here are a few examples:

Apple pulling out an app from the app store because it’s competing with a service they are about to launch, or inappropriately using one of their devices.

Apple’s TV app aggregates TV shows and movies from all the apps that are installed on the Apple TV. If you add Apple’s future original content it’s a very powerful touch point.

Amazon creating an API for developers to use Alexa, controlling what information they give to developers.

Facebook’s single sign in, which allows users to signup and protect their information to a certain extent.

 

It is essential for hardware companies to know what’s going on within each app that is on their devices. Of course Facebook will never agree to give Google all its info about what you do on your device. But in reality, Google look at what you type on your keyboard, and they also know how long you spend in the app. That is already very valuable information.

Imagine you are watching a TV show on live TV and when the ads start the TV blocks them, or changes the channel to something else (your second option) until the ads end. Imagine the TV making sure you watch an ad that is relevant to you, like on the internet. Instead of watching a tampon ad you’ll see a PlayStation game ad. Imagine physical ads on the street that will react to your profile.

I believe that this is the future that companies like Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook imagine. A future where controlling the touch point allows them to set rules that will make the user experience better, that will target us personally with things that interest us (or that will affect us – depending on how dark we want to be). The company that controls the last step of the interaction, the physical touch point, is the company that can call the shots. This is one of the main reasons why every big software firm tries to branch out into hardware.

When a user is using your software the user is your product. You will do anything in your power to retain them and you will make money out of them however you can (ads, upgrades etc.). When a user buys your device the user is your customer and the device is your product. You will do everything you can to make your device better. Thus you will want them to have the best experience possible. Ads wouldn’t interest you because it’s not how you’d make money. You’d make money by selling your device and creating the best experience. And that wouldn’t include ads, unless you are a newspaper 🙂

Goodbye Stereo, hello 360º Sound

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In the past five years, there has been a paradigm shift in the speakers market. We’ve started seeing a different form factor of audio capable devices, 360-degree audio speakers, emerging. I want to have a look at the reasons behind the appearance of this form factor and the benefits it brings us.

First, it is important to look at the market segmentation reasoning:

1. Since the inclusion of Bluetooth in phones there has been a variety of (mainly cheap, initially) speakers that sought to abolish the need for cables. Docs and Bluetooth speakers were the answer. But at the time there was no premium solution for Bluetooth speakers and besides sound quality, there was room for more innovation (or gimmicks, like a floating speaker). To luxuriate the Bluetooth speaker one of the solutions that were created was a 360° speaker.

The original Bluetooth speakers were directional speakers and since it is unknown where they will be placed, how many people need to listen to them and where they are sitting; having a directional speaker is a disadvantage in comparison to a 360° one.

2. From another perspective, 360° speakers function as a cheaper alternative to hi-fi audio systems. Many customers are just interested in listening to music in their home in comfort and do not require a whole setup with wires and receivers. They also mainly play music using their mobile phones.

So it fits right in the middle. Now let’s look at some use cases:

Parties — It can be connected to other speakers and have increased sound. It’s also relatively easy for other people to connect to it.

Multi-room — It can allow you to play music whilst controlling it with your phone in all sections of your house. It can also be controlled remotely.

Conference calls — or actually any call. It’s also possible to put it on speaker on your phone but that’s sometimes hard to hear.

Smart — Today we have assistant speakers with arrays of microphones that sometimes come in the form of 360. It’s a bit different but a 360° microphone array is as useful as a speaker array.

I want to focus on the 360° form factor and discuss why it is so important and a real differentiator. To be able to understand more about 360° audio, its advantages and the future of 360° audio consumption, it is important to have a look at the history of sound systems.

The person as sound — Before there were speakers there were instruments. People used their own resonance to make a sound and then found resonance in drums, and string-based instruments. That led to a very close and personal interaction which could be mobile as well. People gathered around a singer or musician to hear them.

Phonograph and Gramophone — This was the first time music became reproducible mechanically. However, it was still mono (one channel). From an interaction perspective, it was a centerpiece with the sound coming out of the horn.

Stereo systems — Stereo was an ‘easy sell’, after all we all have two ears. Therefore speakers that can pleasure them both are fabulous. Some televisions were equipped with mono speakers but more advanced televisions had stereo speakers too.

Surround — 3/5/7.1 systems were introduced mainly for the use case of watching movies in an immersive way. These systems included front, back, center, and sub speakers (sometimes even top and bottom). It is still quite rare to find music recordings that are made for surround. Algorithms were also created for headphones, to mimic surround.

But there is a limitation with these systems. Let’s compare it to the first two reproducible sound systems: the human voice and the Phonograph. They both had more mobility. You could place them wherever you wanted to and people would gather around and listen to music. I can’t say it’s exactly the same experience, but it doesn’t hurt the premise of the instrument. However, with stereo systems and surround systems, you need to sit in a specific contained environment in a specific way to really enjoy their benefits. Sitting in a place where you cannot really sense that spatial experience makes these systems redundant.

Sources of music

Audio speakers in the present

Considering current technologies and their usage, our main music source is our mobile phones. It’s a music source that doesn’t have to be physically connected via cables. Our listening experience is more like a restaurant experience where it’s not important where the audio is coming from as long as it’s immersive. 360° speakers then were able to provide exactly that with fewer speakers. But we lost something along the way, we lost stereo and surround. In other words, we lost the immersive elements of spatial sound.

Audio speakers in the near future

There are huge investments in VR, AR and AI and all of these fields are affecting sound and speakers. In VR and AR we are immersed visually and auditory, currently using a headset and headphones. At home we’ve started controlling it via our voices, turning lights on and off, changing music and so on.

Apple’s HomePod has a huge premise in this respect. Its spatial algorithm could be the basis for incredible audio developments. Apple might have been late to the 360° market but they have tremendous experience in audio and computing and this is why I think this is the next big audio trend: “The spatially aware 360° speaker”.

From Apple’s presentation

Although they sell it as one speaker it can obviously be bought in pairs or more. The way these understand each other will be the key to this technology.

Spatiality is important because in a 360° speaker a lot of sound goes to waste, and a lot of power is inefficient. Some of that sound is being pushed against a wall which causes too much reverb. Most of the high frequency that is not being projected at you is useless.

Here are the elements to take into account

  1. Location in the room — near a wall, in the corner, center?
  2. Where is the listener?
  3. How many listeners are there?
  4. Are there other speakers and where?

In Apple’s demonstration, it seems that some of these are being addressed. It’s clear to see that they thought about these use-cases and therefore embedded their chip into the speaker which might become better over time.

The new surround

360° speakers can already simulate 3D depending on the array of speakers that are inside the hardware shell. This will be reflected in the ability to hear stereo if you position yourself in the right place.

But things get much more interesting if the speaker/s are aware of your location. If you are wearing a VR headset and have two 360° speakers you can potentially walk around the room and have a complete surround experience. A game’s experience could be super immersive without the need for headphones. Projected into AR, a room could facilitate more than one person at a time.

Consider where music is being listened to. In most instances, a 360° speaker would be of greater benefit than a stereo system. In cars, which usually have four speakers, offices and clubs, 360° speakers would work better than a stereo system. Even headphones could be improved by using spatial awareness to block noises from the surrounding environment and featuring a compass to communicate your orientation. Even a TV experience can be upgraded with just HomePods and some software advancements.

What about products like Amazon Echo Show?

A screen is a classic one direction interaction. Until we have 360-degree screens which work like a crystal ball with 360° audio, I don’t see it becoming the next big thing; after all, we still have our phones and tablets.

The future of 360 in relation to creation and consumption tools

Here are a bunch of hopes and assumptions:

  1. Music production and software will adopt 360° workflows to support the film and gaming industry; similar to 3D programs like Unity, Cinema 4D, and Adobe.
From Dolby Atmos

2. New microphones will arise, ones that record an environment using three or more microphones. It will initially start with a way to reproduce 3D from two microphones, like field recorders, but quickly it’ll move into more advanced instruments driven by mobile phones which will adopt three to four microphones per phone to be able to record 360° videos with 360° sound. Obviously, it’ll be reflected in 360° cameras individually as well.

3. A new file type that can encode multiple audio channels will emerge and it will have a way of translating it to stereo and headphones.

I can’t wait to see this becoming reality and having a spatially aware auditory and visual future based on augmented reality, using instruments like speakers or headphones and smart glasses to consume it all.

Here are a couple of companies/articles that I think are related

dearVR 3D audio reality engine
3D audio virtual acoustics for games and VRdearvr.com
The importance of audio in augmented and virtual reality
A review of the Welcome to the Real World – Immersive Audio for Augmented and Virtual Reality event The uptake and…www.immerseuk.org

Designed for the mute scroller

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Users consume content in a vacuum and it is usually mute. This is a short guide for designing for the mute scroller. How to grab their attention and make sure that your message gets heard…even in mute.

Why mute?

In the Communication Pyramid I mentioned some reasons for mute consumption of content. These reasons are linked to the comfort and discomfort of consuming video. Here are some reasons that relate to sound:

  • We don’t like loud unexpected sounds — for example clicking on something and abruptly hearing a loud soundtrack that you never asked for.
  • It’s rude — because other people didn’t ask to hear what you want to hear, especially on public transport.
  • We are at work and don’t want people to know we are watching videos.
  • It’s a standard for most apps.

Every Snap, Instagram story, Facebook video, starts mute. Upon action, the content will come alive with sound. But does it? To be honest, mobile phones’ sound quality is shoddy and since most of today’s consumption is on a mobile phone, why bother? The smart thing would be to ask, where to bother?

An incentive to click on the video. The post tells us what it’s about and what we are about to hear if we click it.

Users stop!

All interactions are chained to whether people look at your content. For users to absorb your content you need to make them stop and look at it. In reality, many users will do little more than pause to take a cursory glance at your content before they continue scrolling. There is an average conversion rate of 10% for posts, and 4% in newsletters.

I once tried to put an ad on a Medium post I wrote on Facebook. Here are the stats: 12k Facebook exposures, 900 Clicked through to Medium, 100 read it, I got 0 recommends.

The result

There are many facets to fix to make things better but here I would like to focus on typography and video.

Design for mute

In Subtitles were never designed. The missing element in TV typography design I talked about the importance of subtitles. So here is another good reason to do it. Not every person has a budget to create a mini action movie to make people pause and see his content. Not everyone knows how to produce a show-stopping visual frame.

Imagine you’re walking down the street. How many people will make you turn your head after they pass you? How many will grab your attention? How much of it is positive vs negative attention? How much do you remember from walking down the street? If you stand in the street and look at somebody, what can you guess/know about them?

yeah you are angry, but what are you talking about? I don’t know and I probably missed half of it by the time I pressed play. But yeah I’d stop down the street and look at this guy!

Well, this is what typography is for. This is why there are street signs. They give you glimpsable visual information. Some places are busier like Tokyo and some are less, like a highway.

So if you are not a movie producer and you’re not hot the alternative is typography and content. This is a way of grabbing attention by highlighting what’s important in the video.

Good use of subtitles in the French elections

Fast content

A video is the easiest consumption method when users are comfortable. But hey, sometimes users are not comfortable. Sometimes they walk down the street and don’t have time to watch your video, or are just about to get off a bus. So hit it as hard as possible from the very beginning.

Editing is extremely important. The ability to let the observer see the music and imagine how it sounds is the essence of editing. For the mute scroller, it might give them a reason to stop.

Here is an example of a new channel in Israel that shows great editing and can also be seen in mute.

 

Design for sync

Video content pieces just stream. It gives users the feeling of missing out (if done well). But in some cases, it takes users some time to make a decision along the lines of: “It looks interesting, I actually want to hear what this person is speaking about”. If you use typography syncing the user in would be smooth. The user will be informed because he can read what it’s about, and now he can just continue experiencing it.

Typography is not just static. We want to share a feeling and draw users in, which means we need to trigger the right mood. The way the text animates informs the user if it’s a sad/angry/happy story. Nowadays I wouldn’t post any video without subtitles that are matched for the platform in terms of size. But to enhance it further you need to look to the areas of pace, color and size, where much more can be done.

A Facebook example

Facebook recognized this and helped users create these gradients with text. The reason that people turned away from writing is because they believed users would always look at a video or an image, it’s bigger and better at grabbing attention. I think it was a smart decision by Facebook because it works, especially when mute scrolling. People stop and read — if it’s not too many words.

Breathe…

I’m a sound lover and I would love to see a platform that can give me the Facebook feed in audio only. All of these quick consumption platforms are in the business of mini-boredom. They just fill up the empty pieces of our lives. Instead of gaining observation and sociability, we consume isolated from our surroundings. The good thing about sound is that it’s not fully taking over, it’s a secondary sense that enhances your reality rather than replacing it. It comes together and doesn’t take over.

I can’t wait for a world where everyone has an implant in their ear which gives them added information. Personally, I see it as more valuable than AR or VR. I know it’ll be less exciting and grandiose. But it’ll be more intimate, human, and helpful. In any case, I know the future will be exciting, escorted by voices in our heads. In the meantime, we’ll keep on scrolling.

The slipperiness of UX data

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In my article proving design, I talked about how hard it is to have proofs for making the right product or product decisions. Some projects are so expensive that it takes a lot of convincing to get a budget for them. It’s a natural trade-off. It doesn’t get easier after you’ve done parts of the project, or even after you’ve done the project and are now interested in moving forward with a second stage of development.

Many UX professionals talk about the importance of data but let’s be honest, in the cycle of design and decision making there are countless things that cannot be measured.

What can be measured?

  1. Do people need your product?
  2. The product itself and how people use it.
  3. Ideas, and iterations — Using user research.

Basically everything you can do with your team. It adds up to around 20% of the creation process.

What do you create? What informs your ideas? Are you influenced by other designs you can’t measure? Hell yeah!

What cannot be measured?

Competitors

You can’t know why your competitors behaved the way they did. You don’t have their data and you can’t know their decision-making process.

Pre-product behavior

There are many marketing products that are trying to solve this. However, in this part of the user journey, the designers have zero control. The user journey is driven by the facilitators whether it’s the OS or the platform. Each platform will supply you with some data and measurements but it’s not exactly monitoring UX, it’s more generic and marketing led. In big organizations, it’ll also be a challenge to get these data points. In addition, every piece of data should be verified. With platforms, it’s almost impossible to verify.

Analytics

In your service, you’ll need to check and correlate through different tools (MixPanel, GTM, Data studio, etc.). Understanding analytics tools have become essential for UX and Product roles. This is how companies make crucial decisions and that’s why it is checked and cross matched, usually with three to four systems, to compare and see if the data is reliable.

OS design patterns

The fact that Google decided something should look the way it does doesn’t mean it’s the best way. It means that they probably measured it and it works. It also means that with their level of influence, many apps will adopt it and it’ll become familiar. But it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better. Some of these decisions are made to differentiate from other platforms like iOS or Windows. Other decisions are a compromised solution to a great design because the design might be patented. That’s precisely why Google and Microsoft bought Motorola and Nokia, stripped them of their patents, and then sold them on to someone else. So if you’ve seen a design, even if it’s famous, it doesn’t mean it’s the best practice.

Just because it works it doesn’t mean it’s a nice experience. Many companies don’t see a reason to change. It’s very common when a company has a monopoly.. For example buying stuff on eBay…does it work?, Yeah…Is it a nice experience? No. Everything is cumbersome: receiving messages, sending, going through versions of eBay from 2000 till today.

It works but it ain’t nice and at times very confusing

In comparison, Amazon are more ambitious and “very slowly” redesign their experiences to be functional and delightful.

You’ve got the Data! But, wait, it might be skewed.

Let’s have a look at how this can happen.

Wrong implementation

Just a simple line of code or a selection of a wrong event could cause every click to be counted as two. That’s why it’s important to check with multiple systems — which, as I mentioned earlier, could be problematic at the stage prior to the user journey beginning in earnest.

Intentions

Even if you have a lot of verified data, how can you believe the data that you see? Every person that collects data (arguably even scientists) is trying to show the data in a way that will flatter their agenda. Data can be collected and presented in a non-neutral way. It’s natural and happens with everyone from marketing companies to UX designers who just want their projects to be successful.

Source giphy.com

Presentation

The medium is the weapon and it’s important to understand why something was chosen, in a similar way to understanding graphic design decisions: What do they show me, and what don’t they show me.

A few current examples of skewed data and how it has been used:

  1. Facebook admitted to having wrong measurements for the 10th time
  2. Facebook is accused of being part of the Fake news problem…Google is too, but it’s used much less for leisure and content consumption.
  3. Facebook is deleting tens of thousands of Fake users, which is why they keep tweaking the news feed, and Google is doing the same with search results.
  4. Cambridge Analytica is suspected of and grilled about their methods for influencing users in the UK / US.

Key ways to deal with it

Critic

Be harsh and critical, try to look for the angle. Life sucks if you always think everyone has an interest but even though awareness drives sadness it’s smarter to look at things critically, especially in business. So when you see a new feature, after you finish getting excited or booing it, think about why they created it? Whose decision was it to make it and what’s their interest? Link its value to the business, marketing, user satisfaction, design etc. Guess which department came up with this concept. Think about where they could take it to next. What’s the future of it?

Influenced but aware

There is nothing public, what you have is a trail of user experience data. I got responses for a previous post I wrote about Facebook that said: “But where is the data?” The answer is: This data is internal and not available to anyone else. It’s too secretive to expose, it’s their secret sauce. Does that mean I’m not allowed to write about or analyze it? I don’t think so.

In Instagram, you’d know how many pictures are uploaded to Instagram because it’s a financial data that affects retention/time spent. But you wouldn’t know how many of these pictures are uploaded from a computer, user’s gallery or a professional camera. It’s just important to accept it when critiquing or being influenced by it and to know the limitations of the data you’re dealing with.

Here is an example where you have data, but can only see part of the picturee: “Apple’s revenue from repair is bundled in with its “services” revenue, alongside digital content sales, AppleCare, and Apple Pay revenue. While there is no good way to figure out how much revenue comes from repair, Apple’s services revenue pulled down $7.04 billion in net sales, out of $52.90 billion total.”

Hack

Be aware of your level of control, but see if you can take it further. The difference between owning an OS and participating in one is huge. When I was working for Samsung we were designing the core of Tizen OS for TV. We had control over everything without limitations. We could track everything we wanted to if we built it. But when you are a part of an ecosystem you need to play by the rules and get whatever you can throughout the process. That’s why designing for a native OS is such fun, especially if others are building and increasing your knowledge.

Data is important, but I would argue that decision making can only be done based on it to a certain degree. In my opinion, around 70% of what constructs the decision is experience, aspirations, and alignment with the other sides of the business. A good designer or product guy should influence and convince but it’s not all up to data. Data is just another tool in the arsenal and it’s good for specific use.

Facebook’s UX is killing the “home” button

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Facebook has mastered making users ignore the bottom middle button; one of the most comfortable navigation areas. Look at the diagram below, it’s evident that no matter which hand holds the phone it would have access to the most important area of the app. Instead they choose to use the bottom navigation for the promotion of their own new features which are far from the main use case.

Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday “You might have noticed all of the cameras that we’ve rolled recently” but didn’t share any usage statistics about them.

Let’s quickly dip into some examples:

Facebook

In Facebook no one looks at the Buy section. This is a total mystery. I wonder who uses it? Seriously I don’t know anyone. Then there’s Facebook Stories, which offers nothing and as far as I’m aware are used by few people, yet they keep insisting on having it there.

The bottom navigation points at a left to right priority. Feed first (main use case), Adding friends (rare case), Marketplace in the most important position (which no one use), Notifications (probably the most used button on them all), Settings.

Instagram

In Instagram people don’t take pictures, they just add pictures they took on their camera app. It’s mainly because in the regular camera you have more options and it’s better to edit and then select from your gallery.

The bottom navigation is similar yet without text subtitles for the icons: Feed (main use case), Explore (quite popular), Take a photo (main thing Facebook whats you to do), Notifications, Settings.

Facebook Messenger

In Messenger no one uses the My Day camera feature.

The bottom navigation has a huge blue button that is laid out uncomfortably on top of your friends’ names and competes with the blue of the active tab. Priority is: Home-Explore + conversations (main use case), Calls (less used feature), Camera (let’s make it big so people use it), Groups (which has its own Facebook app), People (your contacts).

WhatsApp

In WhatsApp no one uses the camera button.

In WhatsApp all of the priorities shifted. Status is not being used by anyone of my contacts, Calls (very popular use case), Camera (no one uses), Chats (main use case), Settings.

What do users want?

For such a huge company it’s embarrassing. It feels as though someone there doesn’t listen to the designers.

Where users really look — http://uk.businessinsider.com/eye-tracking-heatmaps-2014-7?r=US&IR=T

Let’s look at the core purposes of these platforms and my critique

Facebook — What do we use Facebook for? Reading news, asking questions to a community you care about, complaining, raising money, and stalking people you don’t really talk to.

Hence it’s completely not aligned. It seems like Facebook hasn’t decided what its main purpose is, news or people’s lives. It’s ok to try and have both and it kind of worked for a while in the feed, but once there are creation options that are based on both it just gets very confusing.

Messenger / WhatsApp — We use both of these for talking to friends.

Adding the camera is important for an easy way to share images in the chat, but for that button to create a story and have a global chat makes it feel like it’s introducing a new usage for these platforms. People usually talk to individuals or groups, not to everyone, and especially not to every contact they have. There isn’t even a proper way to target specific groups. In the use case of Snapchat the whole experience is extremely curated. You could argue that you can slightly curate in Facebook / Messenger, but in WhatsApp there is zero curation. In which case, who is this feature aimed at? Who realistically is going to use it, and who’s going to engage with the stories they share?

Users mainly look at the middle and it is the easiest area for their fingers to touch on

Instagram — A platform to follow your interests and share your life.

Stories is aligned with the initial purpose of Instagram, allowing people to only share photos they’ve just taken rather than using pre-photographed images. Providing a way for sharing photos from a user’s gallery really changed Instagram and in some ways it allowed professionals to outshine regular users with tools and talent. Stories offer another way of sharing which equalizes the field and has helped bringing back the originality and integrity of the content. However, since Snapchat allows you to upload pre-made video, I suspect all of the Facebook story platforms will allow it in the future, and then again this feature will lose its originality and integrity.

The bottom navigation mess across Facebook’s apps = no consistency + changing hierarchies

Conclusion

I love Facebook and all of their acquired companies. Each one is really good on its own. WhatsApp for the older generation, it’s light and fast. Messenger for a nicer, almost the nicest (second to Telegram) chat experience. Instagram for the amazing creation that keeps happening there. Facebook for the ability to see what my friends care about and participate in groups.

Now there is a something that has been tried in all of these apps without any thought about consistency or the advanced usage of their ecosystem. It’s a shame. The middle button / middle tab was supposed to be one of the main points of focus of the app, the core use case. But Facebook is telling us it’s not. In fact it seems like there is no logic behind the order in which menu items are sorted. Ultimately that diminishes the user experience, making it far from ideal.

Finished copying Snapchat? What’s next in messaging

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In the past year we’ve seen more copying than innovation in the world of messaging. In 2016 everyone did stories, disappearing messages etc. Instead of simply trying to mimic Snapchat there are other useful avenues to explore that can simplify people’s lives and increase engagement. In this article I will analyze key areas in the world of digital conversation and suggest practical examples of how it could be done.

What should be enhanced in messaging:

As users we spend most of our screen time communicating. Therefore there is a need for it to be easy and comfortable; every tap counts.

Part 1

Comfort — The product needs to be easy to adopt, following familiar patterns from real life and aggrandize them.

Rich messaging — Introducing new experiences that help users articulate themselves in unique ways. Charge the conversation with their personality.

Part 2

Automation — Reducing clutter and simplifying paths for repeated actions.

Control — A way for users to feel comfortable; to share more without proliferating vulnerability.

Rich messaging

Being rich in a wider sense means you have a variety of options and most of them are cheap for you. In a messaging UX context, cheap means content that is easy to create; interaction that helps deliver and sharpen the communication. Rich messaging can be embodied in the input and output. It is catered to the user’s context thus facilitating ongoing communication and increasing engagement.

In the past, and currently in third world countries, the inability to send large files including voice messages resulted in many people simply texting. This led more people to learn to read and write. Unapologetically text is harder to communicate with and primitive in terms of technology, hence why users have come to expect more.

Take voice input/output for example. It’s the perfect candidate as there is increasing investment in this area. Speaking is easy, in fact using sounds is the easiest way for humans to assimilate and share information.

There are scenarios where voice can be the preferred communication method, such as when you’re driving, when you’re alone in the room, when you’re cooking, and when you’re doing anything that keeps you relatively busy.

Here are a few examples for rich messaging:

Voice to text — Messaging is asynchronous and to drive engagement the goal is to strive for synchronous. It doesn’t matter how the content was created. What matters is that it is delivered to the other person in a form they can consume now!

Voice dictation has improved tremendously but somehow most of the focus has been on real-time. The nature of messaging dictates a non-real-time solution. It can be leveraged to give a better quality LPM (Language Processing Model) transcript result. For example, Baidu recently launched SwiftScribe which allows users to upload an audio file that the program transcribes.

Another recent example is Jot Engine, a paid service designed withinterviews in mind. I myself use Unmo and PitchPal to help me prepare for pitches.

They’re not perfect but they take away the guesswork of trying to understand someone in real-time. In a recording, the algorithm can search for context, see what the subject is and rework the language accordingly. I would argue that the result of someone sending you a voice message should be a transcript with an option to listen to the voice as well. As a user, you’d be able to listen to it or just read if you are in an environment that doesn’t allow you to use sound.

In another scenario when a user is in the car they should be able to listen and answer text messages that were sent to them.

Voice context attachment — A good example of this concept is the Livescribe pen. It allows users to write notes that are stored digitally while recording audio to add context. I admit, it’s a more novel idea that won’t be for everyone, but its potential is clear in a professional context.

Metadata — Other than location there are other metadata elements that can be kept with the messages. How fast you type, how strong you press the keyboard, where you are located, who is around you. The possibilities of enhancing the text and providing context are endless and have barely been explored.

It baffles me that no one has done this yet. The cloud actually has more capacity to interpret a message and learn from context. In photos apps like the ones by Google or Samsung, you can see more and more belief in context including location, details of the picture, live photo etc. All these elements should be collected and added when they are relevant.

Engagement and emotional reactions — With services like Bitmoji users can create their own personal stickers. An exaggerated instance of themselves. Seeing this in the world of video would be very interesting. Psychologically these stickers help users to enhance their emotions and share content in a way they wouldn’t if they were communicating in person.

In addition, Masks on Snow (live filters in Snapchat) also helps user express their feelings but at the moment it’s just some weird selection that has a fragment of a context to where they are or what they are doing. You can see how users just post themselves with a sticker not to tell a story but for the fun of it. If they could tell a story or reflect this on reality it would be emotionally usable which will elevate it as a mode of expression.

Comfort of Use

Comfort depends on the way users use the communication. Important relevant detail surfacing and accessible ways of communicating are the backbones of the UX.

Contextual pinning — Recently Slack added an incredible 90s feature “Threads”. If you’ve ever posted in a forum you know that this is a way to create a conversation on a specific topic. Twitter call it stories and Facebook are just using comments. But the story here was the conversion of this feature to the messaging world and that generated a lot of excitement among their users.

However, I see it as just a start. For example let’s say you and a few friends are trying to set up a meeting, and there is the usual trash talk going on while you’re trying to make a decision. Later another member of the group jumps into the thread but finds it really hard to understand. What has been discussed and what has been decided? If users could pin a topic to a thread, and accumulate the results of the discussion in some way it would be incredibly helpful. Then they could get rid of it when that event had passed.

Here is another good example

https://blog.google/

Accessibility

Image/video to message — instead of just telling a user “Jess sent you a picture or a video” you could actually try to tell the user something useful about that picture/video. Currently most notifications systems are limited to text so why not take advantage of the image processing mechanism that already exists? In other richer platforms you could convert the important pieces of the video to a Gif.

* In that context it’s quite shameful that Apple still doesn’t do bundling of notifications which really helps to tell the story the way it happened without spamming the user. I’m not sure I fancy Android O’s notification groups, but it’s definitely better than creating an endless list of notifications.

Voice type emojis — Keyboards are moving towards predictive emoji and text. They understand that having a different keyboard for emoji is a bit complex for the user, especially since they’re used a lot. A cool way to unify it is to create a language for emoji to make it easier to insert them into messages via voice.

In text translation — We’ve seen improvements from Skype immediate translation and Facebook / Instagram’s “Translate this”. Surely it makes more sense to have this in a chat rather than on the feed? I’m sure not too many people talk to other people in a different language, but if users had such a feature, they might do so. This could also be a great learning tool for companies and maybe it’ll help users to improve the translation algorithm.

See you in Part 2…