The poor, bashed-about phone I dropped was a Gen 1 iPhone: almost a retro device by some accounts. Nonetheless, I’ve stuck with it, and life now without an internet-ready mobile is simply not an option for me. It was therefore a rather lucky twist of fate that found a generous friend offering me his brand new Android phone to use for a while.

So I find myself with the latest and greatest Android handset: an HTC Desire. A ten zigabit processor, a gwillion megapixel camera, a ten billion pixel screen, infinite memory. Something like that, anyway. It’s slick, beautiful, thin, light. It has a bright, hi-res screen, a wonderful camera. It is rammed to the hilt with functionality. I’m blown away by having real location capability (remember, my Gen 1 could only find me using cell stuff rather than GPS); I’ve experienced using Layar, Google Sky Maps, other LBS services – properly – for the first time. That openness, that speed, that power. Awesome.

The first night I got back with the Desire, I found myself sitting on the sofa, flicking my way through the Android store, checking Twidroid, browsing the news. And a weird thing happened, something I wasn’t expecting. Like an almost intangible movement in my peripheral vision, I realised that something wasn’t quite right. I was a bit on edge, trying a bit hard, having to think. Night One, I said to myself. Night One with a new and unfamiliar device. No wonder. It’ll be ok tomorrow.

The thing is: the uneasy thought didn’t get better the next day, or the next night, or the night after that.

After a week of using the latest and greatest Android phone, I find myself sitting down on the sofa in the evening and the thing is sitting unused on the top of the piano. Instead I’m – get this - back using the 1st generation iPhone. It’s SIM-less (useless as a phone, but still ok as a device on the WIFI), battered, slow as buggery, and I can’t turn it off, but hey – I’m back.

Now’s the point in time I should make something very clear: I’m not an Apple fanboy. I have a Macbook at home but I spend most of my working life on PC’s. In my past I’ve used both, enjoyed both, had different experiences of both. I’m also pretty conflicted about some of the recent moves by Apple. I personally think that the whole anti-Flash thing is a major mistake, in the same way that I think the anti-Flash zealots are making some pretty bold assumptions in saying that HTML5 can replace Flash at this point in time. Frankly, that’s bullshit. I also dislike the pro-app, anti-web thing that they appear to have going on. The web wins: it always will. Apple say they get this but do a bunch of stuff which implies otherwise.

I wanted to love Android. I wanted to embrace openness, turn my back on Apple’s rejection of free markets, join the crowd of developers shouting about this new paradigm.

I can’t.

I’ve tried very hard to articulate to myself why this is the case. It is – certainly – something about usability. To take one of many examples: on Android you apparently have one paradigm for copy and paste in one application, and another in another: in the browser you get a reasonable Apple-like magnifier; in Twidroid (for example), you don’t. This to me just simply isn’t acceptable. Copy and paste is ubiquitous, end of. Stuff like global Google Search is good – very good – but when every move is hampered by subtle but vital compromises in usability, the overall experience becomes stressful, not playful.

The Android store is also, frankly, embarrassing. I tried very hard to find any kind of game or app that came close to the beautiful stuff you see on even the worst of the Apple store. Nothing. The UI of many apps is just terrible, the graphics all a bit 1995. Crashes are frequent, and when they do happen they are peppered with developer-like comments about code and runtimes.

It’s hard – store aside – to fault the Android device from a functionality perspective, and I’ve tried very hard to find ways that I can articulate what exactly is wrong. It is something about playfulness, about the fun of the technology. There is also something about quality. Robert Pirsig says this:

“…the result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make it acceptable…”

I don’t want to get all metaphysical about Apple products: enough people do this already, but the iPhone experience – in a week of living with Android – is much, much closer to the invisible technology that makes for a better and more natural user experience. That’s what has me reaching for an old, broken, semi-retired phone rather than the faster, slicker, by-all-accounts-better model.

Apple stuff comes with a compromise – and make no mistake, I’m as conflicted as the rest of the world about this: the restricted UI, the closed and editorially controlled store, the limits placed by Apple on the devices their OS will run on – these are not “good” things – but they appear, at least in this instance, to be necessary for quality. When Android is forking its way off into infinite loops of differentness, each with pluses and minuses, Apple stays the course – a slow, chugging, proprietary, known experience. It doesn’t feel right, and yet it absolutely does.

When I think about what this means, I worry. As technology people, we should all be concerned about the approaches that Facebook, Google and Apple are taking, and we all know that openness is – or should be – key. But – and I’ve written about this a bit before – usability and ubiquity are the definers for normal, non-geeky people, not openness or functionality. And we need to focus on this and think about what it means when usability comes into conflict with openness, as I believe it does with Android.

So that’s me. I tried. Circumstance mean I’ll be using Android for the next few weeks either way, and I may change my mind. I may find myself on the sofa using the Ferrari of phones rather than the Morris Minor. But somehow, I doubt it.

In order for this wrongness to happen, one of two things must have been an issue during the project process:

1) Belief that the end user isn’t terribly important
2) A ‘project interface’ issue – a gap in expertise between various departments or a (perceived) lack of cash or time.

It is nearly impossible to believe that the first is true – that project teams put together end-user tech without considering end-user needs. Sadly though, for one reason or another – usually IT teams thinking the technology is *everything* (“it’s really cool the way we’ve interfaced the Z60 box and the AR39 switcher. Besides, *I* understand the user interface so why won’t Dawn in Accounts…?”) – it does happen.

Gaps in project expertise are related but different, and easier to understand. Typically this occurs between designer and techy: each assumes the other is responsible for usability (or just ‘the user’) and in the end it turns out that neither focuses on this, the most crucial part of the product.

Now’s the time to bring in a real-world example. I buy my tickets for London on thetrainline.com for delivery to a ‘fast ticket’ machine at Bath Spa, as I do every week. The tech between the website and ticket machine is enormously impressive: a timetable lookup, a credit card transaction, a central database of bookings networked to any station around the country. Nice, and my thoughts go out to the poor people who had to do it.

So why is it that when I arrive at the (newly designed) ticket machine, I can’t see how to collect my ticket? There’s lots of station names, and a few other buttons, but nothing that tells me where my ticket actually is.

In the end I, like many frustrated users in front of bad UI’s both on- and off-line, start pushing random buttons. Eventually I try one that says ‘Tickets on Departure’. It works.

Sorry? What? Pardon?

‘Tickets on Departure’…..?

Not:
- ‘Prepaid tickets, press here’
- ‘Bought online?’
- ‘Pre-ordered tickets’
- ‘Collect your tickets’
- ‘Ticket collection’
- ‘Fast ticket collection’

…or any other sensible, obvious, meaningful choice of words. ‘Tickets on Departure’…

There’s some other badness going on – a touchscreen keyboard that isn’t arranged in QWERTY layout and the phrase ‘print journey’ rather than ‘print ticket’, but ‘Tickets on Departure’ is horribly bad. Crucially, it’s also right at the beginning of the process: your commitment is low, and peer pressure (the crowd building and tutting under their breath behind you) is high. Your natural response when that button isn’t right there in your face? Abort the tech and go ask a man instead.

I stood for a few minutes and watched other people with the machine. It turns out I’m not alone – the majority gave up, some asked a member of staff (who looked like he’d been asked before..). A couple pushed the last button remaining to them, as I had, and battled through.

Now I’m not big on mainframe stuff but the infrastructure required to do all that on/off-line talking feels to me like maybe 5 million quid, minimum? I’d imagine each ticket machine is probably £30k.

Seems a shame, doesn’t it? All that effort and money culminating in a crap UI which frustrates the very people it’s apparently built for.

Tell you what, I might see what I can find out about the project process in building these particular machines, and I’ll then post about what (if anything) I find…

Not to say that the content isn’t great – it’s fabulous being able to watch a video of Howard Hodgkin talking about his stuff and I suppose the tabbed view of Gilbert and George adds certain dimensions that you wouldn’t get otherwise – being able to link to pictures and other related material is a no-brainer which works alright.

The thing that’s missing is any sense of community engagement, at all, anywhere. No comments, no rating systems, no discussions. In fact if I was being really mean (which I am when it’s lunchtime and I’m hungry) I’d say that the branding of a “player” implies something which does a collective something. This is just a page of videos linking into a Flash player. Strictly it isn’t “technology from BT” but “a web page including some HTML and a bit of Flash”. There’s some RSS in there, but hey, not exactly ground-breaking.

I’m not knocking the idea. It’s fantastic to see a gallery or museum doing video online (although at the Dana Centre we’ve been doing it for a fair time now using our, ahem, “Dana Centre Player”…) – it’s obviously the road ahead and it’s fantastic to see real artists talking about their work. In this way it does a good job at getting great content out to users. What I find annoying more than anything else about this is the amount of missed potential. It isn’t bad, but it just could be sooooo much better with ~really~ not much more work.

Interestingly I thought the same thing about the Tate Carousel – a “visual interface with Tate’s collection” (I won’t be sarcastic right now about what a “non-visual” interface into this particular collection would be..). It was almost really interesting, but then just wasn’t – it doesn’t actually do anything at all…

Following the launch of the “player”, Director of Tate Media, Will Gompertz said:

“..it’s an exciting project with limitless potential and we’re delighted to be able to share with a broader audience the original audiovisual content of the Tate Archive.“

So at least Mr Gompertz recognises that there is further potential in the project. With any luck this potential will be realised quickly and we’ll see phase II with some really nice community stuff going on, some tagging, embedding options, YouTube crossover, ratings, etc.

Right. I’m off to lunch before I start ranting at something else.

In the same way, I find the means by which we browse collections of stuff online is usually wholly unsatisfactory. As Seb Chan said in his talk at Museums on the Web UK, the way in which hierarchies or search results are displayed on the web is almost always terribly pedestrian, and has no real-world connection at all. His example of the supermarket shelf struck a chord: we browse by casting our eyes over the range of products available, use visual cues to pick out the ones we think are interesting and then hone in on those.

Usually people talk in terms of two modes of findability: search (enter terms into box, get results as list) and hierarchy (follow increasingly specific taxonomical tree to your destination). I think there’s another, usually missed, which has at the heart of it the sense of serendipity. This is what “browse” is, really, when you think about it. It’s the means by which you can cast your eye over a whole range of things you don’t know you’re interested in yet and then focus in on things that catch your eye. This is probably why many people find the apparent chaos of a museum store as interesting as a set of interpreted objects in a museum gallery. The lack of order, the sense of finding something, is itself an important part of the experience.

Online museum collections often work on the assumption that people know what they’re looking for. Sometimes they do, in which case search and hierarchy work fine – but if they don’t, and are just “browsing” in the true sense of the word, then the tools at our disposal are slightly more interesting. As a diagram addict these particular tools and methods always interest me.

Here’s a few:

History Wired which has been around a long time but I still like it: A Java app (boo) developed by Smart Money lets you zoom in to objects – the size of which is influenced by the “votes” that have been received for that object. The application can be licensed but last time I asked it was frighteningly expensive…

The fabulous Music Plasma – a lovely Flash based app for finding and browsing bands – *please* will someone do this for museum collections??

Search Crystal – blogged about by Seb recently, a slightly ragged-looking but quite satisfying tool for displaying search results visually

If you think about the ways in which content is searched for and used in “web 2 ways” it is often about this serendipity; jumping across from topic to topic, from object to object, often with little sense of purpose but just a desire to be entertained. Sometimes you’re after specific things, but sometimes you just want to have a fun time…

Browsing through my vast backlog of stuff to catch up on after my holiday, I found this great roundup of UK-available “tv on web” services. So that’s saved me a bunch of time

What’s interesting / irritating about the situation right now is that we’ve got services provided by all the different content providers but have to download separate players for each one. This is a great example of an untenable user experience which needs sorting, big-time.

In the real world, I’m completely agnostic as to what channel I watch – as (I would imagine) a fairly typical viewer would be. I look at my TV guide, choose what I want to waste my time on, and weave a path between whatever channels have good stuff on. Bring what’s happening online right now into the living room and you’ve got a “what’s on the other television?” scenario – you have to “unplug” one application and boot up another to change channels. Very silly. There’s apparently a project underway to sort out this kind of issue by consolidating across the UK networks – try Googling for “Project Kangaroo“.

The nice thing about internet TV is that we’re all starting to get really excited about a technology which is very obviously at the beginning of its journey: now that we’ve got the bandwidth and the streaming technology to deal with the content, the improvements are going to be exponential over the next few months as people get to grips with the usability concerns. And that’s where it gets really interesting.

I’m an avid reader of TechCrunch – I like the topic matter, the bitchiness of Michael Arrington, the writing style, the fact that it’s a superb place for finding out about tech stuff.

But for about as long as I’ve read it, I’ve subscribed to their RSS feed and rarely, if ever, actually go to the site.

This morning, though, I was looking for some stuff on internet TV for a blog post I’ve got planned. And bloody hell if TechCrunch isn’t completely awful…a terrible visual hell hotchpotch of random adverts, blog tech “stuff”, searchboxes, tagclouds…the design is terrible, the usability just completely shot…

The fact that I hadn’t noticed (because I haven’t been) says something pretty profound about the distributed web. If asked, I’d say TechCrunch is in my list of top 10 favourite websites, and yet actually – and I only just noticed – it’s not. The notion of a “favourite website” is completely wrong here. This is a great example of what I talked about at Museums and the Web conference – it’s only the beginning of a much more complex shift in what “having a website” means. TechCrunch is actually on my list of top 10 favourite content experiences – and the fact that it looks like crap doesn’t (usually) matter one jot to me. Except when I’m trying to find anything on the site. And if that’s the case – as is so often with on-site search engines – it’s actually much more effective to use Google’s “search this site” functionality than the in-built one on TechCrunch.

The fact that I’ve been reading this thing for years and haven’t even noticed how bad it is to look at says a lot about RSS but also about TechCrunch’s delivery of it: not only do they deliver the full story but it’s also HTML enriched. There’s actually little reason to go to the site itself.

What *really* bugs me, incidentally, is the way some blogs don’t deliver the full story via RSS but just the first few lines. The BBC are an example of this, and it’s a blinding example of organisational inertia (“we’ll get more traffic if we make people click through to the site”) vs user need (“I can’t be arsed to read this story if I can’t see it all here in my feedreader”).

Anyway. I’ll keep reading TechCrunch. But I might avoid the eyeglare and confusion by sticking to RSS.

Although I spend a lot of time going on about how we should “just do it” (good tagline, that. Shame it’s been claimed by a global corporation of dubious ethics..), I’m also well aware that museums aren’t immune from the hype curve either. The suggestion we should “do something with Facebook” throughout the thread is terribly reminiscent of many requests I’ve had to “do web 2.0″. The conversation usually goes like this:

——————

Web team office, early morning. Somewhere a phone rings.

Web Team: “good morning, this is your friendly web team. how can I help?”

Important Person, usually somewhere high up in the organisation: “we need a blog/discussion board/wiki/podcast/facebook account/mobile website/[insert other new tech thingy here]“

WT: “why?”

IP: “because I read an article in the Guardian on Saturday and it’ll improve our productivity/sales/grooviness. Besides, it’s free”

WT: “what do you want to say on your blog/discussion board/wiki/[...you get the picture...] ?”

IP: “why does that matter?”

WT: “who is your audience?”

IP: “the kids, of course. da street. da yoof. innit?”

WT: …

IP: “right, I’ll hope to see some serious re-alignment of our visitor figures by, say, a week Wednesday. I is expectin’ big fings in da hood. Bitchin’. “

——————-

There’s a fine line of course between what I push for – technology growth, user understanding, fast to market, flexible applications – and the Important Person’s vision. This is a subtle game, and one which often causes concerns.

I see it like this:

> the mashup environment is about playing with technology – it is therefore partially technology driven (a bad thing) but also understands and build on content and data from disparate sources in the hope that the thing which pops out at the end is useful (a good thing). It relies on a Darwinian process to determine what works and what doesn’t: if your users like it, they’ll take to it and it’ll succeed.

> the drive to make things happen – the push which I believe museums should be making to be more leading than lagging – should always come out of user centred design. Websites should come from a user need. Ultimately, they should fill a hole in people’s lives. The bitter pill to swallow is that the needs of the institution aren’t always the needs of the user, and that’s where conversations like the one above start to cause pain.

Sometimes the needs of the institution do match (or can be bent so they match) the needs of the end user – this is when the best things happen. Take for example the fabulous English Cut blog – a fascinating look into the otherwise closed world of the Savile Row tailor. Hugh Mcleod helped put this together and he writes wonderfully about the value of the “micro smarter conversation” vs the value of the “macro brand metaphor”.

This is where web teams need to be incredibly savvy about what is out there and how to make this stuff happen. Actually, the conversation above should have a moment where Web Team gets in quickly with “Good plan, Mrs Important Person. How about a personal blog written by X about the way in which we Y”, thereby cutting off any possibility that you’ll “just do it” in the wrong direction with some god-awful corporate nonsense.

So….should museums be on Facebook? Yes, probably, if that presence does something interesting and motivating for users. Should museums be on Facebook just because it’s there? Obviously not.

My Google search results just turned up looking a trifle different. First of all this:

…and then a couple of minutes later, this:

TechCrunch wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. I’ve seen the left hand nav change that is on their post a couple of times but the shaded bar and dhtml dropdown is a new one on me…