Month: February 2016

Online ads – the fee for our content addicitons

Gearmark1 Comment

I saw this great article a month ago by Troy Hunt about the UX of most sites. It was about advertisers and how they are mucking up the works of UX. 

(I have addressed something to this effect as well – how ads are messing with the Internet)

He indicates how we're letting business factors – like revenue – drive UX decisions rather than user needs. Let's be honest – ads can provide a lot of revenue to a site. Sure, in UX we need to figure out how to elegantly incorporate ads and revenue streams into an experience. But these ad styles often don't enhance or complement an experience – they literally take over the screen.

One could wonder how UX professionals approach implementing ads on a page. In some ways, that's almost pointless to consider – how do you make a takeover ad work for a user? No user wants that experience, unless he likes punishment. And those types of ads weren't built for a user to access content anyway. It was built to be on a page so the user does see it and that view drives revenue to a publisher. 

The problem with ads rests with the business model for publishing – and how the goals of the user (content consumer) and the business collide. Users want to experience content uninterrupted. The business has a different perspective – they aren't selling access to content. They are distributing content with hopes that it will attracts eyeballs that will read ads. The real customers to the magazine business are the advertisers. The publishers are selling your demographic and the opportunity for their brand to be exposed to a large number of people. 

Will the ad experience experience change? Possibly. Some say that ads will be more localized to video. Or they will transition to micromoments.

Or not.

I think things will stay the same. There isn't a publishing business model replacement on the horizon. The only way the experience of ads will change is if users shift their perception of Internet content from being entertainment-driven to being purpose-driven.

When a specific purpose drives you to find content, you don't browse. You are on a mission! You go to your content and ignore the ads. You just don't pay attention. (The Google search results study speaks to this – you go to find something specific – not browse for options)

Content isn't perceived to be that way just yet. In many ways, we still consider content to be entertainment, something to do to pass the time. We will read content online for hours, staying on a site and browse the night away. Heck, we binge watch TV; we surf the Web; we scroll through Facebook and Twitter as if we are searching for nuggets of gold.  

On the business side, we measure the success of content sites by their stickiness, how long someone stays there. Page view time and number of pages per session need to be as high as possible. This reflects how we look at content today. But is this how we should be using content in general? 

Contrast this with the need to reduce page view time and pages per session for online processes like shopping. It's almost a contradiction how we are defining experiences.

In the land of sticky, the more someone is on a page, even if that person doesn't click on the ad, the greater the changes that person sees the ad – either in direct site or through the subconscious minds out of the corner of their eye. With that in mind, one could consider advertising the leech of the entertainment industry. An ad is waiting for it's next victim to come close and become a distraction and a click to another diversion. Without the entertainment factor of content, without that browsing, where would ads be? 

As long as we flip through magazines or surf the Web to pass time, ads will appear to distract our gaze.

One could also look at these ads as a way for us to pay for the content. The other day, a big ol' ad stood in my way of viewing an article. I had to wait until I finished watching a video before I could read it. It's like I am paying for the content with my time spent watching the ad. I'd almost rather pay to read the article than sit thru a mind-numbing ad about whatever.

A great UX and business option here – give me the option to pay $0.50 to read the article or watch the ad.

Airports also present ads to you in payment for Internet access. It seems benign enough – watch an ad and give your email address to get free Internet. Three days and 50 pieces of spam later, you regret your decision and $5 for 30 minutes doesn't sound so bad after all.

But there is hope.

I think we are in the midst of an information revolution. We may be on free platforms, with free content contributions, but running and managing the platform isn't free. So how do we pay for the publications? Micropayments is one option. Another larger scale option is a shift in how we think about the publication business. It has always been about advertising. Maybe it's time for a different way of funding content display and publications?

The online world has been quickly shifting our economy to work in different ways. There is a push to make the Internet more user friendly, to be less about ads and more about accessing content. We are using the Internet less like an entertainment time suck and more as a tool to help us find knowledge and share thoughts. But we need to make that transition for the industry to react. Ultimately, the users decide what they will accept or not for an experience. We as users need to make that decision to stop accepting watching ads as an acceptable payment for accessing content for free. We need to encourage the publishing world to shift its model to make the users the customers – not the advertisers. 

Online ads – the fee for our content addicitons

Why do we keep wanting intuitive interfaces? Create a new familiar instead.

GearmarkLeave a comment

Intuitive. It’s a word that should be reserved for psychics, but instead, we have misused it to describe interfaces.

(As an aside, I do believe in what many would consider to be the more “woo-woo” side of life, with feelings and intuitions. But when I design I try to refer to metrics and stats and leverage design and psychology theories. I’m not into doing what my gut tells me when it comes to business decisions.)

The problem with “intuitive” is that it doesn’t exist. We are only a tabula raza when we are just out of the womb. Shortly after exposure to other people, all bets are off – we become products of our culture. What we are exposed to as a child has an incredible impact on our understanding of the world. You could call it programming – I often do. We are raised with certain beliefs from our family and surroundings that provide us a way to understand the world around us. This is why different cultures and people see the world so differently.

Babies have the ability to speak any language on the planet. There was a study done with babies who were exposed to Chinese the first month or two after birth. They were then immersed in a French speaking environment, never speaking Chinese. In the test, they were given Chinese tonal patterns and they picked them up as a Chinese speaker would. The French language worked completely different in their brain. This shows:

“The sound of languages are acquired relatively early in life, usually within the first year. We’ve learned through a lot of seminal work that is out there that children start out as global citizens who turn their heads equally to all sounds and only later start to edit and become experts in the languages that they’re regularly exposed to.”

–Dr. Denise Klein, Melissa Locker, “An Infant’s Brain Maps Language from Birth,” Time

My favorite story about cultural programming has to do with doorknobs vs. latches. My uncle would constantly proclaim to me how Europe, specifically Germany, was the land of latches and shallow toilet bowls. I’ll save the off-color stories about the toilet bowls for another day and focus on the latches instead. When he went to Germany while in the military, one of his challenges was using a latch. It took a while for him to figure out how it works. I thought he was being funny until a close friend of mine from Germany recounted something similar, but opposite. When she came to the US, she had no idea how to use a doorknob. Needless to say, locking a knob was a puzzlement to her because she never experienced one previously.

When we design a new product, we typically leverage familiar paradigms and patterns. We look to see how we can walk a user through an experience to make it feel familiar to them – therefore intuitive. We’ll apply a wizard paradigm to outline a complex process and simplify it or apply a shopping paradigm for searches and finding the right item.

To make radical changes, though, you often need to create a new paradigm, or at least experiment with creating one. Sometimes there needs to be an absolutely new way to do something to make it easier to use in the end. Raskin tells us often what happens in this process:

Even where my proposals are seen as significant improvements, they are often rejected nonetheless on the grounds that they are not intuitive. It is a classic “catch 22.” The client wants something that is significantly superior to the competition. But if superior, it cannot be the same, so it must be different (typically the greater the improvement, the greater the difference). Therefore it cannot be intuitive, that is, familiar. What the client usually wants is an interface with at most marginal differences that, somehow, makes a major improvement. This can be achieved only on the rare occasions where the original interface has some major flaw that is remedied by a minor fix.

–Jef Raskin, Intuitive Equals Familiar

Going outside of familiar means that you need to take a risk. And most people don’t like risk – they want something safe. They want to be sure that what they are launching will be successful. What many forget is that usability testing covers this risk. When it comes to creating new product, I think often the business forgets that we all look at our world through programmed eyes. Sometimes, to break ground, we need to look at the world differently, see a different way to do something that isn’t familiar. It’s not bad – it’s just a change. Often this change will create a new familiar.

Maybe a question to ask a client – me included – is not how can we get this new idea to work, but how can we change the standard and create a new familiar? Creating a new familiar is revolutionary. Creating a new familiar is what Apple did consistently – and why we now see touch devices and mobile as the future. Something to think about.

Why do we keep wanting intuitive interfaces? Create a new familiar instead.