Flickr Redesign Shows That Marissa Mayer Gets The Joke

After dying on the vine since Yahoo acquired it in 2005, Flickr has been given new life. Is it perfect? Not at all. But it has been frozen in time where people didn't live with multiple devices like they do today. To give it context, the iPhone didn't come out until 2 years after Yahoo made the purchase. The consumer photography experience today is so very different than it was 8 years ago. In 2007, Kodak was alive and actually made a profit.

So literally a day before I was going to renew my Flickr Pro account, I see that all my photos are back. 1 terabyte of photos for free is good. The new design promoting the photography is good. The "Ken Burns" slideshow animation is good. Creating a good experience takes time. Marissa Mayer gets that. The first iPod sucked. The first iPhone wasn't perfect. But good companies make incremental steps towards good User Experience, making the things we love better over time.

Here are some recommendations on other improvements they can make:

• Personal pictures are important to people. Provide us with a safety net if your Flickr account is hacked or mistakenly deleted. 
• Make it easy to socialize photos and slideshows in ways that are relevant in 2013
• Give us simple tools that manipulate photos and videos before we share them, vis-à-vis Instagram and Vine. 

Java thinks I want the Ask Toolbar, and I have 12 pixels to avoid it

Today, my computer prompted me to update Java. I agreed, and then the above popup appeared on my screen. They "recommend" that I install the FREE Ask browser add-on. These add-ons are most often such a bad experience. To make things worse, for most people, they are almost impossible to remove once installed. This also feels like an anachronism.  We are living in a time where everything is changing. Intel is exiting the motherboard business to focus on the “next unit of computing.” That is huge. A disruptive wave of change is happening.
Another thing that makes this feel like something from the late 90s is the interface design. Today, interfaces are so much more touchable and large because in many instances they literally are. Look at the below screen grab from delicious.com.

The "Join" button is absolutely huge by earlier-than-2010 standards. To stop the installation of the annoying Ask.com toolbar in the Java screen, I have to get my mouse over a 12x12 pixel checkbox. Does Java work on Microsoft Surface? Will I have to touch this to deselect it? Look at the two UI components next to each other:

It will be interesting to watch the evolution of visual design in the next couple years as the hardware evolves.

R.I.P. John Karlin, Human Factors Pioneer

On the same day as the blizzard called "Nemo" blankets the Northeast, a story about the life of a User Experience pioneer was published in the NY Times. John Karlin worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey for 32 years, and in that time helped to develop products that the masses could easily use. He is responsible for the touch tone phone design and he put the white dots inside the rotary phone to increase usability after the labels were placed on the outside. The story that jumps out at me was the UX guerrilla tactic he utilized when there was a question about shortening the phone cord. While the debate was going on, he surreptitiously removed an inch of cord from co-workers' phones every three days. They didn't realize it until a foot had been removed, ending the debate, the long meetings and arguments with everyone with a strong voice and opinion. What a great example of Lean UX.

He is also credited with creating the very first Human Factors Department in a U.S. company. UX Professionals owe him a bit of thanks. He died on January 28th at the age of 94. Rest in peace.

Here is the full story: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/business/john-e-karlin-who-led-the-way-to-all-digit-dialing-dies-at-94.html

Jargon is Evidence of a Disruptive Wave of Innovation

As I read through the titles of the first page of stories on TechCrunch.com, I noticed something interesting. There are a tremendous amount of new companies and products out there. 13 of the stories had jargonesque names in them that kind of sound silly if you say them all in a row. I can imagine them being sung in a karaoke bar to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire":

• NanoSatisfi
• Yammer
• Goldbely 
• Uber
• Zite
• EveryBlock
• Happier
• Redfin
• Redbeacon
• MyTime
• Telly
• LibreOffice
• Trademarkia

If you check the home page from TechCrunch in 2011, you see stories about HuffingtonPost.com, Google, HTC, SalesForce, GoDaddy, Apple and Groupon. There are only a few buzzword-ly named companies listed, like Animoto and Audioboo.

I think this illustrates how quickly things are changing out there in the digisphere, with startups popping up so quickly you can't keep up with the latest uber-telly-moto-boo-whatevs. Let's check out the tech homepages in 2015 to see where the startup dust has settled. See you then!

This is Why I Still Buy CD's and Comic Books

We've heard these heartbreaking stories about how our digital possessions are so easily wiped away. The latest example is from Linn, an Amazon Kindle owner. Amazon decided to delete her account, thus wiping all her books off her Kindle. I dread this happening. This is why I still like to actually possess what I buy when I can. There is something strange to me about buying a comic for my iPad app and not being able to store it with other old comics when I'm done. I've lost my Windows machine countless times as well, so I like having the ability to put a CD back into the computer when the OS goes. Apple has serious issues with being able to restore your ringtones, playlists and podcasts easily if at all. 

You can read the gory details here:

http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/

Virtual Meets Reality: Nomad Stylus

What do all of the images above have in common? They were all created on an iPad with a Nomad Brush. I just ordered a couple this morning to use for rapid prototyping, but also interacting with customers during field work. Show them a wireframe and have them interact directly with something that is familiar to them. I also ordered the PenGo BrushPen, so I will come back with feedback after using them to see which one works best in the field. 

Creative Folks Bypass Old School Judgment System: Amanda Hocking

The path for "making it" used to funnel through a select few anointed ones. For musicians it was getting discovered by someone at a major label, and signing a deal. That takes a lot of hard work, but a large portion of serendipity. There were only just so many people in the right place at the right time. These days, musicians don't wait for that to happen, they just create their own opportunities online. This is simple today because MP3 players and sharing music is commonplace.

In the world of writing, the same thing is happening more and more as eBooks become easier to consume on our gadgets. Amanda Hocking was rejected repeatedly by book publishers so she decided to self-publish. Now that the Kindle, iPad and Nook are becoming an outlet for avid readers, she and others like her can wave goodbye to having to pass through the gates of the major book publishing houses. Last April she self-published and has sold hundreds of thousands of books online. Here is her story:

The Ballad of Mirco Wilhelm: Flickr Still Flying Without a Net

In 2004, the photo sharing and storage website Flickr was born. It grew quickly in its popularity because of its features and ease of use. It was a fun, good experience. In March of 2005, Yahoo acquired Flickr for $35 million. They have now had 6 years to grow this product from the great start they had with loyal customers.

So where are we today? Ask Mirco Wilhelm. He is an IT professional that has been posting photos to his Flickr account for years. Thousands of them. He tags them all and people link to them from all over. They are really lovely. Well, they were really lovely. You see, Mirco found someone illegally posting photos on their account so he complained to Flickr. By mistake, instead of deleting the other account, they deleted his. All 4,000 photos, stories, tags, links and everything that is Flickr is gone, and Flickr can’t do anything about it to recover them. They gave him a 4 year credit for Flickr Pro.

This would be horrible under any circumstances, but almost exactly three years ago to the day, the same loss of data happened to Steve Portigal. Someone phished him and deleted his account without his consent and Yahoo could do nothing to recover it. I blogged about it when it happened to illustrate that this is a simple scenario to plan for and that others do it all the time. Even Mirco says that it is part of what he does all the times in his day job.

This means that Yahoo/Flickr has known about this for three years and they just don’t care. Chief Product Officer, Blake Irving, just days ago tweeted the following:

"Is Yahoo committed to Flickr? Hell yes we are!"

Just days ago the New York Times wrote a story on how Yahoo is committed to Flickr, despite shrinking traffic stats. Here is a quote from the article by Matthew Rothenberg, Head of Product Strategy and Management of Flickr:

“We’re trying to build the best experience that we can.”

I think what resonates with people is not your strategy or tweets, but the experience you actually deliver. Here are the words from the Flickr support staff member sent to Mirco:

Hello,

Unfortunately, I have mixed up the accounts and accidentally deleted yours. I am terribly sorry for this grave error and hope that this mistake can be reconciled. Here is what I can do from here:

I can restore your account, although we will not be able to retrieve your photos. I know that there is a lot of history on your account--again, please accept my apology for my negligence. Once I restore your account, I will add four years of free Pro to make up for my error.

Please let me know if there's anything else I can do.

Again, I am deeply sorry for this mistake.

Regards,

Flickr staff

That is the real experience and message we get as customers, not what Product Managers tell reporters. Mirco’s story is being written about by large news organizations and propagating quickly around the web. I hope it doesn’t take Yahoo another three years to finally listen to these and other traumatized customers, and they fix this problem that everyone else seems to have solved. You have to afford and "undo" when it comes to your product, especially if you see this happen over and over.

Here is Mirco's story in his words: http://bindermichi.posterous.com/you-have-to-fucking-kidding-yahoo

Here is Steve Portigal's story from three years ago: http://www.portigal.com/blog/stories-lost-forever/