Nieman Journalism Lab’s website has a great user experience when reading through their posts. When you scroll down while reading the content, the right column fades and becomes de-emphasized to focus on the content you’re reading. If you hover over the sidebar, it comes back into focus.
Continuing with my series on User Experience, I’d like to point out an absolutely epic failure. So let me start this one off with a question:
What in God’s name was Facebook thinking when they defaulted everyone’s publicly facing email address to their @facebook.com address?
User experience is one of my absolute favorite things to geek out on. Every day we go through life touching hundreds of different products and it’s my belief that some of them could work a little better. This post will be the beginning of a series of posts where I try to illustrate great user experiences, or user experiences that could use some work. To kick things off, I’ll start with the latter and talk about a feature of Apple’s iCloud, “Find my iPhone”.
UPDATE: In the comment section, Socialcam has stated that the pushed a “fix” for this. Because I’ve uninstalled the app and refuse to install it again, I can’t confirm that this is true, but I thought it important to point out.
Socialcam’s Shady Secret: I had a hunch that Socialcam was doing some really shady tactics to get more of a bump in engagement at the detriment of user experience. Looks like my hunch was right.
The app has been on quite the tear lately with how much it’s growing and getting insane engagement. It’s already been reported that they’ve been ingesting YouTube videos to get a further increase, but I found something even shadier. Turns out they don’t respect the user’s wishes to not broadcast what videos I watch to their Facebook feeds.
Every time someone watches a video on Socialcam it automatically publishes a story to their Facebook feed about the activity. Inside the app there’s a toggle to turn it off, but it turns out that’s not quite true. If you leave the app and come back, they turn it on again. To make matters worse, after a few seconds they replace the toggle with the Socialcam logo hiding the option to turn it off entirely.
Sure this might have given them a much higher level of engagement by the simple nature of publishing more activity to Facebook, but at what cost? They’re misleading their users in a giant way and should answer for this. I for one am deleting the app, but I’m only one of millions unfortunately.
The rating for “This Is Spinal Tap” on IMDB goes to 11. How awesome.
(Source: littlebigdetails)
A few months ago I left SimpleGeo, a company I co-founded, to take some time off, relax, as well as explore my own new ideas in addition to advising a number of startups. In this time I’ve discovered many ways that startups can get help in various areas to better their companies. There’s design consultants, brand consultants, development outsourcing, management consultants, etc, etc. One thing that I realized is that there’s really not a lot of people helping out with the single most important thing - the product.
It’s been fun recently to advise some startups in a number of areas but the thing I always get most excited about is talking product. I consider “talking product” to be a fairly broad phrase, but that’s on purpose. “Product” itself is an all-encompasing term. To me it means conceptualizing, designing, branding, implementing, iterating, launching and maintaining an idea; seeing it through to something real.
Where I thought I’d originally jump right into planning another startup, I’ve decided to spend the next few months consulting with companies on their products. For me, it will be an opportunity to meet some awesome people and expose myself to intriguing new ideas. But for those that I’m consulting with, I’m there to listen, distill ideas, create and build some kick-ass products.
Now, I’m not looking to take on any and every project. I know what I’m best at, where I’m not great, as well as ideas that I might and might not get excited about. I’m simply doing this because I want to hopefully make an impact and help create awesome products. The areas that I’m most interested in these days are mobile, social, local, health, and education. In the past I’ve been deeply involved in product design & strategy, user interaction & experience, branding, and launching.
With all this in mind, I’m opening myself up to doing product consulting with projects that I may provide a real value to. So if you’re interested in chatting feel free to send me an email to matt.galligan [at] gmail [dot] com.
If you’d like, you can also check out my LinkedIn or tweet me.
When iMessage was announced, I immediately thought it was brilliant. Not only for getting away from the ancient SMS protocol, but as a method of delivery of messages across multiple devices. Now that plenty of people had both an iPhone and an iPad, how great would it be if I could message friends, and receive messages on all of my devices? The intention of the feature was to be very fluid, and it does perform nicely whenever a message is sent from a phone to phone through phone numbers and gracefully degrades to SMS when no data is available.
Now that iMessage is finally in the wild and thanks to iOS 5 upgrades, available to most everyone with an iPhone I was able to test its functionality.
Man, was I disappointed in the user experience nightmare that followed.
First off, let’s cover how iMessages are sent and received. On the iPhone, you have the option of using your phone number (of course), but also the Apple ID (or iCloud ID) to which your device is registered. We’ll call that an iMessage address for simplicity’s sake. This allows iMessages to be received at either the phone number or iMessage address. When you send a message however, one of those two has to be the sender. This is known simply as the “Caller ID”.
The gist is that if I send a message from my phone (using my number as caller ID) to another iMessage device using a phone number as the recipient it starts to send as an iMessage over data. This is represented by the “send” button being blue, and the subsequent message background as blue too. However, if for some reason the message can’t be sent via data, a phone number-to-phone number message will fall back on SMS.
However, if I set my “caller ID” to my iMessage address and send a message to another phone number things start to get hairy. Let’s say I send a message as I just described - iMessage addy to phone number. The recipient now wants to send a reply to that message - it will be replying to the iMessage address, not the phone number. Now, in the event that my phone drops out of data coverage (which can be quite often while traveling), I won’t receive that message. Nor will it fall back on SMS.
The promise of iMessage - receiving messages across devices - doesn’t quite work as smoothly as one might think.
In the event that someone sends me an iMessage to my iPhone’s phone number it will not show up on my iPad. Furthermore, if I’m identifying my iPhone’s caller ID as my phone number, it will never get to my iPad. However, if I change that to the iMessage address, I can begin to receive messages across both devices. Though as I described above, if I use an iMessage address as my caller ID, in the event that data is not available, it won’t fall back to SMS.
I’ve made a chart to help explain this insanity:
Some might think these are edge cases to which I would answer “absolutely not”. Sending messages to phone numbers is what people are used to. Changing that behavior will probably prove quite difficult. Knowing that a message won’t arrive to me if I’m not on data and using my iMessage address as Caller ID disturbs me a bit.
I recently sent some iMessages back and forth with a friend of mine who was traveling. He happened to be on a plane with WiFi and was sending messages with his iPad. Robert was excited that he was able to send these messages but I was getting confused when my messages to him weren’t arriving. Later when I looked back, I realized I had four separate message groups from him: an iMessage address, second iMessage address, Google Voice SMS and iMessage (but sent from a phone number Caller ID).
To illustrate the confusion when he wasn’t receiving certain messages here’s our correspondence:
Clearly this makes for some incredibly confusing and disjointed conversations - not to mention the potential of not seeing messages at all.
Apple could have easily avoided these problems with a few very simple processes:
When authenticating an iMessage address (or multiple), the phone number from one (or more) iPhones get added into that account. This way, regardless of what device someone is using one could receive a message to a phone number via an iPad since it’s working through the iMessage protocol first, then SMS.
Allow me to send messages from the iPad using the Caller ID of my iPhone. This way, whenever someone receives the message, even from my iPad, it identifies as my phone number, not an iMessage address.
Fall back to SMS any time a message is not confirmed as received including when a message is sent to an iMessage address. Considering my first point, when confirming iMessage addresses and phone numbers together, this shouldn’t be hard.
Apple has a really interesting product with iMessage. The problems described above make for a very poor user experience currently, but the solutions are primarily technical and definitely not insurmountable.
There has been some rumor that Apple will begin to include iMessage in iChat or another messaging app on Mac OS X. It’s imperative that they clear up some of these issues before that happens or there will be a lot of confusion around where messages are delivered and why they’re not received when data’s not available.
I can only hope that Apple has already figured this much out and is working on a solution. But until that solution is shown, I’ll continue to be harping on why iMessage has such an incredibly poor user experience. Come on, Apple. You’re better than this!
Hi, I'm Matt Galligan and I'm an entrepreneur living in San Francisco, CA. I'm currently the CEO & Co-founder of a company called Circa and have previously founded SimpleGeo and Socialthing. From time to time I'll blog about entrepreneurship, design, beer, photography, or just about anything else that amuses me.
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