wiredpieces - work, design and ideas by Sinan Ascioglu » sxsw

History of the Button

Sinan — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 22:12:14 +0000

Even though technology evolved at a crazy pace the last 100 years, the humble button has stayed at the center of it all. What is its past, its future? Why is it important? What does it say about the interaction between humans and technology? Pictures, stories, revelations, maybe movies.

@SXSW’10 by Bill DeRouchey, Ziba Design

Click here to listen to this podcast »

Button = Scaling

The first panel I attended was one of those I enjoyed most. In this panel, one great point DeRouchey brought to our attention is that buttons are all about Scaling: a button is there to simplify a complicated, large scale motion to a simple push. This is how initially button was defined as, when everything was mechanical. Button helped to compress time in trains, compress distance with telegram, and abstract any kind of motion to a simple push, a poke or a press. This way we started learning that buttons are abstract.

He drew couple of great examples from the era when button was the ‘cool’ thing and was positioned as the center element in catchy advertising pitchlines: “You press the button we do the rest” for Kodak Camera Ad. “Push button driving” for a 1956 Plymouth car ad.

Push buttons bring new motoring luxury – a 1946 Popular Science article

When asked to his grandmother which button she pressed first, she pointed the light switches on the wall.

Similar valuation of buttons still exists, says DeRouchey: “Push button fat loss, Push button publishing…”. But it really makes me appreciate when I heard the example DeRouchey gave as the first remote control: you push the button, inside the remote a hammer hits the steel, which makes a sound, and machine hears the sound through a microphone. Also, the abstraction of buttons turned into symbolization of life changing circumstances: push-button war (referring to nuclear bomb launching buttons). Also, with the overuse, it lost its simplicity, as in airplane panels.

Buttons = where is it?

We can say that, with the introduction of on-screen devices and computers, button’s scaling effect become less visible, and each individual push of a button makes us less excited. Along the 100+ keyboard buttons, comes the UI elements, mouse cursors, which was the theme of an ad by Apple in the 80s. Hyperlinks changed the shapes of the buttons, and it lost its shape. It transformed into “anything can be a button”, and designers even got lost about how to represent a button, and more importantly, what it represents: Yahoo had 3 different types of buttons on its homepage in 1996.

Amazon the number of elements that are ‘not’ a button are very small.

Where are we now?

At this age, buttons don’t have any specific patterns. They don’t need any border, color, underline (recently Google also removed the underlines of the links on their results page.), etc. But they still have many different functions that can perform. And buttons keep changing how we think about things in depth and time:

We are approaching a time when anything is interactive. – DeRouchey

It was first a lever, then it become a circular button, then it become a multi-touch surface. It can even be a fluid, or a dynamic tactile surface.

Couple of interesting notes from the QA:

His favorite button: OK button. He calls this button a “happy moment button”.
My question, ironically:

Since we are in a world where everything is button (I am referring to Amazon.com example), and button has lost its pattern, should we develop a pattern for non-interacting elements on a website? Say, “all non-interactive elements should be dark grey”..

Ten Commandments of User Experience

Sinan — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:56:00 +0000

Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave’s presentation slides from the SXSWi talk are up. Here’s a summary:

User experiences are your everyday experiences—anything from operating a car, to making a pot of coffee, to ordering a pair of shoes online. User experience is the result of your interactions with a product or service, specifically how it’s delivered and its related artifacts according to the design.

In this presentation Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave will explore the ten characteristics of a great user experience. They will cover all aspects of user experience design such as user research, information architecture, information design, technical writing, interaction design, visual design, brand identity design, accessibly, usability and web analytics. Nick and Raina will also explain how following the ten commandments can boost your web sites, web app, or mobile app’s ease of use, appeal, conversion rates, and more.

SXSW, beautiful Austin, and lots of inspiration

Sinan — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:37:33 +0000

Finally this year, I was able to attend a SXSW which I was interested in since I heard about it the first time. And against all the negative comments in the blogosphere (eg. TechCrunch), I really enjoyed it! I attended more than 20 panels on interactive, met many many people, and even enjoyed a quick chat with Bruce Sterling on OpenProcessing (he blogged about it couple of times, this time he even took a photo of me). I will post my thoughts on the panels separately, but here is what I think and liked in general.

Twitter still rules

Being mentioned somehow in almost all the panels, twitter was still the lead actor in the show. How to tweet the best, how to track your ‘social media’ on twitter, how to aggregate the relevant information on twitter, twitter clients, twitter stories, location-based twitter, ……., and last but not the least, the very underperforming keynote on Twitter from CEO Evan Williams, interviewed by Umair Haque (his apology and summary here). Basically, twitter’s effect on how we communicate still changing how we think, adapt and use our micro-blogging minds. It’s definitely one of the most influential changes within the latest years on how we communicate. While nothing very exciting or influential came out of all these twitter talks, twitter released their location adaption and @anywhere platform during SXSW. The epic fail launch of Google Buzz added more salt and pepper to these conversations (In her keynote, Danah Boyd smashed it, and I loved the way she did it!).

The part that I was more engaged in was to observe the use of twitter by the audience during the panels. Within the last years, it is quite a common thing to add hashtags to panels, but this was the first time I experienced how effective twitter can be in this manner. Most of the panel directors were checking the panel hashtag during the conversation, and the audience was using it to the full extend: pulling important quotes, points and directions, and their point of view 140 characters at a time. Well, less than 140 since the pre-defined hashtags for the panels were extremely long. I was quite impressed that twitting users were quite active on re-defining the hashtag with less characters. The hashtagged conversations on twitter plotted a great silent conversation among the audience, and I will try to copy these along the post I will make on the panels I attended.

Location-based services, not so much

Badgezzz! Gotta get'em all!!

Yes, it was a hot topic. Yes, Foursquare, Gowalla and similar guys on the market were everywhere in Austin, being talked about, dog-fighted for, partied with and checked-in in. I even tried to be more active on Foursquare, bugging my friends with my Austin check-ins, to see if I would get a welcome-back badge.

Didn’t happen. Neither did I get such a badge, nor any of these location-based craze provided much value to the great minds visiting SXSW. I am still convinced that the true value of location sharing didn’t get discovered yet. Foursquare and the likes are highly popular because of their inherited game concept within, but I don’t think this will be the real game changer. When Google killed dodgeball, I think they had a reason. When they didn’t include gaming in Google Latitude and kept it sticking to the barebones of location-sharing, they had a reason too. Google Latitude not catching up is a good proof that sharing my location does not provide users enough value. However, I don’t think playing badge games will do either. Remember for how long you played Hide and Seek when you were a kid? I think there is still a lot of room to explore on this location-based stuff.

The best use of Foursquare, I think, was to be able to see where the most people are at a moment, so that I could decide on which party to go. It allowed me to spot the popular places in a city I’ve never been before (well, for a night, on my roadtrip last year). But as of Foursquare, while some features are there, this is not the main focus of the application. Hence they are missing a point: no way to go back in time or get an aggregated view (what was the most popular spot last month, where’s my gang and like-minds hangout). Although, after all these years of tweeting, I had the privilege of checking in at the same party with @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher). However, currently me getting a push notification on my colleague checking in at the office = no value. Well, seeing my ex-gf getting douchebag badge = Priceless!

The dreams of making quick $$ still applies

So everyone is done with designing, now all is about making money huh? There were a lot of panels, almost one for each session slot, focusing on how to make quick money: Blog your way to $$, How to get rich while crowd doing the job, bla, bla, bla… I ain’t have much to say on this one.

Enterpreneurship: young, and non-stop

I was quite amazed to see so many people, young people, mostly right out of college, are in the track of following their dreams and bright ideas. These people have been at SXSW, challenging their elders with their great ideas and start-ups. I can imagine a data visualization showing the dropping of average age of panel speakers. To me, one of the most sticking ones were Sarah Prevette from Sprouter, who has already established couple of start-ups and running Sprouter.com for entrepreneurship networking and twitting. Another one was Hugo Liu, Product Design & Technology guy from Hunch.com. They both shined and stole the show in the panels while sitting next to all these highly established senior people, and the audience was quite amazed with their approach to the conversation, problems and questions. When combined with Danah Boyd’s great keynote [I will make a post on this one], such young leaders give me both optimism for the future of technology, and encourages me to dive more bravely to the projects I am working on (eg. OpenProcessing).