QR codes here, in my lifetime?

When Jørgen and I were working on Geoloq.us in 2005, we prototyped the use of EAN barcodes, Semacodes, Shotcodes and QR-codes for marking locations and embedding messages. At the time, cameraphones were rare and cheap mobile data access unheard of, so we decided against using 2D barcodes in our app.

Five years later cameras and internet access is a given on most mobiles, but QR codes are still quite rare in US and European consumer markets. Sure, Semacode now makes a QR code reader for the iPhone, but it remains to be seen if Facebook’s QR-coded status updates will make us love 2D barcodes.

There are several lines of verse in the QR code above. Tell me who wrote that text in the comments and I’ll reward you with a bottle of wine if you live in/around Oslo. Really.

Is Google Buzz broken or lost in translation?

When the purpose and method of a product is hard to explain, we ask “What is this for? Why does it exist?”

What is the purpose of Buzz? Perhaps Hank Williams said it best: to make Google look social.

Buzz was shaped by many forces. Were it a car, we might compare it to an Edsel, but social software is so much harder to decipher. The interface we’d eventually figure out, what we can do with it also. But describing a social tool’s underlying structure, hooks, flows, sociality and vectors of exploration takes painstaking work.

Social software is still a young genre. Activity streams might be old conceptually but they were seldom seen five years ago. Were Buzz a film a critic might say that the script was poor but the actors good, the director off course but the editor a master. Mostly, though, I think Buzz lacked an executive producer with instincts, ability and drive.

Why do I say this? Because it’s the only way I can comprehend how Google could buy Jaiku, Netscape it, quietly convert it run on their App Engine, go off and do something else for years on end and then open-source (thereby gracefully ditching) it before shoving a socially inept Buzz out the door to great fanfare.

I think Google just wanted to show that they were good at making social software, that they could succeed beyond the realm of search, analytics and advertising.

Google Buzz might be the best tool ever for sharing ideas, locating experts and documenting what you know – at Google, which is 100% geek.

For the less geeky other 98% of humanity, it’s less obvious why we want this tool, much less what we can gain from using it. In addition to/as a replacement for the gazillion other manners and means we have of discovering, sharing, discussing and connecting with people.

Any ideas?

Eight stages of design evolution?

I came across the list below some time ago. It’s from a Gartner presentation by Ray Valdes on the business value of user experience.

Ironically, the slide deck was in desperate need of graphic design love.

Anyway, the list chronicles an apparent evolution of design approaches over the last decade or so. Here goes:

1. Designer-driven: small fonts, garish colors, monolithic images
2. Developer driven: gratuitous animations and visual effects, heavyweight tech
3. User-configured: basic personalization, not exactly user-driven
4. User-centered: based on research on user needs
5. Usability-oriented: validated by tests on actual users
6. Analytics-driven: live testing with actual users, instrumentation
7. Conversation-driven: participatory, many ways for users to register behavior, beyond raw data
8. Continuous optimization: A/B and multivariate testing, business metrics

Whenever I see a neatly progressing list like the one above, I’m reminded of the great posters HistoryShots makes. They do their best to present a complex reality, gracefully accepting the incompressibility of complex systems.

My main complaints with Valdes’ list are the haphazard ordering of the items, the jumble of user-centered and usability-oriented and the insinuation of causation, but my main annoyance is that it ends with continuous optimization.

For, as Kuhn will tell you, it’s when you’ve advanced so far that only the littlest details can be tweaked, the world is likely on the verge of a leap.

I love continuous optimization just as much as I love infrastucture that can handle diversity and scale, disciplined collaborators and teams that are focused on the outside world, not their corporate logic.

To me, continuous optimization is a smart way of working, not the zenith of design practice. What’s the zenith? I don’t know, but I think strands of activity theory and outcome-driven innovation are a part of the next big step.

I’ll forgive Mr. Valdes, though, because he says something every designer working with/in large corporations should have tatooed onto a lively limb:

Accepting political compromises as design decisions is a top mistake in user experience design projects