So I came up with a silly game. It goes like this:

1. Get quotes from Harry Potterbooks/movies about the Dementors
2. Replace Dementors with Clients/Lawyers/Marketers/Telemarketers
3. Replace Azkaban with the client’s office, if needed
4. Hilarity ensues

Examples:
“Clients are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them. Even Muggles feel their presence, though they can’t see them. Get too near a client and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the client will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself — soul-less and evil. You’ll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.”

“A word of caution: clients are vicious creatures. They will not distinguish between the one they hunt and the one who gets in their way. Therefore I must warn each and every one of you to give them no reason to harm you. It is not in the nature of a client to be forgiving.”

“Then, around the corner, gliding noiselessly, came Clients, ten or more of them, visible because they were of a denser darkness than their surroundings, with their black cloaks and their scabbed and rotting hands. Could they sense fear in the vicinity?”

“I didn’t think of Voldemort,” said Harry honestly. “I — I remembered those clients.”
“I see,” said Lupin thoughtfully. “Well, well … I’m impressed. That suggests what you fear most of all is — fear. Very wise, Harry.”

“A Client’s breath sounds rattling and like it’s trying to suck more than air out of a room.”

“A Client’s last and worst weapon is called the Client’s Kiss. The Client puts back its hood and clamps its jaws on the mouth of the victim and sucks out his soul, leaving him an empty shell, alive but completely, irretrievably gone.”

Part I: Better Bookmark and URL Entry

There are numerous speculative articles out about where television is heading, particularly its tenuous but growing relationship with social media. This post is taking a different approach. What will TV itself have to do, from a user and browsing experience to succeed? This is post one of two. Note: I am basing this article entirely on my 16+ years of experience as an Information Architect, Digital Strategist and Experience Planner for three large, well-known firms.

Importing of desktop and mobile bookmarks:

Sounds like a mundane thing to start with but getting bookmarks right may be the killer feature for a television OEM. Bookmarks have always been one of the most critical features of Web browsers. They define our tastes, our histories (pun intended) and our memories to some extent. They also account for most of our online behavior. We go to the same sites often and typing them every time is tedious.

Currently, typing in URLs on a television is a painful process like texting was in the pre-smartphone era. Possibly worse, because getting a long URL right with a remote control requires patience, determination and at least a fifth of premium-grade bourbon. Some companies have included voice-recognition and hand gestures to solve the issue, but with limited (or no) success. Here’s an example from Generated Content [Emphasis mine]:

“I own a Samsung Smart TV, and rarely use the browser. The main problem is the control method. It takes longer to type in a URL than it does to go to the other room and find my laptop. It has voice and hand gesture support, but I can’t get either to work. Whoever can solve the input dilemma has a good crack at making a browser that people actually use to surf the web.” —David Storey

His is not an isolated comment. Here’s another review All Things D:

“The Samsung Smart TV worked well for some functions, like watching standard cable TV, conducting Skype conversations with the camera and mics, and watching streaming television and movies via services such as Netflix, Hulu Plus and MLB.TV. […] But I found the new Smart Interaction — voice, gesture and facial recognition — unreliable and awkward. Many of the key apps, including Facebook, Twitter and the Web browser, seemed crude and hard to use without a keyboard, which Samsung sells for about $100.” —Walt Mossberg

I’m no fan of Voice Recognition. (Yet)

I tested it on experimental vehicles some years back. It was laughable and tasks took longer with VR than to simply use the existing knobs (Ex., you can turn down a radio faster than you can (clearly) say “Turn down the radio”). Plus there are still unresolved problems with VR. There are too many regional accents. People get colds or bronchitis. Some people have speech disabilities. And lets not forget background noise. I love my 95+ year-old home but when the heat kicks on, it sounds like a Harrier Jump Jet is trying to land in my living room.

Gestural control: It’s not for everything

Before you think that someday we’ll be using Minority Report interfaces, know that keeping the arms up like that for extended periods of time causes soreness, fatigue and leads to something Tom Cruise suffered from during the film called Gorilla Arms. Besides the fatigue aspect there is the matter of appropriateness. Not all commands make sense as gestures, with extended typing being the most obvious. Gaming, Tai Chi, aerobics, Yoga? Sure. Writing a white paper? Forget it.

So voice and gesture controls may have a bit to go before we can apply them to URLs.
Solutions? Here’s three:

1. Importation of bookmarks via cloud services from the user’s laptop, mobile or tablet.
2. Use the tablet or smartphone as the input device. Selling us yet one more keyboard is not ideal for most of us. For those who don’t own, want or need other computing devices, a TV keyboard is probably desirable. For the rest of us, it will simply become a trap for Doritos crumbs. Microsoft’s SmartGlass and Apple’s Remote app may be good starts in this direction.
3. Adding bookmarking buttons and smart autofill features to remotes.

In Part II, we will discuss which manufacturers are on the right track and what to expect this year.

Lately I’ve noticed what seems to me to be sloppy user experience design (UXD) in many of the apps I use. If the mistakes were on small, indie apps that lack the budget for a User Experience Designer or an Information Architect, I could let these go (although why are you building apps if you don’t have a strong working knowledge of UXD?). It’s not the indie developers, though. It’s the big guys: Apple, LinkedIn and Pinterest. They have the budgets and should know better. Here are some of the UXD issues I’ve been repeatedly irked by lately:

APPLE MESSAGES: They don’t fully sync across iCloud like they should. As a result, you may message someone from your iPad and get the answer on your iPhone or Macbook. Worse, should you try to resume the conversation from the device the conversation “moved to” you’ll find it jumping back to the original device, and the history of the conversation split across machines. It never catches up, either. Inexcusable.

LINKEDIN: As I mentioned on Twitter, LinkedIn for iOS doesn’t play well with other apps. For example, say I read an article on Facebook that is hosted on LinkedIn, or I get an email from one of my LinkedIn Groups that I’d like to respond to. I am not sent to the LinkedIn app. Instead, I am sent to Safari wherein I am presented with a landing page informing me that there is a LinkedIn iOS app and would I care to download it now? Weak and disappointing considering how well everything else on the LinkedIn app is. This is a fairly major oversight and makes the app seem amateur.

PINTEREST: While the Pinterest app for iOS has greatly improved with version 2.0.4, it still has some irritating bugs. The first is minor, but annoying as Hell. At least once a week, Pinterest asks me to rate the app. That would be perfectly fine—if I hadn’t already rated the app six times. I kept rating it, thinking maybe each rating is for the new version, but that isn’t it. So finally I clicked on “No Thanks” only to be asked again the same day, just two hours later! Ridiculous.

The second bug is not a bug at all; it’s a feature change that I happen to hate for very legitimate reasons. Time was, if you liked an image on Pinterest, you’d right-click or Command click it to save it. With version 2.0, they removed the ability to save photos—or so it seemed. They actually moved the functionality which they had right the first time. Now if you want to save an image, you have to go under the Share menu. What the? Sharing is not downloading. This is just a bad idea and it goes against expected behavior (i.e., every other iOS app lets you click on the image to save). What are you thinking, Pinterest? This is just bad UXD. The dev that made this call should go work for some other team that doesn’t value the user experience. Microsoft’s Excel team, for example.

What’s been bugging you on your various and sundry digital devices, lately? Do tell…