Review

Researchers at Xerox Parc foresaw that computing devices would outnumber humans → which meant that we’d have to think carefully about our relationship with devices. This book promised to expand on principles and patters for non-intrusive design.

I’m interested in the history of human-computer interaction and I love to dive deep into product design principles. On paper then, I should love this book, but I didn’t connect with it. The principles and evaluation tool were OK, but Xerox Parc history and practical advice were absent. The later chapters felt like a late addition, to make up a shortfall of pages.

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Microinteractions

A nice short book on microinteractions. The tiny moments that make all the difference when you build a product. One of the reasons I love product management is the contrast between big and small. Thinking expansively about vision and strategy, whilst also getting into the weeds and sweating the small details that make something feel great to use.

andrewclark.co.uk

Designing Interactions

This is a collection of interviews that meanders through the history of interaction design. It lacks some structure and isn’t exactly insight dense. I’m interested in the history of computers and the pioneers of early computing - so I found it enjoyable. I wouldn’t recommend if you’re looking for something more practical.

andrewclark.co.uk

Conversational Design

This book provides a great theoretical grounding in what it means to be conversational. The principles of conversation resonated with me and I’ll definitely use them going forwards. I found the practical side of the book a little underwhelming, some useful exercises and frameworks but I’m not entirely confident that I could execute off the back of reading this.

andrewclark.co.uk

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• Calm Technology was first explored as a concept in Xerox Parc. Researchers predicted many devices would be vying for our attention.
• We need Calm Technology more than ever
• Devices are starting to get in our way
• They’re complicated and frustrating
• They interrupt us
• As the number of devices grows how they interact with us becomes more important.
• Efficient technology will win out, as resources, time, attention and support become more scarce.
• We have to make systems less complex, or we’ll suffer the consequences. We have a limit even if technology doesn’t.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear Mark Weiser

• Make devices disappear into the environment → reduce technological friction
• Design toward minimalism and simplicity
• Less technology requires less support
• Calm Technology isn’t about minimising clicks, it’s about minimising mental cost
• Calm technology design principles:
1. Require the smallest amount of attention
2. Inform and create calm
3. Make use of the periphery
4. Amplify the best of technology and the best humanity
5. Communicate, don’t speak
6. Work even when it fails
7. The right amount of technology is the minimum needed to solve the problem
8. Respect social norms
• Attention is still under-considered in design
• The MacBook power cord has an indicator light that communicates status without an interface.
• Before designing a notification →
• Consider the environment where the technology is going to be used (public or private, loud or quiet)
• Can you inform them without distracting from their primary focus?
• What happens if the primary alert fails?
• Most information that comes from a device can be presented in a calm way
• Processes that shouldn’t be calm are limited (smoke alarms)

Calm technology engages both the centre and periphery of our attention, and moves back and forth between the two Mark Weiser

• It’s important to use the periphery of our attention → we can’t focus our attention on too many things at once. Forcing updates into the centre of attention wastes time, attention and patience.
• Resource Competition Framework by Antii Oulasvirta
• Competing information forces users to switch back and forth between tasks and external sources → which temporarily leaves switched-from tasks on hold and slows them down
• Primary attention is visual and direct (e.g. driving the car)
• Secondary is distant, auditory or vibrations (e.g. rearview mirrors, side windows)
• Tertiary is peripheral, distant sound or light (radio, emergency dashboard lights)
• Sometimes primary attention will diminish or block secondary or tertiary (e.g. texting on a phone while walking)
• Typically there’s a primary task of crucial importance, but dozens of small, occasional supporting channels around it
• Poorly designed products make humans act like machines to complete a task
• Affective computing → systems that can recognise, interpret, process and simulate human affects (e.g. speech, facial expressions, emotion)
• Computers speaking like humans without context or relationships leads to a sense of dissonance
• Introduce voice only when absolutely necessary:
• Voice recognition works best in quite environments, but most aren’t
• Voice interfaces rarely work because they require the majority of our limited attention
• Simple tones, symbols or lights can be designed in such a way that they’re universally understood
• Most audible alerts don’t use calming tones
• Match the urgency of the tone with the urgency of the alert
• Many pieces of information aren’t time-sensitive enough to need alerts
• Escalators are resilient when they fail as they work as stairs
• Edge cases often shatter the illusion of calm with technology. Their impact outweighs their frequency. Redundancy is the key to dealing with edge cases.
• Empower the user to get their goal with the least amount of attention

• Technology is most likely to be uncalm in the way it announces itself
• Think about how your alerts will affect people in context
• Calm Technology requires that we pass the least amount of information necessary to get the point across to the user, in order to respect their limited attention.
• Status Indicators can be visual, auditory or haptic
• Status lights are a calm way of conveying a piece of information. Users only need to check a system when the light changes colour unexpectedly. Great for low-importance, persistent information.They carry more information with less distraction than any other status indicator. Use of multiple colours and varying levels of brightness can help provide more information
• E.g. Heat light on a stove (can signal still hot even when off)
• Status Tones: Sound matters. A sound can put you at ease or on edge. A calm welcoming sound can change everything about an experience, and can relieve tension in frustrated users. Status tones can serve as a unique identifier with relatively little cognitive demand.
• Status tones often accompany visual indicators or status lights. The tone alerts the user to a status change and the status light remains on as a persistent indicator.
• Examples:
• Help button on a plane → triggers a tone, switches on a light, steward turns off
• Insulin pumps → can beep when the user needs medication, but in a relatively quiet way that its wearer can deal with
• Haptic Alerts are physical notifications that can be felt on the body through touch. Allow smartphones users to receive notifications without alerting others (intruding on social interactions). Haptics are very personal and visceral. You feel them in your gut. Haptics are an underutilised channel (we typically send 1-bit information) but human touch is extremely high resolution, with an extraordinary range of sensitivity
• Examples:
• Smartwatch alerts → less chance of getting distracted by the bombardment of news, alerts, and social communication that comes with opening a smartphone interface
• LUMO Back posture sensor → as you begin to slouch, the device buzzes on your back.
• Status Shouts are reserved for very important or time-sensitive information: smoke alarms, fire alarms, kettles, microwaves. A good status shout is unambiguous.
• First ask if the information you need to get across is truly urgent. Does it indicate something life threatening? Does it demand an immediate response, or a change in tempo of everyone near?
• Examples:
• Seat belt off alert → when weight is detected on the seat
• Smoke detector → unambiguous tone of a smoke detector is so intense that it causes panic, and rightly so (should have a “broom button” to be silenced)

• The more frequent the alert, the calmer it should be
• Ambient awareness is a principle that says, when possible, load things into the environment so that all of the attention doesn’t need to be constantly checking for a state change. The key to ambient awareness is not to overwhelm.
• Consider the environment:
• the size and location of the beacon is important.
• logic and intuition are required to choose where your notifications go. Should you put it in the user’s peripheral vision? At eye level?
• Test your approach to see if users can tell what’s happening without removing their attention from their primary task
• Examples:
• Inner office window → Allows people to check if somebody is busy without having to interrupt them, will show motion in the hall (when it’s time for lunch)
• A gradual change in an ambient beacon or display can also draw attention to a more complex display or dashboard.
• Contextual Notifications have a trigger as a precondition, a notification state, and a post-condition.
• Types:
• Timed alerts happen at a set interval or predetermined time (alarm clock). These feel mechanical, distant, and detached. Take special care to make it easy to set, adjust, stop, or turn off.
• Contextual:an come from weather, location, time, metabolic and emotional states, and proximity. When you set a contextual trigger you’re putting yourself at the mercy of something that’s happening outside of the system. Redundancy is key. They can be compounded (a hyperlocal weather service to send a push notification to users when it is about to start or stop raining). Accomplishment Contextual notifications can also provide rewards for movement.

• Persuasive technologies change what we think and do. Fogg published Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do (2003). Take what was formerly invisible (behaviours, decisions, unseen consequences) and making them visible
• Make data collection as low-friction as possible

• Calm Technology doesn’t mean sparse communication → it means exactly the right amount of communication for the users needs
• Very few designers ask themselves seriously: whether a notification is even necessary.

• Alerts are usually hierarchical. Test everything you do in the real world to determine a hierarchy of information.
• Consider the primary focus of the user and ask yourself if any individual alert — like an emergency alert — is so important that it should remove the user from their current task

• Make sure communicating to the user isn’t an after thought
• An evaluation tool for analysing various states and interactions of a product, in order to identify moments of intrusion, and opportunities for calming them down

User

Environment

Information

• Teams with fewer stakeholders → get things done faster and are more likely to take risk
• Reduce number of stakeholders by → setting low expectations can discourage unneeded executive involvement

• Consider improving a product over time and avoiding the radical redesign. You end up having to support the old product whilst you’re building the new one. It can take a long time before the new product is stable again. What are you most common complaints? Solve those first.
• The most powerful technology brings humans together.

The future is unevenly distributed William Gibson

• What the technology landscape at PARC was like:
• They imagined a future with many more devices: Pads, tabs and boards and built working prototypes for each
• Many different prototypes
• Everything was expensive, so there was rarely any more technology than was necessary
• Very little legacy to adhere to → building new things from scratch was the norm
• Resources were available
• Fault tolerance was a low priority
• The beginnings of Calm Technology
• Aimed to redefine the entire relationship of humans, work and technology in the post-PC era.The concept of humanising technology was cutting edge.The idea of computing begin calm and fitting into everyday life, feeling natural and enjoyable wasn’t common at the time.
• Researchers at PARC were encouraged to predict the problems of the future and solve them before they arose
• Weiser and Brown chose to take on the problem of humanising technology
• How could great interfaces augment human intellect? By maximising what the human mind could absorb and react to?
• PARC was a safe environment that allowed people thinking time, and passion projects. Many projects looked playful.
• 1996 Weiser and Brown published: Coming Age of Calm Technology:
• The important waves of technological change are those that fundamentally alter the place of technology in our lives. What matters is not technology itself, but its relationship to us.
• Calm Tech empowers the periphery
• Through empowering the periphery, it allows us to attune to more than one thing without taking focus away from our primary task or our ability to be human.
• It’s time to start building environments and systems that work with us.
• Ubiquitous computing just might help to free our minds from unnecessary work, and connect us to the fundamental challenge that humans have always had: to understand the patterns in the universe and ourselves within them.

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Preface

• We need Calm Technology more than ever
• Devices are starting to get in our way
• They’re complicated and frustrating
• They interrupt us
• Electricity is a wonderful unobtrusive technology. It works in the background without drawing attention to itself. It’s invisible day to day.
• Calm Technology was first explored as a concept in Xerox Parc
• Researchers predicted many devices would be vying for our attention
• Create products that demand attention only when absolutely necessary
• Product people love
• Products that are part of their lives, not a distraction from it
• Low-friction systems that bring data and increased capacity in a non-annoying way.
• Products that amplify humanness and retain human choice

Chapter 1: Designing for the next 50 billion devices

• Computing waves.
• Mainframe: many people serving one computer. Complicated interfaces
• Desktop PCs: becoming smaller and easier to use.
• Internet: becoming distributed, networked and connected.
• Device ubiquity: devices outnumber people
• Distributed computing: many devices all connected capable of creating, processing and storing data
• As the number of devices grows how they interact with us becomes more important
• Make products simple to increase their longevity and reduce the need for support
• Facebook is longer lasting than any hardware that runs it
• It’s now all about the data and the technology that serves it
• Efficient technology will win out, as resources, time, attention and support become more scarce
• We have to make systems less complex, or we’ll suffer the consequences. We have a limit even if technology doesn’t
• Distributed computing will help solve bandwidth constraints from growing number of devices
• Devices will increasingly request chunks of data from one another
• Technology of the past was made with low failure rates. Edge cases were accounted for in the design
• Edge cases are unpredictable problems that arise at extremes (often discovered after products launch)
• Involve those with more experience to imagine how things might go wrong
• Where possible products should be resilient enough to work without access to a network
• Interoperability becomes more important as the number of devices and systems grows

Chapter 2: Principles of Calm Technology

The most profound technologies are those that disappear Mark Weiser

• Road signs are always on, ready for there when you need them, available at a glance, rarely break
• Make the computers vanish into the background
• We’re not bad at technology, technology is bad at us!
• Make devices disappear into the environment → reduce technological friction
• Design toward minimalism and simplicity
• Less technology requires less support
• Calm Technology isn’t about minimising clicks, it’s about minimising mental cost
• Calm technology design principles:
1. Require the smallest amount of attention
2. Inform and create calm
3. Make use of the periphery
4. Amplify the best of technology and the best humanity
5. Communicate, don’t speak
6. Work even when it fails
7. The right amount of technology is the minimum needed to solve the problem
8. Respect social norms
• Not every project needs all eight
• Attention overload is a big problem and the strongest argument for making technology calm
• Strive to communicate information without interrupting or distracting people from their primary goal
• Attention is still under-considered in design
• Make it work out of the box.
• The MacBook power cord has an indicator light that communicates status without an interface.
• Before designing a notification →
• Consider the environment where the technology is going to be used (public or private, loud or quiet)
• Can you inform them without distracting from their primary focus?
• What happens if the primary alert fails?
• Technology can create calm by giving you information in the right way (e.g. letting you know something is done, in progress or functioning as expected)
• Most information that comes from a device can be presented in a calm way
• Processes that shouldn’t be calm are limited (smoke alarms)

Calm technology engages both the centre and periphery of our attention, and moves back and forth between the two Mark Weiser

• It’s important to use the periphery of our attention → we can’t focus our attention on too many things at once
• The resolution of our attention degrades to the sides → just like our vision
• Information doesn’t have to be high resolution to be useful.
• Forcing updates into the centre of attention wastes time, attention and patience
• When you’re in a car, driving is the primary task
• When you’re in an office, working is the primary task, communication is secondary
• Decide if your technology is a primary goal/task (or secondary in the pursuit of a primary)

• Resource Competition Framework by Antii Oulasvirta
• Competing information forces users to switch back and forth between tasks and external sources → which temporarily leaves switched-from tasks on hold and slows them down
• Primary attention is visual and direct (e.g. driving the car)
• Secondary is distant, auditory or vibrations (e.g. rearview mirrors, side windows)
• Tertiary is peripheral, distant sound or light (radio, emergency dashboard lights)
• Sometimes primary attention will diminish or block secondary or tertiary (e.g. texting on a phone while walking)

‣

You can plot attention

• Typically there’s a primary task of crucial importance, but dozens of small, occasional supporting channels around it
• Acquiring a good understanding of peripheral attention is essential to designing products

• Poorly designed products make humans act like machines to complete a task
• Affective computing → systems that can recognise, interpret, process and simulate human affects (e.g. speech, facial expressions, emotion)
• A person’s primary task shouldn’t be computing → it should be being human
• Humans understand context, computers can’t unless trained.
• Affective technology can create delight, matching human needs with technology interaction.
• People didn’t identify with jerky uncoordinated robots, but introduce soft movements and people anthropomorphise more and feel more comfortable working with them
• Computers speaking like humans without context or relationships leads to a sense of dissonance in the person using it
• A user interface that requires all our visual focus distracts us from doing anything else
• Introduce voice only when absolutely necessary:
• Voice recognition works best in quite environments, but most aren’t
• Voice interfaces rarely work because they require the majority of our limited attention
• Simple tones, symbols or lights can be designed in such a way that they’re universally understood
• Status tone > voice alert
• Buzz > voice alert
• Status light > display
• The status light on a hob can indicate the hob is still hot
• Most audible alerts don’t use calming tones
• Match the urgency of the tone with the urgency of the alert
• Many pieces of information aren’t time-sensitive enough to need one
• Three types of peripheral notification: visual, haptic, audible. Decide what to use based on context. What is the environment like?
• Escalators are resilient when they fail as they work as stairs
• Edge cases often shatter the illusion of calm with technology. Their impact outweighs their frequency.
• Put yourself in the shoes of your users (also think about brand new users)
• Redundancy is the key to dealing with edge cases
• Make sure your system can work when part of it fails

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away Antoine de Saint-Exupery

• A product that uses the right amount of technology becomes invisible
• It fits into existing workflows
• Remove unnecessary features until there’s nothing left to take away
• Good design means fewer things can break

Good design is as little design as possible Dieter Rams

• Managers add features, but few have the authority to take them away
• Empower the user to get their goal with the least amount of attention
• Technical capability can race ahead of reliability
• Don’t introduce new dependencies unless there’s no other way
• An accepted technology becomes unremarkable, to the point where it’s invisible
• there’s a rate of cultural metabolism for technology (some never make it)
• technologies can be metabolised quicker if people perceive them as returning them to the norm
• expanding peoples definition of normal is a gradual process that takes time
• The iPhones we’re used to today would have been alien at launch, the price points and the capabilities would have seemed absurd and would have resulted in failure.
• To launch a product successfully you have to study your audience (social cues, culture, needs, jobs to be done)

Chapter 3: Calm Communication Patterns

• Technology is most likely to be uncalm in the way it announces itself. So choose communication patterns that “calm down” an otherwise overly demanding interaction or interface
• Status indicators and contextual notifications are often implemented as visual alerts or default tones without really thinking about how they could affect people in context
• Status Indicators can be visual, auditory or haptic:
• Status lights are a calm way of conveying a piece of information. Users only need to check a system when the light changes colour unexpectedly
• Great for low-importance, persistent information
• They carry more information with less distraction than any other status indicator
• Use of multiple colours and varying levels of brightness can help provide more information
• Go further and you could turn a status light into a shape or icon, or associate text with it, and you have a powerful visual indicator with relatively little attention load
• Great examples:
• Heat light on a stove (can signal still hot even when off)
• Server status light (rope lights above the engineering team)
• Light-based tap can change colour based on temperature (red when hot)
• A toothbrush that lights up if you haven’t brushed your teeth
• Red feels anxious, blue is a more gentle reminder.
• Status Tones: Sound matters
• A sound can put you at ease or on edge
• A calm welcoming sound can change everything about an experience, and can relieve tension in frustrated users
• Status tones can serve as a unique identifier with relatively little cognitive demand
• Technology can communicate information, in a way that requires less attention and distraction than the spoken word
• Status tones often accompany visual indicators or status lights. The tone alerts the user to a status change and the status light remains on as a persistent indicator.
• Examples:
• Apple computer startup tone → calming transition (was snuck in by the designer)
• Help button on a plane → triggers a tone, switches on a light, steward turns off
• Washer or dryer melodies → need to be loud to attract attention across the house
• Insulin pumps → can beep when the user needs medication, but in a relatively quiet way that its wearer can deal with
• Roomba vacuum cleaner → chirps happily when a task is finished. When it gets stuck or needs cleaning, it emits a distinct somber tone. Orange and green status lights serve as secondary displays to confirm the situation, so if you missed the tone, you can still access the information in a different, low-impact way.
• Calm Technology requires that we pass the least amount of information necessary to get the point across to the user, in order to respect their limited attention.
• Using haptics appropriately can get you there.
• Haptic Alerts
• Haptic alerts are physical notifications that can be felt on the body through touch
• Allow smartphones users to receive notifications without alerting others (intruding on social interactions)
• Also used with audio and visual feedback to add richness and detail to gaming
• Haptics are very personal and visceral. You feel them in your gut.
• Haptics are an underutilised channel (we typically send 1-bit information)
• human touch is extremely high resolution, with an extraordinary range of sensitivity
• Examples:
• Feedback from a video game controller
• Buzz on a smartphone (something has happened)
• Smartwatch alerts → less chance of getting distracted by the bombardment of news, alerts, and social communication that comes with opening a smartphone interface
• LUMO Back posture sensor → as you begin to slouch, the device buzzes on your back.
• Status Shouts
• Status shouts are reserved for very important or time-sensitive information: smoke alarms, fire alarms, kettles, microwaves
• Status shouts tend to use audio cues, but we could imagine visual and haptic status shouts as well.
• What about haptic shouts? If everyone had a strong emergency vibration as a feature on mobile phones, you could send a direct signal that can’t easily be ignored to every phone at once - unlike text messages that can be silenced or easily missed, they don’t shout.
• A good status shout is unambiguous.
• First ask if the information you need to get across is truly urgent. Does it indicate something life threatening? Does it demand an immediate response, or a change in tempo of everyone near?
• The more frequent the alert, the calmer it should be
• Examples:
• Seat belt off alert → when weight is detected on the seat
• Smoke detector → unambiguous tone of a smoke detector is so intense that it causes panic, and rightly so (should have a “broom button” to be silenced)
• Recess bell → a positive status shout notifying teachers and students that it’s time for play and socialising.
• Ambient Awareness
• Ambient awareness is making use of the peripheral environment (e.g. a display outside of the centre field of view, a subtle tone, or a vibration) to let you know something without needing to look.
• Ambient awareness makes notifications: opt out, rather than opt in.
• Evolutionarily we’re used to receiving messages with sensory information and rich human information (expression, body language, tone). We evolved to notice and comprehend this type of information and pay attention to the most important parts.
• The terms “peripheral attention” and “ambient awareness” can be used interchangeably.
• Ambient awareness is a principle that says, when possible, load things into the environment so that all of the attention doesn’t need to be constantly checking for a state change.
• The key to ambient awareness is not to overwhelm.
• Consider the environment:
• the size and location of the beacon is important.
• Logic and intuition are required to choose where your notifications go. Should you put it in the user’s peripheral vision? At eye level?
• Test your approach to see if users can tell what’s happening without removing their attention from their primary task
• Examples:
• Inner office window → Allows people to check if somebody is busy without having to interrupt them, will show motion in the hall (when it’s time for lunch)
• The live wire → string connected to a motor showed network traffic
• Lavatory occupied sign
• Directional tape on the floor at a conference
• Weather-coloured lightbulb → report weather through colour
• This treatment makes notifications less intrusive, and turns their presence into something reliable and comforting, rather than an interruption to be dispensed with.
• Use to provide persistent calming sensory feedback to confirm that something is operating correctly, or to demonstrate something is “done” or “handled” in the background
• A gradual change in an ambient beacon or display can also draw attention to a more complex display or dashboard.
• Contextual Notifications
• Trigger notifications as a result of an event. A trigger has a precondition, a notification state, and a post-condition.
• First figure out what the precondition or context for the trigger is, then determine what kind(s) of notifications work best, and then test your post-condition.
• The post-conditions of an alarm clock are snooze, cancel, left or unplugged
• Types:
• Timed: alerts happen at a set interval or predetermined time (alarm clock)
• These feel mechanical, distant, and detached
• Take special care to make it easy to set, adjust, stop, or turn off.
• Contextual: can range from a notification that you’ve received a text message to a sensor in your car that beeps at you when you’re too close to another car.
• When you set a trigger like this you’re putting yourself at the mercy of something that’s happening outside of the system
• Sometimes that external event might fail, could be corrupted. So redundancy is key. Gracefully degrades to the technology’s original intent.
• Consider creating a status tone that increases in volume toward a shout if not attended to
• Contextual notifications in action come from weather, location, time, metabolic and emotional states, and proximity.
• Importantly they can be compounded:
• a hyperlocal weather service to send a push notification to users when it is about to start or stop raining
• you can set triggers that are based on being in a certain place at a certain time
• Emotional and metabolic state triggers might be helpful when you need to be notified of a medical or physiological need, such as low blood sugar
• Proximity can notify someone if there are interesting people nearby
• Accomplishment Contextual notifications can also provide rewards for movement.
• Persuasive Technology
• Persuasive technologies change what we think and do
• Fogg published Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do (2003).
• Take what was formerly invisible (behaviours, decisions, unseen consequences) and making them visible
• Make data collection as low-friction as possible → the less effort users must put into recording or submitting data, the more insight they’ll be able to gain
• Examples:
• Alpha wave synchrony feedback machine → creates feelings of calmness and alertness and allow for a technologically guided meditation
• GlowCap → is light-embedded cap that can be attached to the top of a standard pill bottle. It glows when it is time to take medication.
• OPOWER → compares your energy use to your neighbours
• Toyota Prius → miles per gallon on the dashboard has an impact on driver behaviour that far outstrips the most effective education campaign
• Salad bar tongs → coloured based on whether the food was considered healthy or not: green for healthy, yellow for moderate, and red for bad
• Beeminder → track your goals and attach financial consequences to negative outcomes
• The last century of systems work took was about capturing people’s time, the next century might find us creating or removing technologies — to many of us, a more positive experience.
• Calm Technology doesn’t mean sparse communication → it means exactly the right amount of communication for the users needs
• Tips:
• Very few designers ask themselves seriously: whether a notification is even necessary.
• Alerts are usually hierarchical. Test everything you do in the real world to determine a hierarchy of information.
• Consider the primary focus of the user and ask yourself if any individual alert — like an emergency alert — is so important that it should remove the user from their current task

Chapter 4: Exercised in Calm Technology

• Make sure communicating to the user isn’t an after thought
• An evaluation tool for analysing various states and interactions of a product, in order to identify moments of intrusion, and opportunities for calming them down

A Calm Interaction / Evaluation Tool

User

Environment

Information

• This evaluation tool can help you consider how technology fits into a persons life, environment and how it communicates or makes use of information.

Chapter 5: Calm Technology in your organisation

• How to make the case for Calm Technology
• A less calm fussier interface results in more confusion, more support calls and requires more updates.
• Design for calm now, save money later
• Teams with fewer stakeholders → get things done faster and are more likely to take risk
• Reduce number of stakeholders by → setting low expectations can discourage unneeded executive involvement
• It only takes one executive to stop your project.
• Teams with less than 5 people have less communication difficulties and operational constraints. Communication is easier, autonomy is higher
• Do a small test project to see how you are at working together
• Foster a sense of creative safety on the team
• Hire differently from you diverse perspectives are key → take what people have to say seriously
• Find a supporter for your project who can act as a political buffer
• Design for privacy. Privacy considerations should be incorporated into every aspect of an app’s lifecycle. Fight for your users and they’ll fight for you
• Great privacy:
• users will understand the privacy policy when they start to use your app
• present privacy controls at the point of content creatoin
• empower your users
• have on/off switches and simple settings
• make it easy to access controls such as alert styles or tones and volume levels
• separate your privacy policy into english and legalese
• What data is collected and why?
• What will it be used for? Why should users share it?
• How to permanently delete it?
• How to download it?
• how are you protecting users data from being hacked?
• show abbreviated changes to privacy policies
• what are you doing to ensure transparency?

• Typical objections to calm technology:
• Objection → How to respond
• More features are better → educate management about the history of successful products and how they really grow (two main features per season, and interaction with their community
• Feature parity with legacy system → legacy features can prevent new ones from being implemented. They can clutter the interface and disturb flow. Determine whether the market is actually using all those features (product trials, user testing and web analytics can help). You can also create a ‘light’ version of the product to help users get into it without overwhelming them.
• What about all the stakeholders? → the more stakeholders you have, the more you’re building a product for your managers, not your users. Encourage stakeholders to get involved in research, or testing. Share results
• The product must stay secret → extremely secret projects result in products that flop. Engage coworkers and beta builds. Internal usage is a good litmus test.
• A calm product launch:
• Products rarely hit the market in their final successful form.
• Aim to evolve with users over time to fit into their lives.
• Do user research, understand the market needs
• Release it too soon or don’t explain it well enough and people will be confused (or fearful)
• Allow people to play with it, come up with their own use cases,.
• Decision paralysis has hilled more companies than knockoffs.
• Consider improving a product over time and avoiding the radical re-design. You end up having to support the old product, whilst you’re building the new one. It can take a long time before the new product is stable again. What are you most common complaints? Solve those first.
• The most powerful technology brings humans together.

The future is unevenly distributed William Gibson

Chapter 6: The history and future of calm technology

• Folks at PARC in the 1980s who were working on these things: Mark Weiser, John Seely Brown, and Rich Gold
• They imagined a future with many more devices: Pads, tabs and boards and built working prototypes for each
• They created a slice of the future in a very controlled way
• What the technology landscape at PARC was like:
• Many different prototypes
• Everything was expensive, so there was rarely any more technology than was necessary
• Very little legacy to adhere to → building new things from scratch was the norm
• Resources were available
• Fault tolerance was a low priority
• The beginnings of Calm Technology
• Aimed to redefine the entire relationship of humans, work and technology in the post-PC era
• The concept of humanising technology was cutting edge
• The idea of computing begin calm and fitting into everyday life, feeling natural and enjoyable wasn’t common at the time
• Researchers at PARC were encouraged to predict the problems of the future and solve them before they arose
• Weiser and Brown chose to take on the problem of humanising technology
• How could great interfaces augment human intellect? By maximising what the human mind could absorb and react to?
• Bean bags were deliberately used to make it harder for one person to go to the board → and to encourage more collaboration
• PARC was a safe environment that allowed people thinking time, and passion projects. Many projects looked playful.
• 1996 Weiser and Brown published: Coming Age of Calm Technology:
• The important waves of technological change are those that fundamentally alter the place of technology in our lives. What matters is not technology itself, but its relationship to us.
• There is no less technology involved in a comfortable pair of shoes, in a fine writing pen, or in delivering the New York Times on a Sunday morning, than in a home PC. Why is one often enraging, the others frequently encalming? We believe the difference is in how they engage our attention.
• The two things they said were about the periphery:
• Calm Tech empowers the periphery
• Through empowering the periphery, it allows us to attune to more than one thing without taking focus away from our primary task or our ability to be human.
• It’s time to start building environments and systems that work with us.
• Conserve what is good, and improve the rest.
• Individuals and small teams can go a long way when they’re motivated to make change, so create the change in technology you’d like to see in the world. Be patient and it will pay off.
• Ubiquitous computing just might help to free our minds from unnecessary work, and connect us to the fundamental challenge that humans have always had: to understand the patterns in the universe and ourselves within them.