How Hard?
Posted in Latest, Thoughts - January 13, 2010 - tim
My 8 year old son, for some strange reason, has taken up massage, and practicing on his parents. This is often to try to mollify us for some reason, but it’s not a bad strategy. And his Mom is a complete sucker.
He’s strong for his age (thanks in part to constant sports) and so he’s developed a curious technique that I’ve never seen before but I think it’s interesting. And simple.
Before he does anything he holds out his hand and says “how hard?”.
You, the massagee, then squeeze his hand to indicate the intensity you’d like – hard, or soft.
Almost everything, for me, being a metaphor for design it strikes me what a simple up-front context-setting mechanism this is. I’ve written before about the brilliance of the ATM language selection trick (i.e. “Enter PIN and press enter” in multiple languages – by selecting one, you also select your language without even really knowing it) and this is in that vein – not only does the masseuse get a key instruction from the subject, but there is also an initial contact – a handshake. Subtle but elegant. It also sends a signal to the recipient that they are basically in charge right up front.
How many applications – web, desktop, mobile, etc. – start with any sort of context-setting, power-acknowledging, insta-win like this? That’s the interesting question my kid’s technique raised. In strategy sessions with clients I have often tried to pitch up-front context setting mechanisms, but have often (most of the time in fact) been hit with the “we have to set our context first – who we are, what we do, why they should, etc. This feels a bit like the old broadcast one-way mass messaging mentality we still, as a society increasingly surrounded by peer-to-peer interactive media, lead with. More and more, when a client asks for an interesting messaging approach for a new web site or application or tool, I think first about how we could turn the tables and give the user not so much a first impression, but a first action.
How hard?
My son’s technique is elegant because it accomplishes a couple of things at the same time. And it’s simple. The trick in translating this to a consumer site or app is how to keep it simple (without feeling invasive from a privacy perspective) yet effective (from a response perspective). The best example I can think of in contemporary apps is the common location bug on GPS enabled devices like the iPhone. Touch the icon, set the context. Yeah, you’re giving up your location, but the app (if it’s worth a damn) returns something much more powerful than before.
I haven’t given a talk in 5-6 years that wasn’t at least in part about the power shift from “broadcaster” to “user” (to whit) so the concept of leading an interaction with a context-setting opportunity for the user – before or at least simultaneous with the chest-beating part – is one I like.
I’d be interested to hear about radical examples of this out there. Besides Google 
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