user experience

Bluetooth Earphones, User Experience, and Loving the Mundane

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I recently broke my second pair of Bluetooth earphones in the span of one year, and that got me thinking about my experiences using Bluetooth audio devices over the years. 

The Start: Being forced to use Bluetooth Earphones

The first time I started using Bluetooth earphones was back in 2015. I was forced into using them because my phone’s 3.5mm headphone jack stopped working, and I couldn’t be bothered to send my phone over to a repair shop to get it fixed. I was in grad school back then and money was tight- I remember scouring slickdeals dot net and finding a coupon code so I could buy a no-name brand pair of earphones for ten or twelve bucks. 

My first pair of earphones looked something like this

Before then, I was exclusively a wired headphone/earphone user. I didn’t have to think about the experience of connecting headphones to listen to music – just plug and play. That’s where my annoyances started with going wireless. There’s an initial setup process that involves pairing your earphones and your phone. It usually involves pressing and holding a combination of buttons for some amount of seconds until you see some kind of LED indicator and/or hear a particular sound. You then have to find the device on your phone, go through the pairing process and hope it works. 

Over the years, the pairing experience has become more intuitive and convenient due to prior experiences, familiarity, and manufacturers trying to reduce the number of steps needed. 

Thinking back to using those first earphones I owned- I mostly remember them being uncomfortable to wear- they dug into my ears at times, and their shape and hard plastic construction meant that holding onto them, keeping them in your pocket, and even pushing the power button was pretty annoying. The sound quality was hollow and tinny. The battery life was decent. But I overlooked the shortcomings because they were affordable, and I didn’t have a choice. 

Learning to Live with and Love Bluetooth Earphones

As time went on and I switched phones, I ended up continuing to use Bluetooth earphones at least half the time I was listening to music. Being forced to use them had helped me understand the plus sides of going wireless- being able to listen while your phone’s kept away, or being able to use them more comfortably while working out, for example. 

Brainwavs BLU100

Graduating and getting a job also unlocked the capability of buying earphones that weren’t at the bottom of the barrel – that meant better sound quality, longer battery life, better build quality with more “premium” feeling materials, and better comfort. I remember using a pair of Brainwavz earbuds that came with foam eartips instead of the usual silicone ones. Using foam eartips that conform to your ears makes the experience of wearing earphones significantly more comfortable, especially for longer listening sessions. 

Despite becoming more accustomed to using bluetooth earphones, I still had a couple of issues with them. Connecting to a device wasn’t instantaneous, and turning them on required me to press and hold the power button for about 5 seconds. Not huge issues in the grand scheme of things, but when you compare that to the seamlessness of plugging a pair of earbuds into a 3.5mm headphonejack and starting to play audio, having to wait to turn on and connect wirelessly is slightly annoying. 

The unfortunate thing with bluetooth earphones- at least the ones I tried, is that they end up malfunctioning or breaking eventually. When my pair of Brainwavs kicked the bucket, I bought a pair of Aukey EPB40s. Design-wise, they were pretty much the same- except the left and right earbuds were magnetic, and were able to stick to each other- nifty to be sure, but nothing extraordinary. 

The EPB60s

It’s their successor, the EPB60s, that took the magnetic “snapping” feature and used it to switch the earbuds on and off- separating the earbuds to turn them on, and snapping them together to turn them off. What I first considered a clever gimmick turned out to be a great solution to the hangups I had with using wireless earphones. This was the closest that a Bluetooth device had come to seamlessly integrating into my routine. Sometimes the best designs are those that integrate so well into your lives and routines that you don’t even think about them. 

These were the first Bluetooth earphones that became my primary way of listening to music on the go. I still use wired headphones while listening to music on my “audiophile” setup- but that’s a whole different story. The ease of connectivity and the freedom of movement came together for the first time to provide an experience that just made sense. 

My Next Buy in a Changed Tech Landscape

Which brings me back to what I said at the beginning- My second pair of these just broke in the span of one year. Convenience is cool and all, but durability is pretty important to me too, which is why I probably won’t be buying another pair of these. Even if I wanted to, though- they seem to be out of stock or unavailable the last time I checked online. 

Apple’s AirPods probably had a lot to do with the true wireless trend.

Another thing that happened in the past couple of years, is a significant shift in Bluetooth earphone trends. Namely, the rise of “true wireless” earbuds. I’m not sold on the concept personally- knowing how forgetful I can be sometimes, I just don’t know if I can reliably remember to place two separate earbuds into the same box, and not shove them into two different pockets, or keep them in two completely different places. They also tend to be significantly more expensive based on what I’ve seen. Replacing the usual Bluetooth earphones (What do I even call those now- “wired but wireless”? “False wireless”? “Old style”?) doesn’t sting me too much because they’re usually pretty affordable. Having to replace a relatively expensive pair of earbuds will hurt both my feelings and my wallet, and I don’t think I’m ready for that. 

There is one alternative to “true wireless” earphones- like Juan Bagnell suggests in his video, “neckband” style earphones offer a lot more capabilities for a similar price. My issue with them is simple- they’re the bucket hat of earphones. Are bucket hats more comfortable than caps? Sure. Do they tend to offer more sun protection than caps? Yes, for the most part. Are they fashionable, cool, or sleek? For the most part- no. Unless you’re the kind of person that can pull off that look. Neckband earphones always strike me as functional but bulky, while true wireless earbuds stand out because of how sleek and low profile they are. 

In the end, I have a few choices. I could try to find the usual kind of earphones that I get, and replace them every year or two years. I could try the newfangled true wireless earphones and see how that goes for me. I could try using the neckbands and see if they really are as unwieldy as they appear. Whatever I end up choosing, it’s clear that this is a very mundane affair. Why then, did I write over a thousand words about it? 

Changing Preferences and Priorities as you Grow Older

Writing this helped me ruminate about how my tastes changed as I grew up. A younger me would have completely dismissed this discussion as boring and inconsequential. I was a lot more engrossed in the “bleeding edge” of technology back then, and wanted to experience the most enticing prospects in the world of mobile technology. The older I’ve gotten, the more joy I’ve started to experience in how well things integrate into my life. How things make my life more convenient. I get excited about new ways to organize my belongings in the physical and the digital world. Things like finding the perfect set of Tupperware containers, box organizers, shelves… even using an old can of peanuts to store my stationery because it’s just the right shape and size. In the digital realm, it’s more along the lines of password organizers, cloud storage, and faster storage drives for my computer. 

I see now that even something that appears seemingly mundane tends to have a lot of thought put into it- sometimes receding into the background of your life is exactly what the designers intended the thing to do. Sometimes what excites you isn’t how flashy something is, but just how it fits perfectly into your life, how it perfectly harmonizes with your routines and your muscle memory. I’d finally achieved a semblance of that with my bluetooth earphones that just broke. Now the question is not just about what I should buy, but it’s also about how well whatever I buy will fit into my routines, how intuitive it is for me to use, and in what ways will this new thing will allow me to experience that which I experience everyday? 

It’s Time We Re-Examined Aesthetic and Minimal Design

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Let me know what you think about this video in the comments!

Here’s what I talk about in this video:

Let’s have a look at one of the most widely accepted and deeply held beliefs in the UX space and turn it on its head. I had this idea while thinking of Nielsen’s heuristics, mainly “Aesthetic and Minimal Design”. Let’s just start with the bundling aesthetic and minimal together. Why does it have to be that way? Clearly, it is possible to have something that’s aesthetically pleasing without it also being minimalist. If you look throughout antiquity you will see so many examples- The Meenakshi Temple, Angkor Wat, the list goes on. 

Of course, the heuristics are written from a usability standpoint. For the design of tools and services that are to be used to accomplish particular tasks. In that sense, it makes perfect sense to let go of excessive ornamentation if it interferes with the goal, which is the successful completion of whatever task is at hand. 

The issue I have with the laser focus on minimalism is when it bleeds into other aspects of life. As UX-ers, we’ve all been there. When we first get into this field, maybe you read the design of everyday things or some of those other staple books and you start looking at everything around you through the lens of design and usability. How many times have you come across something and said “hey, that’s bad design”. We’ve all been there, we’ve all done that. Some of us still do that, because we can’t help ourselves. And in many cases, it’s warranted- like when you have to park your car in a very confusing parking structure, for example. 

However, in many cases, it turns into a more tribalistic shaming of certain things. Let me give you an example from my own life. My mother loves having a house full of different stuff. Just collections of books or small trinkets or whatever it may be. She loves collecting stuff and changing the décor with the seasons and the festivals throughout the year. It’s always a very involved process for her- taking things out of boxes, putting them in particular spots around the house, and making sure every corner of the house has something placed in it. When I was younger and I was learning about minimalism, I used to think this was all very excessive and unnecessary- that it was inefficient and a waste of time, and that all this ornamentation was … just too much. That it was, well, not good design. 

Thinking back to it now, I realize that I was looking at it from a very myopic mindset. When my mother decorates the house every so often, she’s not creating unnecessary ornamentation. The whole process that I mentioned earlier is delightful in and of itself. UX-ers are always chasing the holy grail of “the delightful experience” all the time- we discuss it in every forum, in internal conversations at work, and so on. Anyway, the point is that a lot of things that bring joy to people are considered illogical or suboptimal when looked at through that minimalist lens. 

Let’s think instead from the “maximalist” point of view. Where it’s not “less is more” but rather “more is more”. Of wanting ornamentation, wanting every nook and cranny full of intricate details. A lot of cultural traditions are like that. In fact, I would even go as far as to say that the thought of minimalism as the only way for something to be aesthetically pleasing is a very euro-centric way of looking at it. The first things that come to mind are Scandinavian minimalism and to an extent Japanese minimalism as well. There are so many cultures that are not minimal though- I grew up in India and the dominant aesthetic sensibilities in my country are unapologetically maximalist, in my opinion. There’s also the phenomenon of minimalism as a form of cultural erasure- this is a more controversial stance which states that minimalism was used by authoritarianism to erase cultural heritages, from antiquity to modern times. In fact what people call modern design that was developed in the middle of the 20th century has that backdrop of authoritarianism and wanting to detach from the cultures of the past. 

As the field of UX becomes more international day by day, I think we as a community need to rethink the core tenets of our craft. We need to think about the overall contexts in which those rules were codified. I think that at least on the digital side of things, these heuristics that were formed in the 90s and 2000s were created when the internet and digital UX were in a nascent stage- when most of the creators and the end-users were limited to Europe and North America. 

So instead of shaming maximalism, let’s try to see how we can fully understand these different cultural and historical sensibilities and move our field forward. 

Thanks for watching, and remember:

Design IS political. 

[VIDEO] UX Research: Why Studying Other Interviewers Matters

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Join the conversation in the comments!

I’ve been wanting to make videos about UX-related topics for a while. I was inspired to talk about learning via observing other interviewers, because I’ve been studying other interviewers for a while, I’ve been told that it isn’t useful, and I don’t agree. It all came together in my head as I was reading Steve Portigal’s famous book, “Interviewing Users: How to uncover compelling insights”.

Here are the key points I make in this video:

  • Interviewing is a skill: the best way to hone this skill is through practice, learning via experience. However, I have a question: Is there any value in learning by observing other people conduct interviews?
    • I asked this to a highly experienced UX-er, and the answer I got was “No, because there are certain intangible qualities certain people have, that you cannot replicate within yourself. You could copy what they do, but that’s just unnatural and forced.”
    • I don’t agree with this, because I am not trying to copy someone’s style. I am observing to see if there are certain things I can learn from interviewers that I can imbibe within myself, like a “formula” of sorts. The goal of observing other interviewers is to augment the key thing which is practice and improvement via direct, actionable feedback.
  • That being said, I don’t just observe other UX-ers. I observe interviewers in various industries. For example:
    • Therapist “Dr. K” From HealthyGamerGG. He has a knack for establishing a rapport with the interviewee, he knows how to steer and control conversations, and I learned a couple of neat tricks from him, such as pausing to think for a minute, and slowly sipping a glass of water during the silence portions of the conversation, to get the other person to speak.
    • All Gas No Brakes. What I learned from the interviewer here is how you can get people to let their guard down by amping up your “naive-ness”.
    • Great Radio and Podcast Hosts: What you can learn from them is how to keep track of narrative threads and how to pull at the right ones at the right times.
  • Lastly, this is personally important to me, because I moved from India to the US. A completely different cultural environment with different social norms. I don’t have any experience with working in customer or client-facing jobs when in high school or college, like a lot of people my age tend to have when they’re born and raised in the US. Observing interviewers helps me understand the different norms (turns of phrase, idioms, common topics for small talk, etc.) that I may not know right off the bat.

A few thoughts on “Using the Difficulty”​ in User Experience Design

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Introduction

While looking through articles and examples of UI Dark Patterns, I stumbled across a paper titled “Use the Difficulty through Schwierigkeit”: Antiusability as Value-driven Design”. I was intrigued by the title of the paper, and the essay style used by the author.

On an initial read through, the paper felt like a meandering essay, which touched upon various aspects of the “Anti-usability/Schwierigkeit ” school of thought. A couple more read-throughs later, I was able to understand the various nuances within the points presented by the author.

The author really exemplifies the point he’s trying to make with the words used in the first couple of sentences. I mean, wording such as  “This aphorism also encapsulates the raison d’etre…” has to have been a deliberate choice.

Definition and Origins of “Using the Difficulty”

Antiusability is defined as

“…a novel way of design that centers on the finely tuned integration of graduated difficulty into user interfaces to systems in a variety of contexts.”

It’s important to note that Antiusability is not the opposite of usability, it is in fact part of usability and user experience design. Lenarcic makes note of this by suggesting the use of the term “Schwierigkeit” (which means “difficult” in German) as an alternative.

Lenarcic cites the example of Michael Caine, who asked the director of a play he was in, about how to deal with a chair that was on stage. The director told him to make use of the chair in a way that helped him express the nature of the scene (smashing the chair of it was a dramatic scene, or tripping over it if it was comedic). In this way the chair went from being an obstacle to an object that could be used in a productive manner.

Key Points

Here are the key  points that Lenarcic went over in his paper:

  • The usability of a device can modify a user’s behavior.
  • Difficulties can be used in such a way as to have a net positive effect.
  • Choreographing obstacles in a way that allows the users to regain the feeling of being in charge of the interaction process rather than being “madly addicted” to it.
  • “Calibrated difficulty in practical design to accentuate the greater good in system use”
  • How easy should things be? How difficult should things be to enable an end user to feel they have performed a useful task?
  • Regaining control over our lives- “slow” movement and moving away from hyper-efficiency as an end goal for all interactions
  • Exploring “viscosity” in user environments, affordances that allow resistance to local changes.

What follows is my attempt at summarizing and reflecting on some of the points presented in this paper. The paper was written in a meandering essay style and my thoughts tended to meander as I wrote this, though I have tried my best to create some coherent structure.

“Calibrated Difficulty”: Gamification and Homo Ludens

The author talks about “calibrated difficulty in practical design to accentuate the greater good”. My mind naturally went to levels of difficulty in video games. Games are a great example of difficulty being an important aspect of the user’s experience or indeed their enjoyment. Most games have different levels of difficulty to cater to different people’s preferences.

Today, gamification of interfaces has become a buzzword. “Gamification elements” have become synonymous with things you can tack onto an interface in order to make it more “delightful”. Things like leaderboards, scores, achievements, and badges. I feel like the benefits of adding such elements without proper thought is limited at best and questionable at worst.

I believe that this idea of using the difficulty has an application in truly gamifying a user experience. True gamification involves using aspects of the interaction itself, using the “Core Drives” of the user, as this article by Yu-kai Chou brilliantly describes. Imagine if you got a sense of accomplishment on completing a tedious task, rather than exasperation. (Something like, say, editing an image-laden document in Microsoft Word without messing up the layout.) Providing a challenge, timely positive feedback and competition can definitely act as motivational drivers as is described in this paper.

But gamification at its core still aims to improve the user experience with the goals of the user in mind. It is still about getting things done by providing a sense of accomplishment to the user for doing “grunt work”. Lenarcic’s Schwierigkeit is more in line with William Gaver’s “Designing for Homo Ludens”. As Gaver describes, his definition of “playing” is different from “gaming”

“Not only are these forms of ‘play’ fundamentally goal-oriented, but in striving for a defined outcome they impose rules about the right and wrong ways to go about things… Pursuing such an instrumental version of ‘fun’ does not help provide an alternative model for computing. On the contrary, it co-opts play into the same single minded, results-oriented, problem-fixated mindset that we have inherited from the workplace.”

Gaver goes on to provide examples of open ended forms of engagement with no fixed goals, rules or outcomes. He says that scientific approaches to design should be complemented by open ended and exploratory ones.

“It is difficult to conceive of a task analysis for goofing around, or to think of exploration as a problem to be solved, or to determine usability requirements for systems meant to spark new perceptions”

Regaining control over the experience- allowing the user to reflect on their actions

Another aspect of Lenarcic’s paper is about allowing the user to reflect and rest as they use the system, instead of having a singular goal of reducing the time on task and increasing efficiency. The more time you can save, the more work you will end up doing, as Landauer expressed in his book The Trouble with Computers.

He argues that allowing time to reflect over actions may help the user feel more in control over the system, as opposed to being “madly addicted” to the process. He argues that adopting a more mindful and “slow” approach could lead to more user satisfaction. Allowing users to reflect on their actions be used to improve learnability and understanding of the system.

A personal reflection on Usability, User Experience and “Delighting” the user

Usability discussions are often centered around ease of use, and when people talk about user experience the end goal is often times “delighting” the user. The end goal of UX design and research is always creating an ideal experience for the user based on their needs and behaviors. Words like simple, easy, desirable, and efficient are the ones that are used, while words like difficult always have a negative connotation.

This paper really got me to think- is making something easy to use, more efficient and less time consuming really the only way to improve the user experience? Can the difficulties inherent in some experiences be leveraged to a positive end?

Of course, there’s a difference between making something usable and making a delightful user experience. I feel like Lenarcic’s idea of “using the difficulty” has a place in discussions about the latter. Some may equate the ideal experience with the most efficient, but reading Lenarcic’s essay made me go back and re-read ideas like Gaver’s Designing for Homo Ludens, and made me realize that there’s a lot more to user experience or human centered design than simply designing for efficiency.

Thinking back to my days as in Grad School, I remember the discussions with professors and peers about ways to “delight” the user. It almost always ended up being about how the interface reacted to the user- beautiful transitions, animations, innovative 404 screens or other ways in which to provide information about system status, and so on.

There’s so much more to user experience and “delighting” the user than a focus on making things easier to use. Exploring, playing around with something with no end goal, some level of challenge, all of these are ways in which we may seek fulfillment. I’m glad I picked apart this paper despite my initial hesitation, because it made me go back and re-read so many things that I had forgotten about or was unable to appreciate because of the stresses of being a graduate student. This in itself is a case in point- I read all these academic papers with a goal oriented mindset, I wanted to extract their meaning, write a summary, and discuss them in class, all with the goal of passing my class, with the incentive of good grades (or the fear of bad grades). My goals were set, and I developed methods to efficiently accomplish the tasks of summarizing and discussing papers. It’s now that I have the time to reflect on these papers that I realize how important and thought provoking they are.

This paper reminded me of my initial wonderment about the human condition. I feel like I had lost sight of the complexities of the things that make us tick, and it’s refreshing to remove the blinders of efficiency and ease of use to look at things like difficulty from a new perspective.

The Ideal E-Reader User Interface

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I recently got the new Kindle Paperwhite for a relative. Before I handed it over, I had the chance to use it for a few days. It uses a touch based interface on an e-paper display. However, there are no buttons and the interface is navigated entirely using the touch screen. After I handed the Kindle over, I also got a chance to go hands-on with an older variant. This used buttons for navigation. After using both, I felt like I should juxtapose both these experiences and talk about what in my opinion would be the ideal user experience when it comes to interacting with e-readers.

Feedback and Reliability

I personally felt that the older Kindle’s button based interface was much easier to use, and also much better in terms of user experience. As to why I feel like the experience is better, the answer is simple- physical buttons have certain affordances that a touch screen only system cannot provide. Affordances are aspects of an object’s design that suggest what you can do with it. This comes into play especially while using the page turn buttons that are mounted on the sides of the old Kindle. The buttons provide a tactile feedback that is reassuring. Tapping on a touch screen does not provide such feedback, unless there is a vibration or haptic feedback from the screen, which the new Kindle does not have. Another issue with the touch screen is that it is not as responsive as smartphones or tablets these days. Tapping to go to a new page does not work sometimes, and at times pages are skipped. The buttons not only provide reassurance and feedback, but they are also more reliable in this case, as the user can be sure that they have gone exactly one page ahead or behind based on the button pressed.

Faster Interaction

Another issue with the touch based interface on the new Kindle is that the navigation options are hidden by default in the “reading mode”. The top of the screen has to be tapped in order to access the navigation menu. In comparison, the old Kindle’s buttons are always out of the way of the screen, and are accessible at all times. This means that the button based UI has one less step when it comes to navigation. For example, if a user wants to navigate to the home screen, on the old kindle he/she just has to press the home button, while on the new Kindle they have to tap the top of the screen to make the navigation bar appear, then tap the home button to go to the home screen. This may seem like just one more step, but it can add up really fast in terms of user frustration.

One handed use

Side mounted buttons to turn pages on the old Kindle make it easier to use it with one hand. Having to tap the screen with one hand while holding the device in the other hinders and in many cases completely eliminates one handed usability. As this blog post says, one handed usability allows one free hand to eat popcorn or chips without leaving grease on the screen, for example.

On the flipside

Buttons do have disadvantages though. They might add to the overall expense of the device. As they are physical objects, they are subject to wear and tear over time. They also add to the overall bulk of the device and may be undesirable for people who value sleekness of the design over ease of use.

The best of both worlds

With the exclusively touch based interface of the new Kindle, Amazon seems to have decided to go button-free for the future. There is a way where both approaches can coexist. Amazon could include Bluetooth connectivity with the next Kindle. This opens up the possibilities of connecting keyboards and other devices to the Kindle and allow the users to use a button based navigation over the touch screen. A Bluetooth enabled case that adds the side mounted page turn buttons would be a great idea. Allowing the user to choose their preferred way of interacting with the device would be the best pro-consumer way to make sure Amazon can retain their sleek button-free design without un-solving a problem that was solved by the buttons in the first place.