Hierarchies

Each and all of the home media interfaces I've looked at and tried, are based on hierarchical menus and folders. I'm trying to figure out what's good and what's wrong with hierarchies, and what's the alternative.
Thoughts or suggestions, anyone?

What’s wrong with hierarchies?

Hierarchies gives the impression that something can only belong in one place, like a paper folder in a file cabinet.

Hierarchies infers a structure of parent and child, even when that's not true.

If we don’t know exactly which parent something is a child of, we have to start digging: the picture was taking during our vacation, but was it in June or July? The 21st or 22nd?

In hierarchical structures it can be hard to get an overview, because things are hidden inside eachother. An example of this is clear when comparing Picasa with Windows Explorer. When you open a folder in Explorer, you can't see the photos in the folder you were in before. So if you open "March 2006" you can see "April 2006". Picasa shows all photos in one pane, regardless of hierarchy so that March and April is visible at the same time.





Another problem visible in the Explorer example, is the Back-Back-Back-problem. In many interfaces you go into a folder, and into a folder and into a folder again. If it's a dead end, you have to back up three times or hit the Menu key or something and then start digging.

If we have to store something in just one place, it requires standards and knowledge to place it right, for instance like librarians arranging books in the Dewey Decimal System.

Hierarchies are best for arranging smaller amounts of objects. As the number of websites increased, Yahoo went from being a directory to become a search engine.

So while Yahoo's taxonomy places me here Arts > Design Arts > Industrial Designers, Google means that I belong here Business > Industries > Design > Industrial Designers. And who's to say that one's right and the other's wrong? Maybe people looking for me here:
World > Norsk > Referanse > Utdanning > Universitet og høgskoler > Vitenskapelige høgskoler >... Coming to a TV near you :)

What's good with hierarchies?

When there is a 1:1 parent-child relationship it allows us to make decisions in multiple steps. Examples of this is dates, and tv-series:





If the hierarchy is correctly buildt, it can help us look for something we know what we’re looking for, but not where it is. It also helps us eliminate: I know it wasn’t in 2005 or 2007, and that leaves 2006.

When we know what we’re looking for, and where it is, hierarchies can be easy to remember. Especially if there is logic associations tied to the placement: the cheese fork is in my flat, in the kitchen, in the top drawer.

What's the alternatives to hierachies?

An unstructured, incomplete list:

Textbased searching through titles, reviews, tags and metadata.
Associating objects, saying “what I’m looking for reminds me of this and this and this.”
Zooming in from an overview of everything, and inwards to what you’re looking for.
Eliminating from a generated selection presented to us, saying “from these three, it’s nothing like this one or this one” or “nothing like any of them”.
Surfing through a huge collection from a starting point, not knowing where you’ll end up. From one object, then from it’s links to another, then from it’s link to another. Skipping from stone to stone...
Pinpointing, very much like surfing, but saying "more like this" and then "more like this" and adding all your choice up to narrow out the thing you're looking for. Could be called Sequential, additive associating...

What do you people do, really?

I've been talking to people about tv and movies. I try to collect a list of how we hear about tv-shows, how we watch them, where we get to know about movies, what we do with it, who we do that with. Can you help me make the list insanely long?

- We read magazines about movies.
- We watch tv-shows about movies.
- We watch tv-shows about other tv-shows.
- We read websites about movies.
- We watch video on the web.
- We watch tvshows on the web.
- We hear about movies on the radio.
- We talk with friends about things we like.
- We watch things we don't like with friends who do.
- We help our parents figure out how to watch DVDs.
- We videotape our kids and show to our parents.
- We show videos of our kids to our kids later in life.
- We watch videos of ourselves (konfirmasjonsvideo :)
- We buy DVDs and give them away.
- We buy a magazine and get a free DVD.
- We buy a box of cornflakes and get a bad DVD.
- We buy DVDs and lend them to our friends.
- We borrow DVDs which we never return.
- We rent movies and forget to return them.
- We download movies illegally from the web.
- We teach others how to download movies illegally from the web.
- We accidentally mention a tvshow to strangers.
- We talk about something that was on TV last night.
- We walk past the cinema and catch a glance at a movie poster.
- We invite eachother home to watch shows or movies.
- We talk about the movie on our way out from the cinema.
- We have dates at the cinema...
- We look forward to movies are released.
- We're sad when a season of a tv-series ends.
- We cried when the last episode of Friends was on.
- We still buy Seinfeld on DVD.
- We still watch Seinfeld when it's rerun on TVNorge.
- We borrow VHS at the library.
- We rent a VHS and don't have to return it.

What do you do? Or your parents? Any Tekst-TV users out there? Or Hotel Cæsar fans? Kiss and tell!

Make or buy... or rent?

What solution would benefit the user more; ally with for example Flickr and incorporate their refined imagesharing into the home media center, or build a new service from scratch? Obviously there's pros and cons with both solutions from a business, maintenance, R&D etc. point of view. But with the user's eyes?

If you bought a new TV tomorrow and it interfaced perfectly with Flickr so that your images was loaded, showed, stored and accessable from their service. Digital photography still requries a PC to load and care for your photos. So shouldn't your TV then just lean on what you've allready done on your pc? And package your photos up for you, regardless of wethere they are stored on your computer, Flickr, FotoKnudsen.

When you want to see your pictures on the Big Screen, my guess is you care about the images. Not the back-end solution, not remembering "where did I put them?". And definitely not "Aaah.. I forgot to convert them and upload them to TVCompany's image database." The goal should be that most popular services interface greatly with your tv.

Staging our lives

Having a discussion with John over a couple of beers, we realised that there's little pleasure in designing our own lives. Making a perfect playlist to listen to during the day is too much work, it feels weird and almost phoney. I don' think we're able to fool our selves. In his book The Paradox of Choice Barry Schwartz explains how our subjective experiences becomes less satisfying when we're in control. We're able to enjoy something more if we know we're not responsible. This fits very well with a hunch I've had for quite some time, that customisation is played-up. Yes, we want things in our lives to feel personal, but there's some kind of border where we personal becomes personal responsibility. And that's where the joy starts to fade. And as many of us have experienced with portable music, I think this staging of our lives is just as destructive with tv as it is with music. That's why the iPod shuffle works. And I personally think that's why Apple have fans. Their products, though they all are the same, feel personal because they have been developed with such care. We, product designers must care so that the users don't have to. And the users feel better because we deside things on their behalfs. The real challenge is in finding the balance between too rigid and too free...

What seems to be the problem? v1.0

I'll try to keep an ongoing dialog with myself, to see what I think I'm doing. Ok, here we go:
I will rethink TV. I want to put together concepts for ordinary people, to show good ways for us to use the big screen in our living rooms. My concepts will be centered around the big screen. I think we'll come to use this screen as a stage. When we share media experiences in our living room, whether it is movies, news, music or pictures, I think it's natural that we use this central stage. We would like to use our best screen to share. Of course we can use our laptop or our phone, but in the living room, the biggest screen wins. So how can we do that?

And I think that we will continue to watch TV. I think watching good video content, entertainment or news, is rewarding and relaxing. It adds value to our lives, and it is big a part of our culture. But with the changes that are taking place now, with content being available online, the way we use TV's to relax just won't work. We can't zap because there's an infinite number of things to watch. Maybe even we can't just see what's on because of time shifting. I want to give people the feeling of being in charge, not overloaded.

And the solution will have to be open. It can't be a finished product. It can't ignore the fluent and rapidly changing nature of the web. A lot of brilliant and good people come up with wonderful things every day. My concepts will have to allow for them to improve this later on. But I believe that a good base, a mental model, a basic environment that feel safe is very benefitiary. Good concepts for new TV should be constrained and defined yet provide the benefits from being connected to the web; like a safe home in a big city.

What do our tvs say about us?

Most of us have a tv, but some choose not to. My impression is that there is still something literary and scholarly in not owning one. More common than making a statement by not having a tv, is making statements with what we watch. I have the feeling that it is quite recognised to be passionate about movies, almost at the same level as really being into theater. We also appreciate people who know and understand current world affairs and it is even more politically correct to say "Yes, I have a tv, but I mostly watch the news" than "No, I don't have a tv".

So there are tv choosers amongst us, either by limiting (like "news only") or by selective absorbing (movie buffs). Will they be better off with unlimited choice of content? And if nothing is "on" and everything is available, will the zapping rest of us learn how to choose? And will the acknowledgment of today's choosers fade?

A wired magazine...

To kickstart my diploma I decided to build a mock up of the paper remote. I disassembled a computer keyboard (kindly given to me by the IT department) and wired it to two touchpoints inside a movie magasine. Then I taped two stickers marking where to press inside the magasine and made a quick Flash interface.
So, when I press the sticker on the page with a review of King kong or Narnia, my "tv" loads the trailer and kindly asks me if I want to purchase the movie. Have a look at some images of the mockup.

The paper remote

Discussing my diploma with Timo before christmas, we stumbled upon an idea for choosing tv content using magasines and books with RFID-buttons. The buttons are only active when pressed and are read from your tv, therefore they would be cheap and thin. In this way a tv magasine becomes a remote control, an edited remote control with reviews in it. Not infite virtual options, but definite physical options.

You could for instance buy "the Hitchcock Collection" as a book, make notes in it, lend it to friends and keep it in your shelves.

When increasingly amounts of video content is made available on the web, these paper remotes serves the same function as DVDs do today. You can also cut pages from magasines and keep for later. Or just save it in your tv for later.