The Awful Truth about Preference Engines

Jayson Jarmon President,
The Lux Group, Inc.

When you encounter an online preference engine or recommendation system in your daily Internet travels, you may be inclined to scoff, “There’s no way the splendid complexity of my rich, multifaceted personality can be parsed by this generic demographic profiling software.” This is of course in some measure true: how can we say we truly know anyone? How can we hope to ever have a complete understanding of ourselves and others without veering into the philosophic or the metaphysical. Human personalities are a complex pastiche of biology and experience…so much like snowflakes, we are told, that no two are alike.

Enter the preference engine. You know the kind--Amazon.com’s book recommendation system… the ITunes “Genius” system, et al. Engines like these and hundreds of others casually suggest product choices to you based on the preferences and buying habits of others who have chosen this or that product in the past. As the user makes more and more choices, the system hones its recommendations until its insight seems downright eerie in its predictive abilities.

Let’s take William Shatner, for instance. While proudly hovering over my extensive collection of Shatner mp3’s in Itunes the other day (I believe my cursor was on Shatner’s stirring spoken word version of the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”), the ITunes preference engine leapt into action and presented me with the following recommendations:

Yes – it’s a version of Tommy TuTone’s 1980’s hit “Jenny (867-5309)” as rendered by bodybuilder/actor/governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I was staggered. How could this simple online system deduce from the millions of needs that I might have at that particular time, that I absolutely had to have Arnold singing “867-5309” more than anything else in the world? More than food, more than drink…it was more than a mere physical need: the recommendation would fill the Arnold Schwarzenegger/Tommy TuTuone sized hole in my heart!

An insipid shelf-clearing scheme writ large on the Internet? A crass marketing tool designed to separate the suggestible from their money? A brilliant piece of software that simply reminds us that we are indeed part of a demographic, however obscure and pathetic? The preference engine is all these things, and, ultimately, a mirror into our very souls. Now leave me alone so I can get back to downloading the “Battlestar Gallactica” outtakes that I need so badly right now that it hurts.

Clear Design: Icons, part two
by Ben Thompson
Creative Director/VP, The Lux Group

Although the icon is capable of doing a great deal of heavy lifting in an interface, the more complex the action or concept it represents is, the less effective it becomes. Moreover, the designer’s skill in representing and rendering the concept also affects its usefulness.

Let’s use the ‘delete’ function as an example. If your ‘delete’ icon is a button with a big, clear ‘X’ on it, it will work as an excellent indicator of what will happen if you hit that button. Using the program or the website becomes easy—just look for the big ‘X’ to delete a file. Binary concepts like stop and go tend to be the easiest to illustrate, and by extension, the most intuitive to use.

Now say that you work as a designer for the company across the road that makes a competing interface. One spec requirement is a ‘delete’ button, and what could be clearer than a big ‘X’? Nothing, except that your competitor’s product already has a big ‘X’. Moreover, perhaps someone on the marketing team thinks that an ‘X’ is too negative, and suggests a wastebasket. Wastebasket renderings follow…

Icon design is one of those things (like logo design) that look easy, but which challenges the illustration and technical skills of even the best designers. When an icon falls short of indicating its function to the user, it decreases the effectiveness and functionality of the interface. The problem is that with a generation of users who have grown up with GUIs, many people assume that their project needs icon-based controls, rather than a simple and easy to use text-based solution.

Back to our wastebasket—after going through rounds of design revisions (What kind of wastebasket? Wire? Does that look too much like a bucket? What does a bucket mean to the user?) the team has decided that a tiny picture of a wastebasket is not clear enough, and that it will be more clear if a little ‘X’ is included in the corner. Each step that’s been taken from the easily recognizable and easily understood has made it more difficult for the end user to use the interface.

Here’s the upshot—when you depart from words into the realm of concept, you run the risk of compromising clarity. When you’re working with your web designer (or designers, when you’re working with your clients) it’s always worth a moment to ask the stakeholders why an illustrative icon is being used, rather than plain language. In the absence of issues involving translation into other languages, the most effective user design solution can be good old legible text.

As someone who’s spent time art directing designers working on creating a simple icon illustration for a complex concept like “litigation,” I can confidently say that sometimes the client’s design money is better spent elsewhere, and it’s the job of a good web agency to make that known early on in a project.