Sandy (www.iwantsandy.com) is an email bot. Typically mail bots handle mailing list subscriptions. Sandy manages to-do lists and calendar - you email her things to remember, and she reminds you at the right moment. Thanks to Harry Brignull for the pointer.

What's interesting is the interaction approach they have taken:

1. They've created a retro secretary avatar called Sandy.
2. Sandy talks in the first person and is very, very polite.

Mind your Ps and Qs

In their book "The Media Equation", sociologists Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass set out to show that (to some degree) we treat computers as if they were other human beings. We follow social rules when working with them, including being happy when a computer flatters us, and expecting politeness in our dealings with them.

Politeness is incredibly important in web software. Politeness greases the wheels of transactions between humans, and since we expect the same behaviour from computers, politeness must be important for online transactions too.

Politeness is all about emotion, and hence its value is hard to quantify, especially to software developers not famed for their sensitivity. From a purely logical perspective, saying "Error: you have entered invalid data" is just the same as "Ooops. There's a small problem with what you typed in". But emotionally it's completely different. People delivering customer experiences in restaurants and shops know it, though. And good interaction designers, thinking about how humans and computers will exchange information over time, know it too.

Sandy must exude

Sandy is very polite. Quite charming. Her status messages say things like "I've saved your settings for you". She signs off her email with "Always here to help". It makes the service pleasant to use.

I think there are two important reasons why the folk at Iwantsandy.com emphasised politeness so much:

• Politeness builds trust: To use the service at all, you have to give Sandy complete access to your inbox. That requires a lot of trust. Sandy is so polite and solicitous that she builds trust quite fast. On one part of the site she gives you the option to " stay in the loop with my delightful, occasional newsletter?" And I almost said yes!
• Politeness is a brand experience: A lot of your interaction with Sandy will be via plain text email, so there's no graphics or layout to speak of. The only way to convey Sandy's brand values is via her tone of voice.

Flowery language is not enough

All this talk of politeness reminds me of Allan Cooper's "14 principles of polite computing" [PDF, 300K]. He points out that politeness goes further than just putting "yes, please" on your dialogue button. It's also about remembering user preferences, making it clear what's going on, and not asking "are you sure you want to...?" all the time.

In the end, I didn't sign up to Sandy's newsletter because even though she was very sweet about it, she didn't give me the facts I needed: how often, what's in it, why is it valuable? Providing the information I need to make a decision is polite - it shows a consideration for my time. Maybe Sandy's just nice on the outside, but doesn't really care.

Being untrustworthy is one of several software personality types summed up by Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users. Here are a few of them...

Do you want Sandy or Brad?

Ultimately, I'm not sure I need what Sandy's offering. I think it's aimed at mobile email users, and I have not yet succumbed. But if you decide to use Sandy, do let me know how it goes.

One other question: is the Sandy brand sexist? There's a 1960s, Bewitched/I-Dream-of-Genie feel to the Sandy graphic. At worst, she conjures up images of patted bottoms and "be a good girl" condescension. My wife, Debre, suggested that there should be an parallel iwantBRAD.com site, offering a cartoonish hunk interface paradigm. But with a tan like that, would you trust him?

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Stephen Fry, captain of wit, brains and volatility has started a technology blog on the guardian website. I'm a big Stephen Fry fan, so I was slightly disappointed by his first posting- a sort of extended apology/justification for even admitting and interest in technology. As Stephen himself would say: Bah! I'm certain Stephen will find his stride very soon. He recently wrote a much pithier posting on his own site.

We know that sick building syndrome is real, and we know what an insult to the human spirit were some of the monstrosities constructed in past decades. An office with strip lighting, drab carpets, vile partitions and dull furniture and fittings is unacceptable these days, as much perhaps because of the poor productivity it engenders as the assault on dignity it represents. Well, computers and SmartPhones are no less environments: to say "well my WinMob device does all that your iPhone can do" is like saying "my Barratt home has got the same number of bedrooms as your Georgian watermill, it's got a kitchen too, and a bathroom." We spend our lives inside the virtual environment of digital platforms - why should a faceless, graceless, styleless nerd or a greedy hog of a corporate twat deny us simplicity, beauty, grace, fun, sexiness, delight, imagination and creative energy in our digital lives? And why should Apple be the only company that sees that? Why don't the other bastards GET IT??

Now that's more like it! (Thanks to Martin Storey and Debre Barrett for the pointers). No comments

Interesting piece of copy in this Windows Vista dialog box. Basically it’s saying:

1. Type your product key in now.
2. But you don’t have to.
3. But if you don’t, you could loose everything.
4. And you might have to buy another copy of Vista.
5. So on second thoughts, you probably should enter your product key in now after all.

Luckily, due to the way people scan-read when using a computer, few will actually read this paragraph and most will skip ahead to fill in their product key without even noticing the content.

Thanks to Peter Otto for picking up on this.

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By focussing on what their users needed, Hays made a real improvement to their bottom line.

Hays wanted to improve the relevance of candidates responding to positions advertised on their web site. This would help their consultants to be more efficient -- and have a positive effect on the bottom line.

They asked Flow to undertake a user-centred redesign of their site. We started with some light weight contextual research with job seekers. Our research showed us that job seekers would often apply speculatively for jobs when they found the details irrelevant or incomplete. It was these speculative applications that were becoming expensive and time consuming for Hays to handle.

Working with our favourite agency Splendid, we designed a new user experience: easy to use, appealing to look at and really suited to the needs of job seekers. It helped people to find jobs using criteria that mattered to them, and see the details they really needed.

This user-centred approach had a very positive impact on business. The number of relevant applicants increased by up to 24%. The number of irrelevant applications decreased by 12%.

It's a great illustration of a classic customer experience mantra: "You get the customers you deserve." Hays took the time to understand customer needs, then empowered their customers to make the right choices for themselves. The reward: lower business costs.

Read the full case study here.

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Concorde's engineers made crude prototypes out of paper and tested them outside their workshops during their lunch hours, reports the Guardian's Jonathan Glancey. Thanks to Andrew Harder for the pointer.

As we design interactive user experiences today, this tried and trusted design technique still applies: make prototypes to help you explore and fine tune design ideas.

Concept sketches - have lots of ideas

As Linus Pauling said, to have a good idea, you need to have lots of ideas. Successful interaction designers avoid just going with the first idea they have - they produce lots of different ideas and let the ideas grow and build before starting to trim them down.

But mocking all those ideas up in slick detail, or expensive code, would slow you down. So it's best to keep initial concepts cheap and disposable.

Testing the concept

To test a paper aeroplane, you throw it across the air field. To test an interaction design concept you put it in front of target users. After all it can't interact by itself - you need people for your concept to interact *with*.

Testing several sketch concepts with target users sounds like it might be difficult, pointless or embarrassing. But it's not. People feel able to give more truthful feedback when they know you haven't slaved too hard on each concept And there's solid scientific evidence that asking users to try out and compare several low-fidelity prototypes will get you more useful and trustworthy feedback than any other approach.

(Messing about with sketches is also a genuinely fun way for a respondent to spend an hour.)

Prototypes - perfecting the details

Once you've selected a winning concept, you need to start working through the interaction in increasing detail. It's a different stage in the project and requires a different style of thinking. Bill Buxton's diagram below shows the key differences.

Imagining an interaction without documenting and testing it is like trying to do long division in your head - painful and easy to lose track. There's a growing range of powerful tools that can help us mock up, step through and tune interactions in detail - Axure RP Pro, Simunication, iRise, Caretta Gui Design studio for example. (There's also PowerPoint - Microsoft used it to design Office 2007.)

But there's a pitfall to watch out for: the constraints of the tool can constrain your thinking. "I want to make a panel pop up here, but I don't think I can do that using the prototyping tool." If you catch yourself saying that, you know your prototyping tool is a problem.

Agile - the product is the prototype

But when you're building really complex interaction (typically a web or desktop application) it becomes almost impossible to mock up the interaction without too much work.

This is where an agile approach is really helpful. Agile methodologies encourage developers to produce working software in short "iterations" that build incrementally towards the finished product. Stakeholders and users can play with each iteration and feed back on it. There's little or no formal specification at the start of the process, and agile programmers fully expect to have to make some changes of direction along the way.

I've found that working on these projects can be tiring and scary - there's very little time to sit down and think things through before someone has started coding it. But once you get past that, it becomes liberating. Agile projects reject the fiction of the waterfall approach - that someone can deliver a perfect interaction specification up front, without ever really seeing the product working.

Humble beginnings

Whichever way you go about it, designing and engineering a good interactive experience needs concepts and prototypes. They may look rough and ready to start with. But don't let that discourage you.

Remember Concorde. The finished product was expensive, ground-breaking and glamorous. Those very first paper planes were not.

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http://www.jamesandjoe.co.uk/

This is the finest Google mashup I've seen since the last Google mashup, and possibly the most original use of the Google maps api I've seen. Why? Because it's not with maps. Instead, they use the functionality to zoom into images and let you get a closer look at their work.

Which makes me think: the Google maps api is free, there's no limits on commercial use that I can find in the terms of use - so why do retail sites continue to pay for Scene7 and others for their zoom functionality?

Anyway back to James and Joe. You need to go into Projects to get to the mash up goodness: these guys are very funny, very engaging, very clever, and very creative; I'm particularly fond of their dairy council diet coke parody, possibly because I'm a new dad.

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