 Welcome back to theCUBE. Here we are at the O'Reilly Fluent Conference. It's coming up towards the end of day one. We've been here since this morning, since the keynote's wall-to-wall coverage. You're in theCUBE, what we do is we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we wrangle up the smartest people we can find at the events, and bring them on theCUBE, ask them the questions that you would like to ask them, and really try to get a feel for what's going on, what's the mood, what are the hot topics, and bring that back to you. We invite you to join the conversation. The Twitter handle for the event is hashtag FluentConf, so go ahead and tweet us in some questions, and join us, and we welcome. So, welcome Dan Saffer to theCUBE, welcome Dan. Thank you, great to be here. Dan does all kinds of things. He's the Director of Interactive Design at Smart Design, as well as an author of a new book. So tell us a little bit about your new book, the fourth book I see. Fourth book of mine, it's called Microinteractions, and it's all about all these small details and small piece of functionality that are around the big features that people tend to forget about, but actually can make a really huge difference in how people feel about the product that they're designing. A lot of people tend to think like, oh, well, if I just nail these big features, that people will love my product, but it's actually not true, like people will tolerate your product, that's sure, it can be usable, but it's not necessarily gonna be beloved unless you nail some of those key details. Right, so it begs the obvious question. Give us some examples. So the most frequent example that everyone thinks about is turning the ringer off on your phone. Like, nobody... I was just doing before we went live. Exactly, yeah. I mean, you do it 10 times a day, but it's not a feature that anyone's gonna buy the phone for, I just expect, wow, I'm gonna be able to turn the ringer off on my phone, but it can make a huge difference. Like, in some of the old phones, you had to go back, you had to go through like 10 different levels of menus to turn the ringer off, and then Apple's like, no, no, you just flick this little switch, and it turns off. But it can still cause some problems I talk about in the book. This famous example from a year or so ago when this guy at the symphony turned his ringer off and thought that it turned all the alarms off, but he was sitting in the front row and one of his alarms went off and ruined the whole symphony, just because he didn't understand how the micro-interaction worked. Right, right. So these little things can just make this big difference. Right, so I have to say, this is an area near and dear to my heart. I spent a long time ago in a different world, 10 years in the consumer electronics industry, and I cannot tell you how many hours I spent trying to teach salespeople how to show people how to program a VCR, and literally the starting point was always the flashing 12, which all of us still had. So one of the debates that would always come up, and there's very different design methodologies, get your, it was kind of like, you know, the menus versus buttons. You know, single use things versus do I have to drill down five steps to turn the volume down? Yeah. What's kind of the best practices around, around something like that? Well, I mean, for micro-interactions, you want to do what most, you want to like expose the thing that most people are doing all the time. So if a majority of people are trying to set the clock most of the time, you want to pull that functionality out and make it as available as quickly as possible. That being said, if a lot of people are doing a lot of different things, man, you don't want a ton of buttons because then your interface looks like it's really complicated. So it's always this dance between perceived simplicity versus kind of functional simplicity. Because functional simplicity, yeah, everything's got a button and I just press it and that happens. But then you have a row of buttons. So what do you do? So it's always a, it's always a tension that designers are trying to resolve. Yeah. So before he came on, I was looking at your LinkedIn page and you've got a deck on there comparing MySpace to Vegas in 2007. So it's always interesting to kind of go back. Looks like Vegas hasn't changed that much, but I'm curious to get your perspective on kind of what was the theme there and how have things changed? I can't believe we're, you know, six years from 2007, no one's even on MySpace anymore. I don't even know if it's around anymore. It's still around. Yeah. I mean, the interesting thing was that MySpace for a long time was the punching bag for bad design. Like, you know, you looked at MySpace and went, wow, this is just a wreck. This is, you know, how could anyone, you know, how could anyone have ever designed this? And sometimes it leads you to believe, well, you know, sometimes designers, you know, think about what is good design with a capital G, capital D and not like thinking about what normal people really enjoy doing or really like their, you know, so MySpace became this whole thing about personal expression. Like, you know, I'm gonna make this page the way I want it. And, you know, you professional designer may think this is ugly, but it is an expression of me. And you see some of this still reflected now in what people are thinking about with Facebook. It's like, oh, this is such a horrible design. Like, why is it like this? And yeah, and so it bugs a lot of professional designers, but, you know, billions of people use it and it suits their needs. It's what they're interested in doing. And we're also in this world, which I think is fascinating when you have devices or software or whatever and you put it in the hands of a kid. I've got a bunch of rug rats that aren't rug rats anymore at home. And, you know, the way that they interact just instinctively, or appears to be instinctively with devices today and the way that they discover functionality versus you give, you know, the new iPhone to mom or grandma, and she doesn't have a clue. I don't know if it's a function of we're afraid to break something as older folks or, because clearly no one has ever read user manual, so I don't think that's really part of it. But how, you know, how do you see from a design professional the way that some of these things, as they get more and more complex, more and more functionality, expose that in a way that people can actually discover, use, and take advantage? Yeah, I mean, there's, I forget who said it, but like, any technology that comes out after you're 30 is magic or something like, you know. We used to talk about the FM chip back in the Mitsubishi days, when we were talking about what that stands for. So, right, exactly. So, I mean, there is that, like, you know, things are definitely becoming more complex, more complicated. But on the other side, I mean, there are people really struggling to make things simple and really, you know, trying to get that right balance between giving you enough things to that you can be, that you can control something or, you know, while still making it simple enough for anyone to kind of pick up and use. And I think we've gotten a lot better, but certainly there are lots of things that are, you know, discoverable and very difficult to, like, just uncover. I talk a little bit about this in the book, like, invisible triggers, these things that, like, you know, you accidentally stumble upon or you read about and you're like, oh my God, I never knew that I could, you know, I could tap this twice and it brings up, you know, a little scrubber so that I can control, you know, where in the podcast I am. Those things are immensely not discoverable. But they did it for the service that most people aren't ever gonna use that, right? I mean, it was only for, like, power users so they hid it behind, like, a secret gesture. Right, right. You know, and if you really were interested in it, you could, you know, look it up or, you know, somehow stumble over it somehow. But yeah, it's a really fine balance to figure out what it is that you hide like that and what is it that you expose. Yeah. But it's, yeah. Well, one of my favorites, a long time ago, I found some money in a budget to take some training classes and then I went and took a Microsoft Word class and this is years ago. And the most useful thing I learned which I'd never had a clue was how tab stops work. And it has saved me hours and hours and hours of time lining up numbers and lining up things using the tab stop function. I don't know how you're supposed to ever figure that out short of the, the menus and this and that and the other. The class. Right, taking the class and nobody takes classes anymore. So, let's go back to your book. Are there some really core design tenants that people need to keep in mind? Cause clearly there's no right answer, right? There's the Apple way where they're basically defining your experience in a way that they think is the best for you. And then there's kind of the Android way which is, you know, we've got kind of a framework and lots of people can take different interpretations. So, looking at your book and, you know, what are some of the really key design criteria that people need to keep in mind? There's a couple of different things that I kind of call out in the book. The first is really to bring the data forward cause there's a lot of times where you're looking at an app or you're looking at your device and you're like, I really need just this one piece of information. What is it? And I don't want to have to go searching into the app and find it and look for, you know, look for the weather. You know, why doesn't my, why doesn't my iPhone, why doesn't the weather data icon update itself to show me what the actual weather is? I have to go in and push the refresh rate. You know, so there's bringing the data forward which is a really nice, what is the thing, what is the piece of information that you could prevent people from having to go in and find it? So that's a really important one. Another one I talk about is don't start from zero. You almost always know something about the user or the environment or the day or the time or you know something about the person who's using the app and use that to make the product better. I talk a lot about, and I'm a big advocate for the app Waze which is a navigation app. Yeah, that's a good one. Love it because I turn it on and it notice, you know, when I'm at my office and it's at six o'clock I turn the app on and it pops up something and says, oh hi Dan, are you going home right now? And it uses what it already knew about me. It said great, you know, every day you do this same thing. I'm just going to present that as an option to you. Let's just do this and so I don't have to dig in go to the navigation area and choose home. It just noticed the behavior I was already doing which is great. And a third one was use what's often overlooked. I mean we have, you know, as designers and developers tons of stuff that we can put on an interface you can always put another button or an overlay or something like that. But what's already there that I could use that's already existing so I don't have to add one more thing to the screen. So I talk about like how Chrome, when you search for a word in Chrome, it uses the scroll bar. It shows you in the scroll bar. Like here's the instances of that word right in this page and it's brilliant. I mean it uses something that's already there. They didn't have to add another pop-up box or something. It's like there are 13 instances. Go to the next one. Go to the next one. It's really brilliant. Right, great. So some of the things you're seeing here and the changes in the application development space and the technologies that are evolving and you know how is that really changing design and the one that if you can speak specifically to you know we've got these mobile devices and you know not only are they fantastic ways to transmit an application and to provide information but I think the big delta is that they're giving information back. I mean this thing will even tell you what the barometric pressure is I guess if there's a reason that you've got an app for that. Talk a little bit about that and I think the other kind of interesting thing is intelligence design and as you said things learning about your behaviors to make hopefully the better button show up higher on the top of the list. So talk a little bit about how that world has changed and what it means for design. Yeah so the first question about how is technology evolving and being involved? I mean certainly with micro interactions and the history of technology are basically intertwined. All the stuff that you take for granted now on your phone or on your laptop those were all once novel micro interactions things like cut and paste and the scroll bar even those were like things that weren't there. So and now that we're like in this mobile world we're still adding to micro interactions. As technology changes there are more micro interactions added to navigate and to think about them. I mean think about when Wi-Fi came in how it was such a how do I connect to a Wi-Fi network? I mean it's such an abstract thing. But now you do it almost unthinkingly with your phone. But somebody had to design and think about that. And I think that we're definitely moving into an area where the designs and the development are so tightly coupled that it's really interesting what a lot of the things that are making these micro interactions possible now are the new tools that developers have and designers have to prototype and test these things. And to take risks like doing things like slowly over time for instance changing the making something that was once a button with a label just down to a button or maybe just down to a small icon that over time as you use it it gets smarter about hey you're now an expert user of this thing you give the app can adapt to use over time. And I think that's a really fascinating thing how do you turn these things that are otherwise very they come out of the box the same as everyone but now this is my phone it's adapted to me. Like the Waze example Waze now knows me and that's something very valuable. It knows a lot about my preferences and stuff like that. Without me having to tell it it's just making these really smart guesses. I mean it's creepy you know in its own way but it's definitely valuable. The things that people can tell about you just from your behavior is really interesting. And I think there's some great stuff I talk in the book about like how do you prevent human error doing this and things like Google mail the Gmail stuff is great. I mean do you write you know hey I've you know I've attached this file and then if you don't attach it it brings up a thing saying hey you forgot this which is amazing but man it's like oh wait Google's reading all my mail. So everything works better just for the folks out there if you just say yes just say yes and actually use it all as an integrated system it all works a lot better. And the reality is even if you say no they know anyway unless you leave your phone at home and most of us don't do that. So talk a little bit about the future and some of the exciting things. We talked about it briefly but you know we had our first guest today we're in Google Glass so clear you know wearable and of course we're already wearing our phones almost 24 seven in any way how that impacts design. And the other thing I think that's pretty interesting with a lot of new apps and apps today is really how they leverage other apps and pull together all these open APIs to deliver really what's already out there that's potentially packaged in a new and innovative way to deliver specific value for the design of that application. And how that impacts design when you're really pulling from not only your own stuff but other apps via APIs as well. Yeah I mean we're entering a really neat era. I mean I've actually heard Google developers say like oh Google Glass is the first micro interaction device. I mean it's only meant for these really short tiny bursts of functionality and that's really fascinating and we see that you know with the pebble watch you see that with you know all the internet of things all these little objects that now they do one thing and they do it well and that's really I think that's gonna be a really fascinating a really fascinating thing especially when they as you were saying they start to pull from one another and learn from each other how to evolve. There's some work being done now like with a robotic cloud where you know robots are learning from each other as they go about doing their work. Which is brilliant but yeah I mean it's a little scary. Paging Skynet. Yeah exactly so that's that I forget what was the second part of your question about. Well we had the. About the APIs and stuff like that. Yeah like you said because all these apps are working together really to deliver something that's unique. I mean I think it's a great time to be a designer in in one sense and that you know and developers and that yeah there's this awesome toolkit now that we have that's just you know provided you know for free and I'll put that in quotes because you know as you as you we've seen you know examples of you know Google and Twitter and other people pulling their APIs for various kinds of projects. If you've built stuff on top of that man your whole your whole business collapsed your whole app goes away. So it's always you know it's always tenuous when you do that. I mean you are relying on somebody else for a major especially if it's a major piece of your functionality. That being said the toolkit is so impressive that it's hard you know I'm not gonna build my own Twitter. I'm not gonna build my own maps you know we've seen what happens when Apple tried to build their own maps and you know in the comparison was like wow jarring. Right. But you know and I think you know Apple did look at that and say wow you know we need this key piece of we need to build this ourselves but it's not it's not an easy thing when it's so powerful and so freely available. Right. But I think you know as designers and developers it's just like you know it's a really cool time to have that stuff just available. Right. So I've never written a book I'd love to have bits and pieces of this and that here and there like probably a whole lot of people and so I assume you wrote that actually wrote the book that just came out a while ago. So what's your next book what's what's kind of your next I don't know that's probably a terrible thing to ask as your book just came out this month. I don't know yeah the book just came out like two weeks ago. So I'm like I should recall that question. I'm fully into I'm fully into micro and you know everyone laughs at all the next books gotta be macro interactions that's that's the obvious joke but no I I haven't really thought about it yet. I mean I've been thinking about a book on like creative direction and stuff like that but nothing is nothing is set yet. Nothing is set yet. Yeah. No it's it's it's enough to get this book out and launch and talking about it. So let's give a little plug to the book. So I assume people can get it as they say wherever books are sold or wherever books are sold online and and in bookstores microinteractions.com is the is the URL you can get a chapter and a half download there for free and okay it is it's out right now right it's out right now if you go to go to Barnes and Noble or BookSync or wherever you get down to the show you find Dan tomorrow I bet you he'll sign it. That's right that's that a deal exactly and for people here I'm doing a book signing in about half hour there you go. So you got time I'm often we could check your Google Maps to find out where the locals and get your map well Dan thanks for coming on it's you know the technology is always interesting but at the end of the day people have to use it and again I go back to my BCR flashing 12 days technology is not always easy to use if you're over the age of 30 it is fascinating the kids are so easily able to discover functionality and and it's important because people put a lot of time and effort into these devices you pay a lot of money for them they can do a lot of things but you know how do you do it and design is such an important piece and somewhere there is still that flashing 12 in the dark many of them many of them many of them I had nightmares about them I can tell you stories and then we won't go there so Dan thanks for stopping by the Cube appreciate it for having me so we're again at a Riley fluid conference at the Hilton hotel in San Francisco wrapping up day one here as we come to a close will be here all day tomorrow so you can watch the interviews live at silicon angle dot com and we will have them up shortly on the website at youtube dot com slash silicon angle which will have the playlist of all the interviews again we go out to the events we bring you the smartest people we can find we ask them hopefully the questions that you would ask them if you were here extract the signal from the noise and really hopefully give you a flavor and feel for what's going on at the conference so we will be back in one minute for our wrap