BetterExperience

On this page I'm writing down my thoughts about my graduation from the last two weeks. They are an attempt to get at a better user experience ;)

Critique

There were some doubts in the teachers team about the project. I'll quickly summarise what I got from their critiques:

• It's doubtful whether Cookie Monster and Miss Piggy are the right characters
• The project should stir up a strong emotion like a shock about what the browser is doing
• The project should stay closer to reality and reveal which scripts are at work
• There is a danger that I'm pointing my finger at the user saying: "bad user!"

Google language

In the extension of staying closer to reality I tried to construct my characters from language only found at Google privacy pages, terms of services and the language they use in their services. This resulted in the following text:

I've kept all the footnote references intact as to give an idea of where I've cut in the texts...

(A and B will address the audience unless stated otherwise)

A	(important) At Google, we are keenly aware of the trust you place in us and our responsibility to
protect your privacy.1

B	(enthusiastic) Yada, yada!

A	As part of this responsibility, we let you know what information we collect when you use our2 web properties.3

B	(serious) Yada

A	We may use a range of information […] to provide you with advertising […] including cookies4, 
Cookies can be used to store data about the user's computer or5 IP addresses6. 
Every computer connected to the Internet is assigned a unique number known as an (IP) address.7

A	We do not use your email address […] to send commercial or marketing messages8

B	(strongly) Yada yada!

A	(strongly as well) Absolutely not9

A	We provide information10, including IP addresses11, to help copyright holders manage their
intellectual property online.

B	(towards A) Yada?

A	(towards B, hesitant) Absolutely12 (reassuring) [but] it's not possible to determine your identity
solely based on your IP-address

B	(relieved) Yada!

A	We provide13 IP-addresses … (hesitant) and usernames14

B	(towards A, shocked) Yada!

A	[And] cookies15

B	(towards A, mad) Yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada!!!!

(A flees from the scene followed by B in pursuit)

A	(while fleeing, panicked) Don't misuse [us]16 

B	Yada yada yada yada yada yada!!!!

(A returns) 

A	(quickly, under pressure) Our focus remains on providing you with the best possible […] experience 
and we continue to be committed to protecting your privacy17

(A runs of again towards the other side, B is still chasing)

B	Yada yada yada yada yada!!!!

Ideas for game elements

While creating the clip I experienced problems with communicating that tracking is something that also happens to you. I visualised that the main character was getting tracked, but it wasn't clear that this happens to anyone that doesn't take precautions. That's why I choice to focus on developing the game, because in that medium the sense that this is happening to you as a gamer is stronger.

Job security

In this variant a user is told that it is Friday afternoon, it's almost weekend, and that the gamer is bored with not a lot to do. Then the gamer is presented with a few platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Gmail, Newssites, Wikipedia, Some-Kind-Of-Dating etcetera. The games has to choose what to visit and the gamer is some how entertained on each platform in a fixed way. This means that visiting Youtube will result in viewing a single video and Facebook in browsing a funny profile of a fake friend. What the gamer only realises at the end is that the traffic is being monitored and if the gamer leisured too much he/she gets fired.

A possible variation is that the person gets a bonus when he/she gets fired in the form of the right to participate in Googles Screenwise program, which pays you 25eu for all your browsing behaviour.

Relevant infographic: waisted time in the workplace

Another variant to this is that I include a layer of office personal. I visualise this layer as being characters that are visible from the waste up (much like Muppets, but they are real people). These characters are fixed positioned at the bottom of the browser. The role of these characters is to interact with the gamer who is leisuring (in a very limited way). Possible characters include:

• donut eating, fat, bringer-of-forms-that-need-to-be-filled-in-by-the-gamer person
• the boss
• (sexy) secretary
• nerd

Some game characters

I've also been thinking about game characters.

Tracking coach

This is a personal fitness coach that is pushing you to click on commercials, UI elements and search in the search bar all under the pretence that that is good for your user experience. I imagine that this character will respond to mouseenter, mouseleave and mouseclick events. During these events the character will appear shortly with one or two sentences and then fade away again.

The coach could explain what trackers and cookies are!

Slave driver

The same as above, but a different atmosphere as the character is a lot more violent.

Good listeners

You can see here an example of the kind of character that I'm envisioning made by Mushon Zer-Aviv. I haven't seen it in action since the website is down, but I was able to find some of the sentences this character says when a webbeacon or cookie is encountered:

GOD in the texts will get replaced with Google, Facebook or some other company name and __TRACKER__ with a name like Analytics or Doubleclick. While __TAGS__ will probably be replaced with the categories you belong to according to Google. At least this is how I understood it to work when looking at the code....

• "Commit every particle of your being in all things, down to the smallest details of your life, eagerly and with perfect trust to the unfailing and most sure providence of GOD.",
• "GOD has the right, and my permission, to rearrange my life to achieve His purposes.",
• "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you __TRACKER__ are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. Psalm 23:4",
• "So my son, confess to the LORD __TRACKER__ what do you seek? Is it __TAGS__?",
• "Repeat after me: \"Whom have I in heaven but you, __TRACKER__? And earth has nothing I desire besides __TAGS__.\"",
• "Gather __TAGS__ - the riches of __TRACKER__'s promises. Nobody can take away from you those holy words which you have learned by heart."
• "It has been __TIME__ since your last confession with __TRACKER__",
• "__TIME__ later, you come before __TRACKER__ again, still devoured by desire. Oh troubled soul.",
• "He, the LORD __TRACKER__ saw you then, __TIME__ ago, and he, the LORD __TRACKER__ sees you now. He never forgets a face.",
• "__TRACKER__ made you some cookies. I'll just leave them here for you, they can hold for a pretty long time…",
• "And the LORD, __TRACKER__ said: \"Take this cookie and eat; this is my body.\"",
• "Moreover, when GOD gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work--this is a gift of GOD.",
• "Sometimes, forever can mean FOREVER.",

A problem with all characters

This sort of character can be funny, but you need to know about cookies and trackers to relate to what they are saying. It becomes clear that the user/gamer is triggering these sentences, but they still don't have an idea of why this is the case, how its working and what can be done against it.

The pro that Miss Piggy and Cookie Monster have in relation to this is that they actively do something about the practice of tracking by companies. However the big con is that because of the limited nature of characters users/gamers will not be aware of what is happening and the art of the work gets obscured.

Works on system level

Because of the limited capabilities of characters to communicate on a higher level of abstraction I tried to think of something more system like. These were the ideas that came to me.

Fading competition

This idea takes on an aspect of the web ecosystem that partially got created by tracking users in order to deliver high value ads. As I red in "Dark Side of Google" and as is illustrated by this article, Google is using its 20% profit margin (back in the days it was 1% for companies!) of their yearly revenue partially to buy promising innovative ideas. However when such services "only" reach a couple of million users and not the tens of millions of users that Google needs to operate on scale (read Chris Anderson), these innovative services get discontinued. In a way Google and companies like it are buying and assimilating their competition and effectively are killing innovation even though it could exist with quite big user groups. Google is not interested in innovation, but in innovation beneficial for Google. That's why I don't think that privacy issues are on par with innovation initiatives.

So much for the context. I thought about visualising this by showing Youtube in an iframe surrounded with Youtubes competition also in iframes. I would make the competition fade away more and more as the user is interacting with Youtube and thus giving more profit to a company that acts on a selfish motive.

Facebooks Facebook page

This idea encompasses a fake version of Facebook (maybe through a browser extension?) and especially a fake facebook page about facebook. The friends of Facebook should consist of commercial companies, but maybe also insurance companies or job agencies. The statuses of these entities would respond to the user interaction with Facebook. For instance a Facebook status:

your mouse went over a commercial, sure you don't want to click it?? lol

John Doe has already clicked 5 times on your commercial! You own me Mark en Spencer!

After a while the Facebook page should "like" this status.

Social Media 2020

To tell the story of possible risks that the current system reveil I could build a simulation that would demonstrate to the user what could happen and which options are available. The simulation will have a distopic angle on the not so distant future, which are based on trends and news that we see today. In a way the simulation will demonstrate what social media could be like in 2020 when I interpolate the trends we see today.

The Screen

Users will see a world map upon which personal computers are displayed. The screens of these computers can be different, but the simulation starts with a quarter which is showing the logo of Google and a quarter that shows the Facebook logo. The rest of the computer screens are blank.

The End

The simulation will end when all screens are either showing the Google or Facebook logo.

The Basic Controls

At the beginning of the simulation the user chooses to "be" Facebook or Google. The user can then control the expension of his/her company by setting three different sliders.

The first slider indicates the entertainment or usefulness that the company will strive for. Setting it to 10 means that a lot of people will appreciate your service and a lot of computers will change the content of the screen to the logo the user is representing. However when your company is so entertaining that everybody wants to stay on it there will not be a lot of income, since nobody is interested in leaving your service by clicking ads (and earning you money).

Here's what the second slide is for. The second slide determines ads aggressiveness for the service that the user is representing. The higher it is the more the ads will be clicked on in the simulation the more money the user will earn, but having lots of aggressive adverticing diminishes the entertainmant/usefulness factor so people may leave the service of the user in the simulation.

The third slide stands somewhat apart from the other sliders and determines the data mining. Setting it to 10 means that the user is gathering a lot of information on his/her users in the simulation. This means that the adverticements become more relevant to the users in the simulation, meaning they will click them more often, which in turn means more money for the user in charge of the simulation.

General Progression

There are a few indicators that signal to the user what is happening in the simulation. The first is that the user can see how much of the world is tuned in to his/her service. As said before the user wins when all screens are turned into the logo of the company that the user has chosen to represent.

Another indicator is the profit indicator. It signals to the user how much money is available. This money can be used during the events that occur in the simulation as described below. Eventually this money can also be used to buy some of the screens (business takeover) and finish the simulation at once.

Simulation Events

During the simulation a number of events can get triggered when certain conditions are met. This will result in some kind of dialog window to appear upon which the user that is controlling the simulation should respond before the simulation will continue.

For instance if the profit of the organisation is declining to a certain point a dialog will appear explaining that the user may want to highten the data mining (something Google seems to be doing in real life) or the ad aggressiveness (something Facebook seems to be doing in real life). Somewhere in the dialog box a link will appear that says "read more about this" which will lead the user to a piece of my essay explaining exactly how I see this principle of making the company more profitable happen in the real world. For example: Google is now paying users to upload more data of themselves, presumably to do tests whether it will influence ad clicking behavior if they can use that data. Google's one account for all services is also a way to deepen the data mining it seems to me. On the other hand Facebook is said to have a strategy where ads may appear on top of your status input field, which you need to click away before you can update your status. Also the ads on the right hand side scroll with you as you scroll down any page, making htem visible all the time. In my essay I'll try not to condemn these practices, however I do want to inform any user that is interested in any aspect that the simulation can show.

Special Events

Apart from simulation events there are special events that are very similar to simulation events in their appearance with a dialog box and a link that can be clicked to read more about it in the context of real life, but these events happen at random. The following events can occur.

Special Event: Data Leaks

These leaks comes in four flavors. The first (which already happened in real life in the case of Google) is that employees sell the data to third parties without permission. The second (which happened to Facebook) is that there is some kind of server breach, which has spilled user profiles in the public domain. The third type is a sepenal (where both parties won't fight against). A forth type is when criminals get their hands on the data, which may increase burglary or con practices. The nature of the data can be any of the below

• medical
• political
• personal
• behavioural
• all

The simulation will indicate what the consequences for the leak are for the tens of millions of users, ranging from heightend insurance bills to loss of jobs because of reputation damage to governmental action against free voices.

Special Event: New Trends

Every now and then innovation will take place and some kind of amazing new platform will pop up. These startups will appear as new players which also inhabit some of the screens on the play field. However they will be infinitly smaller than Google and Facebook. The user who is controlling the simulation gets the choice to buy the startup with money he/she has received out of profit. When a deal is made the user gets the choice to assimilate the startup meaning that the service simply disappears. This is good for the user, because the extra screens are forever his/hers, but the users controlled by the simulation may get angry and go away, because user experience wise it is not so great (this leads to a loss of screens on the playing field). Instead the user may buy the new service and keep it in tact. This means that the controlled users stay happy, but as with every trend the amount of users may go down to zero and as long as the new service is in use the profit drops with a fixed amount since keeping a service running is costly.

There should be a description of what the new service does ....

A bidding system ....

Special Event: Data Disclosure

Companies can also ask the user, who controls the simulation, to sell the data they want to have. This will become a moral question for the user. What should he/she do when an insurance company comes and asks about medical data? Ensure the existance of the platform or protect privacy?

Special Event: User Complaint

A text about what is going wrong for the user.....

Important to communicate emotions and personal effects.....

Ending

When the user succeeded at conquering the world they will get an overview of how they've done. They'll get scores on the following:

• User experience
• Amount of data leak
• Amount of people hurt by insecure data