What you’ll do:

Team work, yeah!

• Process accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll and expenses. (30%)
• Order office supplies, answer phones, accept packages and greet guests (20%)
• Keep the office beautiful: artwork, flowers, lighting, snacks, etc. (20%)
• Coordinate occasional paperwork with lawyers, accountants and governmental agencies. (10%)
• Help plan small internal and external events. (10%)
• Coordinate travel (10%)

All about you:

• You are a master at prioritizing and executing a variety of different tasks.
• You don’t hesitate to speak up when you notice something that needs attention or you have an idea of how to make something better.
• You have experience in bookkeeping and office administration.
• You are a native Japanese speaker, but can converse in English, and read/write English email.

When and where:

Where it all happens

• This is a part-time position at our office in Nishi-Azabu, ten minutes from Omotesando station).
• We are looking for someone to work 16 – 24 hours a week across 2 – 4 days, on weekdays between 10am and 7pm.

Working at AQ

Stand up meeting

• We set the course together. Everyone has a say on what ideas to investigate, which projects to take on, and how we run the business.
• We work together. We don’t have many meetings, but we work on most tasks together, usually in groups of two or three.
• We like to share. The book we’re reading, the apps we’re using, the event we attended, people we met and things we learned. We’re rarely left wanting for something to talk about.



• We like to eat. Exotic snacks seem to always be around and a topic of conversation. Some of our best conversations and ideas happen over lunch.
• We leave the door open. We get a lot of guests: developers, artists, designers, writers, clients, researchers, teachers, and relatives.

The Rest

• Compensation based on hours, plus transportation expenses.
• Hourly rate will be determined based on professional experience.
• We are a small, but growing company. This position has plenty of room to try new things and gain new skills.

Ready to Apply? Send everything we need to know to hello@aqworks.com

From time to time, AQ has an opportunity to design the logo of some of the web services we build. In recent years however, we’ve noticed that the importance of getting brand identity right, once a given, is starting to be called into question, especially by fast-moving, tech-driven entrepreneurs.

When asked “are logos really that important?”, maybe we can answer “logos are the name cards of your product”. If someone says “Apple” or “Starbucks”, their logo floats naturally to front of mind, locking the brand’s image to the reality of who they are, what they do, and what they stand for as organizations. In this sense, logos are not only an important as public relations device, and a team-building device.

Recently, I was asked to design the logo and business card of a newly minted theater group called Theater Colony. The group was still preparing to launch their first performance, and reaching out to potential performers, venues and other partners, with little more than a name and a vision. For them, the logo was an opportunity to capture this shared vision, and even their interpretation of an ambiguous brand name, in a visual form that can be conveyed accurately to others at any time.

As with many design exercises, meaningful participation in key decisions by stakeholders is key to making sure that this happens. For Theater Colony, I knew I had the right solution, only once I presented the final logo to the three co-founders, and saw them nod in unison. Though they might not use the same words to describe why it was right, they all knew where it came from and why.

The lineup:

• Picteen: a photo booth style iPhone app
• Dreampass: community driven, on-demand movie theater screening
• Qiita: a know-how exchange service for engineers
• Kwl-e: an online creative community for sharing work and feedback.
• Feel on!: a Twitter app for illustrating tweets
• Jumvle: a web service for buying and selling goods to people near you

As in our last design session, we spent the day sketching interactions, sharpening copy, prioritizing features, and generally touching on every aspect of the product that will influence whether users understand the product, receive value from it, or choose to recommend it to others.

Though each startup came with different missions, different resources,  different hypotheses, and different questions, most of their UX design challenges (and opportunities) can be boiled down to one: reaching clarity through choice.

Choosing to emphasize one action over another. Choosing not to compete on features, so you can compete on your strengths. Choosing a color, shape font or word that speaks to people. Choosing the right moment to give, and the right moment to ask. Choosing when to show more, and when to show less. Choosing the right places to be predictable, and the right places to be playful.

These kind of choices are how products reveal their big idea, their values and their tastes to the rest of the world. As designers, an invitation to take part in these choices, even if just to lay out the options, is one of the most exhilarating parts of the job, and today was no exception.

Big thanks to Hiro Maeda and Yuka Yamaguchi from Open Network Lab for hosting us. Looking forward to the next one!

Since launching our UX consulting service AQ Lift last October, we’ve held a UX cram session with four of their startups, and also spoke about the integration of design and development within a lean startup at the New Context Conference. AQ and ONLab share a belief in the potential of Japanese startups in becoming global leaders.

Below is the joint press release from AQ and ONLab.

AQ and Open Network Lab to lift User Experience quality for Tokyo’s Startups

Tokyo-based design firm AQ and seed acceleration program Open Network Lab (Onlab) have formed a new partnership, in order to embed user experience design best practices within the recent surge of entrepreneurship in Tokyo’s web industry.

Via the partnership, AQ will hold regular user experience design workshops for resident startups enrolled in Onlab’s four month program. Teams will be able to ask questions, gather feedback and sketch solutions via one-on-one sessions with AQ’s user experience designers.

In addition to the mentoring program, AQ’s managing director Chris Palmieri will join Onlab’s roster of mentors. AQ and Onlab also plan to hold public workshops and seminars to teach how design processes can be integrated into the rapid development cycles of web startups.

“After our first session at Onlab, some teams were able to take our quickly scribbled designs, code them, release them to users and start collecting stats in just a few days. This tight feedback loop was motivating for everyone, so we started talking about how to make this a regular thing.” says Chris Palmieri, UX designer and managing director of AQ.

The partnership is part of Onlab’s ongoing effort to instill the importance of user experience design in its own startups and the greater Tokyo tech community, a group which is often dominated by engineers and entrepreneurs with less exposure to design thinking.

Last August, Onlab ran a “Lean UX” workshop with Janice Fraser, a co-founder of Adaptive Path and frequent consultant to Silicon Valley Startups. In October, Onlab ran a workshop at Keio University’s SFC Campus on design for startups.

“With the help of AQ, Onlab looks to strengthen their acceleration program to help startups build better products with better design and usability.” says Open Network Lab’s managing partner Hiro Maeda.

AQ is a Tokyo-based design and consulting firm, founded by Chris Palmieri, Eiko Nagase and Paul Baron in 2008. AQ has designed websites and applications for early stage startups, large corporations and cultural organizations in Japan and abroad, including ASICS, MyGengo, Mozilla Japan, and Tokyo Art Beat. In 2011, AQ launched AQ Lift, a rapid user experience design consulting program for early-stage web service businesses.

Open Network Lab is a seed acceleration program based in Tokyo, Japan. It was jointly established by Digital Garage, Kakaku.com, and Netprice.com on April of 2010. The program is mentorship-driven; where mentors such as Joi Ito (Director of MIT Media Lab), Biz Stone (Co-Founder of Twitter), Phil Libin (Founder of Evernote), and many others have participated. 24 startups over 4 batches, including Giftee, Wondershake, Sassor, Compath, and Mieple have been funded by Open Network Lab.

For more information, please contact:
Chris Palmieri (AQ) chris@aqworks.com
Chihiro Kobayashi (Open Network Lab) onlab@garage.co.jp

Related reading:

• Video about ONLab’s mentors
• Interview on the tech news site Penn Olson: Tokyo-based AQ Wants to Help Start-ups Design Better
• AQ blog: Event report on The New Context Conference 2011 Fall
• AQ blog: Event report on our UX cram session with ONLab

At AQ, you will help people find meaning, utility and joy in our websites and applications. People will love and remember the things you make because they helped them discover something new in the world around them or accomplish something they never thought possible.

All about You

• You’re equally comfortable defining what something looks like, how it behaves, and what it can do for people.
• Your design process starts with hunches, but thrives on real world feedback. You observe user behavior and translate it into the next round of design.
• Your work speaks for itself, but you love explaining it to anyone who will listen.
• You have at least two years professional experience designing interfaces OR have invented and launched your own web service/tool/app.
• You have a set of design tools with which you can efficiently perform daily acts of beauty, but are open to learning new ones as well.
• You know your way around HTML, CSS, and maybe even know enough PHP, Ruby or Javascript to bring your idea to life.
• You’re a native speaker of either Japanese or English, and can communicate in the other.

The Position

• We start with an initial three month full-time contract, after which you’ll become eligible for full-time employment.
• Salary will be determined based on your skill and experience.
• All the magic happens at our sunny office in Nishi-Azabu, Tokyo (accessible via Omotesando and Roppongi stations).

Working at AQ

• We set the course together. Everyone has a say on what ideas to investigate, which projects to take on, and who we work with.
• We work together. We don’t have many meetings, but we do a lot of designing, writing and building together, usually in groups of two or three.
• We like to share. The book we’re reading, the apps we’re using, the event we attended, people we met and things we learned. We’re rarely left wanting for something to talk about.
• We like to eat. Exotic snacks seem to always be around and a topic of conversation. Some of our best conversations and ideas happen over lunch.
• We leave the door open. We get a lot of guests: developers, artists, designers, writers, clients, researchers, teachers, and relatives.
• We work with great people around the world. This means a bit of travel and a lot of Skype to the US, UK, Holland, China and Australia.

How to Apply

Send everything we need to know to hello@aqworks.com. We prefer URLs to PDFs.

Joi Ito (MIT Media Lab) kicked off the conference Thursday morning with a sprawling, energetic assessment of the “AI” (after internet) world, including the methods and outlooks that produced some of its greatest innovations. His call for all of us to proceed, not with maps, but with compasses, was echoed by speakers throughout the event as a fundamental requirement for lean entrepreneurship.

Panel Session on Integrated Design and Development for Lean Startups. Photo by Chiaki Hayashi

On Thursday afternoon, I joined a panel session with Joi, CJ Kihlbom (Elabs) and Brian Flanagan (HyperTiny), moderated by Mikihiro Yasuda (Digital Garage), to discuss the integration of design and development within a lean startup. Lean startups, a term popularized by Eric Ries and the theme for this year’s event, are businesses that operate based on a set of agile business, design and development processes, in order to more quickly find and meet market needs.

CJ started our panel with a short presentation of how designers and developers work together at his agile web development company, ELabs. His teams tend to get the best results working side-by-side on the same problem at the same time, in the same medium, whether it be sketching on paper or prototyping in HTML, even if one has the title of designer on their business card and the other has the title of developer.

The panel was in agreement that any such collaboration must begin, not only with shared tools, but shared values, tastes and respect. I recounted some activities that led to successful collaborations at AQ, including starting projects with a non-design, non-development creative task, like co-writing a key piece of content that defines the product.

Thursday wrapped up with an introduction to the concept of a lean startup by Janice Fraser of Luxr, a San Francisco based consultancy focused on “creating high-performance product teams in high-growth startups”. Janice stressed the importance of “getting out of the building” to talk to your customers, releasing so early you’ll be slightly embarrassed when you look back, and continually interrogating your product to ensure it has not only a problem/solution fit, but a product/market fit.

Our Unconference session on Lean Content

On Friday, Tomomi and I hosted a late afternoon unconference session asking what it might look like to apply lean startup principles to content strategy and content creation. During the session, we unearthed all kinds of problems that typically pop up in the content creation process, including ambiguous ownership and content scope creep. We ended the session by putting our own top secret product on the chopping block, asking the group for suggestions on reducing the barrier to launch without sacrificing content quality. We weighed a spectrum of content creation options, from fully DIY to Wikipedia-style crowdsourcing, including potential tradeoffs in community-building, content quantity and content quality.

We owe a great thanks to ON Lab’s Hiro Maeda for inviting us to the event, as well as the many speakers and participants. We learned quite a lot and had a good time doing it!

Update: AQ Lift was launched on October 28th.

Last Wednesday, we tested the program with a half day design session at Open Network Lab (ON Lab). ON Lab is an incubator for global-minded Japanese engineers, led by Hiro Maeda, and co-funded by Digital Garage, NetPrice and others.

Professional chin-stroking in action.

Chris and I met with four teams for one hour each, to test out their apps and services:

• Find JPN – a marketplace for tourists looking for authentic Japanese experiences.
• Compath – a social location discovery application
• Pirka – an app to encourage yourself and people you know to pick up litter.
• ABCloop – an online community for social language learning.

Together with each team, we sketched design changes, rewrote copy, and simplified user interactions. Each team left the session with a list of improvements they could start implementing the next day, and hopefully a slightly more user-centered approach to their product.

We went into the sessions with close to no prior experience with the products, allowing us to play the role of a user first encountering the service. This revealed ambiguities in how each product communicates what you can do with it, and why that’s valuable to prospective users. We also discussed what it takes to earn a new sign up, and how that might differ from what it takes to retain that user over time.

For us, it was a very satisfying workshop. Each of the four teams were bubbling with smart questions, spirited opinions, and a singular dedication to make their product better. We can’t wait to see how each product evolves over the next few weeks and months.

To hear more about our experience at ON Lab, as well as the state of Lean UX in Japan, join us at the upcoming New Context Conference on Thursday, November 3rd. Chris will be joining a panel session with Joi Ito (MIT Media Lab) and Brian Flanagan (HyperTiny) to discuss this year’s theme, Lean Startup Camp Tokyo.

One of these challenges, designing for smartphone and tablet based web browsing, has inspired several bold new practices: the abandonment of Flash, the embracing of HTML 5 and CSS 3, Luke Wroblewski’s Mobile First, and most recently Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design.

Responsive Web Design Today

The demo that started it all: type size, image size and layout responding to browser window size.

As understood from Marcotte’s seminal article and book, Responsive Web Design is a flexible, adaptive approach to the display of web content, achieved via technologies that rearrange, resize, add or subtract content. Marcotte’s Responsive Design serves a more legible, usable web page to an array of devices with varying screen resolutions and download speeds.

The popularity of Marcotte’s responsive web design will likely result in better content consumption experiences for a lot of websites, for a lot of people. However, by focusing our conversation on the optimization of visual presentation, we’ve placed just one of what I hope will be the three pillars of responsive web design: content, presentation and interface. By broadening the definition, we will allow responsive web design to better support the way people experience the web today and will experience it tomorrow.

In this essay, we explore ways in which the first pillar, content, might become responsive. But before we begin, let’s first examine the role physical devices can play in making these experiences possible, especially the mobile devices which initially inspired the responsive web design movement.

The device is more than a display.

In Responsive Web Design, Ethan Marcotte uses media queries and a little Javascript to learn a few characteristics, resolution, size and orientation, of the user’s device, and responds with a more legible page.

However, as Gino Zahnd points out, devices are much more than displays with modems attached: they also provide mechanisms for input, sensory feedback, processing power, data storage, and environmental adaption.

We can call on each of these device capabilities, to help us understand something about the user’s goals and context, and deliver a response that is more useful, more relevant, and requires less effort.

As device capabilities continue to increase, it becomes easier to slip into design discussions that confuse the devices with their owners. We can avoid this pretty easily however: Always start with the question “What is this person trying to do?”, not “What can we do with this device?”.

Mobile devices are more personal than mobile.

Most discussions of mobile begin with a story of the user on the go, out and about, painting the town red. As Marcotte points out, this is a assumption from which to start, since many people spend as much time playing with their smartphone on the sofa as they do on the street. Acknowledging both contexts will open our imagination to a wider range of possible offerings, and save us from viewing the mobile web as a restrictive, watered-down version of the PC web.

A more reliable and powerful assumption is that mobile devices, including tablets, are primarily personal devices. Though it is possible to share an iPhone or iPad, their lack of multiple user accounts makes co-ownership awkward, reducing the value of the device for both owners.¹

Data moving through the stack: not everything makes it through to the website, but the layer where any type of data starts and stops changes from time to time. (Click to Enlarge)

This bias towards individual ownership has resulted in most of us carrying more intimate personal information on our mobile than on any other device. My iPhone, for example, knows where I am, what time it is now, what languages I speak, what time I woke up this morning, when I last exercised, what I’ve been reading lately, what I’m doing tomorrow afternoon, with whom, their contact information and much of my contact history with them. Whether it’s a good idea or not to do so, all of this information, could one day be used to make any web experience more responsive.²

Of course only a thin slice of that information is currently disclosed by the device to the web browser, and an even thinner slice disclosed by the browser to any website. The depth of these disclosures will however continue to shift based on device capabilities, industry standards, public taste and individual preferences. As responsible designers³, we should always work at least a few steps back from the line of what is possible, and ask permission any time we take a step forward.

Responsive Content

Now that we understand how much devices can teach us about users, we can look at how users derive value out of content, and devise a few new responses to maximize that value.

A valuable encounter with content can be dissected into a hierarchy of needs:

1. Access
2. Legibility
3. Ease of comprehension
4. Relevance to the moment, interests, behavior, and personal history
5. Everything else: Later access, referencability, sharability, conversability

The better a publisher responds to each of these needs, the deeper users can engage with the content.⁴

Let’s use the example of a news story on a recent crisis, the 2011 London Riots. How can we improve the quality of engagement with this content? Here are a few ideas:

If you know that I’ve read this story once already, show me what has changed. In the midst of a crisis, a single news story may be updated several times throughout the day. Add timestamps to passages of text, compare it with my “last read” date, then respond by highlighting new passages, saving me wasted effort when my time is most precious.

If you know I’m in Japan, show me a quote from leaders in East Asia, or make comparisons to similar historical events that occurred in my area. This will likely increase my engagement with unfamiliar or far away topics, raising my cultural literacy and potential contribution to public discourse.

How responsive is too responsive?

This second example, though modest, begins to serve, not only a different presentation of content, but different versions of the content itself to different people. Though this difference seems more helpful than harmful, how does the user experience change as these customizations increase or grow more personal?

If it were possible for a site to know my age, would we want it to tune the writing level? If it were to know my gender, would we want it to tune tone of voice? Uh, not really. These are clear overreaches, both creepy and damaging to society.

Even our tame example, a quote selected and presented on the basis of a user’s IP address, would contribute to the further destruction of the canonical content experience⁵⁶, making any discussion of the content more fractured and confusing. Imagine comments, blogging, tweeting, email forwarding, even political election debates around a news story when everyone has read a different version of it.⁷ Though not impossible to overcome, this challenge to meaningful discourse will require a new set of adaptions that will take years to work out.

Work from the outside inward.

This type of customization becomes less problematic when applied to the content around the content, such as related links, illustrations or maps:

If I live close by zoom in. If I live far away, zoom out. Imagine our London Riots story was accompanied by a map of the affected area. If I were to access the story from a flat in East London, you’d do well to display the map zoomed in to the city level, maybe even closer, since I’m likely to be familiar with the microgeography of the area. If I were to access the same story from Istanbul however, you would do better to zoom the map to a regional level. This tiny response to geographical context would increase comprehension for most people, without disrupting the conversation around the story.

Side-by-side comparison with a map of Tokyo at equal scale helps Tokyoites like me process an unfamiliar map of London, and understand the sprawl and severity of the 2011 Riots.

The 2011 London Riots and your current location. Click image to view (requires GPS). Code by Raphaël Mazoyer.

A similar customization can also be used to increase comprehension through comparison. During the London Riots last month, an image appeared on Twitpic showing the size of the affected area side-by-side with the 23 wards of Tokyo, revealing that they were roughly the same size. This simple image made the scale of a far off event instantly personally relatable. A savvy publisher could replicate the evocative experience of this visual for readers around the world by detecting the user’s current location and placing a map of it side by side with a map of the riots.

The Road to Responsiveness (Where’s the source code?)

As you’ve surely noticed by now, this article is heavy with what-ifs and light on how-tos. Though all of these ideas are possible via today’s technology, no one-off demo will prove the scalability or even desirability of any of these ideas.

Truly responsive web design will only be born from the sustained collaboration between publishers, designers and technologists, as they develop new publishing tools, new markup language, new production workflows, and eventually new approaches to digital storytelling and product development. All of this will come at both a production and delivery cost, though I believe the promise of more engaging, more efficient digital content will prove worth the investment.

I expect a lot of fumbling around in the dark before we find the practices which best respond to the ever evolving and fractured context in which people experience the web. But let’s fumble together, content creators, editors, designers, business strategists, developers and users. Only together can we begin to move responsive web design from experiment to application, and begin responding, not to devices, but to people.

Footnotes:

1. In my observations, even the lovely interactions of sharing and collaboration which the physical form of the iPad affords, are ultimately only infrequent streaks in a primarily personal ownership experience.

2. Some of this is of course already happening within individual apps and website.

3. And by designers, I mean anyone who is making decisions on how people experience a digital publication or application, including interaction designers, engineers, editors, product managers, etc.

4. While engagement itself may not always be the end goal, it is a powerful means and measure for almost any other goal.

5. Craig Mod calls this “the fall of the great, immutable artifact”, at the hands of endlessly editable digital versions and social marginalia.

6. While news organizations’ digital publications are only beginning to to respond to the reader, they’ve been responding to the moment for years now. Jump to the bottom of an online news article these days and you’re likely to see a disclaimer along the lines of “A version of this story was published in The New York Times on August 28, 2011”, making lunchtime discussions of the news a little more confusing already.

7. Required viewing: In his 2011 Ted Talk, Eli Pariser warns that similar personalizations on websites like Facebook and Google Search are already resulting in an unintended “filter bubble” effect, in which we we are less often exposed to opposing viewpoints and challenging information, weakening our collective intellectual rigor.

Credits:

Thanks to Olivier Thereaux and Raphaël Mazoyer for helping me shape this into something semi-coherent, and hopefully useful to a few people.

Double thanks to Raphaël for whipping together the map demo while I was asleep.

Though I rarely have time to read the emails, I always read the subject lines:

Barack Obama is in your Inbox

• You should pass this one on
• Exclusive: First look at our report
• A milestone
• (no subject)
• Midnight
• They’re wrong
• You’re the first to know
• Deadline: Thursday
• Video: Afghanistan
• How about a T-shirt
• Dinner
• This video really moved me
• Dinner with the President
• Not too late
• Something lovely
• Tap
• Decided something today
• Our plan this summer
• Restating the obvious
• You’ll like this one
• Something happened
• Fixing what’s broken
• Tonight
• Big things
• Video: First look at our campaign plan
• Unlimited funds
• The next move is yours

Here is what I noticed:

They never mention the candidate. Since the ’08 campaign, messaging has always been about us, our community, the change we want. Nothing new here, but impressively consistent.

Actually, they rarely include any proper nouns. Instead of people, places, bills or taxes, they speak of opportunity, urgency, belonging and progress.

They are written to be forwarded. Though an email from a campaign manager titled “Something lovely” comes off a little cloying, once I forward it to my sister, there’s a decent chance it’ll blend right into the conversational tone she’s used to from me.

I would love to peek in on the writing process for these subject lines, and
see the stats on how these are performing. Leaving my personal aesthetic objections aside, I doubt there are many CRM campaigns anywhere operating on a higher level than this.

Google+ is no exception: it’s a relatively compact first release of just a few core concepts. Like many, I look forward to watching millions of people build on these concepts with improvised hacks, shorthand and other homemade enhancements, to complete a product story started by what may have been just a few dozen in Mountain View.

When taking a look at some of the decisions Google made, I found five ideas worth keeping in mind when designing any new service.

1. Use language that people already know.

“Google+”

Pluses everywhere.

“+” is a completely unimaginative and entirely appropriate name for what Google+ is aspiring to be. It is not a new, independent product. It’s a layer of social tools built to enhance what Google already is to billions of people.

Some have complained that the symbol is too small; tacked on to the Google logo you barely notice it. But this isn’t a 20th century branding exercise: tacked onto the Google logo in the bottom left corner of a subway poster is not how we will see it most of the time.

Its compactness allows it to inhabit any corner of the product interface, taking on different forms and nuances as needed. As “Google+” on the website it means “the Google you known with an added benefit”, as “+Chris” in my Google toolbar it tells me “Add yourself to the conversation”. As “+1” in my search results, it means “raise your hand in support”. Nothing particularly original here, but the flexibility of it will allow the product to be whatever and wherever Google needs it to be, next year and the year after.

“Circles”

Circles couldn’t be more elegant. It’s a common noun, and Google is using a common definition pulled straight from the language of offline relationships. It requires no learning to understand its purpose or how it functions. It does what it says. It’s a one word opinion paper on what Google thinks is the primary nature of online social relationships: loosely bound, transient, non-binary, and founded on shared interests.

The web interface for circles may be clumsy, but it's a smart communication tool.

2. Interfaces don’t only enable, they speak.

The drag-and-drop interface for managing Circles is a great piece of communication to introduce the concept of circles. The large circles containing rings of small portraits leaves a memorable image of the feature, an image you might retrieve as a mental model to explain the feature to a friend.

Okay, the usability is not optimal. Web designers have yet to get users to master drag and drop within a web browser. Maybe Google will, if by brute force, but in its current form, manipulating the large contact cards and circular targets feels like dragging boulders across a beach to drop them into the sea.

Even in its first week, Google+ contains many better tools with which to organize social relationships, so this is not the one most of us will use most of the time. However, if it helps sear the concept of Circles into our collective understanding of online social networks, it will have done its job.

3. Contrast is the key to Focus is the key to “Simple”

Designers and users have managed a consensus on the superiority of “simple” tools. In reality however, most of the truly simple tools were invented by our ancestors, leaving us mostly with simple looking. A spoon is simple. Google+ is not, but it looks simple because it has been designed to optimize focus.

The stream, for example, has been designed for focus on the presentation of content, making it one of the most elegant pieces of visual design on Google+. Like Twitter’s timeline and Facebook’s Wall, Google+ stream includes many tools for the manipulation of content. These tools remain quiet in flat whites, pale greys and thin lines until you show interest, when they spring to the foreground: text fields take on a comforting size and visual heft, buttons and icons, now ready to be clicked, blush in full-color saturation.

My favorite focus detail in the stream’s design is a hairline vertical rule, which appears when I click in the vertical space of any content item in the stream, or use the j/k keystrokes to toggle focus between content items. This little line helps the user tame the uneven height and visual texture of content blocks, find their place after scrolling, and understand where content begins and ends.

While Twitter and Facebook use similar techniques of progressive disclosure, neither has reached as comfortable a balance of visual focus.

4. Tune the “volume” of the interface to the environment.

Google+’s smartphone browser interface is a full-featured manifestation, conceding very few functional limitations imposed by the cramped screen size, while taking advantage of the extra bits of information a user on the run can provide about their environment. Whether or not the product designers started Google+ from mobile remains unclear, it is clearly a “mobile first”-class experience.

Where Google has refused difference in functional richness, it has embraced difference in aesthetics, as the smartphone interface bears almost no visual resemblance to the PC site. The PC interface seems inspired by the quiet aesthetic of the printed page, while the smartphone interface takes all its cues from the pumped-up visual language of iPhone apps:
Large, beveled, bold icons we can identify out of the corner of one eye, while the other monitors our overfilled take-out coffee as we barrel up the stairway towards the next subway transfer.
Zooming and sliding animations that let the user know that they’ve changed levels of detail in the hierarchy of information, even if we weren’t fully paying attention.
Shadows, highlights and layering that encourages clicking.

The total of these details isn’t a realistic, consistent world of 3D beauty, nor should it be. These details have been added to reduce mistakes and increase confidence as the user manipulates the interface, within the multisensory distractions of the real world.

5. Loyalty is built from a thousand tiny moments.

These days, people know they are making an investment whenever they try new software, even free software. If they aren’t investing money, they are investing effort, attention, social influence or one of any number of finite resources at their disposal. When Google decided to enter the crowded social network business with Google+, they took on the unenviable extra burden of inciting a mass brand switch. As Instapaper creator and tech writer Marco Arment pointed out, Google+ has to do this quickly for any of its key features to be useful to its first wave of users.

Google made several smart decisions to make this likely. By far the most important of these decisions was to chop the user’s investment size into tiny pieces, offering the user modest returns of happiness for those tiny investments, and removing as much friction as possible from the transaction, via kick-ass interaction design.

The best example of this was the organization of social relationships with Circles. Google didn’t force us to upload and organize our entire contact book on day one. Instead, they added a tiny interface to Google+ and Gmail that allowed us to describe social relationships piecemeal, when we felt like it. This investment occurs via the frictionless repetition of a tiny cursor movements and just one click, a flawless specimen of interaction design.

And what does Google give you in return? At this point, who knows. The “Rolodex card” we clicked on disappears and seconds later, is replaced with another. Not particularly valuable, but satisfying enough the first dozen times. Before long we notice your Circles begin to grow. Friend’s photos appear next to their emails in Gmail. The next time we share something with a group of friends, it takes 2 clicks instead of 20. Whether these little transactions add up to the loyalty of a handful or a billion of us is a question a few years off from being answered, but in the meantime, Google buys themselves a little time to observe and adjust, and complete the circle.