American Express is rolling out a new travel service for its business customers. As is customary for today’s web services, there’s are terms and conditions that the new user needs to agree to when they sign up.

Now, these are often implemented with a checkbox that says something like “I have read and agree to the terms and conditions.” Most of us know that hardly anybody reads and everybody just checks off the box. (Once, I watched my dad, a lawyer, check the box without reading. “It’s probably unenforceable,” he told me.)

But on this new Amex site, there’s a different implementation of this control. Sure, there’s a checkbox, but it’s grayed out. The only way to enable it for checking is to scroll to the bottom of the agreement.

The Amex Biz Travel site greys out the checkbox until the user scrolls to the bottom.

Now, as is also standard, the agreement is presented in a tiny little scrolling text box that shows about 200 words at a time. And, as is also standard, the agreement is a whopping 7,243 words (13 pages in a standard document) long.

Therefore, scrolling through this box takes a fair amount of effort. It’s unlikely that scrolling will encourage anyone to read the document. It’s just an extra hoop to jump through to continue the farce of pretending that the user has “read” whatever it is their agreeing to.

Apparently, the lawyers at Amex think that by having me scroll to the bottom, they can claim that I had every opportunity to read and agree to the terms. Therefore, if there’s something down the road I want to sue them about, I gave up that right with my scrolling action. (It’s unlikely any sensible judge will buy this argument, but it’s just as unlikely that any suit against them will get in front of a judge.)

Of course, the best way to do this would be to be honest with your users and treat them with respect. Amex could write the terms in simple language and give users a chance to really understand what they are agreeing to.

The problem with a design solution like the “scroll to agree” implementation is that it won’t be good enough. What happens when some other lawyer at Amex (or whereever) discovers that users don’t read it when they scroll to the bottom and therefore don’t understand what they are agreeing to? They’ll put in some other ridiculous control, where you’ll have to enter a secret code or recite poetry or something.

At some point, we, as designers, have to stand up and say, “This isn’t really doing what you think it’s doing. It’s just making our relationship with our users worse.” When do we do that?

I’d like to start now.

[ Transcript Available ]

Mobile is the “hot topic” these days. It’s increasingly at the front of designers’ minds. In a world where the power and capabilities of the device in your pocket are so great, the possibilities become somewhat astounding. The mobile landscape is changing so rapidly that it makes developing a formal strategy to “figure mobile out” all but impossible.

Luke Wroblewski is at the forefront of the mobile design movement. He suggests that it’s better to put something, anything, out there and see how it fares. Excessive planning in the mobile space leads to missing opportunity after opportunity. Taking advantage of the market as it is today and the capabilities of these devices can lead to the refinement and evolution of your product.

Luke will be conducting a full-day workshop full of his thoughts on mobile, including why you should design for mobile first, at the User Interface 16 Conference, November 7-9 in Boston. Learn more about Luke’s and the other 7 full-day workshops at UIConf.com.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“…today, [mobile] devices have a lot of constraints based on the ergonomics. They’ve got a small screen. In many situations, you’re using them in environments where there’s other stuff going on. You’re not hunkered down at a desk for an extended period of time.

You may be at home on the couch watching TV, or you may be in a line somewhere, or passing some time in, hopefully, not the car. So there’s these constraints. Low bandwidth is another constraint. And when you use the devices, you familiarize yourself with what those constraints are.

But there’s also a lot of opportunities in terms of capabilities. And if you use lots of apps, you can see, how are they using the accelerometer? What have they done with front and rear-facing cameras? How are they using location in order to deliver information? How are they using the video port, the camera, the audio input? All those things can open up new ideas about how to take advantage of those capabilities in your service.

This is a device that you can use pretty much anywhere and everywhere. You have it with you all the time. Coverage of networks is way better than it’s been. And so, through the fact that you have it with you everywhere and anywhere and you can pull it out and access a network and access assets, all these new use cases emerge that you didn’t have before…”

Tune in to the podcast to hear Luke answer these questions:

What is the alternative to sitting and planning your mobile strategy?
Where should teams start to familiarize themselves with mobile?
Is there an advantage to playing with as many apps as you can to learn about the interaction design?
What are some things that make good mobile design stand out?
What is the benefit of desktop operating systems emulating features on touch-based devices?
How is multi-platform emergence affecting approaches to design?

Do you design for mobile? Share your thoughts with us in our comments section.

Recorded: September, 2011
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Full Transcript.

Jared Spool: Welcome, everyone, to an episode of the “SpoolCast”. Today I have the amazingly awesome Luke Wroblewski, who is going to be speaking at UI16, our User Interface Conference.

It’s coming up this November. He’s going to be giving a full-day workshop on designing for mobile, a really hot topic. And he is the guy I know that knows the most about mobile, and I’m very happy he’s here today.

Hello, Luke.

Luke Wroblewski: Hello, Jared. Thank you for having me.

Jared: Thanks for being here. So let’s just get into this. I’ve got all these clients now, who are pushing hard on their mobile, and they’re really trying to get there, but it’s really hard to figure out what to do right.

There are some crazy things that people have been trying to do. What are some crazy things that you have seen organizations do with their mobile implementations, particularly organizations that should have known better?

Luke: If they’re doing small, crazy things, at least doing something, I think that’s OK. The biggest issue I’ve seen is people running around and making PowerPoint deck after PowerPoint deck, trying to figure out their mobile strategy.

Jared: I saw that! I saw a guy on the plane. I’m sitting in the aisle, and then there’s someone in the middle, and this guy’s in the window, and he is editing up a PowerPoint deck of a mobile app.

And then, every 20 minutes, taking his laptop and passing it to the woman in the window behind him. [laughs] And then they would have some conversation, and then he would come back and he’d make more changes to it.

Luke: Wow. So there you go. And real-time, on the plane, even.

Jared: On the plane. [laughs]

Luke: It’s gotten to the point that I make this joke when I go and talk, especially at corporations. I say, “The worst thing you could be doing is just sitting around making PowerPoint.”

And pretty much inevitably, I always get this nervous laughter and someone coming up to me after the meeting: “You just nailed what’s going on over here! How did you know?”

[laughter]

Luke: I know because it’s pretty much what everybody’s doing.

Jared: Wow. And so what’s so nutty about that? On the surface, it sounds like a great prototyping tool.

Luke: [laughs] Well for building an app within it, sure. But when you spend all your time trying to imagine the future of mobile and planning accordingly and not taking a move until you’ve got everything nailed, then you’re just missing opportunity after opportunity right now.

And frankly, if you look at the space, I think it’s changing so dramatically day after day that any strategy, long-term, you put together is likely to get pretty disrupted.

Just looking at the past few weeks, right, we had HP getting out of WebOS, killing their tablets. We had Google buying Motorola. We had Steve Jobs resigning.

It was just bombshell after bombshell after bombshell in terms of what’s going on in mobile.

And so I think, when you get in this mode of all you’re doing is planning and things keep changing on you, you just keep planning, planning, planning; you never actually do anything.

So what you’re describing, where the guy’s actually designing an app, in whatever prototyping tool he needs, I think that’s great.

My concern is more along the lines of, “Hey, we’re planning out this large architecture. Hey, we need this long-term road map.” While I’m not completely ragging on planning, I think it’s very, very possible for organizations, especially bigger organizations, to just get stuck in that phase and never get out of it.

Jared: Yeah. So the alternative is what, then?

Luke: The alternative is just to put something out there and see what happens. If you actually look at the big companies that are currently doing well in mobile, that’s what they did.

So I keep hearing stories of a small, rogue, or interested team just went out and made an app or a mobile website, and all of a sudden it started taking off, and now that has gained a lot of momentum in the company and they’re taking off from it.

So one of the, perhaps, biggest examples is eBay. eBay was one of the first ones to pull together an iPhone app. And that was essentially a product manager, designer, and they worked with outside contractors just because they were really interested in it and wanted to make something there.

And you look now; eBay has 50 percent of mobile commerce in the US, and 70 percent of that is coming from their iPhone app.

At least as far as I hear the stories, I wasn’t there, obviously, this wasn’t some huge effort in terms of strategy and planning. It was rolling up your sleeves, making something and getting it out there.

I heard a similar story, for example, from Expedia. For a long time, I used Expedia, the travel site’s mobile app as an example of “Look at how focused their mobile experience is compared to their desktop Web experience.”

And I heard from someone after one of these talks that that app was created in their R and D Department by, again, two or three guys who were just really interested in, passionate about the space, and now they’re taking a lot of what they learned from there and applying it to the desktop and other places.

So this “just roll up your sleeves and do something,” I think the type of market it is and the type of environment it is lends itself a lot more to that kind of effort.

Jared: The folks over at Disney, there was an article recently published that had this visualization of all the Disney mobile apps, and there’s like 35 or 40 different Disney mobile apps.

Is there a point where just getting out there and doing it and having all these different parts of your organization just trying something gets in the way, and that maybe you should be sitting back and saying, “Well, do we have a strategy here?”

Luke: Yeah. Well, once you hit the point where you’ve actually done something. I guess I should clarify. I’m talking about people who are trying to, “figure mobile out.”

Jared: Right.

Luke: There’s organizations that have been in there from the beginning and have done a ton and they’ve learned a lot.

And once you’ve learned a lot and you understand, if they’ve got 35 apps, they probably know which ones are being used. They probably know where they’re getting new customers, where they’re making money, which platforms are working for them.

They have a crap-pile of information upon which they can start to build a strategy.

Jared: Right.

Luke: Whereas if you’ve never done anything, and all you’re doing is thinking about the re-architecture, which is going to take you two to three months, yo[…]

Lately, I haven’t been making friends with people who work at design agencies. I think it’s something I said.

It’s definitely something I said. In fact, I can tell you exactly what I said.

However, to do that, we need to revisit some research we’ve conducted over the last few years. We’ve been looking at the process of making design decisions and realized there are five distinct styles. (If you haven’t read or seen me talk about these, go read about them now. Otherwise this won’t make a lot of sense.)

If you’re a designer, any of these styles can produce great results that delights customers. However, for many, the most advanced styles, activity-focused and experience-focused design, are the more desirable projects. That’s where the really cool stuff happens and where the biggest challenges are found.

And this is where I get in trouble with the agency folks. As we’ve been researching these five styles, we found an interesting finding: agencies can’t do activity-focused or experience-focused design.

Many do self design. Some very successful agencies make a lot of money with genius design. (And there are many that do unintentional design, but they probably shouldn’t brag about that.) However, it seems activity-focused and experience-focused design is out of reach of the agency world.

Now, many agencies try to sell themselves as doing this work. And many agencies get clients to hire them to do this work. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about creating successful designs using these decision styles. That doesn’t happen with an agency. It can only happen in-house.

Activity-focused design takes a long time. It requires making an investment. The team accrues knowledge over a long period, studying users and their activities, implementing solutions, and seeing how those solutions work. It takes many iterations to do well.

Most agencies aren’t brought in for long-term iterative work. Eventually, all agencies leave. When they leave, the knowledge the team has gained walks out the door with them. Then the client is left with something they don’t know how to maintain or improve. The project fails.

Experience-focused design is even more difficult. The designs often require changes at touch points all over the organization. For example, for a retail business to create a seamless experience, they’ll have to change things on the web site, in the stores, at the call center, in the distribution centers, and in the merchandizing department.

Agencies can’t have this kind of reach. It takes commitment at all levels. It’s too expensive to teach an agency how your business works. They don’t have the political clout to make the hard decisions.

Sure, a company can hire an agency to give them ideas. Agencies have really smart folks with lots of great ideas. But the long-term, in-depth execution has to come from within. The company has to make the commitment to investing on their own.

Needless to say, statements like this don’t make me popular with agencies. Recently, I’ve found myself sitting in front of agency owners, defending this position. They don’t like it at all.

I could be wrong. (It’s happened before.) It could be that an agency could take over the management and operations of a business and build a fabulous design using activity-focused or experience-focused design. I haven’t found one yet, but it could happen.

I just hope that agency’s contract never ends, because then their (now former) client is screwed.

Opportunities lost by @disambiguity – AlphaGov <-- A worthy project which didn't deliver on its intentions