I have been super busy lately working on the beginnings of a Mobile Pattern Library for a client. This work involves a lot of auditing applications. I am looking at both apps designed by the client and others in the landscape for comparison and for developing best practices across the iPhone, iPad, an Android handset and an Android tablet.

I can honestly say that while there are a lot of crappy iPhone apps, there are 10x the amount of bad ones in the Android ecosystem. I know, this is probably not new to many but was an interesting thing for me. On the other hand, I have gotten used to the hard back button on the Android and was extremely surprised by how much I like the Android tablet.

The best experience so far was a moment of “it just works” on the tablet. When I got the Android tablet – an ASUS tansformer tablet – I signed into my google accounts and without any prompting from me, any apps that I had downloaded on the Android handset self-installed into the tablet. This was a very surprising but cool experience.

On the other hand, I am extremely surprised by the application makers, on both the iPad and the Android tablet who don’t bother to refactor for the increased real estate and just expect the app to be either tiny or stretched to fit the space. I know many of these apps are free and people want to get their app out there before the competition, but my time is worth money and I want to love these applications and right now I don’t because of the perceived laziness of the app creators.

More thoughts soon as I collect screen shots and the adjust more global patterns for public consumption.

Here are a few more good articles/posts about this ongoing conversation about Identity and Google +. This is a hot potato and people need to speak out against the policies that Google has set forth. They are discriminatory and do not promote true social engagements.

“Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power

Google+ and The Trouble With Tribbles

It’s official: Google wants to own your online identity

Google+ Can Be A Social Network Or The Name Police – Not Both
Love this quote from this piece – “Mike Neuenschwander has famously observed that social software is being designed by the world’s least sociable people, and Google+ seems to be a case in point. ”

Fantastic and thorough thoughts about the issues and pros and cons of the Google+ Real Names policy by Kee Hinkley

Real Names: Google+, Government & The Identity Ecosystem

And if you can’t get enough of this issue, check this out “All the News & Commentary on the Google+ Nymwars”

Recently Google launched Google Plus and in the process, they have required that people use their real names as their identity. This is causing tremendous issues—suspension of accounts deemed not “real”, suspending accounts because of pseudonyms.

In our book, Christian and I talk about identity, about owning your words and owning your reputation. We proposed the following in the Identity pattern:

• Give users control over how to present themselves. Users should own their actions and have reputation attached to their identity, but the option to go anonymous should be offered in some instances.
• Let your users decide who sees what parts of themselves. Give enough control and permissioned access. Do my friends see my birthdate or does everyone? If it’s everyone, be prepared for a lot of fake data.
• Be clear on reflecting back to the user what they see as an editor / owner versus how others see them. The dating sites have this idea down to a science, but on many other websites it isn’t clearly articulated who sees what.
• Having a robust identity solutions won’t alleviate sock puppets and alternate identities that people may create.

Randy Farmer goes on to discuss this in his essay The Tripartite Identity Pattern, which discusses the differences between an account holder – known to the organization, the online identity – the name with which the user is known to the world and their community, and the user’s login.

So what does this have to do with Google+?

There is controversy happening over Google’s policy of users having to use real names in their profile – representation of themselves – on Google+.

They outright break the first best practice – let user’s choose the name with which to represent themselves – and the recommendations from Randy which call to separate the ACCOUNT from the representation of the user. This combining of the two requiring a real name may seem like the easier way to go when building the system, but in real life it always blows up.

Kaliya Hamlin “Identity Woman”, who has long been a proponent around Identity practices that support the needs of people, especially disenfranchised people—anyone who wants to be able to speak out without fear of reprisal or stalking or of losing their job or any number of other factors that play into bad behavior online seeping out into the real world— has a series of blog posts and tweets calling out Google+ for suspending her account because she used the name she is known for online “Identity Woman”. Her reputation is tied to this identity. Years of reputation. Years of expertise. But it’s not a real name so suspended.

She makes some great points and I recommend that if you are at all interested in Identity and how Google is handling this, you should read them all. They are on the road to controlling your identity online so it is well worth reading and thinking about.

1. Google+ and my “real” name: Yes, I’m Identity Woman
2. Nymwars: IRL on Google’s Lawns.
3. Google+ Suspension saga continues
4. Lets try going with the Mononym for Google+
5. Google+ says your name is “Toby” NOT “Kunta Kinte”
6. Is Google+ is being lynched by out-spoken users upset by real names policy?

Charlie Stross sums it up well in his post “Why I’m not on Google Plus“.

While I am on Google Plus using my real name, I don’t believe I should be required to if I had another name with which I better identified with. Frankly, it’s not Google’s place to tell me what name I have to use to present myself, and I am surprised that they have gone this route – there are a ton of really smart people over there who know better. There is no reason why they can’t have the ACCOUNT be in the person’s real name which is never shown, and let the user present whatever they want to the world. Since they are iterating frequently, this is an iteration they should seriously consider.

I have long been a proponent of grid systems in design. After all, I started out as a print designer working on annual reports and other multipage projects. The grid has been harder to apply in reasonable ways online but I still love the order of working with an underlying structure and the challenge of when to break the grid for emphasis or when to keep a consistent experience.

Art directed by Hugh Dubberly based on a patent held by William Drentell and Jessica Helfand, this cool poster shows 892 ways a 3×4 rectangle (i.e. a webpage) can be divided up into a base grid.

Here’s the full assortment as a video:

The 892 ways to partition a 3×4 grid from thomas gaskin on Vimeo.

And last, but not least, a website that creates HTML code for an underlying grid for any combination.

A few more events are coming up that I will be involved in:

Web 2.0 Expo
Keynote talk: Start Using UX as a Weapon
March 29th, 4:45 pm, Main Stage

I will be a judge, along with an impressive panel of amazing designers and web people for the 2011 Webvisionary Awards at Webvisions this year. Should be fun. Give us your best shot!

Webvisions
Webvisionary Awards judge
May 26th, 2011