paper & pencil

Putting Disorientation into the Design Process

Jared Spool describes the technique of putting disorientation into the design process - or "hunkering" as one person they studied called it.

Even though each craft was different, the behavior of hunkering was the same:

• They lay out whatever physical pieces they have -- raw materials, sketches, and images they'd collected.
• They work to put things close to where they'd be in their final form, relative to the other pieces.
• Then they step back and ponder it for a while.
• In some cases, they walk around to view it from a different angle, to see what it looked like from another perspective.
• Then they start back up to work.

Hunkering doesn't seem to be the appropriate term here as that implies leaning in and getting to work. The process described above is the opposite motion of stopping work, stepping back and assessing the design.

I used this process frequently as I'm sketching designs and creating wireframes and prototypes. The process is also used within our team by conducting design reviews with the product manager, developer, QA and system architect leads. In a recent project, conducting these reviews allowed us to catch many issues early on that would have been very costly to fix in code.

Designing a Unified Experience

Kim Goodwin of Cooper talks about bringing interaction, industrial and visual design together.

Interaction design, visual design, and industrial design are distinct disciplines for good reason: Each excels in different ways. Interaction designers must be good at imagining structure and flow, which requires strong analytical skills and a high degree of rigor, especially for complex systems. Visual designers and industrial designers are masters of visual and physical usability but are also masters of emotion: They know how to evoke caution, attract attention, and instill desire for a product at first glance. Users have just one experience of a product, though. All three aspects of the design must work in concert, or the product will fail to satisfy. Integration of the three disciplines is a central theme of Kim’s new book, Designing for the Digital Age.

3 design-based strategies for beating an economic downturn

Phil Barrett of Flow Interactive offers 3 design-based strategies for beating an economic downturn.

1. Innovate your way out

Innovation doesn't mean throwing money at blue sky projects and hoping for miracles. You can cut out masses of risk by using a structured design process:

• Contextual research. This isn't market research with surveys and focus groups. Contextual research is about observing and participating in people's lives to get the dirty truth about what they need, what they want and how they behave. The innovation often seems obvious when you've got the right information.
• Conceptual thinking. Get your team together. Have lots of ideas. Stay out of the details and explore the new and usual stuff - that's where inspiration comes from.
• Evaluation with target users. Make cheap prototypes any which way you can, and watch target customers try it out. Even if the feedback is not what you want to hear, it's better to face harsh reality in the R&D lab than out in the open market.
• Iteration. Your first attempt will be shaky. Keep testing and fixing your product's design until your customers tell you its ready.

2. Optimise, to squeeze more from what you have

Digital marketers make a lot of noise about acquiring new customers. That's certainly an essential element of a successful business. But keeping your customers happy when they get to you is worthy of at least as much attention. There's a rule of thumb: acquiring a new customer is 6-10 times more expensive than retaining an existing customer. So a solid strategy when times are hard is to plug the holes in your "leaky bucket," and stop website visitors from pouring out as fast as you can pour them in.

3. Cut costs by improving the customer experience

Organisations that work to improve the customer experience benefit from reduced costs. They can entice customers to the most cost-effective channels and they generate fewer negative customer experiences and fewer expensive service calls.

10 Best Application UIs

Nielsen Norman Group conducted a competition to identify the 10 best-designed application user interfaces. Some of the common elements of the winning designs include:

• Business-Oriented Interaction
• Progressive Disclosure
• Freeform and Linear Task Flows to support both experts and newbies
• Limited use of Modal Dialog boxes
• Lightboxes
• Inline User Assistance
• Contextual, Cheap, and Quick Usability Testing Methods

The lightbox benefit is obvious: it's impossible for users to overlook the only bright part of the screen. This is in stark contrast to many traditional designs, where users often remain blissfully ignorant of notifications that are camouflaged within busy pages.

Lightboxes do have downsides, however, and they shouldn't be used everywhere.

• A lightbox is a blunt instrument that hits users over the head and causes them to stop everything they're doing. Don't use them for low-priority items or background information.
• Talk about modal dialog boxes. A lightbox takes that concept to the extreme. (Even though it's theoretically possible to enable interaction with the dimmed parts of the screen, in practice this just isn't done because something that's dimmed should be inactive.)
• Users often have to refer to information on the background display to resolve the situation in the foreground dialog box. If the background is dimmed too much, such information can be hard to read.

Five Principles to Design By

Joshua Porter describes the five principles to design by.

1. Technology Serves Humans.
2. Design is not Art.
3. The Experience Belongs to the User.
4. Great Design is Invisible.
5. Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication.

Great Design is Invisible.

An interesting property of great design is that it is taken for granted. It works so well that we forget that creative effort was involved to bring it about. Sometimes, like with the lowly spoon, the object is so simplistic that it seems obvious, and we disregard that at one point in history it wasn’t. Other times, like with the automobile, the object is so sophisticated yet easy-to-use that we’re blinded to the fact that millions and millions of human-hours went into getting it to this point. That’s a shame…every great design has a rich history. And every design has behind it a designer or designers who tried to make the world a better place by solving some problem or another.

Bad design is obvious because it hurts to use. It is awkward, difficult, and complex. In a great irony of the world, bad design is much easier to see than good design. It raps us on the head like a bully. Because of its success, great design is often invisible.

Demystifying Interaction Design

Joshua Porter expands on behavior is our medium - Robert Fabricant's keynote at Interaction 09.

We design to change, guide, support, elicit, constrict, and control behavior. The products and screens we create are about getting others to do something, using or buying or donating or otherwise taking some real-world action. Good design elicits the right behavior, poor design does not.

Robert Fabricant - Behavior is our Medium from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

An interesting discussion occurs in the comments about the words "elicit" and "behavior". There is a large focus on the moral implications of changing a person's behavior but that was not the point of saying behavior is our medium. It's also about changing the behavior of a system to match the user's goals, needs, wants, etc. to create successful interactions.

Surprisingly, Robert’s assertion was not as obvious to all those in attendance as he had hoped. He got pushback on the idea that designers traffic in behavior. In a follow-up post he writes:

“There is universal acceptance of a holistic approach to human centered design within this community – generally referred to as ‘experience design’ (not my preferred term). This approach considers all of the contexts surrounding use and then tries to build a unified interaction model to support user needs over time, across these contexts. It focuses not just on expressed needs but on those that are unexpressed: the emotions, motivations, and desires that shape user engagement over time. In fact, more and more of our clients are looking for our help in identifying these latent, unmet needs. So, it is interesting to find designers who are very comfortable, in fact insistent, on this holistic approach and yet spooked by the idea that we are in the ‘behavior business’.”

While I largely agree that I work with behavior, I don't feel this fully "demystifies" what I do as you could say the same about many professions - marketing and advertising come to mind immediately. But I do like using the word behavior in terms of what I'm shaping, more so than pixels, because it gets more to the heart of what an interaction designer does. And this is why I don't use the term "interface designer" as it puts too much emphasis on the screen and the visual and that's the easiest aspect to describe what I do.

Everything's amazing, nobody's happy

Comedian Louis CK talks to Conan about what an amazing time we live in yet no one is happy. Hilarious and very true!

UX annoyances

A handful of user experience annoyances I've recently, um, experienced...

1) On my Samsung Glyde (Verizon) I set a daily alarm to off, clicked Save, and was prompted with this: "ALARM IS OFF. TURN ON NOW? - Yes  -No". wtf?

2) I received a shipping notification email from LandsEnd.com and when I clicked the link to track it, the web page asked for the order number. So, I had to go back to the email, find the order number, copy it, go back to the web page, and paste it in. I order lots of stuff online and any necessary data such as an order or tracking number is always passed along in the link.

3) I came across a demo of Sketchflow, a new prototyping tool which will be part of Expression Blend and I am very eager to try it out. The demo was done at MIX09 on March 20 and almost a month later I cannot find any information on the Microsoft site about when it will be released.

[Shakes fist at Samsung/Verizon, LandsEnd.com and Microsoft.]

Apple, IKEA and Their Integrated Architecture

Davide Potente and Erika Salvini discuss their findings in studying the bridges between information architecture and wayfinding strategies. They examine the bridges between the web sites and retail environments of Apple and IKEA.

Regardless of where the experience begins and ends, it is highly desirable that the consumer be permitted to interact in a seamless manner and that no information flow fractures be apparent. Continuity can be provided by a structured, bridge-like experience. It follows that the users can keep the same mental model through each step of experience, which will provide a homogeneous model of interaction [1]. Bridge experiences synthesize this process by identifying continuous passages of information

• from one web or software environment to another
• from the web to a software environment 
• from a software environment to a hardware environment 
• from the web to a physical environment.

Harnessing the Power of Annotations - An Interview with Dan Brown

Jared Spool interviews Dan Brown on annotating deliverables.

Choosing an appropriate format for annotations can make them less daunting. No doubt most people use good old-fashioned prose, but we've found that adding some structure to the annotations can make them more readable. For example, for any given interactive element on a page, we will break the annotation into different scripting-like behaviors like onHover or onClick. Developers tend to like that we're trying to speak their language, and it provides some clear structure to the annotation.

We've started adorning our annotations with icons to clarify their purpose. Annotations might describe business logic, editorial guidelines, or display conditions, among others. Each of these functions has a unique icon to help differentiate them on the page.