04 May 2008 2014H

Calendaring apps

It occurs to me that we spend far too little time actually tackling industry-standard problems in school and that is, of course, what we look for when we interview people: has the candidate actually done work that looks like a professional problem, with the inputs and limitations placed upon us by resources available?

If I were to assign such a problem to students, I think calendaring would be among the more difficult but satisfying assignments to work on. When you think about it there are really some fairly complex algorithms to get into code: how to calculate a calendar, for instance, how to display information in a calendar. Then there are the human things, such as how to schedule for events, once, repeating, what if there are multiple events in a day, so on. Then, of course, how to accommodate all the different ways that people have of describing repeating events. I suppose the calendaring could be broken down into small problems since it is such a large project. It is an ideal project of course: there hardly comes a day that we do not encounter some form of calendaring and of course, once designed, you can continuously improve upon it, making it an investment that keeps on giving.

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04 May 2008 1952H

What is a user experience professional?

I’m often asked what does it take to be a good user experience professional. Well, of course that depends on where you intend to use your user experience work. I happen to work on the web, so the UX I do is naturally a bit different from someone who works with embedded systems or industrial design artifacts. But if I were to design a whole curriculum around producing the next generation user experience professional, I would require:

1) Social science methodologies. Much much of our work revolves around the observation and analysis of human behavior. I’d say a background in psychology or social psych would be best, particularly around environmental or industrial psych, possibly human factors, although I think it is a little too quant heavy for our work, some sociology, anthro, so on. I’d want students to be good quantitative and qualitative people and to have tools at their disposal. You must be able to understand how to observe people and collect data, either narratives or numbers, accurately describe where the data came from, who they represent, how that data was collected, cognizant of threats to validity, sampling methodologies, how to phrase questions without injecting bias, so on.

2) Library and info science. A good deal of our work involves the categorization of information and information seeking needs and how users are served thereby. It is interesting to note that LIS tries to claim information architecture but I feel they focus too much on the categorization and labelling than they do on fundamental interaction design, which is really taught nowhere, unfortunately, and not at the undergraduate level where it really should be fundamental to. . .

3) Computer science. A lot of our work involves dealing with technology. So I would have to say that you should have at least built one website and maybe no less than three to five. You should have learned how to gather requirements, which is of course what no one teaches. You should have learned how to program and interface with databases and know your way around SQL. It would not hurt to understand Java or another object oriented language. You should have learned how to work with different types of scripting, like HTML, Flash, Javascript, so on. In other words you should know how to work with developers and speak the language of development. Wouldn’t hurt if you had deep chops with HTML, CSS, XML, and Javascript. Here is where comp sci could be useful but isn’t. Requirements and methodologies would be great to know here, but that would require students to actually work in teams on projects that simulate real world problems. In addition, a lot of what passes for information architecture really is in fact interaction design, which is only emerging as a discipline of its own now, but has deep deep roots in comp sci.

4) Visual communications. Now we get to the softer side of things. A lot of things we do involve designers. So a few courses on type, color, composition, grids, branding, being subject to the sometimes brutal and subjective cycle of ideation and critique, and actually doing the work of design on real world projects wouldn’t hurt you in the least. Primarily I would avoid the whole stylistic track — you will inevitably gravitate towards your own unique style — but I think I would focus a student towards information design, such as newspaper infographic designers do: how to make complex information understandable at a glance. Layout for reading comprehension and how to grab people’s attention really also helps.

5) Interaction design. Most importantly and least often presented in the curriculum, I would say, this is the most important skill. You should be able to talk in the language of decision making of choices made in the design of interfaces. Unfortunately, not very well or broadly taught and not deeply enough. Maybe it is time to actually start doing so. There is quite a deep reading list to go through actually.

6) Business courses, particularly around marketing and operations.

It will be noted drily that few people have done all of the above and that most of us working in UX now do not come from such backgrounds. Zannen da kedo! Fortunately, the tools that give a good liberal arts graduate a good head start in the world can also be applied towards catching up with the other disciplines in this list.

What about you all? What would you think would be useful for a user experience professional to know?

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02 May 2008 0719H

Make my logo bigger

Hilarious.

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17 Apr 2008 0626H

Apple Design Methods

Was passed this by a colleague, an article from Business Week, which reveals some techniques they use for ideation. Particularly useful I think are paired design and the pony meeting. We hold pony meetings all the time, reminds me of the lines from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, “they talked wildly about the death of the blue heavens and the setting up of the yellow,” but the paired design technique bears some scrutiny. Well, why not formalize design by committee then? Is two the number to maximize design time, but minimize use of resources? I do think that you must get all the people working on dependent parts of a site together in the same room at some point, early on in the process, especially for somewhat complex interaction processes with multiple dependencies. You can read more about paired design from Disambiguity.

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14 Apr 2008 0611H

Things that impact user experience outside our domain

Just heard a story on NPR about TurboTax (which I just used for the 10th year in a row last night). Last year they didn’t anticipate the hit their servers would take. The cost? 10 million in refunds issued to angry users that needed to be assuaged. They’re not the only site: think about all those sites that experience seasonal hits on holidays, or florists who get hit at Valentines and Mom’s Day, or those for big  tickets and software releases like those for big releases of videogames. On-demand load balancing and stress testing as well as user experience enhancements in terms of lightening pages and process flows should now be critical path components for large scale websites serving millions of users.

Similarly there was a story about the evolution of video game music. As technology has advanced, so too has the ability to create much richer experiences: few elements have advanced so much as the capability to enrich the experience of immersive play than music.

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08 Apr 2008 0745H

On “Chinese Design Everyday”

Is there such a thing as Chinese design?

Of course there is design produced by Chinese, either Americans of Chinese descent or Chinese in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taiwan, or Singapore. That is Chinese design after a fashion. But is there a vernacular we can call Chinese design? What makes it so?

I would aver, as the exhibit or rather, its curation seems to indicate, that Chinese design is Chinese only to the extent that it “speaks” to and is “understood by” Chinese.

Thus, in viewing the exhibit, I was struck by how graphic design, being a communications medium, is given over to the same impulses, traces, and gaps that spoken and written communications are prone to. In short, design is really a language and with it is imbued all the frailities and strengths that humanity is prone to. Its relevance and power thereby is only carried forward by visual “utterances” and references to the everyday cultures that produce it. However, density of East Asian urban population did not seem to be one of those influences.

So what is it we’re seeing here? Are we seeing traces of top designers, who were educated in the city’s polytechnics, or in western universities, and thereby were taught how to see through western eyes and how to draw with western hands? Or are we seeing something else, in how the exhibit was itself curated, the pieces carefully culled from many which were excluded? What is it that I am looking for amidst all these artifacts?

In examining the traces of the designs, I realize that in my own search for a “pure” Chinese design vernacular, free of influences from, and references to, the Soviet-style romanticism of Communist state art, or from the western colonialist commercial romanticism in Shanghai and Hong Kong design vernaculars, I myself harbor hidden western metaphysics, unspoken logocentric notions, and a longing for a pure language. It is likely impossible to refer to a period when design ever was composed of signs without referent, if only because design itself is not only a language, whose power depends precisely on its ability to link meaning with images and type, but it is an artifact of history as well, produced by modernity, shaped by capital, and so it is inflected with the traces and references that produced it. Such a search for a realm of pure ideas, a search for a language of ideas without referents is ahistorical and exists only as a dream.

Chinese Design Everyday runs until the 13th at the Design Exchange in Toronto. I have a small collection of photos from the exhibit.

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07 Apr 2008 1750H

All we have been doing in user experience

when it comes to online retail, has been done before, not in so many words, but, in parallel, by Paco Underhill and his firm Envirosell. Usability? Let’s call it customer observation, customer ethnography. Of course it is not really so, unless we were able to observe user sessions completely hidden from view. But we do work in much the same way. Although it’s very much a self-promotion piece, there are some good thoughts in there. The audiobook, Why We Buy, is available unabridged on iTunes, $19. Worth it to me to pay someone to read it to me; maybe so for you too. Get it and give it a listen.

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07 Apr 2008 0638H

Ellen Lupton’s Thinking with Type

While I’m busy processing my thoughts about the Chinese Design Everyday exhibit, now on its last days (closes April 13) at the Design Exchange in Toronto, I’ll throw this out there.

On a trek through that stretch of Queen St West in Toronto that’s been dubbed the Art & Design District I wandered into the tiny but unusually well stocked Type Books (883 Queen St West), and picked up a few additions for the shelves, one of which was Ellen Lupton’s Thinking with Type. It’s a beautiful book and I think it is an excellent, painless intro to the niceties and deviltries of working with type that even seasoned veterans can get something out of. Check out the companion site: Thinking with Type.

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31 Mar 2008 0524H

Going to Toronto

I hear there are some interesting things happening up there and it’s high time I took vacation, so I’m going away for a few days. I’ll post photos. Bises.

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29 Mar 2008 1804H

Earth Hour is nothing, NOTHING

A pause here in the normal flow for this important message.

After all, it is in keeping with Papanek’s imperative that design, being a human activity, serve humanity by helping us survive as a species. You know. Kind of important.

Darren Yates, a contributing editor to Australian PC User magazine, says we should think about all the things you can do to save the planet during our work day and at home:

1) Black-background screens on websites reducing energy consumption of screens? A myth. What works: reduce your screen brightness and contrast to the minimum you need to get your work done. Most screens are cranked up to full brightness and full contrast, which causes the meter dial to spin so fast I could slice deli meat on it. Turn it down. Potential savings: up to 3.3 million megawatt-hours.

2) Set your power management settings on Windows. In Vista, you could use the PowerSaver setting. For the rest of us who run Windows XP, forget about screensavers: they don’t save energy, what they save is your screen from phosphor burn-in, a danger of previous generations no longer present. You can power down your monitor when it’s not in use or follow the EPA EnergyStar instructions.

3) Turn off your computer, monitors, and your printers before you leave for the night. Don’t standby them: turn them off. Potential savings: 2 million megawatt hours.

4) Turn off your DSL modem before turning in for the night. Savings: up to 5 million megawatt-hours.

There ya go. 10 million megawatt-hours, easy. You could even start buying EnergyStar 4.0 or later certified computers, but I think most people would have a hard enough time just trying to get these first four things done.

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