Today I was doing a bit of moonlighting of a fun project a former colleague has graciously asked me to work on with him. I love these opportunities and I welcome them (hint, hint). It helps me stay connected to practice.

During the design phase a conversation ensued about the use of a label. It was a simple label at that. It brought up for me a knee jerk response that was so strong, I couldn’t explain it at first. I had to do some looking around the intertubes for similar labels with similar intents to communicate similar functionality and not a single site used that label. I understood the concept from the visual designer and the subject matter expert, but for the life of me, it felt like a needle in my side.

Then a few hours later I finally understood the issue I was having and it had to do with my mental model of computer systems in general and my philosophy about designing technology.

Here’s the dealio: A technological system can either be a cybernetic augmentation of our humanity or a servant that acts in our best interest. My predisposition towards story and performance has always prejudiced me (I think correctly) towards the later. The systems we create are actors as we are in a constrained & guided improvisational dialog. The former option is that technology in all its forms is a metaphorical appendage, meant to augment our very own physicality.

I will say that I lean heavily towards the “actor” but that is also because I’ve been mostly designing desktop-based systems through my career (web-based included). The ways we use desktop computers is almost always from this position of dialog.

But something is changing. What’s changing is the intrusion of mobile devices into our world. Smartphones which are in hand, and mobile, do behave by their very nature as an appendage, or more accurately an augmentation of an appendage (our hand).

So how does this play out in UI Design?

For me it all comes down to the semantics and syntax of language, but also to the type of controls we use. When designing for an appendage system. Everything should be “mine”. The computer shares the same central point of view as the owner, so of course everything that it displays is from the point of view of its owner. The list of groceries it is displaying is “mine”. Obviously, you can see the contrasting use of “your …” when the system is an actor playing the role of concierge. It is speaking to you in dialog and thus the voice of second person or other makes complete sense.

That is probably the first time I have understood from a mental model perspective how to decide when to use what terminology. But is it so clear. Can I have “your list” on the web version of an application but then have “my list” on its iPhone app? I’m not so sure that makes sense. I don’t have a clear answer but part of me feels comfortable saying that they should be different, but I’m not sure if the confusion would be noticed, ignored, or repulsive?

But this mental model can be explored further. The general tone of language is at stake here. Do the buttons I press have the POV of “self” or are the buttons an invitation from another? Am I “looking for …” something, or do I ask the system to “show me” something?

This notion of personal vs. collaborator can be added to the list of design principles that make up your project and hopeful put in a place that allows you to be reminded of that decision so that the system remains consistant. The POV of view of the voice is almost as important as the tone.

I’m a big fan of projected motion media: TV & movies. I love it in fact, to a fault. Two of my favorite TV shows are So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD) and Top Chef. I watch both of these shows not so much because I’m a dance aficcionado or a foodie (though I do love to dance and eat) but because I love learning about art criticism. I also love Pixar movies and again Pixar killed it with their latest release, Toy Story 3. Couple that with watching the World Cup and a very clear message is coming that I’d like to share to all you designers.

It is all about what you do in between that will turn your fantastically usable system that meets the needs of your customers so perfectly and turn it into an experience sought, after, awarded, lauded, and cherished.

On SYTYCD this week, one of the judges (a very accomplished choreographer, movie director and producer in his own right) gave the direction that you need to be more fluid between your steps. “You are hitting every step” but your movements between the steps are not full enough. (I ended quote b/c I realized I was paraphrasing.) When we look at a dancer, we are struck by fluidity. The movement feels s0 impossible to replicate that we are in awe. We are also entranced by fluidity. When there are fewer and fewer marks where we can find a pause we are brought into hypnosis like watching waves hitting the sea shore. Yes, we can create pause/stops/negative space for its own aesthetic, but this only works when it is actively contrasted against existing fluidity.

Let’s move on to cooking and Top Chef (or even Ratatouille) it is clear that the whole of the combination of ingredients is ever more powerful than them separately. But it is more than just the wine going with the steak that counts here. It is also about how moving between flavors is controlled. This is how the art of deconstructed cooking comes in. In order for it to work, it is more than just separation. The food needs to be prepared so that when eaten separately their order and their make up allows the eater to reflect on the original.

To transition this now to Toy Stor and Pixar, my friend Brooks saw the latest movie before me and he was struck (as were other reviewers) about how much better the computer rendering was. (He graduated with a degree from SCAD’s Digital Media group, so he’s pretty aware of this stuff.) and when I saw it, I too was struck by this. But this is not what made TS3 the best 3rd part of a 3pt series before. It is about the in betweens and about the holism that Pixar so beautifully crafted. Let’s take these on in order.

The trailer: Told me enough of the story to know it was about Andy getting old and the next type of fear all toys face: donation. But it wasn’t that. After watching the trailer (of course we had to prepare) re-watching Toy Story 2 was a completely new experience. It’s like that movie almost 10 years ago already knew what TS3 was going to be about. By playing off of Jessie’s story of abandonment it created the familiar and thus we were able to instantly frame the new story were were going to be entering.

The resolution: I mean screen resolution. This includes 3D, but also the resolution of the 3D rendering. They didn’t play to 3D but every scene felt deeper. By being more like what we expect the world to be we were more incline to believe what was happening in that world. But there was nothing in the digital translation of the analog that felt stopped. It was at such a high resolution that every pixel flowed into the next. There was no perception of aliasing all. The pixels just flowed together.

The segway: Pixar’s use of the segway is art. Every scene flows together perfectly referenced by the previous one. Even when we have a split in contexts/setting the movement between the two are choreographed beautifully through dialog and imagery.

These can be tied to the very well known concept of Gestalt Principles (tons of info) which draws upon the cognition & perception reality that at any given moment we are perceiving our total environment holistically.

But to translate this more tactically to our daily practice here are some things to think about:

Segway: Communicate where you are and where you are going. Yes, I bet you knew this, but do you do it? Do you really do it? How well do you telegraph your system’s journey. Of course, you have to do this without giving away too much, or the user will be overwhelmed.

Transitions: These are a type of segway, but so much more. Yes, they do communicate context, but they also increase fluidity. Transitions used to be difficult for us mere IxD’s to design for our developers in the more stagnant software and web app marketplace, but today tools like Blend and Flash Catalyst make designing transitions so utterly easy.

But this is also about choice of controls. By designing the controls transitions and sketching the motion graphic themselves using the above tools, you will find that your choice of controls may change. Some control types will not afford you the opportunity to manage more fluid transitions and further you’ll need to concentrate on how the presentation of these “new” controls do not degrade the core usability of the system.

The waiting: Transitions are not just about motion graphics. It is about managing the waiting. Whether in a software context or a service context there is almost always waiting. These pauses are seldom in your design control and seldom purposeful but they require as much design effort as the motion graphic transitions mentioned above. Sometimes it can be a simple loading animation that does what ou need, but it can be longer, or not relate directly or indirectly to an activity that can be actively monitored by your system. You are still responsible to the people using your system to engage them through, or segway them past these forced pauses.

Mental models, metaphors, abstraction: How you manage these will greatly effect the experience of “in-between”. “In-between’s” are often about how we fill in the gaps ourselves. In digital systems the gaps are huge. Many we cannot fill with literal mechanisms. We need analogs of linguistic and physical types. This in my mind is where most interaction design falls apart. One because doing this cross-culturally is very difficult, but also because of the wide variations that exist within any culture amongst their individuals. But it is one of our primary tools for filling in the gaps between digital tools and analog people.

If you want to read up more on related issues here I suggest you look up that stuff  on Gestalt Theory, watch SYTCD (the dancing is really great too!), and read up on Jonas Löwgren’s Fluency and Pliability (PDF) in interaction design.

In preparing for a meeting about my program I was forced to define some things in a way that can speak to the widest education audience of administrators and teachers. Here are 2 things I came up with that seems to be sticking and even got some good feedback from people on Twitter, so I’m sharing here.

What is Interaction Design?

Interaction Design is a multi-disciplinary design discipline that uses human understanding to manage the growth of complexity due to but not limited in scope to technology.

When first posted it said “multi-disciplinary practice”. This led to some people bringing up Applied Anthropology as possibly another practice that fit under this title. I don’t really mind sharing too much and as a trained Anthropologist sharing with Anthropology is pretty darn good with me. But there is definitely something particular about being a “design discipline” that separates IxD from Anthropology. The use of abductive thinking which in my mind separates design from other problem-solving methods (see recent IxDA thread) is core to the interaction design discipline. This separates it quite dramatically from Applied Anthropology.

What does the Interaction Designer do?

The Interaction Designer designs the behaviors of systems that lead people through positive experiences.

This one seemed to get no flack from people except for its closeness possibly to “user experience” (UX). But as discussed with @nickf (1 of my favorite twitter sparring partners) I believe that UX is not a design practice, or even a discipline. It is both a result of both of those and/or a philosophy to be applied to both of those (practice & discipline). Lastly, UX is a community of practice which is different from being a practice in and of itself.

Lastly, I want to high light this. What I appreciate the most about the above statement is that it eliminates the idea that we design experiences while still acknowledging that experiences are at the heart of what it is that is created between the artifacts that we do design and the human beings that engage with them alone and in concert with others (some of which we do design and some of which we don’t control at all).

I’d be interested in YOUR thoughts about these 2 little semantic trinkets.

As I write this, I’m also caught w/ the nagging question of how do these definitions change the way you think about what you do, or more importantly inform what it is you will continue doing moving forward? Think of this in the broadest sense if you can. I’m still scratching my head, myself, but really want to make sure that all my “defining the dam thing” hobby is more than just semantic navel gazing and has applied academic purpose.

I got back from @uxlx this week. My write up of the conference will be @johnnyholland later this week. The conference was quite excellent. The diversity and quality of attendees and speakers felt unprecedented to me which combined with the venue and surrounding city made for a wonderful event.

What I want to focus on comes from the closing keynote by one of my fave UX speakers, Jared Spool (@jmspool). His talk was entitled “The Dawning Age of Experience”. In this talk he outlines the qualities of organizations and designers that have led to the design of great experiences (also successful from a business perspective, as well). In this talk, one of his main points was that great experience design is not open to introspection.

I found the use of this term odd and later asked Jared to clarify. He stated that it is not his term, but is a means of explaining results which cannot be easily explained, deconstructred, or codified. He gave 2 examples outside design that were really interesting. The first was about a group of people who can determine the sex of a baby chicken (chick) well before we can through other means with pretty good odds. Well in excess to the 50% that we are all born with. After outlining the “sexing of chicks” Jared explained a similar phenomenon amongst midwives who are able to determine a fetus’ weight with much higher accuracy rates than any medical device or doctor’s procedure in practice today.

Then Jared spoke about how this plays out within design. He explained that he was once invited to an important conference by AIGA. At one point during the conference a creative director of an interactive agency was reviewing their redesign of the Wall Street Journal. Coincidentally, Jared and his company UIE.com had just completed a review of the Wall Street Journal and other financial information sources for a project he was working on, and so he was not listening without some background to the topic of the design. It turns out that the designer nailed the design. He outlined every major point mentioned in Jared’s report and executed on those points really well.

Jared took it upon himself to question the designer. The designer claimed to have done no research–none. He was able to explain why he did what he did but he couldn’t explain how he did what he did. He could not approach it with introspection. He just did it.

How does this happen? It comes from the type of education that is not seen amongst the columns and pig skin diplomas of formal education. It comes through deep & sustained practice within the confines of relaxed mentorship. This isn’t to say that basics of craft and concepts of design thinking and supporting social sciences and humanities that make great designers can’t come out of today’s formal design education. However, the model of apprenticeship is something that is hard to replace in the school setting compared to out in the field.

In a class today, we discussed this topic because I found myself giving directions and not being able to fully support the direction and didn’t want to make shit up in front of my students. I related this story and said that basically, I just know. I know because I’ve tried so many permutations within my years of practice and have found out through all those failures that this is the right answer.

Then I remembered a very long conversation on the IxDA discussion list. The originating post was made by Jim Leftwich, now a former board member. In his originating post and the subsequent conversation he attempted to clarify what he meant by something he dubbed “Rapid Expert Design”. His explanation of his apprenticeship and working system left many aspects unexplained, but more importantly actually tried to codify how the system works.

During the conference I had opportunity to speak with Luke Wroblewski about apprenticeships. She said that everyone who worked under him  he has thought of as an apprentice to him. I know for my short spells of management I tried to think the same way, as well. But I still have pause for a few reasons. I don’t think that most UX design managers do think about apprenticing their direct reports and almost even more important, I do not think that employees understand that they are being apprenticed. First, this relates to the culture of rewarded failure that Jared speaks about in his talk. So few organizations have this culture. I have worked at many and I haven’t ran into 1 that has it, and that includes working directly for creativity-centric organizations like advertising agencies. Second, in the UX community where way too many of us do not have any formal (or even informal) training in traditional  design or visual communications we’ve never experienced what a real apprenticeship studio looks like. Even many programs today are more focused on imparting chances for practice over having practice being part of an apprenticeship experience. Third, it is rare that upon hiring employees feel that they are entering an apprentice environment. I have never heard a hiring manager put in their job description that they are looking for an apprentice. Basically, we are made to feel as if our employment is the equivalent of being converted from a human being into a cog into a machine.

My entire career has been one where I’ve been hunting to be an apprentice. I know that it is not something that requires direct overt invitation. The closest I feel I came to that for myself is in my previous job at Motorola Enterprise Mobility, when I got to work with the amazing (and humble) Ted Booth. He is currently the Director of Interaction Design at Smart Design. Unfortunately, for me he took that position at Smart months after I joined Motorola, so I was not really able to get the long term impact. I did learn a lot from other peers there in an apprentice like way, but the lack of depth in any one area, and the lack of closeness in discipline made it difficult to sustain an apprentice-like atmosphere.

All this begs the question of what an apprenticeship should look like? How can an organization set up such an experience? I may take this on as part of a more broad discussion about design education, formal and informal in the coming weeks. For this article, I’ll conclude with the thought that definitely within the user experience experience the concept of apprenticeship needs revitalization. Even in more traditional design disciplines economic forces are making it hard for well meaning organizations to sustain the requirements that make apprenticeships work.

More soon, I hope!

[I also want to add that having a "mentor" is not the same as being a part of a thorough and formal apprenticeship.]

[This is the second part in a continuing series about UI Design. Catch the 1st part here!]

Storytelling has been huge of late. Many people have been talking about storytelling and creating narratives as a core competency and practice for good interaction design. Some have gone so far as to say that narrative IS what we experience when we use tools and services of any variety because it is through story or narrative that we derive meaning in our lives.

I have also recently been exposed to the practice and methods of service design. In their practice they do not speak of users, but of actors. This reminded me of the classic UML work I did as an IA/BA (business analyst) at the turn of the millennium. We also spoke about actors instead of users back then as well, but did not really think of them as pieces in a production. We didn’t take the metaphor that far.

Today though we are taking the metaphor of performance and production that far if not all the way to the end. We are using video production to create “experience” prototypes as but the clearest example. So I’d like to take this opportunity and declare that like many who refuse to say “user” any longer and use human or searcher or customer or creator, I am no longer going to talk about pages within any type of application platform. I would like to begin advocating for the term “stage” to be used.

Why “stage”?

First, the term “page” which is so common in use to talk about major changes in context (per my original piece in this series) for web sites and applications does not work for all types of application on all types of platforms/media. By using a new term that has appropriate usages outside of the web environment we can do a better job at training application designers instead of just web designers.

Second, it has two meanings. Both of them can be very useful when trying to describe how a human being moves through an interface. It is very common to talk about steps in a process as “stages”. Further, the term “stage” is a great allusion to performance and story. Yes, there is a 3rd meaning, but it isn’t so useful here since no one is on a coach (buggy) being pulled by multiple horses.

This second definition though is the main reason. The use of stage as an metaphor will lend itself to help so many designers think about the environment they are creating as a setting for where dialog and action collide towards creating a performance that satisfies and elicits emotion. Like the real stage itself, we can create sub-stages where sub-dominant contexts have great significance and focus if only but for a short while, while contextually relevant to the whole. We can understand though that a curtain pull between stages (scenes) can act as specific dramatic play, toying with the user’s anticipation, or better preparing the user to receive a large monologue of data that they will need further assistance in processing.

But it is also important to remember that not all UI Design is done for “the web”. Outside the web the concept of the page has no significance. For visual basica applications they have used the term “form”. For Flash applications they have used the term form or scene. I’d like to propose that by using a new term, we can find a semantic structure to UI design that speaks to all application platforms. It will especially help web designers to start speaking about their applications without being tied to the previous metaphor and its unnecessary limitations. I also think it will help web designers and developers alike move more fluidly between different types of application media.

In our next installment we’ll talk about what makes up a stage as it relates to UI Design and Interaction Design. If you missed the 1st one, you can always give it a read.

[This is going to be a 2 part piece discussing first why designing for contexts of use is so important by analyzing kayak.com as a great example. Then part two is going to ask for a new metaphor to be be used to describe this type of design across a greater number of platforms.]

In 2005 and 2006 (you know, ancient times) we started to see that the metaphor of the page that existed till that point to describe the major context of focus in UI design for the web was starting to crumble. At the 2006 IA Summit Gene Smith quoted me as saying “The Page is Dead” as he stated afterward “Long Live the Page!”. I took his talk to heart. Later that year, I changed my own presentations to talk directly to the page and the importance of understanding that “the page is a metaphor of a moment of uninterrupted context.”

There are 3 core points to make in this slide (besides the fact that Neo kicked ass!):

1. Nothing on the internet really exists. It is only through metaphor that we can understand anything that happens on computers at all. It’s all 1′s and 0′s and we are at the mercy of those who present concepts to us so we can derive meaning to the whole.

2. The web has transitioned from a mode primarily of reading and writing to a mode of activities and tasks.

3. If we are to have a metaphor at all, like “page” then we need to reframe what it means so that the meaning we give it fits the analogy of its reality.

The example I gave back then was kayak.com. 4 years later (4 decades in internet terms) it is still as good as ever. There are 3 distinct contexts within Kayak:

1. creating your search query
2. browsing results with the ability to filter and sort along key criteria
3. confirming your purchase destination

There are other distinct contexts, but you can look at these as the primary examples if the flow of Kayak as a service. What is unclear is why these contexts? What makes these moments of distinction worthy of separation, focus, and control? Let’s review each one.

When creating a search query there is one thing we know. We know what we are searching for. We know nothing else. By “what we are searching for” we know what type of travel item. We also know the criteria of that search. It makes no sense to have a bunch of blank areas taking up space and/or creating distraction for the end user.

But what Kayak knows that the end user may not, is the intensity of the process of running a search for travel. By maintaining a distinct context here it is easier for the designer/developer of Kayak to mitigate the awful feeling of waiting for results to emerge. That is to say that the next context, results, is completely reliant on the criteria of the search. Any change in most of the parameters of a travel search require a deep set of processing rules across many servers to acquire a result set.

What the user learns, only upon first use is the shere enormity of a results set for Kayak. If Kayak was to make room for both setting the search query and its result set, there would have to be a sacrifice of usability of both screens. Further, if the end-user changed specific criteria like dates or places in the search query while viewing results, existing results would have to disappear, or alternatively there would have to be a clear way to save pieces of the existing results or concatenate the results of multiple queries. This level of complication would be difficult for even the best designer to manage with probably only utility for a small subset of user real world scenarios.

The power of Kayak though is revealed on this screen more than any other. It is in the left side filters. I can change any of these parameters and without so much as a flick of the page, the data (which is already resident on my computer) is limited in view or changed in order as I requested. Being able to play with this data in real-time without having to run heavy queries back to Kayak’s server is a win for me (the end user) and for Kayak (as it reduces load on their servers).

Besides the filtering capabilities of the UI, it is also important for the UI to offer controls to progressively display if not give options for the next level of key actions, such as purchase. In the example above, when the user clicks “select” for any option, they are presented with a dialog overlay of the precise purchase options.  There are other overlays like this in the results list area. There is also progressive display of parameter options that are not as used as often in the filter area on the left side panel. Combined these allow the user to change the context permanently (the filter presentations) and then the overlays for progressive temporary information, or an access confirming for the end user goes to the right place when they want to.

A great feature in Kayak is the overlay to see a the details of a single direction on a flight combination. This overlay with accompanying options allows the user to get valuable information that is contextualized with useful options for making decisions without a large investment through the change of the interface.

The details view of all directions and all stops is made available through a contextual progressive display. This has had various view types in the past. At one time for example it was a dialog overlay that was modal (didn’t allow the user to use the rest of the application unless the dialog was acted upon). What is also interesting is that depending on the type of travel object being searched for (flights, hotels, cars) this interaction changes. For example, for hotels the amount of information in a details view is so large with so many different types of views (hotel info, map, reviews) that it actually opens a completely new context, but does so without destroying the results view by opening a completely new window or tab (depending on the user’s settings).

Here on the flight page though, this progressive “opening” of the details of the flight selection could be seen as a “sub context” because as you can see, the amount of information that needs to be made available takes up so much of the screen real estate that almost all the rest of the results page is gone. What this does allow though is to take advantage of the 4th dimension in Interaction Design through scrolling. A user can easily compare 2 open details views by having them both open and scrolling between them. I do not think though this is how it is commonly used. So its other advantage is that it allows the user to dig deeper without feeling like there is a large investment in the system to present this information to them and thus not difficult to return back to where they were.

As you can see through this deconstruction of the contexts of Kayak, a lot of thought went into when to “change the page” and when not to. It is important to have focus, but it is also important to make the user feel comfortable in highly invested search operations, so they feel at ease in digging deeper.

I hope this deconstruction of Kayak.com will help any designer in the future make decisions about when and where to create new contexts and how to manage dominant and as described in the last example, sub-dominant contexts.

In the next part of this series, I’m going to discuss why the page metaphor needs to change to something more robust so that the idea of context management can be applied generally to all types of platforms.

Found this great interview done by @JohnnyHolland of Mark Baskinger, Professor of Industrial Design & Interaction Design at Carnegie Mellon University. He talks beautiful about drawing and what value it gives the designer. Can’t wait to reference this as part of my “secret sauce” workshop @UxLx next month in Lisbon.

Check it out:

Mark Baskinger on Drawing Ideas and Communicating Interaction from Johnny Holland on Vimeo.

Finally got 2 seconds on my friend’s iPad today. Can’t walk into Best Buy because I don’t trust myself. I played with it for maybe 5min tops and a lot of that time was with my little boy tuggin’ at my sleeve saying, “What’s this?” So this is by no means a review.

Despite being accused of being a “total fanboy” (something I don’t understand since until a month ago I never owned a mac my entire life) I was really skeptical of the iPad. I just knew though that until I touched it, my opinion was going to be quite stupid. I was skeptical for a few reasons:

• The hardware made me feel like it was just a big iPod Touch.
• I was REALLY upset w/ the lack of capture tools (no camera or mic)
• And like Robert Fabricant pointed out on Fast Company recently the OS felt really like a step up from the phone OS. This felt like something MS would do about 5 years ago.

So I finally got to pick it up. I have to admit I wasn’t wowed. I don’t think I”m really the market for it. Maybe if I didn’t already have my netbook that I’m using now beautifully with @jolicloud running I might be.  I don’t watch a lot of movies and I’m not a big reader. I have tried to tell myself that maybe I would read more if I had an e-reader, but my wife won’t let me test that out and to be honest, I think she’s right on this one. Oh! I am also not a big gamer. Lastly, I live on my iPhone. I type blog entries, really long emails, do task lists, etc. So I don’t need something bigger just to type better, faster on it.

But that’s me and that’s not the point of this. Not every tool has to be for everyone. But that’s not the point here either.

What I noticed in all this that for some reason struck me harder than in previous work I’ve done in similar spaces myself is how important trust is to the design process. I look at the iPad and I realize that few organizations could do it. Not b/c of lack of talent or lack of skill, but because of lack of trust. Now I could flip this and say that Steve Jobs is capable of seeing the future, but I really doubt that. He definitely has vision and enables vision with his team, but seeing vision through takes trust. A manager and all the team members have to sit back and say, “It will come” and they have to know that “It’s ok if it doesn’t.”

That’s a HUGE deal. There are few environments that I have worked in in either software or hardware that has that freedom of time and failure. Or truly the impossibility of failure because of the freedom of time.

Along with this, I will add the importance of building it to know. Only in using it can we know the true value of interactivity. To me this has been the largest failure of most UX practices where the UX designer never builds anything. How can they know the success of their design if it cannot be used. If you are working on anything more complex than a standard info-site then as a designer it needs to be played with, touched, manipulated, transacted with to be understood and validated as successful.

Tools have come out lately that help this cause, but the processes of UX designers are still too wrapped up in the wastefulness of tools that are way too static. The only static 2D images we produce should be sketches. Anything else after that has to be interactive. If you can’t make it interactive at any level of richness then find a partner who can or get yourself a relatively cheap subscription to lynda.com and figure it out.

The only way that “It will come” is if you build it.

I came across a piece about the iPad from @petterihilsila, entitled Game-Changers Are Usually Imperfect. Normally, I wouldn’t post something just about the iPad, but I think this piece highlights for me the importance of platform design over component design in products and services (especially where they are combined).

Before Saturday, when people asked me how important the iPad was going to be, I told them to judge it not by the sum of the device that Apple released this week. iPad is a platform, and platforms are processes–so if you’re trying to figure out if iPad is a big deal, envision the one that Apple will release a year from now. Then decide.

This seems like such an obvious lesson but so few organizations have taken this approach forward well. There are huge obstacles, but it is very possible and feasible to do and the competition will if you don’t.

In my last piece, I discussed an important part of design education which is lessons in humanities especially rhetoric and comparative literature. I discussed the importance of frames as well as narrative. But it doesn’t end there. These concepts–frames and narrative–are just tools for something bigger, which is meaning.

As human beings a huge part of our derivation of meaning comes from language. Language though is largely understood as a collection of graphical symbols and signs. Further, we rely on non-linguistic pictograms to complete or enhance moments of communication where linguist communication is not always enough. But even what I’m referring to as non-linguistic almost always is understood as a linguistic analog.

The study of semiotics is crucial for all sorts of communication, but since design is so focused and relies on visual communication it is even more important, so I’ll add here:

#17 Semiotics: How do we understand and create meanings within signs.
When we talk about providing affordances within systems (where there weren’t before) is is really about creating cues through visual signs. Sometimes these signs existed within culture or map directly to culture and can be predictably understood. Sometimes we have to create wholly new signs and teach these systems. Sometimes especially these new semiotics exist in spaces beyond the initially visible and more involved envisioning our own kinesthetic presence. Regardless, for us to do well as designers, especially of systems without direct analog controls, we have to become experts in using existing and creating new meanings through the many forms of signs.

This is #17 of my series on thinking about design education. Here are the rest of the links:

• 1-13 – The beginning
• 14 – Creating knowledge
• 15 – Art
• 16 – Humanities

As always, I’d love to hear from people their thoughts, contributions, questions and contradictions about any and all of these ideas.

[Continuing my series on design education]

I feel blessed to have come to design in a serpentine path. I came to be a designer after being an anthropologist. Not only did I get the obvious dose of social sciences like anthropology, sociology and psychology, but I got a strong does of linguistics, history, folklore, and political science as well. Other peers of mine also studied economics, philosophy and rhetoric.

When I moved to design, I noticed there were a lot of folks like myself who came to design through a similar social science or humanities path. I noticed these folks had something different. They were able to add value through the act of framing. Framing is what I consider to be the most important skill of a business person and if you are involved in design you are involved in business.

An education in liberal arts I feel (and will probably be scrutinized for it) forces a student through more ways of framing the world (if not the universe). One could say (and I will probably be punished for that too) that science is a singularity of a frame and is the basis for all of the natural sciences, mathematics, and applied sciences (engineering). Design also has a limited view of frames, but is balanced out by the infinite frames that the multi-cultural arts provide.

But what is a frame?

It can be simply the way one begins something. It is usually most obvious in the communication arts, when a person uses an opening reference to a discussion and is hard to refute on its own. The following statements then are based on the logic of that opening statement which in combination create a whole new meaning.

This same idea of frames can be seen in the way we learn to communication visually as well. Engendering visual communication is one of the common ways of doing this.

It is important though for designers to be steeped in as many types of frames and manners of framing as time allows.

But it is not just about frames. The humanities offers other types of lessons, especially in terms of narratives. Comparative literature and history both are imbued with tremendously rich narratives. Storytelling is the designer’s data. It persuades toe-to-toe with data in the best scenarios. It is often why creative directors in advertising come from writing and not always from the visual communications side.

So the next rule

#16 A complete education includes the humanities and social sciences.

Here are all the articles thus far in the series:

• 1-12 +13
• #14
• #15

As always I’d love to get people’s thoughts on design education.

I’ve been resistant to publish stuff here that says, look over here for something I’ve said. But this piece in particular is something I put a lot of attention on and struggled about whether or not it should be published elsewhere or on my blog.

As I’ve been teaching this past year and been in dialog with many design disciplines, this piece represents my best thinking about the best direction for young designers and how they should engage in interaction design as a part of their larger design education and career development.

Check out the piece on JohnnyHolland.org.

As part of a press release that was crafted by SCAD for the Interaction 10 | Savannah conference, i was asked for a quote (well a lot of quotes) and this one was put in there:

“Interaction design is not the design of a medium but rather a philosophical shift in how to design for any medium. It answers the questions of why, how and what with a new lens and expanded impact,”

I found it interesting that after a big brain dump on what is IxDA, what is its influence, what is its partnership with SCAD in the past and now in the future and what is Interaction 10, this is the quote they chose. It’s one of those quotes that when you read it you double take as if listening to yourself on an audio recording. Ya know? that sense of disbelief that that is really you.

Then I read it again and I realized I didn’t say anything at all, because the statement is so separated from its context that it just isn’t real. So here is the full paragraph in which I was responding to this question, “What is unique about interaction design at SCAD?”

As far as I can tell SCAD is the only design school that offers interaction design as a minor to its undergrads. The program here at SCAD for the minor is geared towards bringing the design of behavior across all the design disciplines here at SCAD. By focusing on behavior regardless of medium, we have a strong opportunity to bring a new level of fidelity to all our design programs. Interaction Design is not the design of a medium but rather a philosophical shift in how to design for any medium. By concentrating on the dialog that takes place between people products & services and then the effect that those dialogs have on the behaviors of people, interaction design, answers the questions of why, how, and what with a new lens and expanded impact.

Reading that, again really helps fill in the blanks for me and is a lot more meaningful all around.

Watch This! before continuing: (It’s an amazing video prototype that re-thinks multi-touch for the desktop.)

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

First Clayton, I’m incredibly impressed by this video. It shows an attention to detail in production value, theoretical analysis, and overall solutioneering that I know many can learn and be inspired by.

I have a host of questions about the video:

1. This feels overly complicated. “It feels” that way b/c it looks like (I can’t play w/ it yet, right?) a piano metaphor and at that the gestures that each finger has to be able to articulate to reach the level of expert is even more complex than that of a pianist. That being said, I just realized that most functionality is available in simple strokes and this can be a way of ramping up someone from novice to expert. I just wonder how many people will be able to make it past chopsticks.

2. I have worked in the industrial design community for quite some time now. Their reliance on tablet profile desktop screens through the use of Wacom Cintiques is quite strong. Other 3D software communities like visual effects artists, etc. are also making great use of this model. The flexibility of the the cinque to articulate between positions is the key to its success b/c it takes advantage of the reality that there are different modes of operation throughout the day. I do Alias and then I answer email. But my main point is that due to the this ability to transform the tablet is not permanent and thus the stress you suggest inherit in that design is not real. BUT! I also want to say that before we had computers we wrote. I mean w/ a pen and this meant looking down and such. We survived that, no? All that is to say that I would re-evaluate your critique of the tablet position, or your limited view of the tablet profile and re-examine it.

3. Who? who is this for? I think your video is trying to generalize experiences which may not be true. For example I have changed my entire mode of operation to be comopletely browser driven. Close to 80% of my daily interactions happen in the browser. This means that due to tabs I have 1 application open at a time with maybe 2 other widgets that I access from a sidebar (music & twitter). This model of interaction feels like it is an extreme case, which is why the person above who talks about music is totally perfect for this, b/c music has such a level of complexity of controls.

Further, is “window” operation/manipulation really that hard in the current model? I probably spend 80% of my time on the keyboard and 20% on the mouse, so what problem are you look at that requires such an intense shift in hardware and software models?

This is to ask plainly, “Is the problem that great or even really there at all?”

But another important point to this is that design needs to not just think about human mechanics, but needs to be situational. I love video prototypes, but I stress to anyone who tries it that video prototypes need to be situational. The narrative of human use is an imperative in making the medium be truly useful to a design process. So I would ask that a 2nd take on this video do just that. place a “real” person in the middle using this in their day to day life. Bumptop a similar attempt at desktop re-design has the same problem, while I think that Aurora by Adapative Path is a great example of changing the browser & hell the desktop too, by embedding real human narrative into their demonstrations.

4. the loss of direct manipulation feels to me to be the crux of the issue. What makes an iphone and other multi-touch systems “work” is direct manipulation. If multi-touch is just a remoted system like a mouse, then all you’ve done is change the point of gesturing and added an arguable level of complexity that is not required. to me it is direct manipulation and not gesturing where the greatest added benefit of touch comes to play and this doesn’t address this.

5. the keyboard. 1 area that is interesting is that you don’t address the transitional moments of shifting between keyboard (well we all know the keyboard is a problem in and of itself) and the “pointing device”. The simple and current elbow articulation to a single handed mouse not only is simple and the muscle memory easy to embed, but it has the added value of leaving 1 hand on the keyboard so that experts (ever play doom?) can gesture with both hands to create unique modes of operation. I.e. control and drag causes a copy.

But the real benefit of this mode of operation is that w/ one hand “always on the keyboard” you end up with increased efficiency of target acquisition b/c the moving hand can always use the reference point of the stationary hand when trying to find home keys when leaving the mouse.

6. the existing trackpad issues where not addressed. The main one being my wife’s pet peeve which is that she always looses her cursor with accidental taps by her wrists.

7. Why choose 1. Going back to my ID studio, the current set up has many devices: critique (pen direct touch), 3D mouse, keyboard and regular mouse.

Most importantly though, that putting yourself out there like this to criticism is HUGE. This is inspirational not only for what it offers directly but because it offers a point of discussion. I could have never done this level of articulation with someone to respond to as well produced as your demonstration. It has great thinking and there are real problems to address, or more importantly even if the problems aren’t great, there are still places where we can hope to do better.

My top list:
1. object management
2. ergonomic data entry
3. mental models of pervasive and transitive computing
4. form factors beyond (too wide, open, eh?)
5. self induced behavioral change through technology

Thanx Clayton for putting this out there! It is going straight in front of all my classes and my entire faculty today!

– dave

Today I was working on my workshop for prospective high school students who are interested in SCAD (@scaddotedu). The workshop is a 2.5 hour interactive, hands-on, intensive extravaganza.

So I’m using as a base my 1/2 day workshop that I did as part of Interaction 09 as an Intro to IxD. Fun times were had by all. But as I looked at that slides, I realized that WAY too much of that material is way beyond what high school students need. So, I’m toning it down and beefing it up.

One area (about 1/2 the workshop, I hope) is a break down of the practice of making. Previously, I had the following: sketching, tell, frame, refine. For the most part I think this works, but it is incomplete for me and well not descript enough.

So here is where I landed in my haste to get this all together on time:

Immerse, Collaborate & Observe:
One must do research. The best kind starts with immersion. I’m an anthropologist at my core and ethnographic participatory observation is still my favorite type of research. But any sort of immersion coupled with acute observation leads to great results. This past week at IDSA I heard from a design researcher from Continuum that in order to really design out of our cultural box we need to immerse ourselves into something wholly new. The collaborate to me is next. Now that you’ve acquired the language and customs, it is time to collaborate. Partner with those whom you want to design for (and in this case with). All the while in both processes there is observation. In fact, observation and our ability to capture what we observe is a crucial tool & skill to learn.

Tasks:

• Ethnography
• Interview
• co-design/participatory design
• participate
• Analyze
• Model
• Understand

Explore & Experiment:
I have gone on record many times saying that design is the intentional creation of an environment that encourages serendipity to occur. When I talk about sketching I can’t not mention this fact, and it is during the early ideation process where we take the insights from immersive and collaborative observation and analyze and synthesize them into creativity–exploring new paths, and experimenting with things only previously unimagined. The opening up to associative juxtapositions is at the heart of designerly method throughout all these processes and frameworks.

Tasks

• sketch
• prototype
• play
• travel
• discovery
• create

Situate & humanize:
I used to call this “telling”, but it is what we do with the narrative that is more important than the narrative itself. What we need to accomplish with any manner of narrative is to humanize our ideas and make sure that the characters, objects, dialog all have a well defined context.

Tasks

• storyboard
• video prototype
• role-play
• define
• understand
• judge
• embue
  

Frame & validate:
At some point the funnel has to get much smaller. To do that we must look at what we know. Not just from the user research but from the other areas of consideration. One of these areas is just the human being. and another are human beings. This is where we hone the solution to fit, to be the RIGHT design. We take our language acquisition and use our inner Rosetta Stone to translate requirements into comprehendable interfaces and all that goes with them. Finally, it is about making the design right!

Tasks

• wireframe
• structure
• task flow
• language setting
• seo
• organize
• navigate

Finish & express:
Finish in this sense is like the finish on an object. The final details that bring it all together. But this is also where the designer adds flourishes from their own soul to express themselves aesthetically.

Tasks

• Help (inline/other)
• Messaging
• exception management
• Visual design
• Audio design
• Motion Graphics
• Final interactive prototype — ship it!

So that’s where I’ve landed today. What y’all think?

(an experiment in open source design and interaction design education)

Introduction

What I’m about to start is a huge project. I won’t be doing it alone (at least not for long, 1 way or another). I want to create a series of tutorials that take on the multiple facets that lead to the design of great software. The project is about educating ourselves and each other. Like an Unconference where no one comes to purely consume, everyone who enters this project is a co-teacher, mentor, and student.

What we are here to do is design and prototype (at all levels of fidelity and manner) GREAT software and services for software. But we are also looking to reframe the open source project as a design centric one. We are here to make huge mistakes, get terribly embarrassed, teach each other, and learn from all.

Project Goals:

1. To create an educational framework for interaction design specifically and all aspects of digital design more generally. Hopefully the framework can be repeated as a long-term and remote capable curriculum.
2. To be a framework for others to plug-in their educational expertise in topics that I am unable to elaborate on. This is a major requirement as there are definitely facets of this project that I will definitely be recruiting help for.
3. To e a framework to push my own learning in areas that I am lacking as a designer, as a developer, etc.  And in so doing be a framework for others to fill in their own gaps as well. Being a teacher teaches you one thing so quickly–that you have so much more to learn.

Why twitter

1. confined and easily understood space
2. while confined it is cloudware + unproduct + traditional software product all wrapped in one
3. it covers traditional desktop, iPhone, webkit, mobile (other), widgets (blog, dashboard, google gadgets, sidebar)
4. there are actually fairly different and exciting contexts of uses and user types (aka personas that can be explored long term)
5. there is a robust collection of existing tools out there for deconstruction
6. basic functionality is small but could be built upon and grow complexity over time or through iterations of design & development
7. there is a large design community and larger developer community already fairly invested in their own use and possibly invested in being involved in this way

Get involved

While the end goal of this project is go all open, the early days, weeks, and probably months are going to need to be more closed. Not opaque from view, but rather we need to create a glass box.

So with that in mind I’m looking for people with interest in the concept for the project, believe in open education, and have something to bring to the project that I don’t have. Here’s the list:

• Visual design: especially in regards to interactivity
• Game deign/theory
• True programming skills: Flex/Flash, iPhone, Java, HTML 5, Databases, APIs, Web Services
• Service design
• Business
• video prototyping
• visual thinking
• social theory, especially around social networks

Everyone should consider themselves a creative contributor and remember that one of the goals is related to design-centrism.

To this regard people interested should send me an email (me(at)davemalouf(dot)com). In it should be the following:

1. explaining what contribution they hope to bring to the project,
2. how twitter makes a difference to their lives and the people around them,
3. a vision statement about open source design,
4. and finally what they most want to learn through this project

The glass around the box

So how will the rest of you benefit from all this?

1. All participants will be encouraged and expected to blog frequently about this project.
2. Calls for participation in the form of pure student roles will come up often. Outstanding students will be asked to become full contributors .
3. Everyone reading this and other blog posts will be encouraged to give feedback to the work as it is presented. The eventual hope for the project as it grows and flourishes is to apply more resources towards better transparent & inclusive systems.  (I didn’t want plain free wiki-ware, so am using socialtext which does not have “public” abilities in its free version.)

Well for now, just put your feedback here in the comment form below and let’s get this party started.

So finally after 3 months of waiting the next large chunk of vids are up on line via Library.IxDA.org.

My faves include:

ME! – Foundations of Interaction Design

Jared Spool & Friends: Hiring the next generation of interaction designers

(at around the 46min mark you can see me causing a ruckus during Q&A. It’s real fun!)

In BusinessWeek Bill Buxton gets a short piece where he answers the usual engineering type question regarding UX design.

It is a beautfiul piece that for the 1st time for me articulates the absurdity of the initial engineering question and outlines the various levels of design “education” from easy to figure out to requiring a degree.

Nicely done, Bill!

Check it out!

This summer I need to go to camp. Yup. Like the young school teachers who turned camp counselors over the summer, I too need a job.

So let me talk a little bit about what I can do for y’all.

Remotely:

1. Do Interaction Design work. UI Design work on web, software, embedded and hardware. This would work best in the scenario where your team is not formally trained in ui design, ia, or ixd practices and need that extra nudge to get them over the edge and produce better work, but you can’t afford to hire new blood during these times permanently.
2. Do mentoring with your team combined remote & in person. What this means is that I can work with your team and give them guidance, and instruction on process and criticism to make what they deliver 1st class. This works best for a young start up UX team that needs a higher level design director managing their work, but funds are low for such a permanent high level position, but you don’t want your quality to diminish during this hard times.

On site for short stints (less than a week at a time):

1. The most obvious thing is a controlled workshop.
   1. • Sketching for IxD – This workshop is perfect for organizations that want to begin to move their UX &/or UI team towards a more design centric process of innovation & creativity. Sketching as a process is at the heart of great design thinking. It is a tool for idea generation and rapid idea validation. (1 day)
      • How to design Rich Internet Applications – Taking fundamentals of HCI & mixing it with a new understanding of the aesthetics of interaction design, this workshop will take UI Devs/Designers, IAs, and others past the basic patterns of RIA design, and towards a deeper understanding of what works in the growingly complex rich paradigms of today’s network-based applications. (1-2 days)
      • Introduction to IxD – This workshop is great for people who are in product management, business analysis, and other non-design roles such as development and information architecture, but find themselves doing interaction design as part of their jobs. They just want to know more about what they are doing.  (1/2-1 day)
   • You represent an organization that would like to have me come in and do one of my workshops that I’ve done in the past or offer something new:
   • What other organizations have suggested in the past is that I do 1 of these 1-2 day workshops, then we do an day of mentorship & critique on ongonig work within the organization.
2. Bring me in to facilitate a design sprint for your team. What is a design sprint? It is a short term design exercise around a specific problem where a group researches, ideates, refines, tests and produces work within a short time. I’d suggest 5 biz days. (NOT 9-5). Obviously, after the sprint I can remain connected the project, remotely, if desired.

I’m also obviously open to YOUR suggestions as well.

So I know in these troubled times added expenses are hard to endure, but having temporary help to get you through times where permenant design leadership is lacking, can really save the day.

Shoot me an email! dave(dot)ixd(at)gmail(dot)com

Just a simple blog post to let people know that I posted a reprise to my “Foundations of Interaction Design” presentation I did at Interaction 09 | Vancouver on JohnnyHolland.org.

As a reminder you can see the slides from the talk here.

The JohnnyHolland.org piece is listed here.