–Engage

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.

Today I was pointed to a blog post by an IxD (@jseiden) questioning the need for visual design skills. Below is more answer.

Seriously, give it up, you need to work on your drawing skills, or at least your envisioning skills.

You want to work on behavioral systems then you have to design not just “the wireframe” but the system. Yes you can collaborate with visual designers, but the end product is in that collaboration and you can’t think that your deliverable is “the wireframe”. It isn’t. Your deliverable always has to be the final product. This also means that the intimate collaboration (or personal abilities) also need to include production execution of the behavioral code that makes those graphics interactive, responsive, and engaging.

But even before that, visual skills communicate better even at the level of the abstract. Your models of your research, your task models, flow diagrams, sitemaps, content strategy diagrams, etc. etc. will always be more valuable if they are well communicated.

Then to communicate behavior you still need the visual. Prototypes and narratives told in visuals are always more compelling/convincing than straight up wireframes AND they are clearer an more precise allowing for the collaborate mentioned above to take place best.

I need to close w/ “bullshit” on the last comment. The DesignBoom issue is not b/c people are focused so closely on the visual, its because the visual is the only true measure that human beings can respond to. As an IxD you are part psychologist. You have to go back to the basics of cognition and perception and realize that to be noticed/perceived and then processed you have to reach a critical mass of gestalt so that the person in question “notices” what it is you want noticed. This is not a conspiracy against IxD, but rather reality of communication.

I’ll just close with this thought that I learned from my ID education as small as it was:

A great idea that is not well communicated is not really a great idea at all.

Can we communicate as well without visuals or even good visuals? That is the question and for me the answer is always no.

So here I am on my first week of having an iPad sitting in bed next to my wife who is already asleep while I am reading a book … HOLD IT RIGHT THERE PEOPLE …

1. I do not like to read books. Really I don’t. Makes my occupation of being a professor really difficult, but due to some maladies in my vision reading large volumes (over 20 pages or so) is near impossible (coupled w/ having 3 sleeping disorders for the better part of a score).
2. I do not read in bed. Never have. did ya catch the part about the sleeping disorders in #1. Location, Location, Location is the adage, and well a bed is not a good location for someone to read when reading already makes ya pretty sleepy.

So what the heck is going on?

Well, thanx to my crazy friend, @brooksre, I’m in the rare position of being about to try an iPad before I buy one. So, here I am in my first week of owning this do dad and already I am doing something I would never have done before hand. What the hell? Is it that easy? What’s going on?

It all started with Flipboard. See these screen shots:

Flipboard Opening Screen: Image is in motion, thumbnails of contributor images.

Flipboard Table of Contents: Up to 9 feeds to look at

Flipboard List View: Shows you the content of posts to Facebook, with attention on the content of links and media posted.

Flipboard Pre Article view shows you the beginning of the content from a posted link to an article. Even shows you the conversation happening on FB if any and gives you the chance to jump in.

The experience of Flipboard is not perfect, but it is very compelling. It has changed the way I engage my content on Facebook and even has given me new outlets to explore around topics like News, Design and Technology that I wouldn’t have explored as easily before. I will admit that I don’t like reading Twitter this way but that’s b/c Twitter is so darn conversational for me and less of my feed is about linking to other content on the internet.

So that started changing my habits. I found for the last 3 nights that I’d flip through my flipboards every night. Then tonight, I did it. I bought a book on Kindle and starting reading it after I was done with my flipboards.

The book was “Gamestorming” by @davegray and a few of his friends. Why that book? Well, because it was under $10 and topical for a project I’m working on. (good read so far).

So in less than a week the combination of having an iPad got me start doing something I otherwise would’ve hated doing because of the way that device affords some neat behaviors:

• A level of intimacy with the device that allows it to easily enter contexts that are less comfortable for previous contexts. Even a mobile smartphone is less comfortable as it is too small. A laptop is not only too large, but requires to be plugged in if used in this way. My laptop does not last more than 2 hours.
• A form factor that has a large enough screen, yet is still light enough to be held on the side or placed on the lap similar to a book.
• A screen with high enough resolution and pixel density as to be crisp enough.
• A platform that allows for the creation of applications like Flipboard, Reeder (Google Reader RSS Reader), and Osfoora (Twitter Client) that combines graphical richness for emotional engagement with abundant feature sets.
• A platform for easy and quick book purchasing that in SOME cases reduces the price point of distribution to levels I can live with.

I’m sure there are more reasons, but these are the ones that come to mind. I’m not suggest that having a Kindle or Nook wouldn’t have been great, but for me since I’m an iPhone user/lover, and not a big reader, the iPad as a multi-functional tool fills other practical (and impractical) needs/motivations while enabling and encouraging behavior I had previous resistance to.

Yes, this is a personal story, but

• It expresses how the insertion of technology can be effective for change
• That no 1 component is responsible for changing behavior
• That often behavioral change is at once “accidental” and “directed”.

Has anyone else noticed how inserting a new product in their lives has changed their behavior and can you explain how it do it. I’m not looking for examples where you bought a treadmill and now you run. I’m thinking of how maybe a DVR/TiVo changed your behavior in unexpected ways beyond the initial intention, or how a smartphone changed how you think about email, etc. What’s changed you?

I was honored to be asked to write for IDSA‘s latest issue of Innovation. This issue’s executive sponsor was Alistair Hamilton who I had the honor to work with and was edited by Don Carr of the Syracuse Univ Industrial and Interaction Design Program. The issue focused on interactivity and interaction design. You do need to be a member to get the magazine which is only in print format.

I was asked to write about my experience helping to form IxDA. This article at first was a history of IxDA’s growth, but eventually turned into a discussion of the “design principle” that I still feels sets IxDA apart from other similar professional organizations.

IDSA has given me permission to post a PDF of the article here so that I can share it beyond the IDSA membership.

I look forward to people’s comments, but would request that people not comment here, but rather comment here: http://www.papercomment.com/ so that the entire IDSA and non-IDSA community can join in as well.

Designing a Down-Up Organization (pdf)

Today on Twitter @odannyboy and @russwilson were doing a quick back and forth about whether designers need to know how to build what it is they are designing for. In the conversation @odannyboy pointed to this well reasoned piece explaining the point of view that it is actually bad for designers to not only know how to code but to build their own stuff if they happen to.

The summary is that you will either:

1. Limit your creativity because you cannot obvious think outside of technological constraints
2. You cannot be for both good, clean code and a good user experience at the same time

It is a well written and organized piece and worth the read, so here’s the link again. (by @lkm)

Here is my response on twitter:

@odannyboy @russwilson I think that piece is a truism. it is true because the writer says it is so, not because it is proven that it is …

@odannyboy @russwilson the other clear argument is the more you control the execution the more likely they will be executed as designed.

@odannyboy @russwilson last pt: asking a designer of interactivity to not know code is like asking a sculptor to not know the prop of clay.

Explaining a bit more this last point. No one would ever tell the artist that they are less creative because they know the technology of their medium. In fact, many in media arts push towards the code itself being an aesthetic property that effects the aesthetics of the interactive experience itself. That is not merely building blocks. But I cannot truly speak to that as I am not that good at my programming.

I do think that one CAN be a good designer without doing their own code as part of the product lifecycle, but knowing the intricacies of the medium you are designing for/with alone or in collaboration is never a bad thing.

Also, to the point about building it yourself. Whether industrial design, fashion design, architecture, or interactive design. The more you can control the elements that lead to final execution whatever form that takes the more the execution will look like the final design intent.

Of course, this can all be played with too. A more open designer will argue that design intent is not nearly as important as the moment of unpredictable co-creation that occurs between designer, service/tool provider and the human being consuming that offering. But this is at a different level. What is being offerred still needs a final form that is a design artifact in and of itself who’s execution is tangible and absolute.

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.

Social networking, media and marketing are all the rage these days. There are many great examples of organizations that are using these tools to re-create themselves as true social engineered businesses and kudos to them.

What I’ve noticed though is too many organizations are jumping into this realm hoping that it will change their marketing channels by reinvigorating them with newly found engaged fan[people]. This will give them a new revolutionary guard of evangelists to empower and spread the wonders of their brand.

Here’s the catch. Social at the functional levels we are trying to achieve only works for human beings, or entities that attempt to embue themselves with the same characteristics that allow human beings to engage in social systems.

To many businesses are jumping into the social mix without doing the all important first step (way before their first tweet or facebook page)–embed human qualities into your organization. Well, embed the good ones! What are those? Well their the things you think of when you think of the good people in your life with whom you are already socially engaged:

* Empathetic
* Compassionate
* Flexible
* Trustworthy
* Openly Fallible
* Apologetic
* Displays of play (individual & organizational)
* Humor (including self-deprecating)
* Friendly
* Accommodating

I think you get the point.

So until your organization can take on 1/2 of these and change your customer’s outlook of your organization if not your entire industry (I’m thinking TV, Internet, Phone, Medical and Travel) then what’s the point of having someone on Twitter. It feels so fake and so disingenuous.

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.]

A very interesting take on where IxD is from a Greek in Scotland.

Ok, I admit it. My last piece on “open systems” was a tad narrow and not thought through. Thanx Tom & Jorge for helping to set me straight. Well, maybe not straight, but straighter. Here’s what I’m thinking at this point:

1. Open vs. Closed is a pretty good ying-yang continuum and not really absolute. Even the most open systems have aspects of control subtle or overt that help them out. And the touted closed systems have elements of openness that act as release valves for otherwise contained energy.

2. What is often meant by “open” is a wide berth of easy participation across a large critical mass of population.

3. Not every component of an open system has to be open.

4. Open != to democratic. Participation, influence and control are different aspects of open and democratic is only 1 combination of those 3 criteria.

But now here are the issues I’m struggling with.

1. Can open systems really support consumer stakeholders? That is to say that consumers are complex individually and that complexity increases exponentially when we consider “the group”.  The main issue here is around the topic of open participation leading to shallow decision making processes.

2. Is an open back-end system (e.g. developer environment) as important as an open front-end system (e.g. end users, consumers)?

3. Since there are examples of amazing innovation in closed and in open systems can someone really espoused a philosophy that one is absolutely better than the other?

I have some more questions that are more difficult to articulate, but I’m feeling that openness is both overstated and incredibly important. I just can’t figure out how to codify the decision making process for when to use an open system and when not to within any larger system.

I’d appreciate other people’s thoughts immensely!

[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.

It’s not even an insurmountable disadvantage. Just a disadvantage.

I go back and forth with my appreciation for and my disfavor of open systems. I believe that everyone has taken sides in the world. You either believe in government or you don’t. That is to say, you believe that agencies can act on your behalf or you don’t. For example (w/o any data to prove it), I believe that most open source software folks when push came to shove (meaning, if you were to really dig deep using the Socratic or similar method) are libertarians. They hate any sort of control over anything, out of fear that that control will be abused. A sound piece of logic to say the least. Now on the flip side, I am a betting man who will consider that designers tend to be socialists. They are bound by strong humanistic ethics AND believe that government can do good to help societies achieve those ethical standards.

So what does this have to do with anything?

Well, open systems are played out in software more than any place right now. 10 years ago OSS folks would ride charging at full tilt against the Microsoft juggernaut deriding that closed system. It was easy. The system just sucked. It wasn’t even fair. That is to say that anyone tilting at MS back at the turn of the millenium or earlier using any logic system would be right b/c the initial frame was “you suck!”. Everything else after that just rang true regardless of being proven or not. Today, the new target of OSS expletives seems to be Apple. Hell, it isn’t even about an open system fighting against Apple, but about a closed system’s “rights” on another closed system. (Definitely great marketing by Adobe to have everyone defending their closed system as a flag bearer of the open movement, suddenly.)

For the last 3 years, open system people have been complaining about Apple’s iPhone OS. Hell, there are entire communities of practice dedicated to hacking the system open and minions ready to follow on. I think this is great actually. I think that Apple hasn’t even fought back that hard b/c they think it is great. A pretty insignificant group of people, get to tinker publicly with the iPhone system while Apple watches and sees how it fails, etc. I bet they have researchers (probably outside of the fortress in Cupertino) jailbreaking their iPhones and doing reports on use.

But within this group are those who can’t bother. They prefer to just work in an open system. Their prayers answered by Google with Android devices which actually do compete well. It is a totally open system (well not totally) and is even Open Source. Android devices even have all the great features that an iPhone doesn’t have. Seriously, they are all there (forgetting about yesterday’s announcement).

But from a design perspective (sorry it took me so long to get here) and even a business perspective, this just doesn’t matter.

Why?

Because open systems people lack patience and strategic thinking. Yup! I said it. There ya go! With very few exceptions (ok, Mozilla you’re off the hook), OSS systems have failed to deliver mainstream, compelling, engaging, successful products. Even Android, while “open source” ain’t really all that open. it is just “opener” and more of its success has to do with carrier wars than w/ phone wars. If Apple could release on Verizon as is w/o any changes the Motorola Droid would be an afterthought to the mainstream market. Maybe Blackberry (as closed as it gets) will maintain some of VZs smartphone marketplace due to its great design focused on productivity more than entertainment and content consumption like the iPhone.

Android and Palm with their rush to “multi-tasking” (BTW, when I owned a Blackberry, I don’t remember really having anything background running except for Email and other PIM functionality) and a clipboard, succeeded to release it before the iPhone. I would argue though that their implementations lacked thorough thought of the strategic idiosyncrasies involved in doing this on a mobile solution. Battery life is only one of the issues here.

As I listened to Apple talk about what they did to make their implementation of Multi-tasking work, it just started to really crystalize for me one salient point about Apple.

It is not about the right feature, but the right feature done right at the right time.

This means being thorough. It means understanding the ins and outs of your system. It means being patient until both design and engineering get it right, and not just get it done.

This level of intentionality is something that open systems can’t deploy well if at all. If everyone is free, then no one waits. No one considers. No one designs.

As a point of context. I have been shopping for an Android phone for my wife who is dedicated to VZ. (I don’t blame her; completely.) I finally got a chance to play with someone’s phone and well it sucked. it didn’t suck out of the box when I tried it at the store, but it sucked on his version. With all the openness he had so many apps running and so many apps integrated into the OS itself that it was beginning to feel like a Windows 3.11 box.

This doesn’t happen on an iPhone and won’t. It won’t b/c the “government” of Apple led by Emperor Steve won’t let you do that to yourself. Why? b/c one person having a bad experience on his device could mean 5-125 others hearing about it. If only Emperor Steve could control AT&T there would never be a bad experience on his device, ever.

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.