Interaction Design, Design Education, Design Thoughts
{ Monthly Archives }
Just sharing a great article I found on Digg about Web Design.
I for one truly believe that typography is a key element of interface design that goes sorely neglected. Any way you can focus on “clarity”, you will also receive a strong notch up on ease of use and engagement.
So last night Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path gave a solid talk for the NYC IxDA monthly event and even demonstrated through exercise about the need for us to change the ways we communicate our designs. At the end of the talk someone asked about how the methods he was describing, namely using animations may be stepping on the toes of their visual designer counterparts.
Personally, I was stunned to hear such a comment. But first let me fess up. I’m an innie working on software and not web sites. i work on hosted applications (at the moment). It has been a long time since I’ve been in any environment where there were different resources for visual design and interaction design or IA. (For me it is IxD). I haven’t worked in an agency/consultancy environment for a long time where graphic design took precedence over interaction design or IA.
But that being said, after 7+ years of solid UX understanding why was such a comment not only made, but also followed up on by so many nodding heads. Am I that out of it?
For me, it has been about collaboration. When I have had separate roles for visual and Ix design available to me, it was never about handing over the wall. It was always about 2 (or more people) working in unison towards a common goal of making a holistic design work. We work together and each takes over driving the craft as their roles allow for that technical expertise. Each though shares a vision or tries to create a shared vision.
Warning, baseball metaphor
It’s like a Short Stop and a 2nd baseman. Both have equal responsibility for covering the bag of 2nd base depending on the context of the moment. It is also true that they both cover the middle of the infield. Yes, sometimes, they bump heads, but a good SS and 2B work in unison and if they ever point fingers at each other it is usually to say, “Good job”.
Ok, my soliloquy is over … Please explain to me why besides antiquated politics, that some not only work in environments where there is a pass of of duty, but they seemingly accept it as something that should be that way.
Please comment about your experience below, by explaining what type of environment you work in and the relationship between IAs/IxDs and visual designers.
As a secondary note, this “hand-off” mentality is also often used between designers and developers and I find that one even more entrenched and annoying, but more understandable considering the stark differentiation between roles.
As more followup to the presentation that Bill Scott and I gave at UI11 and are giving at the Web Applications Summit in January, I thought I’d point people to this new tool I learned about.
Altia has created a new Photoshop plug-in, called PhotoProto, that helps people make prototypes. I know a lot of designers live in Photoshop and this tool can be really helpful. There is a video presentation of their product at the end.
Today the treasurer of IxDA, Greg Petreoff, had the honor of announcing our new pledge drive to make some dough before the end of year to support IxDA’s project donahue initiative.
Project Donahue is exciting because for the first time in the UX community an organization is putting its resources behind inventing its own virtual community software, transforming the traditional discussion list into a true knowledge center where people can contribute and consume as always, but also curate, to aid future consumption. See the presentation below to learn more. And go to http://ixda.org/ to donate money to help with this cause, and the other initiatives that IxDA is up to including local events, conference events like the IA Summit pre-conference IxD symposium and others to come.
Again, see the presentation below to learn more about Project Donahue:
The UI11 conference isn’t even over yet, and UIE announces their next event: Web Application Summit in Monterey, CA, where the Bill & Dave show will do a repeat performance and much more.
The event will be January 21-23, 2007.
See you at Canary Row and the home of Steinbeck!.
Well, I should put my money where my mouth is. I told about 250+ people this week that they should learn to code to better communicate their designs to engineers. Well, this resource came my way from the deverloperWorks @ IBM: Mastering AJAX.
So far there are 7 parts available. I think you should assume some type of technical aptitude is required in order to proceed. But it is one of many starts out there.
Good luck!
I think about 4 times people asked about Accessibility when I was at UI11 this past week presenting a workshop and short talk about designing AJAX and other RIAs. It just so happens that today, Access Matters, an Accessibility Blog, posted this timely article about AJAX and making it work with Screen Readers.
Just letting people know that now that my commitments to UI11 are over, I’m going full steam ahead with my new name. I’ll no longer be incorporating the “(Heller)” in my name official or otherwise. I’m just henceforth to be “David Malouf” … Ok, you can call me Dave if you like, but its up to you. Don’t ask me what I prefer.
For more information about this whole name change thing you can look at all the postings in the “name change” category.
Designing Powerful Web Applications with AJAX and Other RIAs – Full Day Workshop
UI11 – Cambridge, MA – October 9, 2006
What is “Rich”? Why do “Rich”? – 90 Min. Talk
UI11 – Cambridge, MA – October 109, 2006
There will be audio of the 90min. talk available soon. I’ll post at an update when that becomes available.
If you would like the complete notes for either talk please contact User Interface Engineering.
All the world today is in a panic about “Innovation” and how “Design Thinking” is the cure all for all of business woas; especially those businesses trying to stay afloat in this rapid idea reproduction economy. I think this is GREAT! I believe that design thinking as a description of the types of activities that designers have traditionally done in order to be successful within their micro-tasks can add value towards success of thinking larger and broader across many areas of a problem set.
Ok, so what’s the problem? What’s the problem is that within certain affinity groups of the UX community (IA, HCI, Usability–those groups most distant from formal design training) there has been a great evangelical effort push those like presentation designers (e.g. visual design and industrial design) and engineers into the fold of the important work of user research. (Make sure you read the word important, as I don’t want to be seen as dissin’ user research.) But in so doing, they have squelched out almost any other type of research from the community discussion.
Now it makes sense that those who do user research are most comfortable speaking about user research so why should they discuss anything else, but the rest of the community is also silent (at least in the UX community). There have been whispers about design vision. This is important work as it brings to the fore that design is about emotion as much as about utility.
First, let’s understand what is important about user research. More than anything else, user research when applied properly gives designers insights into the context of use of the products and systems that designers will be designing for. It also functions as a guide to the overall success users will have with a design.
That is good. There are elements here which do guide designers towards idea generation and aide in the creative process. User research adds more data points allowing a designer to gain more empathy with the human beings that will be hopefully engaging the designs they design.
Usability Testing–a popular form of user research–teaches us that it we need something in order to evaluate its success. Ideas by themselves are not testable, as they exist in a plain of existance that is too ephemeral, intangible, and well, inconsequential. But that is not just true for user testing. It is also true for all types of research. Research requires experimentation and what designers do very well, is experiment–quickly, methodicly and creatively. Twist, scew, discolor, elong, burn, degrade, fade, crop, chop, re-align, scatter, disolve, etc. etc.
When I was on a panel at the IA Summit last year regarding wireframing techniques, I asked the question, “How many people do 5 or more different ideations of their designs at any phase of their projects?” There were FIVE people who raised their hands in an audience of about 250 or so. FIVE!!!!
How can you come up with good design ideas, if you don’t ever give yourself the opportunity to let ideas flow and be explored? If we constantly shut down an idea in our mind, and don’t take it a bit further, we’ll never get to the nuggets that really make an impact. We’ll constantly be in evaluation mode, and the only things we can evaluate against is what already exists–to my point above.
So my point is that Design Research is really about using our best weapon–our creativity–and researching the ideas that flow from it. If Iwas to take the process further, I would suggest that going out to users without a design concept is not a form of design research at all, but a form of market research. Now of course this could be semantic twiddling, but people who know me, know that I am a semantaholic.
What I do know is that design exploration as a form of design research is not commonly spoken about in the halls of UX-dom and that I believe if the UX community of practitioners want to make a real difference, we need to be incorporating design exploration into our formal methodologies as an important piece of design research, without which we will be relegated to “sitemaps & wireframes”.
I know to some of the people who read this blog, this might all seem, like “Duh!”, but I bet that you were either trained in a Design School, have some other fine arts degree, or worked in a design studio environment of some kind. And if you are, maybe you take all this for granted, but as someone who had to come to all this informally and in isolation, I would encourage you to share with the UX community what you have learned and gained in Design School, or through Studio living. I really appreciated David Armano’s contribution to this discourse with is blog posting aptly titled, “What I learned in D-School”.
Slideshare.net is a beta site (invitation only) that allows people to share easily their presentations with others. Tag them, for others to relate and thus find them, and then present it. It converts from MS PPT and other presentation software into Flash so that the animations are clickthroughs are retained.
You can also embed your new flash presentation into your web page–like on your blog. See! …
I think its a great offering and I’m very excited for when it becomes more public over the next few weeks.
What is nice about it is that like the Author, John Boutelle explains on his own blog, is that you can combine Flash (or other richer RIA technologies, along side standard HTML with or without AJAX) to create a good RIA experience.
The story goes like this. I’ve been on the lookout for a free easy to use, fit all my needs RSS Feed Reader that was online (i.e. hosted and not downloaded). I have never found anything (didn’t look TOO hard) that could do all I got from Mozilla Thunderbird, so I just stuck with it, but was relegated to really only reading news at work because I didn’t want to keep two different installs of Thunderbird synced up all the time.
Anyway, last week Google re-launched Google Reader. When I went, I was skeptical, because I felt the first edition just totally missed the mark. Boy! was I suprised. Google Reader 2.0 (if you will), is completely different and does everything and more.
Favorite Features
Problems
I don’t have a list here, but just a general complained that this is the most buggy beta I have ever used from Google. Not huge bugs, but I have had to hit the refresh button a couple of times in the last week, the read/unread changes don’t take effect universally consistantly, and the performance (i.e. speed) of the application really needs to hit it up a notch.
But all these problems don’t make up for how much happier I am using this reader.
It’s integration into Google’s personalized home page is also stellar. I don’t nearly use all the features, but it is definitelly really nice. I think adding a “mark as read” button to that widget would just put it over the top for me.
I think what they finally got was the scale that people like myself use feed readers for. I have some 100 feeds that I subscribe to and read about 200 messages a given day across those feeds.
Sharing
Of course you can e-mail a message pretty easily because if you are registered for Reader you have a Gmail account as well. So that is pretty seemless. But there is this other option for sharing (see to the right gutter of my home page) that I think is really smart.
You can tag something as “Share” and it gets added to a list of its own. You can send peopel to that list, or you can publish the list as I did. (added it to the page just for fun).
What about SynapticBurn
All this of course precipitated the need to make some small changes to SB. I finally added the Archive link and Categories list to the home page. Yes, it is now busier on the page, but that was a big deal. Last, I took off the “Engage” link at the top. Yes, I still think that Engage is the perfect word, but the URL is taken and I must move on. :)
Anyway, if most of you just use a feed reader, you will never see this anyway. 8-)