–Engage

As many of you know, I’m the vice president of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). I am also a former board member of UXNet. This means I think often about how to organize a community and advancing a discipline. This has really been a great exercise in differentiating tactics vs. strategy as well as what it means to lead both those items. I have had some great mentors in this regard like Robert Reimann (IxDA’s current president), Challis Hodge (IxDA’s co-founder), and Dirk Knemeyer (President of UXNet) to name a few.

With 4 years of my most recent experience in leading and building IxDA I have learned a lot, but I also know I have a lot more to learn. One thing I learned is that organizing and advancing is actually just a design exercise like any other that requires thinking of tactics and strategy and what it means to lead. The other thing I learned is that sometimes the best strategy person may not be the best tactician, and definitely not the best leader. As I said this is also a design exercise and I’d like to express a few examples of how this is all connected.

First thought, I’d like to define some things.

Tactics – Are modes or points of execution. While they are independent from a strategy, their ultimate goal is to achieve a strategy.

Strategy – Is the reason why we do tactics. They are the end goal, the result we wish to achieve through our tactical execution. There is usually more than one way to successfully reach a strategic goal, and the level of success is directly correlated to the tactics executed.

leading – making sure things go well within the boundaries of what is being led. This means a few things. It means that you understand the end goals and the strategy for reaching those goals. It means that you understand how to execute the tactics. And finally it means you know how to work with those in your bounded space who will help with all the above.

I realize these definitions are a bit vague, but hopefully through the “case study” that I’m going to present you’ll be able to get a clearer sense of what I mean.

Recently, Peter Merholz, President of Adaptive Path, former President of the IA Institute (IAI) and current board member of IAI, posted a blog entry where he actively criticized the “leadership of the IA Community”, and it was clear he was explicitly speaking to those who were organizing the IAI community. He made it clear that even before attending he was feeling hopeless about the Summit content and pointed to a key area of disappointment—a specific workshop was cancelled because of lack of attendee signup. He spoke about how the IA Community needs to take on more risk and encourage the equivalent or “loss leaders” in order to push the IA discipline and community forward.

I read his post with interest but also with shock that someone who has so much visibility in the IA community and has been in the role of leadership for so many years, also misses the point of it all, so while I agreed with him about the disappointment of the loss of this workshop, I also challenged him on his finger pointing as being a bit of the pot calling the kettle black.

Peter for his part has responded to my critique by calling me a “narrow minded half-wit” and my thoughts as a “toxic” contribution to his blog. Peter first approached me (not on his blog but in private email) that he was hurt by my comments, He was right to call me on this because they denigrated one of his big efforts last year—IDEA Conference—way harsher than was necessary. In response to his private email I apologized and tried to clarify my point further. Since then I was alerted to his response to me, which catalogs a list of things that Peter has done while leading in IAI.

When I read his list of events and actions that he achieved, it was clear to me that two things were going on. Peter wasn’t leading, he was doing. Peter wasn’t using the right tactics to achieve his strategic goals.

While what he’s done is pretty cool to read as a laundry list, If one was to analyze the results (which is the content of his post) … “IA isn’t dead it is only sleeping” … it is clear that the real analysis shouldn’t lead to finger pointing at anyone, but a re-evaluation of the tactics used to attempt to reach the strategic goals. It is also important to understand that choosing tactics is a strong part of leading and their choice in and of themselves could be the difference between “being visible” and “leading”.

All of the tactics that were listed feel like a plausible way of reaching the desired strategic goals. However, they didn’t work primarily the strategy focused on goals of the organization or discipline without navigating the motivations and contexts of those who practice and there would be the advancers of that discipline.

Also, many of the stated tactics were not done through leadership but rather through autocracy. In essence the problem here is someone attempting to lead without making sure anyone was following. If IA is sleeping, it is because the practitioners, the potential followers of any leadership initiative, are not following. If they are not following it means that there is an implicit problem with the tactics being used.

Peter made it very clear before he arrived into Las Vegas that he was skeptical. But from his very arrival at least for those of us who were twittering away, it was even made clearer by his constant messages saying he wasn’t even in the building. I mean, I didn’t go to many sessions at all and the sessions I went to were quite disappointing for me, but I at least stayed and attempted to make the Summit work in other ways. I don’t mention this to try to pick on Peter, I mention it because it speaks loudly to the lack of leadership by Peter. He points a finger, comes, but doesn’t really participate and wonders why no one is following or more important responding the way he feels we all should in the community.

For my own part, I do not feel like I’m an expert here. This is one of the main reasons I feel my vice presidential position is appropriate for my level of understanding how to lead and to create a tactical plan for achieving strategic goals. I have done well as someone who completes tactics, and who has great insights towards creating a strategy. But I have often failed in understanding how to create the list of tactics themselves. And this is where we get back to design.

On any design project no matter the scale there is always a need to analyze data towards the goal of discovering problems that need to be solved, an understanding of what would happen by solving that collection of problems, and the constraints for how to possibly achieve those solutions. In the design world we use tools like ethnography, active listening, laboratory testing, client discovery interviews, etc. The goal is to understand the holistic problem set as from the point-of-view of both the end users and customers, but also tangential stakeholders. All of these are human beings in the total system.

After we do this level of research, we can then create models (many many models) which will help to bring understanding to the data we captured and thus converting data into information. From this understanding of the human’s world and the total contexts of the system we create a set of strategically informed success criteria and from that we model what tactics would help us reach those success points.

One might call that “design” at the very least, but maybe it can be called strategizing. The next part though is in execution. If you can’t do the tactics well, it is probable that you cannot achieve your success points of your strategy. But what is also true is that if the analysis used to create the list of tactics is flawed in some way, no matter how well you do your tactics, and execute, you will not achieve your strategic goals.

For me as a designer and an organizer this happens often. Sometimes, because I don’t have enough resources (time, people, money) to get enough data points. Shoot! Even knowing what is “enough” is a strategic problem in and of itself. Other times it is because I didn’t analyze the data correctly. This can happen because I didn’t iterate on the modeling enough (usually because of time), or because I got caught in a sandtrap or false path that deceived me into a bad direction. There are many other places where this system can fall apart and one of the reasons why design is actually a very time consuming proposition when done well—methodically, rigorously, creatively, analytically.

I have been pushed recently to outline a strategy while I’m in the midst of creating a tactical plan to help create a conference for IxDA next winter. At first, I felt put off by the request, But after reading Peter’s article it is clear to me that we do indeed such a strategy statement. The reason why you do that is that you need something to reflect against. You also need to have an understanding of all the points of context and for that to be modeled as well. The reason the strategy and the contextual models are so important is that they act as a comparison point for the tactical planning. Without these two points of evaluative reflection as an organizer or designer, you will not have clear boundaries to help guide your tactical plan. This will lead to great ideas being executed that have limited or no effect of leading towards your desired goals.

So while I was a bit hurt and Peter was a bit hurt through this process, for my part, I feel I learned a great lesson through it all and a lesson that I can use not only in my organizing world, but one that makes complete sense (if not more) in my design work I do.

Here are my slides for my IxDA Symposium 1/2 day workshop on Designing RIAs while learning IxD. Man! it was hard to do this in a 1/2 day. I hope my students were forgiving. I had fun teaching it though. Great interactive group!

Get the presentation at Slideshare.net

Joshua Prince-Ramus gave a great presentation @ the IA Summit on how he leads the development of architectural engagements using data visualization analysis — Fractals arrive to architecture.

click here for bio

The reason I say this, is because Joshua presented a few case studies which produced amazingly aesthetic results by using various types of information visualizations as the basis for original glyph sketches for spatial designs. The information sources was based on what was presented as solid research and it really appeared that the team did their homework.

What was apparent to everyone in the audience was that he was architecting based on information architecture and as he said himself that information architects are going to be the next architects.

While his work is compelling and many I’m sure will blog more about the details of the presentation. What interests me is the apparent guiding principles of his design philosophy is a backlash approach to the aesthetic driven architecture of architects like Frank Gehry. He presents it though as the last school of architecture. The only real way to do architecture, as opposed to the reality that this is a stamp in time, and just as in the past there have been vari0us levels of ornamentation and minimalism in architecture, this is but another sing of that pendulum.

Also, he presented his visualizations as absolutes, both in visualization style as well as in the categories and metadata used to drive those visualizations. Both of these accounts are quite subjective and changing any “axis” in these approaches could lead to very different results using the very same data sources.

A last appreciation of Joshua is his ability to push constraints into design realities. This is something we face all the time as designers of software, but we often just scrape scope instead of learning a keen awareness of the problems we face and then turn those into new advantages. I really liked this and it was a great lesson for all of us.

Here’s Joshua’s bio from the site:

Our keynote speaker is architect Joshua Prince-Ramus—a Principal at Ramus Ella Architects (REX). REX’s current projects include Museum Plaza in Louisville, KY; the Dee & Charles Wyly Theatre in Dallas, TX; the Annenberg Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA; and the Forward Residence in New York, NY.

Prior to establishing REX, Mr. Prince-Ramus was a Partner at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and founder of the firm’s U.S. branch, OMA New York. While with OMA, Mr. Prince-Ramus was Partner-in-Charge of the Seattle Central Library in Seattle, WA; the Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas, NV; and the Vestbane Master Plan in Oslo, Norway. Additionally, Mr. Prince-Ramus oversaw the execution of the Illinois Institute of Technology Campus Center in Chicago, IL; and the Prada “Epicenter” Stores in New York, NY and Beverly Hills, CA.

Mr. Prince-Ramus received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy with distinction from Yale University in 1991 and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University in 1996, where he was the first Araldo Cossutta Fellow and an SOM Fellow. Mr. Prince-Ramus will be the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture in the fall of 2007.

So all this fuss about Twitter got me in a fuss and I didn’t want to miss out. So I’ve joined. Follow me!

This is all in preparation for my trip to the IA Summit tomorrow morning. I get to enjoy a relaxing day in Las Vegas, a place I haven’t been since the LV Boom of the mid-90s. I’m most lookin’ forward to hangin’ w/ my bud Jared for some sushi tomorrow night. Then my IxD workshop on Friday followed by the IxDA dinner @ Battista’s, and well there is the Summit itself of course.

It seems Twitter is the rage post SxSW and well its pain to entry wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be so I’m twittering away slowly. Thank G-d! for unlimited text messaging. ;)

Wow! what an opportunity to be a part of a great school doing amazing work promoting design and promoting design thinking.

The d.School of Stanford is recruiting for fellows. Do you have what it takes?

Bruce Nussbaum from BusinessWeek published a talk he gave at the Parsons School of Design this past week. Are designers really the problem? Sounds like scapegoating to me.

In it he states that designers need to move away from “designing for” to “designing with”. Create tools that allow them to design their own experiences and let them be the better designers.

Wow! talk about falling into your own stuff. I mean didn’t we learn this lesson from the desktop publisher age? Seriously! I know we are in a participation economy and all and that is all well and good, but he complains that designers are too egotistical and arrogant and it is getting in our way. I just don’t see it that way. I see designers doing amazing things as designers, leading design with tremendous vision and it HAS been working.

The backlash as he calls it doesn’t seem to be effecting my world at all. I haven’t come across it and I don’t see it that way with my peers. I see design as a sought after commodity unlike every before both from process and methods. “Design thinking” is still in vogue and design jobs (real design jobs, not the ones from the 1990′s) are growing at a rapid clip all around the world.

If I see anything of a backlash at all, it is a scapegoating where things aren’t succeeding due to the limitations that the design role continues to face from most corporate culture. Corporations have not been willing to take the steps necessary to really bring design and designers into their culture, so they remain outsiders for the most part where the best of the best remain in consultancies and at best are brought in as advisers from the outside or fellows with their own dominion where they can’t really effect what is inside the castle keep.

On the flip side, I think that Bruce’s position on sustainability was actually one of the clearest I have seen and quite honestly gave me a real “ah-ha!” moment of finally understanding sustainability as part of the holistic nature of design. Cradle-to-cradle design needs to be an imperative for anyone designing products or systems that use physical entities and quite honestly if I have a digital system, then aren’t I in some way responsible for its effect on the carbon needed to use it.

Lots to think about for sure.

Anyway, enjoy the article!

David Fore the VP of consulting services at Cooper tells us the important role of Interaction Design.

David is a really bright guy and it is rare for me to see him put his face forward like this. It is usually Kim Goodwin in the spot light, so I like it!

Normally an article like this would go into my Google Reader Shared List. But this requires being bubbled up.

– dave

Designing rich internet applications (RIAs) is 50% about designing time perception. To me this is such an unconscious thought, that when I get slapped in the face as I have just this morning trying to communicate with my team about this issue, it really reinforces why I believe so so strongly that we need to be so much better at defining and articulating what it is we do and the value it provides.

I’ll be teaching a workshop at the IA Summit that deals with this topic and others related to the design of rich applications (internet or otherwise).

it is important to understand your role as interaction design as one of story teller. Just like a book author or movie director, pacing (managing time) is a primary component of success criteria for the success of your product’s experience by the audience, or end-user. Brenda Laurel’s work comparing Computers to theater speaks directly to this.

I’m currently working on a desktop application project and it amazes me how similar desktop application problems are exactly the same as web-application projects, just in robe of different acronyms. So instead of HTML, JavaScript, AJAX, DHTML, etc., I’m looking at .NET3, C#, WPF, etc.

In both cases though it is really clear that developers and product managers don’t understand what an interaction designer does. They are so concerned with metrics of the UI that they don’t understand that context greatly determines the perception of those metrics.

In desktop applications maybe the # of clicks might be looked at, but what is looked at more (at least in this case) is “performance”. they’ll stop watch application and screen change load times as if that is somehow a valuable measure of experience. Like, when’s the last time a user held their watch up to a screen after clicking or double-clicking? And even if that value is bad, is that the only thing going on for the use at the moment when that event is taking place. I mean we are multi-tasking, multi-aware people who get distracted fairly easily because we are always either prey or hunting.

So instead of seeing opportunities to mitigate poor performance experience as a part of the interaction design, which would take advantage of cognitive pulls and pushes to sway perception of time, they are stuck on the stop watch.

First off, it is important to realize that this is my fault as a designer. My communication of the problem and the solution have not been good enough and this is where prototypes come in. Unless things are experienced then they are not easy to understand. It is also why I believe in interactive digital prototypes. They are so easy with tools like Flash and Blend that there is really no reason to do paper anymore. Just different levels of fidelity of interaction.

But let’s get back to time. What does it mean to mitigate the perception of time. Too many multi-syllable words in there, eh?

1. Animation – This is probably your best source for making time appear to proceed faster. Movement implies forward motion and motion occurs over time.

2. predictive content management – the better you understand the flow of your users the more you can put in a preload treatment to your design so that the user doesn’t have to wait for something that should be dynamically generated at the point of interaction. Call this predictive caching if you like.

3. smaller chunks – This is more akin to streaming, but if you can break up your interface to load in smaller units, with the overall framework to load first and then apply the details as necessary. if you are running a query to a large data set, you can find ways to steam in the table instead of waiting for the table to complete using methods such as passive scrolling.

Don’t treat all interaction moments as equal. Loading an application is different type of initiated action than a menu-drop down. The first type of action can be mitigated with “tricks”; the 2nd type of action really needs to flow well at the point of initiation and thus needs to be pre-loaded as much as possible. To tell the difference between the two is to get a sense of the user’s perception of change. The more change they are experiencing the higher their pain threshold is for that change. Obviously, the result has to add value to them so that they get the right Return on Investment, which in this case means an investment of pain.

In the end, performance is but one issue or constraint that a designer needs to deal with and there are many tools in our chest to help mitigate the issues associated with performance whether it bandwidth from networks or CPUs.

Dan Saffer nails it about what Design schools SHOULD be doing.

I do think Pratt from my experience is doing the right thing. Dan, take a look at their ID program. It is all about doing. Their 1st year is a workshop in foundations of ID that dates back to the 50′s. They even wrote a book about the ID department’s founder, Rowena Reed Kostellow.

Thanx Dan for breaking the silence about all the hype with “design thinking”.

The folks at Humanized, headed by Aza Raskin (the last name is not a coincidence) bring you a Command Line Interface (CLI) to do many simple tasks for you on your computer.

Let me try to explain. The folks at Humanized have decided that the modal trigger of your caps lock key is doing the wrong triggering. What it should be doing instead on actuated is pop open a nifty little CLI with so far a relatively small but useful set of commands. You can set up the behavior of the caps lock key to either need to be held while typing a command or lock so you can let go. In either case a command is actuated when you hit the enter/return key.

To be honest the “hold” version didn’t work for me. The Letter “a” is almost impossible to hit when holding the caps lock key, so I immediately switched to the locked version which works much better for me. And no, I don’t miss using my caps lock key. They were dead on that it is pretty useless, though you could choose other keys like the “start” button.

I almost exclusively use it as a launcher (one of the names of the product). I have no use for it as a spell checker because Google solved that problem for me by putting a spell checker directly in my browser.

But as a launcher I like it in specific circumstances. But generally I find it problematic. On purpose I gave myself a month before writing a review here because I wanted to give myself time to adjust to it. Here’s what I found:

The premise of a CLI is that it is easier to learn commands and type them then it is to use a mouse, hunt and click type interface. My hands do more on the keyboard then they do on a mouse, so every time I leave the mouse I am loosing efficiency. Nice theory, but it assumes a lot about keyboard mouse usage that I’m not sure is really true. I am confident that there is a loss of efficiency. But that statement is de-contextualized from how people are using computers and how that use is juxtaposed to the launching of applications.

When I have set up a few launch commands for popular sites I go to. So launching tabs in Firefox (I love that it does that instead of launching windows) is my primary use of Enso right now. I can also launch applications but it never occurs to me to use it for that. I also when launching URLs in Enso fumble, even after a month. I get confused about what would be the best way to do it and I stall thus eliminating any sort of efficiency that I might have. I have noticed that I’ll use Enso even when my hand is already on the mouse, or I’ll use my bookmark toolbar by del.icio.us with my mouse even if my hands are on the keyboard. Then I’ll get angry with myself for doing the wrong thing, making for an even further delay. I’m sure this is only because I’m an interaction designer.

My behavior when browsing the web is actually bifurcated. Most of the time say 70% I am in my web browser to read. This means my hand is on the mouse. I use the mouse to scroll and click around from place to place. About 30% of the time I am composing like I am right now, but usually writing an email in Gmail which is now my sole email program for non-work email.

Because of this 70/30 split, I am still favoring a point-click behavior stream and thus when I want to switch to a keyboard method of doing things even when appropriate I freeze.

If I was doing things differently and not so mouse driven in how I actually use things (and quite honest SHOULD be using things) then maybe the learnability factor of Enso would hit it up a notch and then I’d be able to better integrate it into my life.

I think they got some things right like using the caps lock key and the wording of most commands, though some are a bit long and you have to type the whole thing. Most commands are done through auto-complete which is nice.

On their blog they talk about not using intelligence to create an adaptive interface similar to the one that Office 2003 has where it only shows you the menu items that you use. I agree that MS got it wrong and the reasons they describe are right. The reason they are right is that MS’s model is one of restriction. Another version of an adaptive interface is in Gmail using their auto-complete for email addresses. It puts them in order of popularity but it shows you all of the choices still. I think doing this would go a long way to making their auto-complete feature work much better and increase efficiency. I also think like in DOS there needs to be short hand for longer commands that are used repetitively.

I think for any interaction designer it is worth playing with ENSO. I have no plans to uninstall it despite my problems. Exploring the command line is interesting work. I’m just not confident it is a product I’ll pay to use if I was a regular user.

Check out this new social feed aggregator that the folks at Involution Studios put together.

This is the description from Dirk Knemeyer one of its creators:

SPIVOT FEATURES

* User-friendly layout and navigation. Looks and feels like a newspaper, not a feed reader. Yet, has more power, customization and easy access to raw sources than traditional feed readers.

* Full integration of mainstream and blog content. While you can choose to only look at traditional Sources or Blogs, our Topics bring them altogether in a nice, happy mix. Then, filtering from there – or even just zeroing in on one of our thousands of pre-programmed sources – is one-click easy.

* True multimedia content. So far we have only surfaced video and text integration, but it introduces a really interesting integrated media experience. Search for Tiger Woods and see what happens. (Don’t worry: we’re working on the video lag issue right now)

* Powerful filters that give YOU control of your content. While our default is Most Recent content – taking a traditional News-focused view – with a single click you can check out the Most Read or the Highest Rated stories. *You* choose what to look at and how.

* Explore Related Media. Each story includes its own page with a long list of stories that relate to the topic of the selected story. You can always dig deeper to get a full view of the news.

* Social news features. The ability to rate, email and comment on stories are included baseline features. While our Ratings method is currently only on the Explore Related Media view, this will shortly surface across the entire site. It is through our user ratings that we truly empower democratization of content and priority, a la Digg.

* Traditional Feed Reader functionality. In My Stuff, Spivot members can set up any feeds they want, organized the way they want them. As with the rest of Spivot, they won’t need to consume them one feed at a time: they can “mash” them together into a unique, combined “newspaper-style” view.

* Up-to-the-minute updates. Spivot will surface stories almost simultaneously with the original content creator.

* “Powers of Ten”. Designers Charles and Ray Eames used the “Powers of Ten” metaphor to show how your perception changes as you are nearer to or farther away from something. One of my favorite things to do with Spivot is to explore media in a Powers of Ten sort of way. I start by picking the Sources tab and clicking on the Newspapers link underneath it. This gives me a content mix of over 60 stories from ten of the top western newspapers to peruse and explore. Then I start clicking into each of the 10 newspapers, one at a time. The experience of getting an overview of the news from many sources – before quickly, easily and in the same interface being able to drill directly into each specific source, one after the other – is a media experience that I really enjoy and have not seen anywhere else.