–Engage

Last night I went to a Tribeca Film Festival premiere of “The Business of Birth” and it truly brought to clear light the theory of “less is more” and the how sometimes the best we can do with technology and design is to stay the hell out of the way!

Being a father having gone through my side of the home birth experience, this movie obviously resonated with me a lot. But I also think it brought home very well that there is A problem within maternal medicine in this nation and maybe it doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to remove the role of Medicine and birth and after birth care in this country, but when we compare ourselves to countries where midwifery and even home birth is considered normal compared to the US where it is under 1% and juxtapose that to our staggering rates of maternal and infant mortality how can we not take notice.

Let’s put aside all the feel good stuff and commercial aspects that both sides of the home birth vs. medical practice sides represent. The reality is that intervention, legal defensive, doctor ran birth is not actually succeeding. Yes, things go awry and when they do doctors are the greatest people in the world for dealing with problems, but their attitude of not being able to sit on the sidelines and allow experts in birth (not in surgery) to do their jobs is so troubling. More women would choose hospital based midwife supervised births if the medical industry did not get in their way.

Let’s just go back to the Hippocratic oath of do no harm.

Now, back to the “less is more”:
Fetal monitoring
Medical beds
Drugs

Each one of these “technological” advances can be directly correlated to problems that occur during birth. There are times where each is necessary, so the product design and creation itself is not at issue here, but their use and application.

All this brings to mind that we as product and system designers need to take more of a role of HOW people use our solutions.

If you can see this film while it is at the TFF, I suggest you try to go. I think its playing a few more times. This movie is for issues around Birth what “Bowling for Columbine” was for guns. Yes, it was that good.

Tamara Adlin is putting together an amazing collection of interviews of UX professionals who are shaping our world called UX Pioneers.

Her first 3 interviews start off with Jakob, Peter Merholz and Whitney Quesenbery. A nice mix of very different worlds. She has lined up an even more amazing list of interviewees according to the site.

I do have to say on all that list of Gurus and userati there is one thing REALLY missing and that is Interaction Design and well DESIGN at all. Where is Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, Clemont Mok, Jon Maeda, Nathan Shedroff, Tog, Etc.

Further, it feels ultra USer-centric. I know Jakob is not a USer, but he has been living and working in the US for decades. Where is Thackara, Crampton-Smith, Vanderbeeken, etc.

But regardless of what it is lacking, I think to survey and catalog all these great people is a wonderful project and I commend Tamara for taking this on.

Enjoy this very short presentation trying a different type of definition of “What is Interaction Design”. I gave this presentation at the IDSA NE District Shift conference as the introduction to a panel intended to be a survey of the practice of interaction design.

So what is “WWSD”? Well, obviously it is “What Would Steve Do?”, as in Steve Jobs. Now, we know that Steve is not an interaction designer, but he represents Apple (as any good CEO should represent their company) as a visionary who understands product design.

So what are my lessons?

1. When putting out a 1.0 application, put in less
2. Design for approachability. This means it should communicate clearly, and not be scary.
3. If you have to add complexity, make it discoverable in engaging and learnable ways.
4. Iterate your revisions through a combination of feature additions, and experience improvements
5. It is about the “eco-system”. Creating packaging that encompasses a large set of connected elements.

Well that’s what Steve would do, no?

Enjoy!

Sorry for the short notice, but I wanted to let people know I’ll be speaking at the IDSA N.E. District Conference, “SHIFT” coming up April 21st.

I helped organize a 90min. panel presentation and conversation about Interaction Design. If you are going to be at the conference to be held at RISD, we will be running our panel during lunch on Saturday. Joining me will be Ted Booth, My boss, at Motorola Enterprise Mobility; Robert Reimann at Bose Corp, and Mike LaVigne at frog design.

I’m excited for this opportunity to engage in a conversation with the industrial design community. I have submitted this panel again for the Connecting ’07 conference and I hope it will be accepted. Still waiting!

My buddy Chris and I have a way to really get debates going. Here is one based on the article by GK Van Patter that he lauds and I hate.

It started here, when Chris points us to GK’s article (go there to read GKs article. I don’t want to add another link to it to help its Google score).

In the comments Chris and I do a little back and forth and I was about to reply in his comments and I thought … “This is good shit” and I should post it to my own blog and point back if I can. So here goes … Enjoy!

Chris,

[Chris challenges me to whether or not I've been to a workshop of NextD (GK's organization. After I state that GK has not been to the IA Summit, the only "Findability IA" conference I know of, after claiming he knows what we do there.]
1) I’ve been to GK’s workshops. :), but my point was that he CLAIMS knowledge of a community that he is criticizing, but really doesn’t know anything about it.
2) He actually never makes a point in THIS article, except to criticize a growing and successful community of practitioners.
3) He creates a term that no one in the IA community uses; “Findability Information Architecture”?
4) Why? To what purpose? What is this treatise hoping to gain? If he is trying to convince the IA community about the value of strategic experience design, he is really preaching to the choir. I mean the IA community is completely embedded with experience designers like Nathan Shedroff and others who are leaders of the experience design movement. Many of these leaders were instrumental in bringing about the AIGA-Experience Design community into being and creating the DUX conferences.

Personally, I went to the first workshop from NextD b/c I saw something worth relating to about thinking about design. It is right on, but I soon learned that what GK is talking about is well, DESIGN. It is just using cognitive thinking as a way of structuring ideative processes. Cool! Lots of value there.

Good stuff, valuable … But when someone goes foul in the game, I believe it is fine to call them on it, and well, I’m callin’ him on it.

I’m also finding a lot of reactionarism growing in the “design thinking” community as well. I would just caution the whole IDEO, Nussbaum, NextD love-fest going on here.

Recently at the IA Summit architect, Joshua Prince-Ramus, gave a great keynote about his work. In it though he keeps using the term architecture and design as a pejorative, literally saying as such. He explains a methodology of design in his own right that is rational in juxtaposition to that of say the expressionism of a Gehry. Ok, that’s fine, to create a new school, but he expressed it in such terms that it was progressive in nature, like evolution, instead of how all design moves, which is cyclical, curvy, non-linear, advancing and retro, all at the same time.

This same “progressivism” is what I’m hearing from the “design thinking” folks. I like the general thoughts around design thinking, but I do think we need to be cautious and take a full look backwards and forwards, and not react too harshly to where we’ve been as there are still great lessons from our forefathers of design: Reed, Wright, Rand and the great schools of design as well.

Something new will eventually come around and when we react to forcibly away from our past heritage the follow on is usually a sharp turn towards the retrospective.

I think that strategic design is great, but you can’t ONLY do strategic design. You have to then execute on that strategy at some point and to do that requires knowledge of the individual disciplines of design and to do that there needs to be people who understand each of these in depth but with a thinking ability to apply it to that strategy.

Basically, the mission to turn EVERY designer into a strategist is all well and good, but then who is going to execute your strategy? What theories of practice and methods are you going to use to build and advance those disciplines? How are you going to have solid academic research if all you do is at the 30,000 ft. mark? Someone has to be able to form, structure, narrate, fashion, organize, embody, enspace (is that a word?), etc.

So I bemoan THIS article of GKs for these reasons.

Blend review

I just completed what could only be called a boot camp in how, why, where, what of MS Expression Blend, the new interactive design tool, which is part of the Expression Studio suite of design tools. I have to say that my introduction to Blend is very different than most people who it seems this tool is targeted for from my experience with the tool and the rhetoric about it. My main experience of Blend is really in the context of being considered for the position of UX Evangelist for Microsoft. This position was tied directly to the existence of Expression Suite as it was the Expression Suite product managers who were championing the position. The position itself was going to reside as part of the WPF and WPF/E developer evangelists as MS has never had a design evangelist before. But the title being “UXE: User eXperience Evangelist” in my mind meant that they were targeting Expression right at ME! I mean I’m an interaction designer who specializes in RIAs and desktop applications usually in closed environments where technology choices are quite simple to make due to the level of control I have. Yea!!! A tool I’ve been waiting for my whole life.

Through my interview process I felt I became acquainted with what they had of a strategy for evangelizing this tool to the masses, and especially those who I thought were the primary users of the tool, Interaction Designers. It turns out that I was completely wrong and this more than anything else probably sets up a huge disappointment in this tool.

The other part that sets up my disappointment of this tool is that I am constantly comparing it to its closest competitor in my mind, Adobe Flash. This is probably not the way that MS thinks of it though. I think they are mistaken as they are not really thinking about 2 issues: 1. interaction or interactive designers have embedded themselves pretty seriously in the use of Director and Flash for either prototyping or actually implementing interactive applications. 2. Desktop applications are no longer the going to be solely developed using Microsoft technologies even for Microsoft platforms. Apollo is going to change that. It seems that from querying people related to the product that MS is not completely familiar with all that is going on with Adobe as they still think of Flash as a gaming and animation environment and they think of PDF as a static environment. Both statements have not been true for quite some time now.

So, while I’m going to review this product within that context, I realize that I have a lot to still learn about the tool. After a week of this boot camp I learned that first lesson when trying something new, that the first bits of knowledge do more to teach you what you don’t know than what you need to know.

At this point I want to give some major props to our instructor, Brennon Williams out of the UK. His company is called x-Coders (x-coders.com) and his upcoming site expressionblend.com will be an invaluable resource to anyone learning about Blend.

Day 1 of our boot camp was a huge lesson in not Blend, but rather Visual Studio. Yup! The first thing we learned was that Blend is not a tool for designers in the sense that I’m used to thinking of, but really for “interactive designers” in the sense of those people who are hard core Flash/ActionScript programmers. Sure they can do visual, but their real strength is programmatic. And Blend was really meant for them. I would fight this concept the entire week through many a break and lunch time debate about “Why Blend is a mistake?” with Brennon, who was a tireless defender of what he thought of as a “new paradigm” and what I still think is 5 years jump in time BACKWARDS!!!!

But there we were trying to learn about user controls, and object mapping before we ever drew our first screens–even at a wireframe level. We had to learn how to do referencing, build a solution (something you can’t even do in Blend, though Blend will open a solution). A solution is the largest collection unit in the MS programming world. In side of a solution are project files which can have many different control definitions, reference libraries, and applications built in them as other sub-units. Their relationship is something I still do not fully understand, but I know that if you don’t get it your whole application will break. It is important in the end to understand how to architect your objects (elements, user controls, libraries, and applications) because this done incorrectly will lead to really poor performance.

Learning this on Day-1 led to our entire boot camp structure being changed. We realized that in 1-week of classes we were not going to learn what was necessary for us to really own the UI code as we had hoped and as we understood the promise of Blend. While things like Databinding were soooo much easier in Blend than they were in Flash, how to manipulate events as simple as a “click” on a button were much more difficult than Flash. This led to a tremendous amount of frustration because when I came out of my first Flash class for Flash MX, I was able to instantly tinker and even was able to create my portfolio site (now we can judge the design in a different article). I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t do the simplest of tasks.

After a week, I realized that a lot of this was because of one HUGE difference between Blend and Flash and since Blend had 5 years of Flash development to build on, it was astonishing that this main component of the UX of Flash was overridden. What is it? Well, the object relationship nature of the code in Flash makes it Sooooo easy to embed programming into it directly. While I could go out to Flex and go to town on really complex stuff, I can also embed really simple programs of events and data structure formatting onto the objects themselves. I do not need to go into another environment, and if I need to find my code later, I know to go to look at the object it is related to.

Another big looser for making Blend easy to use as a designer was that the relationship between user controls and the parent application were not manageable nearly as well. For example it is VERY easy to do a click event in 1 object (say a movie clip or even a SWF) and target an object in a completely different movie clip or SWF. There was direct targeting capabilities up to parent and down again, or directly to root and down a new path entirely. How does this pan out? I can put a click event (& listener) directly onto the button itself and then I can reference in that script easily any object in my application so long as I know its relative or absolute path. In Blend, you have to have listeners at every parent level along the way for these events and then down the child path back to the object. Now I’m sure there is some technical reason for this, but remember, I’m a designer and if I can “do” something in one application I see no reason that I can’t do it in another. Well, that isn’t designer speak per se, that is just plain end-user speak.

You open up Blend and it is obvious that it is a very powerful tool. But so much of that power is hidden in panels and dialogs and mixed titling that you can never find it without an expert guide. For example, going back to the “click” paradigm. There is an event type called “click”. GREAT! But it isn’t where you’d expect. Ya see at the top left there is a panel that says things like “Event” and “Trigger” and you’d think that is where you’d go to do something like adding a click event to a button, eh? Uh? NO! In the properties panel on the other side there is a toggle marked by a 16×16 icon with only a tooltip as a label that says “Events”. The icon is a lightning bolt. I NEVER even noticed it until it was pointed out to me. And the first event I see there is called “Click” and next to it is an open text box. I was expecting it to work like a CSS panel where when you click on it a drop down would appear with options for that property or action. Nope! Dig this! It takes me directly to Visual Studio!!!! Where it fortunately creates an area for me to add my click event on the selected object in a .xaml.cs file that the system created for me. And at that there is no help unlike the ActionScript panel in Flash for me to figure out what to do next. I’m sorta just left there. Guess what I did? I closed VS and shrugged my shoulders.

After all this, I realized that MS made a really powerful tool for really expert users. It seems that after all is said and done that it is a tool not for interaction designers, but for interactive designers and thus its real promise is lost because interactive designers don’t design or engineer applications but rather sites, and experiences. Interaction designers do both, and quite honestly are more skilled and experienced in designing complex interactivity than those who come to all this from interactive design. I know I’m going to get burned from that statement, but while interactive designers are really great and knowledgeable, they don’t know a heck of a lot about UX, cog psy, HCI, usability, etc. It just isn’t part of what they do. They concentrate mostly on implementing the presentation layer without much attention to the context of use, without using user centered research models, etc.

So after a week, I feel lost again. I was soooo hopeful that finally there was going to be a tool where I felt I could do my work as an interaction designer and user experience designer and integrate seamlessly into the development process as peers. What I discovered is now I’m going to have to go back and hire a new expert who can do that bridging for me, adding another interpreter in the puzzle.

Something that came up between my teacher, Brennon, and myself was that Blend has really powerful 3D features which take advantage of technology in Vista. I was not only unimpressed, but it sorta pissed me off more. It is the classic mistake of software to be built with too many features, but this feature more than any other feels the most useless to me. I cannot tell you the last time in the last 10 years when I was asked to add 3D to a project I was working on. Enterprise software just doesn’t need it and while Business Intelligence apps thrive on it, we still have not figured out how to make those 3D visualizations and interaction models work with standard PC installed I/O devices, nor have we really proven that 3D interactions and visualizations really improve consumption success of the data into useful information. It’s a prefect example of how UX was not even considered in the totality of the project.

Now all that being said, Blend is necessary for anyone wanting to design UIs for WPF & WPF/E applications. It does give you a step up over just using Photoshop/Illustrator and just handing it off. It also allows for very very rich transitions which are indeed helpful in any Rich Internet or Desktop application. Transitions are done easily through the timeline and you don’t even have to tell the system to tween, nor do you have to manage a heck of a lot of keyframes. The other part that I liked was the style and template controls that are in the system. It is very easy to manage an object used in multiple places in the system.

If I had to sum it up, I’d have to say that they are about 3 revs away from creating a tool that I would want to use as much as other existing tools such as Flash, Dreamweaver and Axure. There are also tools like iRise and Serena that do work well in desktop app environments that should compete pretty well here if they had the marketing money that MS has.

I cannot recommend that any designer take up using Blend in their practice unless they are doing WPF & WPF/E applications and even then really learn what you are getting yourself into.
Bring Brennon in to help you out, or at the very least subscribe to his lessons on expressionblend.com.

Good luck! because you’ll need more than the force to use Blend.

Yes, I know this is not on topic, but what the heck … I’m selling a custom designed kitchen island made from IKEA parts with 3 bar stools.

I made this kitchen island when I moved into my soon to be old apartment 2 years ago. I put the ad itself on Google Base.