–Engage

Today at work while working through a design during a scoping & requirements definition session with my internal stake holders, I found myself challenging my team because I felt the popular suggestion in the room (can’t really talk about the design by committee situation I ended up in) was leading towards what I could only describe as an “ugly interaction”.

I know when I come back to the office tomorrow morning, I’m going to be pressed to do a better job of expressing why I feel this way and what it means to be an “ugly interaction”.

What is sorta interesting about all this is that it is right on the tail of my discovery of a recent Jonas Löwgren piece on issues that effect the aesthetics of interaction design. So the concept of beauty of interactions was sorta on my mind today anyway. I’ve also been arguing heavily on the IxDA.org discussion list (check the web site here) around what it takes to be an IxD and why UCD standard practices aren’t really all that helpful or revolutionary from the position of standard design theory. So designerly thinking was also on my mind.

So what was it that was so darn ugly and what made it ugly. In this case, I’m pretty sure that it was the use of exception messaging when they really weren’t necessary. Creating a dead-end for an end-user when it REALLY isn’t necessary or even through an inelegant method throwing a human being into an unexpected and possibly undesirable flow or context to me is … well … ugly and in this case, even FUGLY. (Let’s just say its a not nice way of saying VERY ugly.)

I don’t have any general rules to derive from this design experience, but I feel it in my gut that there are collections of interaction types and points that when composed together just create ugly interaction types. It is something to be care for and something you should trust your gut about. Be on the look out and heck report them when you find them.

I’m teaching an interaction design class for SmartExperience.org right now, and I’m in the midst of my sketching lessons. Dealing with a smart group of UX professionals, here is what I’m figuring out about sketching. …

The lesson asked students to do 10 sketches about their project. Personally I felt this was a low number, but it turned out it was way too high for all of them. No fault to them though. Rather it is the fault of all their teachers and managers before they got to me. No one every taught them the importance of sketching multiplicities is toward generating ideas.

What did I get from the students? Most students actually gave me a quick drawing of a single idea. Some did 10 sketches, but just went deeper on a single idea, as opposed to generating completely new ideas.

As someone who grew up outside the design world, I totally understand where my current students are at, though there are a few who are design educated who still surprise me how they didn’t use sketching as an idea generation tool. It is only recently for me with my classes 3 years ago at Pratt in Industrial Design and now my work inside of an industrial design studio that I’m even beginning to incorporate sketching as a tool.

But, it is still sad that so many UX professionals still do not understand that a sketch is not the drawing/visual equivalent of an elevator pitch. That the “napkin drawing” is not really the practice of “sketching” from the point of view of designing. May 100 napkin sketches would suffice.

I’d like to offer some semantic clarification and maybe it will help us to move forward if we change terms a bit within our own corridors. Doing a quick drawing to communicate to people an idea should not be referred to as a sketch any longer. It is a hand-drawing. A sketch or the practice of sketching for designers should always have multiples, should be for personal or team ideation, and should be very rapid and rough, to the point of being trash before the pencil even leaves the paper.

Since discovering sketching as a tool. I try to do a lot more of it. The level of discovery through personal or group sketching has increased the alternate possibilities and have led to innovations so much more often than a linear singularity can do.

Everyone reading this, please sketch 5 completely new ways of laying out my blog. Be as wild as you want and email me your results. ;-)

Thanx!

– dave

Feb 5-9 I’ll be in Vancouver, BC, Canada @ IxDA Interaction09 | Vancouver — THE global Interaction Design conference.

See y’all there!

Plurk is a micro-blogging application that is very rich, interactive and wonderinfully and thoughtfully designed. It takes the concept of Jaiku and Twitter which are so minimalist in their presentation (Twitter is MySpace-like and Jaiku is Face-book-like) and applies some really interesting RIA design theory around it.

Instead of a “feed” it uses a timeline. Questions about scale have arisen, but so far that part is working for me. Further there is inline threading of comments on your plurks that end up with an inbox-like alerting system.

There are still many bugs, around some email and IM integration points, but the spirit of the app is right on target.

My biggest complaint so far, is that there isn’t a version that works for my iPhone. There doesn’t seem to be any APIs for others to hack out of it that interface or others that people may want or need. The 2nd biggest complaint is that no one is thinking about X-posting to Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Jaiku, etc.

I’m at http://www.plurk.com/user/daveixd … Become my friend and I get good karma!