–Engage

In my Senior Intearction Design Studio today I had a student present his sketches to me and the rest of the class. During his explanation I kept getting bothered by the words he was using to describe what was otherwise a good framework for the user interface he was designing for a kiosk system.

Then it struck me. He kept using the word “click”. He meant nothing by it. Really! he didn’t mean anything by it. But it was clear to me that his framing of his interface around “clicking” was leading him towards a specific direction in the interaction design.

As he said click it was very clear that he was using the word “click” to mean “change context”. In the web world, that would mean a new page or a new screen. He would say “click” and then move his hand to his next view, as if to say the current view is over, or “Next!”

I confirmed my observation during the critique when I offered my interpretation, and offered him the following, “You might want to be clearer about when it is necessary for you to change contexts.” (paraphrasing from memory) His eyes sorta lit up as did the rest of the small class as I explained further that he should start thinking about increasing the information and interaction density of the interaction design by layering through progressive presentation elements within the same context instead of always moving to the next context.

Similarly, this happened in the earlier class with the same students where their use of metaphor was single-dimensional, relying on staid patterns like “tabs” which have no reference to the message of the information they are trying to bring futher understanding to. There were two examples where the metaphor of space (buildings) would have been much more appropo and it could have been easily implemented using a zooming interface instead of one that relied on “point & CLICK.”

My point in explaining this is that for me there was an epiphany (this is why teaching is so wonderful), I was finally able to see the example of what I have been trying to articulate for years about the complexity of interaction design, and its so strong tie to language. Not just narrative (as all interactions tell a story) but to the semantics, syntax and semiotics of what makes up the way we talk about the interactions we design.

In this case, even before a real wireframe was developed of any fidelity, the means of framing the interaction already pre-determined (or limited) the interactions that were to be available in the designer’s mind.

Coincidentally, on this very day, @rhjr (aka Robert Hoekman, Jr.) asked the twitterverse about what is good and bad about patterns. He was speaking about design patterns. I think though this ties directly to what can be dangerous about design patterns is that some patterns get TOO ingrained in our minds. They become the only way we can even conceive doing X,Y,Z, and we freeze our creativity.

But this is what language is. It is the cultural patterns embedded in our sentences. As designers though one might say it is our job to move past these limitations of language and structure and open our minds to new possibilities.

Something I usually look for in designers (it doesn’t always work) is to hire designers who are multi-lingual (btw, this design student is at least bi-lingual; disproving my point) because if you have different language sets to access during problem solving, you have multiple frames of reference.

Anyway, my point after rambling is that you need to deconstruct your language. Write it down. Write down your narrative of your interactions and look for affinities that develop around words and phrases and see if anything calls out to you the way the word “click” called out to me.

Anyway, people have asked me to write more about my teaching, so here is one for you all. Enjoy!

So today I went to http://businesstobuttons.com/ and finally saw the new updated site for this year’s conference. There are a few European conferences that year after year get a special mix of presenters and workshop leaders and THIS one always had my attention. More than Shift or Lift, I have always wanted to go. Maybe it is because of the special mix of organizers (inUse, Ergonomidesign, and Malmö University) who are able to combine their diverse points of view and bring together such a special group of speakers. I don’t know how they have done it so consistently year after year. I’m just so excited that @niklasw invited me and accepted my crazy idea for a talk.

Some people at Interaction 09 | Vancouver may have heard me say that I’m going to Malmö this summer for this conference. I know I might have come across as bragging a bit. But my jubilation at attending this event is not so much ego as it is FINALLY getting to check off that box that has been on my travel sheet since I was a little boy to go to Scandinavia. I have dreamed of the halls of Valhalla since I was a little boy (1 too many episodes of Thor, or something like that). My interest only increased the older I got, and the closer to design I became. Was it the story of how Denmark protected almost all of its Jews? The Swedish entrepreneur who used his industrial backings to save even more? Yea, that played into as well. So I hope people don’t confuse being giddy as a boy in a comic book store with arrogance and bragging. If you did see it as bragging, I’m sorry.

So today I finally got to see the list of speakers who will be joining me. What is so interesting is that 3 of them are people whom I interviewed with through my career to work FOR them. I’m humbled to be speaking as a peer with this group and feel like I’ll be as much an attendee as a speaker at this event.

As for me, I’m coming up with a completely new talk I’d like to share. It helps if you are a music fan such as myself (see just below here). I’m also doing my workshop, “Sketching for Interaction Design” which I’m also hoping to do in other spots in Northern Europe if time and money permits.

Anyway, here is the talk I’ll be doing, and do be sure to check out the links for speakers and the rest of the conference I spattered above:

“What’s going on” to “We’re not gonna take it”

The customer of yesterday focused on quality differentiation. The customer of today assumes quality as a given.

The new differentiators are beyond quality and usability, but is directly related to holistic aesthetic design consideration.

Designers bring a new level of “fit” to this new class of products and services. They imbue stories that engage and delight. Surrounding all this is depth, connectedness, and individual expression, that adds up to the “soul” of a design.

Achieving this level of design is hard work. But even more, it requires a rich and rigorous understanding of the make up of interaction design as the design of situations, and of behavior of products as they respond to human interfacing.

How to get there is through a rich understanding of design foundations as the core tools and language for communicating this holistic vision.

Let’s look at what all this means practically for your product and services and explore them together in conversation.

Thanx again to @niklasw and the rest of the organizing team for From Business to Buttons. I can’t wait to see all my new Scandinavian friends when I’m there this June. I’m also planning on staying a few days before the conference in Copenhagen and after the conference in Stockholm.

This is my response to Andrew Hinton’s recent blog post. I was going to post it as a comment, but it really is MY thinking and it is rich enough that I feel it belongs here. Sorry Andrew, my experience is really changing my framing of who “we” are and whether or not there is a “we” at all.

So here’s how it came out of me!

What I said at IxD09 is what I’ll say now. The context of the conversation cannot be generalized. Talking generally about UX is an exercise in futility. The “umbrella” is made up as a social convention that I’m growingly starting to believe does not serve anyone at all. It is a crutch that we’ve created to hide from truths, and continue misinformation about what is we really do. We have allowed the origin of our communities to define, the terms we use regardless of their validity and then used the community as the basis to expand those definitions beyond utility.

A post like this is trying to solve the wrong problem. Andrew is a natural peacemaker, but I’m not sure you are asking the right questions, and I’m not sure you are serving the community that you feel closest to.

There is so much that separates IA/IxD/Usability/HCI/Graphic Design/Industrial Design, etc.

To this end, I don’t see the tent. If you look at the trends in education, and outside the web world of design, the very concept of UX is a blip on their radar. This reality alone challenges the notion of the tribe.

Now, let’s be clear. Separation is not the same as devaluing, or degrading. It is about creating clarity, which in turn will clarify so many different things that still in the UX world remain unnecessarily confused:
1) How do we get educated?
2) What is our career path?
3) What are the right methods of practice?

The reality is that once you move OUT of the web there is so much more that separates IA from IxD than keeps them together. Just look at the work from CIID & RCA/DI and compare to the work of any US IA program.

I find this chumbaya repetition to simply be counter productive at this time in our history. Revel in our differences, and lets stop denying them, couching them in friendlier terms, or otherwise try to make us just get along.

I said this to Louis Rosenfeld and I mean it today even more than then (during #ixd09). Different is not a value, just a description. It is not divisive, and does not mean that collaboration and cooperation cannot happen. A civil engineer and an architect are not the same thing, nor is a cariologist and a neurologist, or a carpenter and a cabinet maker.

Interaction Design is NOT Information Architecture. Stop the madness of trying to be everything to everyone!!

Here are my slides from my two pieces from Interaction 09 | Vancouver.

Bill Scott, a former co-workshop leader of mine and Theresa Neil have written an O’Reilly book called “Designing Web Interfaces: Principles & Patterns in Rich Interaction”.

If you want to get a taste of this fine book before buying this presentation should do it for you:

A theme is brewing in my life as a designer and a design educator. As many of you know I’m teaching mostly undergraduates how to become great interaction designers. My classes tend to have some amount of overlap and so themes sometimes come out that jump out at me that can’t be ignored any longer.

This month’s theme is “story telling” or “narrative”.

It came to a head tonight when I saw the announcement of a new product for storyboard, animatics and audio soundtracks.  The Product is called Story Planner (with a Pro edition). I haven’t used it yet, but just its existence is compelling enough for me.

Yes, there are other comic creation tools out there like Comic Life, but adding in the ability to animate aspects of the board and put in a sound track and now you have a tool that lowers the bar in the creation of really simple video narratives for communicating design directions and scenarios.

But what is the big deal about narratives anyway. They really have existed for quite a long time in design now, going way back. The very notion of using storyboards in a design setting is not that new at all. But what has been happening lately is an “upping” of the ante.

Character development through Goal-Directed Design personas and then GDD scenarios is a common UCD methodology. But expanding on those scenarios and converting them into stories, takes them out of the mere “practical” and into the realm of the creative, sparking a new level of connecting the designer to the user, and allowing the designer to use their less analytical skills towards expressing and synthesizing design goals and needs.

So while yes, there is nothing new under the sun, how we use it and fuse it can lead to new interesting things.

Kudos to the Cooper folks for presenting thier Commuter Buddy “Drawing Board”. What a great example of a very quick slide/cast (basically).

The Drawing Board: Commuter Buddy from Cooper Journal on Vimeo.

The use of whiteboard wireframe images with quick shot photography (some even repeated) and then drawn on for UI’less design, was just brilliant.

What I particularly like about it is the way it uses a situated narrative with a well defined character (Ah! persona). This aspect of both character development and narrative is an important means of expressing design concepts that is often under utilized.

Another less rich mechanism for doing this is through comic storyboards.