elegant interaction

These past few months have seen the growing pains of a Visual Designer in her transition to a User Experience Architect role. I've been head down in an exciting new project that has allowed me to explore human centered design from the ground up. Lots of agonizing over the user's needs, goals, and motivations. Stacks of paper and whiteboards full of sketches. Rapid prototyping with Axure. There's something very satisfying about working so closely with business and user needs; seeing the big picture and then diving deep into details. I know one thing for sure — the next time I approach the visual design, I'll have gone in with an even broader perspective. The ability to see the big picture and connect all the dots is absolutely key.

When it comes to verbose work emails that force me to comb through each tedious paragraph for the main points, I find that my patience wears thin. It's perhaps for this very reason that I strive to be succint in my own email communication. I know that the inboxes of my recipients are flooded on a daily basis, so I don't want to add to the noise and clutter. A well-crafted, succinct message has a far greater chance to cut through the noise and get a response. The advantage is two-fold: not only does my recipient benefit, but I likewise benefit when I'm forced to boil my message down to its essence.

I'm a big fan of short paragraphs and bulleted lists. As a best practice, this is validated by Web content strategists. Brain Traffic, one such firm, offers this advice in their post on Web Writing for Email:

• Don’t use ambiguous language.

• Eliminate unnecessary words.

• Keep your sentences and paragraphs short.

• When making lists, use bullets.

• When giving instruction or steps, use numbered lists.

• Your last sentence should include a clear call to action.

I've followed the buzz generated by UPA Boston's Mini UPA Conference, twittered via #miniupa. Came across Aye Moah's presentation, "What User Interface Designers Can Learn from Architecture." Slide 28 contains a great quote by Matthew Frederick: "Beauty is due more to harmonious relationships among the elements of a composition rather than to the elements themselves."

I couldn't help but think of LukeW's article, "Common Visual Design Misconceptions," where he dispels the myth that it's possible to evaluate visual design in pieces. It's critical that design decisions are made by looking at things holistically, rather than in isolation. As LukeW says, "When a designer adjusts one element, she needs to refactor the overall composition to restore balance. Design decisions made in isolation tend not to add up to a coherent whole."

Ok, so this totally made my day. Whitney Hess included me as one of the 'Women of UX' on Twitter. Listened to her IA Summit 09 "Evangelizing Yourself" podcast a couple weeks ago, and as a fellow introvert, have been inspired to reach out more into the UX community ever since. It doesn't always come easy to put myself 'out there', but it's nice to receive a nudge of validation and encouragement! Honorary #followfriday mention on Twitter

This year I've had the exciting opportunity to be involved with IA Summit 2009. "Principles of UX Leadership" is the poster that I had the privilege to design with a former colleague and mentor, Joe Sokohl. Scheduled this evening at the Summit is a Poster Reception, during which our poster will be featured along with others. (Although I am not able to attend in person, I will be there in spirit!) Now more than ever, the UX community needs practitioners to step up into leadership roles. As Joe illustrates, leadership is "more than just completing a wireframe or writing a Twitter post; instead, leadership is the art of inspiring people to accomplish goals." Here's a few of the sound principles that Joe offers:

• Know yourself and seek self-improvement, both in the field and personally: Make sure that you understand what you want to do in this field, why you want to do it, and how to ground yourself.
• Seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions: Your designs and those of your team matter. They have real impacts on people. Make sure that you take a sense of ownership and feel responsible for users' successes and failures. Strive to take on more responsibility for larger areas of product development.
• Set the example for your peers, your staff, and your superiors: Not only should you be a good UX designer, you need to set the example in your demeanor, your work ethic, and your devotion to both client and user success.
• Know your users as well as your staff, and look out for their welfare: It's critical for you as a leader to make sure that users' needs are addressed in their experience with products you work on. At the same time, take care of your people, ensuring that their needs are met.
• Keep your staff informed: You need to ensure users know what they need to do in their tasks, but you also need to keep both project team members as well as your staff are knowledgeable about what is going on, what is expected, and what effect actions might have.
• Build the team: This principle applies to both the UX team you lead, the development teams you work with, or the project team, or all. Building the team means imparting sound guidelines and principles of UX design & development.
• Assign your staff wisely: As a practitioner, you make sure that what you design meets users needs, goals, and task expectations. At the same time, pay attention to the people on your team. Are they working on projects they have the ability to work on? Do you have someone who's interested in Little IA doing Big IA deliverables?

View the poster to see all of the leadership principles.

Last night I chatted at length with a friend who has been designing the UI for collaboration software. She related the clever ways she has been able to talk directly with the users via the product's open source blog, since the product managers (and business group as a whole) don't subscribe to a user-centered approach. As the sole User Experience representative in the company, she has many challenges as she fights for the needs of the user. For example, the developers insist that "the software should be able to do this," without any real reason behind it. Or the product managers will claim that a new piece of functionality needs to be added, because "the client wants it." To which my friend will often reply, "Who is the client? Are they the user?" After asking this latter question enough times over the past months, it seems as though her efforts to champion the needs of the user are starting to sink in. No doubt her conversations with users will be key when she defends her design decisions in the future. You need to start with small wins and build on those. I can't help but think of the quote by Don Norman: "Don't speculate. Don't argue. Observe."

When approaching the visual design of a given project, I've found the following framework to be helpful in gathering requirements. Non-functional Specs

• e.g., Screen resolution

Technical Specs

• Technical limitations
• Framework
• What technologies/interfaces are users familiar with?

Messages

• Key attributes
• User expectations
• Look/feel

Standards

• Existing corporate standards
• Find common ground, establish new standards
• What are users familiar with? (layout, color, visual cues)
• How much branding of content?

Relationships Get landscape relationship of elements:

• Level(s) of users
• Different experience for each user?
• Parent/Child Relationship? Equal? Powered by?
• Sense of place
• Data relevance
• Organizational integrity (for ea. group)
• Site to site
• Site to application
• Data owner/source

The goal of the requirements, of course, is to drive and inform the visual design. We collect information such as key attributes to translate them into sets of criteria which become underlying principles for the visual design. Getting a landscape relationship of elements is important because it helps us to create visual hierarchies, which essentially creates meaning for users.

Over the past year, I've been heads-down in a supporting role for an enterprise Flex application, so it's been inspiring to poke my head back out, so to speak, and take a look at what the rest of the world has been doing with Flex these days. Check it out: http://flex.org/showcase/

This creativity self-assesment developed by CREAX asks a series of questions and provides a score on 8 different axes: Persistence, Connection, Perspective, Abstraction, Curiosity, Boldness, Paradox, and Complexity.

• Abstraction: The ability to abstract concepts from ideas.
• Connection: The ability to make a connection between things that don't initially have an apparent connection.
• Perspective: The ability to shift one's perspective on a situation — in terms of space and time, and other people.
• Curiosity: The desire to change or improve things that everyone else accepts as the norm.
• Boldness: The confidence to push boundaries beyond accepted conventions. Also the ability to eliminate fear of what others think of you.
• Paradox: The ability to simultaneously accept and work with statements that are contradictory.
• Complexity: The ability to carry large quantities of information and be able to manipulate and manage the relationships between such information.
• Persistence: The ability to force oneself to keep trying to derive more and stronger solutions even when the good ones have already been generated.

As applied to the practice of User Experience Design, many of these qualities are essential. It takes boldness on the part of the designer to visualize solutions. That fearlessness frees one up to focus on the process, rather than on what others are thinking of you. The ability to see connections between things is important, because connections are one's own work of creation. Grasping large, complex bodies of information and seeing relationships between them is crucial in order to see the big picture; one's breadth of understanding goes a long way toward solving problems.

Kim Goodwin's talk at User Interface 12 in Boston outlined the entire Interaction Design process, with a focus on core skills and tools to improve solutions.

• A designer visualizes concrete solutions to human problems.
• Visualization skill is part aptitude, part fearlessness, and part imagination.
• Practice fearlessness with gesture drawing. Keeps focus on process, flow; not end goal. (Playing scales on piano.)
• Cooper phrase: "Reality bats last." Gets away from scarcity thinking and toward abundance thinking.
• Play encourages imagination.
• Pretend it's magic. Drop constraints.
• Pretend it's human. A great human assistant knows you.
• Collaboration: 2 or 3 are fast, 4 are slower, too many are deadly.
• Design Patterns: a designer's vocabulary.
• Practice deconstructing what you see. Identify components and relationships between them. What problem does it solve, and how else could it be applied?
• Design Principles: grammar. Tell us when and how to use vocabulary of patterns.
• Personas are the characters used to drive the story in scenarios.