Posts
May 9th, 2008
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.”
Posted in Design, UI
March 19th, 2008
When approaching the visual design of a given project, I’ve found the following framework to be helpful in gathering requirements.
Non-functional Specs
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.
Posted in Design, UI
February 20th, 2008
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/
Posted in Design, Flex
January 24th, 2008
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.
Posted in Design, Creativity
November 8th, 2007
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.
Posted in Design, Conferences
July 10th, 2007
- For me, the device lives up to the hype. I feel it is just the right size, and overall, I can accomplish tasks with amazing ease.
- Using the touch-screen keyboard to type is way easier and faster than I had imagined. I do wish, however, that the keyboard’s layout would always change to landscape mode when rotated to better enable typing with both thumbs.
- Maps are exceptionally useful. After pulling up a location, mapping directions to and/or from it, calling its phone number, or visiting its website are just a tap away.
- Using Google Maps on my laptop is a disappointing experience compared to that on the iPhone. I miss the behavior of map pins dropping into place, and I want the ability to pinch the screen to zoom in/zoom out.
- After a road trip across the state, found that reception was comparable to my friends’ phones (also on AT&T).
- Some websites chugged along on the EDGE network, while others loaded speedily. Seems to depend on how well a site is built using standards.
- Several times while composing email, I wished I could select specific portions of text to edit.
- Visual voicemail is awesome. Every time I listen to a message, I still expect to hear the save/delete dialog at the end, and am relieved that I do not. The ability to listen to a specific portion of a message is very useful, especially for jotting down phone numbers, etc.
- Without any hint of elitism, I can’t help but feel sad looking at other peoples’ cell phones by comparison. The current gap that exists is a bit hard to wrap my head around.
- With a good dose of elitism, I do revel in using the default signature, “Sent from my iPhone” when sending email.
Posted in iPhone
June 29th, 2007
I confess: after slight hesitation, I have become an early adopter of the long-awaited iPhone. I’ve decided to ignore the cautious folk who advised that the EDGE network would be too slow, that the touch screen interface wouldn’t last, that the reception would be poor because of the metal plate on its back (I have yet to confirm this one). So, at approximately 9:30 this evening, at the Cambridgeside Galleria, an Apple salesperson delivered into my hands a beautiful, sleek 8GB model.
Before my acquisition, I dined in Harvard Square, where I received a fortune cookie at the end of my meal that read, “Your inner child will play today.” I noticed that one of my lucky numbers was 29, today’s date. Normally, I wouldn’t heed either fortunes or lucky numbers, but I let that be the little push I needed to make my purchase.
More to report soon!
Posted in iPhone
April 5th, 2007
In one of the Institute of Contemporary Art design series lectures, Rick Poyner and Michael Rock discussed recent examples of graphic design, questioning and challenging conventional ideas about purposes and possibilities.
- Place for designers to step up to plate and take responsibility for their design.
- “A movie is not what it’s about, it’s how it’s about it.” Same with design.
- Prada’s alpha brand, Guilt. Expands with the brand. Not focused on selling product for Prada (ubiquitous already). Prada’s consumers highly intelligent women who enjoy irony.
- Designers: Cultural Producers or Corporate Pawns?
- Examples of one design firm’s strict use of Helvetica in their work. Another designer creates the same business card for every client.
- Design critique examining design’s role in society and effect on culture.
- Design at the fringes gains traction and seeps into collective conscious.
- Rather than offer yourself up as anything the client wants you to be, come in with a point of view.
Posted in Design
January 29th, 2007
Design/Testing/Development
- Work Reengineering (aka, Information Architecture): support identified business goals, minimize retraining, support user tasks, provide foundation for visual design, separate issues of organization from issues of presentation.
[Design level 1]
- Conceptual Model Design (aka, Wireframes): establish coherent, rules-based framework which makes IA easy to perceive, understand, learn, and provides unifying foundation for all lower level UI design decisions. Supports mind’s natural tendency to look for patterns, forms useful mental model. Facilitates learning both within and across applications.
- CM Mockups: realize alternative CM designs and provide props for early evaluation.
- Iterative CM Evaluation: get quick, early, and objective feedback. Changes easy to make at this point in lifecycle.
[Design level 2]
- Screen Design Standards: insure consistency in detailed design within/across apps, quality control, reduced development time. Maximize standards, include guidelines, principles as appropriate. Document standards in product Style Guide.
- Prototyping: realize screen design standards, subject to iterative evaluation. May be more complete and “live” than CM mockup (live navigation, real vs. simulated input, etc.)
- Iterative Evaluation: get quick and early feedback. Changes easy/cheap to make.
- Style Guide: documents (and provides rationale for) the completion of high-level UI design.
[Design level 3]
- Detailed User Interface Design: Continue and complete user interface design in complete detail after evaluation is complete. Visual designer prepares detailed UI design specs for developers.
- Iterative Evaluation: use formal Usability Testing to verify solutions to problems found earlier.
Installation
- User Feedback: gather input via Usability Testing, Interviews, Focus Groups, Questionnaires, Usage Studies for maintenance/enhancements, next release, design of related products. Techniques can be combined.
Summary
- UE Lifecycle as a Collapsible/Expandable Model: Design levels 1-3 can be collapsed so that testing takes place after all design levels are drafted.
Posted in Design, Conferences, UI, Usability Testing
January 28th, 2007
Dr. Deborah J. Mayhew’s talk at the BostonCHI Professional Development Seminars at Sun Microsystems gave an introduction to the usability engineering process.
- Usability Engineering is a discipline that draws from other disciplines: Software Engineering, Ethnography, Cognitive Psychology, Experimental Psychology
- Key ingredients for effective Usability Engineering: General principles, Usability Engineering Lifecycle approach (Requirements Analysis, Design, Evaluation), and Managerial and Organizational Techniques
Requirements Analysis
- User Profile: establish interface requirements for all levels of users. Infrequent users need ease-of-learning (i.e., wizards), while high-frequency users need ease-of-use (i.e., keyboard shortcuts)
- Contextual Task Analysis: produce a user-centered model of work as it is currently performed. See how users work in their environment (invaluable tool; part of being a good anthropologist). Understand their jargon. Maximize efficiency.
- Usability Goals: extracted from User Profile and Contextual Task Analysis (and general business goals). Two basic kinds: qualitative, quantitative. Goals should be prioritized.
- Platform Capabilities/Constraints: Either select platform based on requirements criteria (above), or identify pre-existing technology platform. Based on platform, determine UI possibilities: possible vs. not; easy vs. not cost-effective.
- General Design Principles: help in meeting usability goals and tailoring UI to users/tasks. Not substitute for Requirements Analyses, but when applied together with them, can shorten cycle of design/testing.
Posted in Design, Conferences, UI, Usability Testing