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Data, Delight, and User Experience Design

Many thanks to my friend Ric Ewing, who was a co-author of this piece.

Pick a card from the deck that I've fanned out before you. Memorize the card, then place it on top of the deck. I'll let you cut it a few times, before I reveal that it's… the Six of Spades!

What's the secret behind this magic trick? If I told you, then it wouldn't be a trick anymore—and you wouldn't have been delighted in the process.

As a magician, I can't reveal my methods. But as a UX designer, I have an obligation to point out that the trick isn't really magic. "Not even the best magician in the world can produce a rabbit out of a hat if there is not already a rabbit in the hat," says a character in the movie The Red Shoes. UX designers are ever seeking to identify, define, refine, and otherwise clarify what people expect to see and do when they visit a website or use a web application. The best sites fulfill these core user expectations, but the very best sites deliver an extra layer of "magic" that transcends those expectations through how data is surfaced through their site experience.

So how do you make sites that provide this extra bit of magic? Here's a few common-sense notions on the subject.

"Can You Say That in English? Explaining UX Research to Clients" in A List Apart Magazine

The new business meeting was going swimmingly—that is, until the client started asking questions about our design process. Then we unleashed our lexicon of specialized user experience (UX) research terminology.

Why should we do that thing you called...what was it, task analysis? We’d like some of those personas. They’re important, right? What the heck is contextual inquiry?!

As mental models flew about the room, I realized how hard it is for clients to understand the true value of UX research. As much as I’d like to tell my clients to go read The Elements of User Experience and call me back when they’re done, that won’t cut it in a professional services environment. The whole team needs a common language and a philosophy that’s easy to grok.

I created a cheat sheet to help you pitch UX research using plain, client-friendly language that focuses on the business value of each exercise. But, before we get to the cheat sheet, let’s talk about how we can communicate the value of UX research at a much higher level.

Continue reading at AListApart.com

Phone Knows Best

Can a phone be your trusted best friend? Your personal trainer? Your confidante? Can it cheer you up when you're stressed? Can it know what you're feeling, and why you're feeling it? Can it go away when you just want to sit in the corner and cry?

If we're serious about pushing the utility of mobile devices to their absolute limit, then we will have to create software so sophisticated that it can discern the difference between the perceived intent of user actions and the actual intent contained in our brains and bodies. Computers will need to make us feel like they're reading our minds—not just our words, where our eyeballs are pointing, and where our body is positioned in physical space. And when we behave in a irrational manner (meaning like human beings) these same computers will need to withhold judgment on what does not compute.

We will call these design challenges "HAL 9000 problems," because this leap in technological evolution brings up some very gnarly dilemmas for designers and developers—though not because an AI in a spaceship is preparing to kill us. (Yet.)

YOUser Experience

What DNA does conceptual art share with interaction design? More than any technical profession would care to admit.

"The idea in conceptual art is that the artist causes experiences to happen to himself, and then ruminates on the interaction between the self and the experience; an audience may be permitted to observe, but is not essential," says Roger Ebert, in his recent (and fantastic) blog post "The agony of the body artist."

So if I was to apply Ebert's thinking about conceptual art to the discipline of interaction design, then it would read as follows:

The idea in interaction design is that the designer causes experiences that happen to others, then ruminates on the interaction between the other and his or her experience; a designer may be permitted to observe, but s/he is not essential.

The Object-Verb Problem in Augmented Reality

I can see into the immediate future. It will consist of millions of people standing around looking at their phones. On their phone screens will be information regarding what they're looking at, and based on what verbs are provided to them, they will either be smiling in delight and pressing the appropriate button overlaid on reality, or cursing in great frustration, wishing doom upon the designers who tried to cram too much functionality into the next great augmented reality application.

While reading a recent article by Luke Wroblewski about the benefits of creating first-person interfaces, I had a realization that one of the most intriguing challenges we're going to have as interactive designers is dealing with verbs when designing first-person interfaces.

Use Cases, Not Useless Cases

What's the use of use cases? Oh, I can think of a few.

Say that you're creating a website for a client that sells pony dolls made from corn plastic. On the site, there are games for kids to play, and if the kids log in, they'll be able to save their high scores, post messages regarding their favorite dolls, create a public user profile, and other features that have yet to be dreamed up by your team. You've been tasked with designing the screens required for registering users for accounts on the site.

Sounds pretty simple, right? This is where designers usually can't restrain themselves from diving right into sketching and ideation and Photoshop and luxurious comps. Next thing you know, the client approves the designs, the project moves into development—and lo and behold, there are a few corner cases you hadn't acknowledged. A few whiteboard sessions later, a long discussion or two with the client, and those corner cases are starting to loom large over the entire design that is now been un-approved and is in the midst of rapid redo.

Even worse, the client is on the hook for making some major changes to their company's business process because those details weren't thought through in the design phase and implemented in a usable fashion.

Oops. Looks like you should have run some use cases, and right from the start.

Critical information always lies buried within the details of use cases. If that information isn't triaged and surfaced properly to the client and your developer, you can totally bollix a big project.

Redesigning Wikipedia

This weekend, I found myself—through the execution of what seemed like an easy challenge for my book—thrust into redesigning a Wikipedia page. In the process, I was dumbfounded by how many usability and visual consistency issues there are in the Wikipedia interface.

We spend a ton of time querying the Internet for details about everything from where President Obama was born to who directed the third episode of the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And more often than not, we're interested in the facts we're uncovering, not how the facts are presented to us. This is a shame, because there are major improvements that can be made by designers to how we present factual content that's meant to be consumed through the Internet.

Other sites, such as Usability Post, have done a thorough job of documenting a number of the major issues with the old interface, so I spent an hour correcting some of them in a visually pleasing fashion to show how, with a minimum of effort, a coalition of designers could rethink some of the key interactions on Wikipedia.

Hello, frog design

 

This July, I'll be making the leap to the Seattle office of frog design—as a senior interaction designer.

I'm very excited to be joining a firm whose work and legacy I've followed through my career. Their recent establishment of the publication Design Mind—as well as their devotion to engaging high-impact pro bono work alongside their always-stunning client projects—are borne out of a sustained commitment to design's pivotal role in industry and culture.

It's been quite a journey to arrive at this destination.

Thinking about Intangible User Interfaces

Apple's announcement on Monday regarding the iPhone 3G S, with voice control, represents more than just a way to manage your iPod state and dial phone calls in a hands-free manner. It's an important step in growing new flavors of user interface that are contingent on the intangible into the mainstream.

I'm not talking solely about Voice User Interfaces (VUIs), or the profession of Voice Interaction Design (VIxD), or the many small fiefdoms and associations currently blossoming around human-computer interaction governed by conversational speech systems. These are useful and important niches, but let's think big in our increasingly fractured and over-specialized profession of design.

Let me propose a somewhat radical alternative: roll Voice User Interfaces into a category that I'd like to dub the Intangible User Interface.

We have Graphical User Interfaces, which we know quite well from decades of struggling with operating systems. Our new friends, the Touch and Natural User Interfaces, rely on our physical bodies for operation beyond things like mice and keyboards. Intangible User Interfaces, however, would be a branch of interface that relies on everything but using your physical body in motion as an input mechanism. There's some wobbly semantics around the word "intangible," as it's often used to describe the attributes of a designed system that can't be visibly measured or quantified when observing users. However, it's that specific quality that I want to focus on: input and output contingent on what cannot be seen.

That Was Perfect. Can You Do It Again?

Web sites don't behave like nature on the back end, but the experiences we find most pleasing on the Web conform to a natural order: in the grids we use to constrain information; in the "weather" of how content flows into and out of a visual presentation; through each tiny interaction we initiate with the system and the expected reaction. As designers, we attempt to control as many of these variables as possible in order to ensure a consistent, desired effect on the user.

But sometimes it's just as valuable to let users follow a more chaotic, yet finite path. Elegant Web experiences walk a fine line separating simplicity (yawn) from chaos (huh?). And the rules that govern the quality of the attempt are derived from considerations of natural organization. This can still be elegant -- as long as the chaos is modulated within a stable container, constrained by a well-designed illusion of natural order.

Great Web sites have feel -- what Leonard Koren had called "heartfelt intelligence." And there’s a certain logic to how they manifest. When I was in high school, one of my fellow students devised a computer program that could write symphonies. The program followed "the rules" of how a symphony should be composed, and it turned out somewhat turgid music. That is, until the student devised a scheme in which the program randomly broke those rules. It turned out that there was a point of natural order between too few rules broken (rigidity) and too many rules broken (cacophony). When his program was dialed in, it composed an infinite number of superlative symphonies.

I have fond memories of playing drums for the first time with a top-flight band and record producer. The engineer would cue up the metronome and the entire band would play through the song again and again, attempting to finish a clean take. When we'd thought we perfected every single note on the Nth run-through, a curious thing happened. The producer said into the talk-back mic: "That was perfect. Now, could you do it again?"

Several more attempts at the material followed. Soon, we began to relax into the song again. Musical flubs and jokes passed between the performers. The song began to gain new life. After the session, I went into the control booth and asked the producer what he was aiming for -- and his answer was bold. While we'd performed the song exactly how we'd envisioned it, the arrangement had suffered because it was lacking feel. Feel only comes about when you tear away the illusion of perfection.

Doing Less with More: The Elegance of Denovation

Are you looking to create the next killer Web site or app? Perhaps you should start by denovating.

Elegant Web experiences mingle utility with a spirit of "denovation" -- a word from Jeremy Alexis, who defines the term as "the attempt to simplify or reduce the number of products without reducing the service performed. Denovation provides a clear path to elegance."

Successful Web sites and applications, well-tended by humans, naturally lend themselves to a denovative approach. You can shed unnecessary or cumbersome features and pages to create a firmer focus on a user's greatest needs. Much like pruning a tree in order to preserve its health, a site whose growth is managed in this way can maintain its systemic and formal elegance over time.

Web sites and apps need to evolve as user behaviors change. In this fashion, the Internet conforms to the same natural rules as humans because these billions of pages are created by humans and fed by humans. So if we view elegant Web sites as being organic in nature, then we can read "denovation" as a form of natural selection. Features whose level of use fall at the very far end of the long tail should be pruned.

Reducing features also has an added benefit: you gain more space in which to evoke positive feeling, not cognitive friction. Can you imagine if they did such a thing with, say, Microsoft Word? I think the overall level of anger in today's society would drop substantially...

"'Experience Design' is a Bunch of Horse-s*$#" by Jon Kolko

This morning, I tripped over the following presentation by Jon Kolko (PDF) while reading through some of the blog coverage from Interaction'09.

Jon's presentation is one of the best articulations I've seen regarding why we should resist talking about how we design "experiences" for our clients, as opposed to interactions.

I know that many years ago, I would have been guilty as charged. Thankfully, I have now fully drunk of the IxD Flavor-Aid and can now be found browbeating my colleagues at work about how we can only reach so far into our audience's brains through our design deliverables...

"Carpe Diem: Attention, Awareness, & Interaction Design" by Dan Saffer

Here are the slides from the kickass keynote given by Dan Saffer of Kicker Studios at Interaction'09. This is the video that Dan references at the start of the presentation:

Interaction'09 | Day 2: How Should We Show Awareness?

This second day of the IxDA's annual conference was stellar. And I have few words to share, as I'm still processing the massive number of sessions that were crammed into the day. However, through the day, I copied down the following quotes from the presenters. If you've got your own favorites based on the sessions that you saw, add them!

Robert Fabricant, Frog Design

"Interaction design is not about computing technology. Technology is not our medium. Behavior is our medium.... Sustainability is a problem of behavior. Sustainability = our problem."

Nathan Moody, Stimulant

"Virtual keyboards suck."

Jon Kolko, Frog Design

"I saw this + I know this = Insight + design pattern = Design idea."

Michael Salamon

Instead of a quote, download his simple presentation about Gestalt at http://www.michaelsalamon.com/ixd09.

Camille Moussette

Speaking about how to put together haptic and multimodal interactions: "Use the world to control the world." Don't think you have to go digital to sketch out an interaction idea.

Dan Saffer, Kicker Studios

The real shining star of today's presentations, just because it was such a needed kick in the ass for our profession. Dan had a long, long list of the things that we can do to show more awareness as interaction designers. I hope that video of this keynote is made available. Some of my favorite quotes:

Stop looking for the magic bullet.
Instead of "design thinking," let's think and make.
Stop fetishizing simplicity.
Don't forget that for most, the interface is the system.
Stop waiting for permission.
You already know everything you need to know to design the future.

Interaction'09 | Day 1: Please Confirm or Deny Your Involvement

Do we deny the overall state of the world in order to create things that fit people's immediate lives -- thereby confirming their behavior and point of view -- or do we urge those people to change their behavior so they don't need those things at all?

This is one of the major themes I've seen boil up from my first full day of the Interaction'09 Conference: this consideration (or denial) of fit.

Spotted in Seattle: DC Web Stencil Kit

My friends over at Design Commission sent me one of these Web stencil kits for the holidays this year, and I'm totally hooked. You can now buy one of your own through their Web site for $19.95 + tax/shipping, which gets you a stencil, a pad of grid paper, and a mechanical pencil.

I'm looking forward to seeing what these guys are going to make for next Christmas. Perhaps an IA stencil?

The Boundaries of Natural User Interfaces

A few weeks ago, I went to a talk hosted by the IxDA Seattle chapter called "Brave NUI World," hosted by the Artefact Group. At the event, some of the Microsoft Surface team showed off their technology in action and had a panel discussion about how their product's Natural User Interface (NUI) was developed within Microsoft, as well as the user experience and usability learnings they'd gleaned from the 5-year development process.

One of the things that really struck me from this entire panel was how much energy they'd invested into paring away anything that did not look and behave like a real physical object, as opposed to trying to integrate interface elements such as a scroll bar or a text input screen into the device. Everything in their NUI required physics or real-world behavior, which creates some interesting opportunities for interaction, but is also a major limiting factor for accessing any large quantity of information.

Want to see what considerations go into designing a NUI? Artefact has done a good job of videotaping the panel, which you can watch at your leisure here or view them at the original post at 720 px wide:

Another company I saw a presentation from almost two years ago was the Netherlands-based design firm Lust. They crafted a NUI for their design firm retrospective "Generation Random", which is also quite instructive to watch in action. Click in the (not very usable) nav on their site the first text link, to see a video of their first exhibit in action.

Give Your Phone the Finger

Multi-touch, gestural interfaces are the new black. And for the next four to five years, they're the immediate future of our ever-evolving human/computer interactions. But for us designers, I'd like to project a little further into the future and discern an even more likely scenario: true sense integration on mobile and desktop computing devices.

As designers, we usually only get to consider how media looks, sounds, and feels in a mildly tactile sense. In the future, we'll be able to consider these variables at a much greater depth and dimension than that of a static, unchanging substrate. I also wouldn't be surprised if smell and taste gained much greater prominence in the designer's arsenal.

Specifically, there are certain kinds of interactions regarding mobile and desktop devices that don't seem very far off from a technology standpoint. They do, however, require weaning us off the idea of doing our computing through a screen-topped device with a gestural input mechanism. Multi-touch interfaces don't have a ton of utility if you have disabilities, and definitely don't exploit other mechanisms we humans have for conveying and receiving information.

Here's what I'm dreaming of...

An earpiece that doubles as a phone and really understands what I want.

I don't always need to see the Internet to be able to grasp the information from it.

If you're looking to access the visual Internet, the iPhone dominates the field for ease of use and clarity and will likely be the gold standard for some time. But what if I'm going out on the town and don't want that phone in my pocket? Make the earpiece a phone as well, and pair it with trainable natural-language voice recognition software driven through the cell-phone network that learns my voice, my needs, and my quirky slang.

I could imagine the earpiece phone recognizing commands such as "give me turn-by-turn directions to Pacific Place," "pay my cell phone bill with my credit card," or "text my friend Joanie that I'll be twenty minutes late" and it will be smart enough to fulfill your actions without any major hiccups.

This is a true expression of cloud computing separate of the desktop and is where Google is starting to lay the ground with services such as 1-800-GOOG-411, which they claim is a not-for-profit venture, but makes a heck of a lot of sense in their long term strategy for having a universe of cloud-driven Internet tools that have great utility for a broad audience and further help them sell search advertising.

Knowing how excited people get about these kinds of interfaces, I could see them being smart enough to recognize patterns of behavior and quietly prompt you: "Did you mean to pass by the cereal aisle? I know you like Lucky Charms." (Okay, that would be scary...)

A touch interface that communicates through sense of touch, not screen activity.

What's the weather going to be? I go to the weather service on my phone, and when I touch the screen to see what the upcoming weather's going to be like through the weekend, the surface of the touch interface gets hotter or colder depending on the time period my finger hovers over. Sounds frilly, right? Sure, if you aren't blind. Blind people should be able to ask their phone, "What's the temperature going to be tomorrow?" and have the phone adjust its heat output in relation to today's temperature to indicate the relative difference.

Another example. Let's say I'm considering taking SR-520 over I-90 to get to the Eastside. I ask my phone (using my voice interface) how the traffic is on SR-520. The steering wheel gets harder by 30%. Should I take I-90 then? The steering wheel softens dramatically. There are other ways of getting data instead of me barking orders to my phone/car/computer, then having it bark at me a series of choppily-voiced words, which are interrupting my enjoyment of the new MGMT album.

Yes, the multi-touch gestural interface is very cool and gets rid of that mousy thing on the desk. But I want more sense out of my touch interactions.

Forget the idea of the phone altogether. It's part of the devices around me.

I know phone manufacturers want to make money from our phone networks that require devices that earn money for large publicly traded companies through the use of night and weekend minutes... but doesn't that idea sound... quaint?

I'd be perfectly happy if phone calls followed me from device to device around me, instead of me having to carry a device around in my pocket. Sure, there is the love that I'd lavish on a phone as part of my technological pocket arsenal next to the iPod, the (soon to be smart) wallet, my house keys, my sketch notebook, and my pack of mints. But I'm of the "less is more" camp, and less means no phone whenever possible.

Since I'm Gen X, I'm cool with being a little out of touch. I'm already seeing that use of cell phones will stratify, with phones being generated for the youth as part of their uniform, while from Gen X on up, it's seen as a necessity, not as an entertaining activity. Higher-end luxury phones will be wispy, while phones for the youth will be badges.

But really, I'd like to get rid of the word phone altogether. Or at least call this new category of devices something else. The whole beauty of the term "mobile device" is that you don't have to say it's a phone/MP3 player/GPS/Knife/Wii remote. Let's just tack the word "multi-sensory" onto mobile devices and hope that the device manufacturers can pay it off with something that delivers some real utility to us technology junkies.