Why is it that when people think of involving a community in design their minds immediately turn to surveys and polls? Enough already. Involving a community in your design process doesn’t mean making the community make the design decisions… this is why we’re dreaming up new ways of engaging a community, qualitatively, in the design process for the Drupal 7 User Experience Project.

What’s so bad about a poll?

I think there are two key reasons why voting should generally be avoided in community design practice:

1. Your community is (probably not) made up of designers

what colour would you like? Which icons do you prefer? Do you want your navigation here, here or here? Which of these three visual design treatments do you like best?

When you’re out doing design research in person, you don’t ask people where they’d prefer their navigation. Rather you use conversation and observation to gain insight into who your users are, what they need to do with and any other information you need in order to make good design decisions. Why should it be any different online?

Humans, at the best of times, are pretty bad at telling you how they’re going to use things and what configuration will best suit them. We know that, don’t we? So what makes us think a poll is a good idea? A
nd what do you, as a designer, do with data that says that 67% of the people surveyed prefer green? You don’t know anything about *why* these people like green, or in what context they actually hate green. This data contains no real insight.

2. Voting is like fast food
cheap

It is easy and initially feels good, but it leaves you wanting more

A
 vote is super quick and easy to set up and similarly it is quick and easy to participate – you can sit back and watch the numbers roll in. ‘Look!’ you can shout, ‘see how many people are involved in our project!’

It’s easy to be seduced by the numbers. But ultimately a few quality interactions with your community are worth more than 1.000 empty gestures. Just as when you compare numbers in a qualitative study and a quantitive study, it’s not always a matter of more is best. Ultimately everyone is left wanting more. The designer wants more insight and the participant more engagement.

We need to be more thoughtful, more creative and willing to work a little harder in designing ways for communities to engage in an open design process. With that in mind, here’s a few activities we’ve been trying out on the D7UX project.

Crowdsourcing Wireframes

Extracting Existing Community Knowledge

This is an exercise that we first did on the Drupal.org project and are now running again for D7UX. Essentially we invite people to draw up a wireframe (in whatever medium they prefer) of a part of Drupal they think needs improvement. This time around we also asked people to make a quick screencast walk through to give us some more context and understanding of both the problem and the solution. Participants post their work either to their own blogs and give us a link or to the Flickr and Youtube groups we have for the project.

There is a reasonable amount of effort involved in participating in this activity, so we tend not to be flooded with responses. This is good, for a number of reasons:

• The data is quite tough to analyse.
• The people who do participate really do care about the project and the problem and have given it some real consideration. Each submitted artifact then becomes a discussion point for the rest of the community to gather around.

Working with a developer-led community like Drupal we do tend to get our ‘wireframes’ in pretty high fidelity. In fact, a wireframe for us is everything from a pencil sketch to a live implementation. Especially on a project like D7UX where there is a ‘back story’ to everything and almost every idea has already been considered and discussed at length. It is a great way to draw some of these conversations out earlier in the project than might otherwise be the case.

Crowdsourcing Usability Testing

Capturing Scale, Sharing Our Process

Continuing in the crowdsourcing vein, we have also been trying to capture the scale and diversity of the Drupal community by recruiting willing participants to help us do some user research on the project. We first attempted this exercise during the Drupal.org project but it didn’t really take off. Despite lots of interest, no actual tests emerged. So, it seemed like a good idea but we needed to tweak the process a little to make it more accessible and easier to engage. So far we’ve run one round of CrowdTesting for D7UX and happily, we’ve had about a dozen people around the world participate. And the information we’ve been collecting has been put to great use already.

What did we do differently this time? Rather than just putting the concept out there and saying ‘go for it!’, we have scheduled a series of dates throughout the project when testing will be undertaken. I’ve also been a lot more prescriptive about what needs to be tested and how to test it this time around. I provided a downloadable document with the materials (we’re testing paper prototypes at the moment) and a script to follow, plus some interviewing tips for newbies.

Participants conduct a short test and post the results to an online questionnaire. We also encourage participants to video their test and post the video to our Youtube group (or elsewhere if they prefer). The posted video is particularly helpful in allowing us to analyse and contextualise reported findings.

What are the benefits of this activity? Not only do we gather more research data from all around the world (and yes, we are still coming to terms with the challenge of languages other than English), but we are also making user research much more accessible to people who might otherwise never had exposure to it. We are really hoping to continue to promote the practice of user observation throughout this project. And we hope to see real user observations used as evidence as we work with the community to debate the best approaches to various aspects of the interface.

‘Pimp Your Admin’

Extracting Existing Community Knowledge

When we first started on the D7UX project, we had a feeling that lots of people out there were ‘hacking the interface’ of their Drupal admin to make it more usable for their clients. We knew this, of course, because we’d seen a few instances of it. It struck us that this would be a great way to do some ‘requirements gathering’: to take a look at as many ‘hacked interfaces’ as possible and see if there were similarities in the changes that people were making to the admin interface to make it more human friendly.

And so we came up with ‘Pimp Your Admin’ in which we invite people to walk us through the customisations they’ve made (or that they regularly make) to the admin interface. We launched this at a conference, Drupalcon DC, where we sat down with people and did the screen recording and interviews in person. But this is also an online activity and members of the community from around the world have since prepared screencasts sharing their own personal interface modifications. This has been interesting both for us and for the community – you don’t really get to see other people’s admin interfaces very often!

As we suspected, there are definite ‘themes’ in the changes made to the interface and even at this early stage we know that several of these will be mirrored in our proposed design. We’re continuing to capture this material throughout the project too.

Having the opportunity to work within this community context is an amazing challenge and opportunity, we’re really trying hard to be as thoughtful about the way we engage with the community as we are with the design work we produce but it is a constantly evolving process of trial and error and refinements.

Want to see where we’ve gotten with it so far? Be sure to check out our recently released Initial Concepts and Directions and be sure to let me know what you think!

Top image by yoroy

For the last two years I’ve been working on Dopplr, a service to help people travel smarter. I’ve been trying to explore new ways to organise and design social networks. I also tried to visualise an awful lot of data, and on top of that, do it in a way that delights our users. And that’s what I’m going to talk about at the Business to Buttons conference in Sweden this coming June.

In the time I created all of the above, I believe we’ve seen the rise of a class of services I call ‘personal informatics’ (about which Eilidh wrote an article) – a class of which Dopplr is a member.

Last year Tom Coates (product manager of FireEagle, and a well-known thoughtful practitioner in matters of social software) and I gave a talk at Web2.0Expo San Francisco, “Polite, Pertinent, and… Pretty: Designing for the New-wave of Personal Informatics“. This presentation looked at interaction design principles to maximise the humanity of personal informatics services and minimise privacy issues. Since then I’ve realised there’s a fourth ‘P’: ‘Persuasive’.

There are both implicit and explicit persuasive roles that such services can adopt and, in concert with the other ‘P’s, this becomes a valuable design strategy.

Persuasive Design is a field that has been in the ascendant since Stanford professor B.J. Fogg popularised the term in his 2003 book. Essentially, it is as designer and writer Jeremy Faludi describes: “crafting a product’s user experience so that the user’s actual interaction with the product changes their behaviour.”

It’s particularly interesting to consider this approach to the data-rich world of personal informatics. The data itself is coming from their behaviour in the world, after all: their travel in relation to Dopplr specifically, but you could also think of things like exercise for services such as Nike+ and Nokia Sports Tracker, or their music-listening in terms of Last.fm and Spotify.

So, how to employ persuasive design in the representation of personal informatics? Surely, you have to truly represent a user’s data back to them. Yes. I think that’s the basic tenet to stick to – one might group it under the ‘polite’ heading of the four ‘P’s. But the act of representing a user’s data, harvested from their behaviour or interactions with a service, is the completion of a feedback loop. And the nuances of how you deliver that feedback can produce different persuasive outcomes.

The most basic persuasive outcome is the most negative: you fail to present the data in an interesting and compelling way and you persuade the user of nothing. Or worse, not to bother returning to engage further in the service.

There are acts of micro-persuasion that can be factored into your service design, which might engender large outcomes. For instance, in Dopplr’s carbon calculator (created in partnership with AMEE) we respond to a month with no reported trips with a simple “we envy you”. Erika Hall’s “Copy as Interface” is a great guide to acts of micro-persuasion in interface design. And Stephen Anderson recently gave a great presentation on “The art and science of seductive interactions” which looks at these techniques in some detail.

At the larger scale of persuasion, there’s the opposite of the nightmare scenarios I described above: present the user’s data back to them in an interesting and compelling way that makes them engage with the service more frequently and more deeply.

This was what we were attempting with our ‘Personal Annual Report’ – a summary of the user’s data over 2008, visualised in what we hoped were interesting and beautiful ways and in the context of both their social network and the larger Dopplr community.

It succeeded, and also proved to be a significant user recruitment and retention asset. It also generated a lot of great marketing – both word-of-mouth (and blog) and in the traditional press.

I’m going to be talking in detail about the ‘Personal Annual Report’ at this year’s From Business to Buttons conference, and going deeper into the role of macro and micro persuasion in the design of personal informatics. I’m looking forward to discussing it with some of you there – hopefully you’ll be persuaded…

About From Business to Buttons

Held in lovely Malmö in southern Sweden, From Business to Buttons is the meeting place in Europe for interaction designers, business strategist and usability experts. This year it will be held on June 11-12.

Dopplr carbon footprint screenshot by sebastiankippe

Prototyping in the early phase of a project is the ideal way to see if (and how) a concept will work. But often enough it’s not being done because design teams fear it will cost them all of their available hours. I think this is a big misconception, since there are many different ways you can prototype… And even the fastest way, sketching, is more valuable then doing no prototype at all.

It makes you tell stories

There are many reasons why you should start prototyping… but for now I want to focus on just a couple of reasons. The first being: it makes you tell stories. When you force yourself to make a lo-fi prototype (e.g. sketching) you suddenly have to go through the scenarios/use cases. You have to design the interface and in your head interact with it. It’s not just wireframes in Visio anymore, but it comes alive. And this forces you as a designer to start telling the story of the interface. See it as a person, talking to the user… And like a storyteller you should define the character of the product. Is it agressive? Your friend? Your tutor or advisor? Will it talk to you as a restless child or be like Buddha himself? And what does it tell you? When? How?

The exercise of making a prototype brings this alive. It forces you to imagine how somebody will play around with it. I acknowledge that you should also do this when drawing wireframes, but there you’ll easily enough lose yourself in the details. It’s also a process where you approach each screen as an individual, trying to get the balance on the screen right. Maybe that’s not the correct way, but it is how it works. While making a prototype and playing around with it makes you feel close to the user.

It let’s you explain your concept

Personally I’m not always a big fan of wireframes. When I create them I already know that they will limit me in some way. Clients have a problem looking through the wires and seeing the interactive concept… And I have to split up an interactive concept in different pages and screens, while any interactive part can only be described in text. A prototype helps me explain what I have in mind (even to myself). It’s an easy way to start bringing the concept alive and seeing how it interacts with people. I can make sounds, move things around, let things disappear… everything that I need to bring it alive. And before I dive into the details I can easily change stuff. While others (and me) play around with the prototype, it evolves. Making the prototype isn’t a one-step proces. The creation and adaptation of it is the actual development of the concept.

So let’s start prototyping. And as a proof that anybody can prototype and bring an idea to live… Look at this video:

Over the last few years, social computing has been relegated to asynchronous websites like FaceBook and Twitter, where users connect with many people and their collective information is harvested for the larger group. However these are still largely individually actions, not synchronous… yet we call it “social”. I would like to expand that definition.

Think of a computer where you sit down and work simultaneously with your friend. Imagine you and your friends all playing a game or solving a problem at the same time on the same computer. This has been one of the key aspects of our vision at Microsoft Surface. As I’ve presented over the last year on Surface, I’ve talked a lot about the aspects of social computing. Initially when I started on the team I was skeptical of social computing as Surface defines it: multiple people working around a single computer. Since that time, I have seen some of the great innovations and situations that Surface style social computing allows. With its vision system (instead of capacitive or infra-red), Surface can recognize 52 simultaneous points of touch, as well as physical objects, making it a computer for a truly social environment.

Social computing is described as the intersection between social behavior and computing systems, and often in somewhat ambiguous computational terms. I question how much of what happens on social sites like FaceBook [et al] is really social (I don’t often come to work sharing a list of 25 personal oddities about myself). The only real social aspect is that you’re sharing items with other people in an easy way across geographic divides. Although the web seems like a macrocosm of that definition. I’m not sure why things like instant messaging are not considered social computing, but they are more social than most sites bearing that label.

I would like to implore readers to expand their definition of the term social computing and realize it can apply to many more situations than it currently is; those being actual social situations. I would describe that as what Surface is aspiring to be, the first true social computer. It provides context and use for multiple people, on all sides. Although true social computing can be done with a single computer and two or more people, it may not be optimal. Below are a few of the ways I’ve come to think about social computer usage:

• Driver as a presenter: this happens when you’re showing someone a YouTube video
• Driver (w/ an influencer or back seat driver): this happens when you’re searching the internet for someone and someone is telling you what do type in
• Turn taking: passing a laptop back and forth to share information
• Simultaneous: both playing a game on Microsoft Surface. I’ll call this synchronous social activities. Very different from the three above it

Of course none of what I describe here is the current way we define social computing, which is why I’m asking people to expand their thinking. Perhaps there is another word to describe these situations? Whatever happens, it’s become clear to me that the computer cannot simply stay as the personal device it has been and designers should begin to think about social proximity activities and behaviors. As technology becomes more pervasive and cultures become more acquiesced to computers, there will be a need and desire to continue and expand the social aspects.

As an aside, while I bring up Surface several times in my posts, please don’t take that for blindly selling the technology. I am very aware of its flaws and issues, and part of my opportunity at Microsoft is to make those better. For those interested, here is my talk from MIX09 on Surface and touch computing where I discuss both my love and discomforts on those topics.

I want to be a toy designer because then I can be a child at work. I think that I’m still a grownup child, so it would be so great if that dream comes true. I’m having a lot of fun creating, seeing, experiencing and using stuff just like a little child. And that, I think, is very important when creating something new. Here are some things I would design.

Pendurella

You get home in the rain and swing your umbrella a few times to drain off the water on it… Why shouldn’t we replace that movement by making a huge pendulum toy?

Snow Globe Screen

This could make a good reason for you to have a toy on your desk all the time.

The snow globe that gets your photos wirelessly from your PC and displays them in 3D. Shake it to shuffle the photos.

Move to Trash Game

I’m wondering if I could make my routine desktop work like a game.

So how about becoming a kid again to think like one? It’s great.

Last December I posted a small blog post entitled “Designs with Soul”. In it I discussed the importance of the designer in product design.  Some feedback about the piece is leading the formation of my upcoming presentation at the From Business to Buttons conference in Sweden this coming June.

Here’s my summary of the original thesis:

Most successful products create a sense of connectedness between the consumer and the designer and that this connection occurs when designers balance the pull towards the rational, functional, & expedient with the natural & emotional.

But let’s take the thesis deeper. What is really being connected here? What does it mean for the end-user to feel connected? What are the examples in the real world where we get this at the various layers of design.

Great design is connected to art

Great art isn’t just beautiful. It creates a sense of connection between artist and audience. Here is my attempt at what makes great art evoke a sense of connection to the artist:

• nature – Even the “ugly” in nature can and often does inspire a sense of connection to “something”. As a devout atheist (not even close to agnostic anymore) I call this sense of awe created by the magnificance of chaos and how time works out so much beauty.
• emotion - emotion expressed, or otherwise given space, demonstrates a connection to the society around us and the people who embody society.
• analog – This means a few things. 1) it means non-digital. Our senses are set up to understand the analog; whenever we digitize something we are asking our minds to perceive elements that they are not used to and it throws them. 2) Metaphors that map to our expectations.
• technology – demonstrating we have an intellect, a sense of rationality is key to remaining connected, as it holds us towards the hope that all is not chaos. It is balanced, because too much technology negates the previous two ideals.
• referencing the world – even if your audience doesn’t get it, referencing the world (the many cultures we share this blue ball with) will bring an added sense of connectedness.
• aesthetics – this isn’t just about color, layout, form, line, texture, etc. but rather it is about engaging all facets of the mind, as it moves through an experience. How one moves during its use, the conversation it engages, the fit to motivation & goals.
• amazing craft – I think we all know that craft is hard and we have an internal appreciation of the skill it takes to make something wondrous.

I’m sure there are more, but when these properties of art are also applied to products & services, it upgrades the overall experiences surrounding them from “getting the job done” to “How did I ever live without this tool?” to “I will not only use this product, I will pay a premium for it, and be its greatest advocate.” To be great doesn’t require applying all these elements, but balancing a few really well. When it comes to a product even one of these attributes done well can have a great effect.

Let’s focus on art a little more…

Michaelangelo's David

David by Michaelangelo (not just a past relative) is one of the best known statues in the world. What is so special? Is it the perfection of the body? Or is it also the amazement we feel when we sense the magic of the craft that carved that vision out of the marble. It also has to be the choice of subject. Taking a story of the Bible and portraying this “Boy” as someone robust & perfect, but also oddly vulnerable.

The Renaissance offers up a ton of examples that accomplish this goal–Mona Lisa, Sistine Chapel, Birth of Venus. Just the application of depth added a truer naturalism than previously present. Not until the Impressionists and post-Impressionists do we see again this great sense of human connection & soul in the art of Europe. The emotion against nature that Monet explores is unparalleled. Van Gogh obviously increases the intensity of the emotion, but also adds more abstraction through what can be called the addition of technology to his painting.  Art has always waxed and waned in trying to remain connected while advancing its means of self-expression. Even if we look at seemingly non-natural art like Kandinsky, Pollock, Warhol, Picasso, Miro, etc. some elements of the above are mixed together at the most abstract levels to draw connection between the artist and the audience.

Now let’s look at design …

One can’t ignore architecture’s primary mandate going back to Roman times which states: Firmness, Utility & Delight. I would argue, though, that all 3 of these are attainable in the most basic sense without achieving the soulful sense of connectedness that I believe moves a product out of the territory of contemporary success into the heavens of “How did I ever live without this?”

Great design using the attributes noted above is referential to something global. Most references that work best exist in nature. The Elephant of the Kitchen Aid food processor, or the natural lines on most cars (cats, fish, sharks, whales, etc.) begin the process of creating the scene for a story for the consumer or end-user that, if maintained, can be the track guiding them through their connected life with the product.

Y-water by Fuseproject

Another more recent product (Nope! I’m not going the Apple route…yet) that feels this way for me uses another tactic in product design that is seldom thought about: playfulness. Yves Behar’s design of the water bottles for Y-water is a great example of using the story behind the product and twisting it with appropriate playfulness. It creates a sense of connection to the children who are the chief consumers and the parents who are the chief purchasers all at the same time.

It’s at 2 levels of the design …

Great design is carved out of an amazing story. In some cases the design itself is a story, but more likely the design is referencing and creating a story within its interaction.  Too often the story used doesn’t play to the aesthetic elements noted above and we feel the product’s design value becomes contrived–even the most awarded designs. Motorola’s products fall into this category. I don’t know if I can say there is a story around “The Razor” but I do know that the subsequent design language used to create a dozen post-Razor replicants is totally devoid of meaningful connection between designer & user. The initial design upon which all that followed is based, is devoid of any balance of the 8 properties noted above. It attempts to only speak to our most base levels of aesthetic understanding through great technologies. This strategic design flaw can probably be used to point squarely at the downturn of Motorola.

But as an interaction designer there is another level. This level is a lot more tactile. Some may be familiar with my Foundations of Interaction Design. In it I discuss 3 primary foundations that make up the clay of Interaction Design: time, metaphor & abstraction. Two of these are directly related to the topic at hand. I alluded to one, metaphor, earlier in the examples of referencing the natural. The other is abstraction.

I describe abstraction as the movements of our body in direct or indirect correlation (abstraction) to how the system communicates that it understands those motions in a meaningful way. The least abstract thing one can do is tap on a screen or speak a natural language command. I don’t want to say that “direct manipulation” is always the best aesthetics as I could imagine that directness may be less natural in some circumstances in terms of mapping against expectations in the mind. There are also possible efficiencies within the most indirect and abstracted of all interfaces the command line interface.

Google Maps

When the abstraction layer is in balance with the metaphors being used to communicate the responses to those abastracted commands, then something great can happen. My favorite example of abstraction done well with metaphor is Google Maps. The clipping metaphor maps against what I would do if I had a paper map on my table in front of me. I have a naturally occurring clip due to the focus area of my eyes. When I want to bring something from the south west into centered view I grab the page and slide the whole page towards the north east. The only breakdown here is the notion of “grabbing”, but in the context of mouse-usage this breakdown seems to be easily overcome through the extension of the metaphor of the mouse that is so ubiquitously well understood.

Let’s take a step and examine the evolution of the iPod. The iPod is arguably a soulless (yet attractive) form design, despite huge success. I say that because of its almost complete lack of obvious natural or analog tendencies. (I’m not delusional; there are a ton of reasons why iPhone is a success; I’m trying to make a point here.) It is in the interaction design and the information architecture where its soul shines through. A circle is infinite–its that simple. Compare the wheeled navigation of an iPod to all the previous attempts at non-circular navigation of music players. The circle afforded something that other modes of interfacing could not and that is a sense of “forever”. It also added the element of gears shifting in an easily translatable way. If I went slow I wanted it to proceed slowly and if I hit the gas on my thumb I wanted it to go to warp speed and skip through the alphabet. The kicker is that when I slowed it didn’t mean go to individual songs again, but just slow the alphabet and only after stopping and starting again would I move the individual items again.  The wheel was an advance in UI convention that reduced the level of abstraction within a mapping to a winning metaphor that was also a key instrument to the product’s success.

Apple iPhone (3G)

But it doesn’t stop there. The iPod advanced. It moved from wheel to touch screen. The make up of the screen however removed the physical affordances of a wheel. Moving around a circle without physical guides would have never worked. So it meant returning to up and down again. But it had to be improved upon. The flick in terms of a gesture against the touch screen actually increased the level of abstraction successfully. If it was truly unabstracted movement would cease when the finger left the screen of the device. But not only does it continue, it continues using a fairly complex algorithm used to replicate the physical analog of a wheel. This “gravity” metaphor is a big part of the iPhone story.  Couple this with the jump navigation in the right margin and you gain a combined interaction design model that successfully brings the infinity metaphor of the wheel to the iPhone. Not by re-creating infinity but by mapping against other metaphors with newly appropriate metaphors.

Back to humanness …

As I said, soul comes through a feeling of connectedness. The above mentioned flick of the iPhone is more than just a great metaphor: it is a calling card. It is that random sign that is completely analog in its interpretation. No machine could have ever conceived that. Apple through almost all of their products have become expert at adding these “human” touches in their designs. Washington Mutual Bank did this with the language they used in their ATMs (I’m sure it is gone now). I was always amused with their use of slang in the system.

Sometimes even “bad” design choices can lead to more connectedness. The allowance of mistakes (tolerable ones) increase the sense of humanity’s imperfection in the system. Think about how the best heroes in literature are always ones with flaws. Perfect heroes are untouchable and beyond our ability to relate to them.

Great design in the end will give us something to relate to, to feel connected with, and to reinforce our humanity. Tapping that right balance between emotion and logic, chaos and control, analog and digital, is the key to this success. We can no longer rely on “form follows function”. Form has to be parallel to function, as function is growing in commodity. … more on this in Malmo in June! I hope to see you there!

About From Business to Buttons

Held in lovely Malmö in southern Sweden, From Business to Buttons is the meeting place in Europe for interaction designers, business strategist and usability experts. This year it will be held on June 11-12.

We are living in a world where computing and information processing is going beyond the desktop model of computer interaction to be integrated into the everyday objects we interact with and activities in which we partake. During the course of a day someone ‘experiencing’ this ubiquitous computing may engage with a number of computational devices and services and not even be aware they are doing so.

This model is moving beyond the desktop paradigm, and has more recently been described as ‘everyware’.  When primarily looking at the objects involved, and the way they are networked through wireless technologies, this can then be described as the ‘internet of things’. Everyday objects being networked is a simple concept yet the application is complex, holding huge possibilities. If all objects from our daily routines could be ‘tagged’ with an identifying device we could see untold amounts of information about the product.

These technologies have the potential to redefine the way in which we interact with the physical world and how we gain insights about the actions that make up our daily routines. That greater awareness has the capacity to help us to adjust and moderate our behaviour in a number of positive ways.

Although we are not yet living in a world where our shoes can talk to our socks to tell them they don’t match… ubiquitous computing is without a doubt starting to creep into our lives. Adam Greenfield described it nicely when he wrote of “information processing dissolving into behaviour”. This is definitely the case for the emerging area of ‘Personal Informatics’.

Photo curtosy of Matt Jones & Tom Coates, from their presentation

Personal Informatics can be characterized as the monitoring and displaying of information about our daily activities through intelligent devices, services and systems. This information allows us to see trends and opportunities for change that we would otherwise miss.  With the rise in network and RFID technology we are pointing to a time where personal informatics can play an important role in our lives. If people can access this information about their daily routines, and interact with their own personal data currently invisible to them: would they make more informed decisions?

One of the greatest values of this new technology is the ease with which it can provide information about specific products and services we use. If household items, personal belongings and new devices could be used to motivate people to make small changes in their lifestyle, the effect could be positive for the entire society. Essentially: what are the possibilities when we help make people aware of their life patterns?

Specific contexts

In our everyday lives we are often engulfed in specific contexts, which makes it difficult to see the bigger picture. Personal Informatics enables us to see relationships in our behaviour we would otherwise miss. Devices such as Nike + and money management software Mint aren’t designed to control your behaviour, but to monitor your actions and display your information. They do it in such a way that it will raise questions and give you the platform to make changes. Many opportunities from personal informatics can happen at a grass roots level. For example if you start monitoring your home energy consumption and realize that you are leaving your lights on more than needed you can instantly change your behaviour.

Opportunities

I see huge potential in the field of personal informatics and it is definitely something that is very exciting in the UX field. There are two areas of challenge within it that really interest me. Firstly: how can these personal insights and data behind your lifestyle be delivered in such a way that it will impact someone on an emotional level. How can you motivate people so they will actually change their actions rather than just turning a blind eye to the reality.

The second is that our lives are already infiltrated with huge amounts of information each day from emails to RSS feeds. So how can the interface for these products, services or software be designed in such a way that the information you receive does not add to the information overload that currently exists. Plus it should not result in people compulsively checking their ‘data’ as so many people currently do with email.

Examples

Nike +
Nike + is one of the most commercial and well discussed personal informatics tools currently available. The system is made up of a small chip that you insert in your running shoes, combined with a personal online service. The tangible UI which is imbedded in the sole of your shoes communicates with your Apple iPod (which has pre-loaded software) feeding it with information about your running to help you track your training regime. The system essentially becomes a digital personal trainer. After you have completed your training session you can plug your iPod into your computer and log into your personal Nike + account. What I think has greatly contributed to the success of the Nike + system is that even though you have a personal account you are part of a community. Your web based account allows you to provide training tips and advice to other people and recommend good running routes. By being part of community I really believe that it makes peoples actions feel more valued.

Nike + software, tracking you progress

The Wattson
The Wattson is a new kind of home appliance that is networked to a sensor attached to your home’s electric meter box. Using colours and numbers, the Wattson device displays your energy consumption and stores it on an online database making it easy for you to manage your electricity usage and therefor save money. Not only is the system hugely informative and practical… the device also looks great.

Time will tell…

Personal Informatics is a very powerful idea, and is hugely based on the assumption that people will makes changes if they are given the platform to do so. Time will tell if knowing more about ourselves will empower people to adjust their daily routines, but the early success in such an emerging field sure is exciting and will hopefully bode well for the future!

Deconstruction is one of the most frequently used and fundamental analysis techniques in our toolkit. It is used as both a preparatory technique to get research data ready for use in other ways; and a powerful technique in its own right as a method of isolating, exposing, and testing assumptions deeply embedded in our mental models.

One example of deconstruction is turning an interview transcript into a series of separate comments or answers to questions. Deconstruction is often used simply to prepare data for other analytic processes such as manipulation or summarization, or even abstraction.

Note: this article builds on the first part of the series: Deconstructing Analysis Techniques published in February.

Examples of Deconstruction

• Chemical analysis – mass spectrometry: a technique for determining the elemental makeup of a substance or molecule.
• Philosophy/literary criticism: a technique of isolating and testing ideas contained within a work of philosophy or literature
• Systems analysis: identifying root causes through the identification of individual system ‘actors’ and their interactions
• Quality control: unit testing functional components of an application, requires first identifying those components (typically by recourse to the specification)
• User interviews: identifying individual concepts or ideas
• Card-sorting: working with card-pairs
• Task analysis: breaking down complex activities into individual tasks and their components.

There are a wide range of examples of the way in which deconstruction occurs, but our aim is always to reach a definite ‘atomic’ state (where the atom is defined by our research objectives). It should be noted that there are typically more things going on than merely breaking down the data. In the case of chemical analysis, level of elements or compounds are measured; in the case of a stakeholder or user interview, the individual words, phrases or ideas may be tallied, grouped, manipulated or otherwise worked with to form some new insight.

Deconstruction can – and often is – built into the design of the research. We see this in online card-sorting, for example, where data is stored from the outset as card-pairs. Survey results are another example of data where pre-deconstruction is built into the research.

Why, though, this urge to break data down into smaller and smaller pieces?

Smaller, more granular data provides for greater flexibility in the other analysis techniques we need to undertake. By separating ideas or objects out into their own data elements we can have greater control over how elements are treated and positioned with respect to other elements.

For example, splitting a Name element into separate First Name and Surname elements allows us to treat these two components independently, and ask a broader range of questions – such as: “What are the most common first names?”

Smaller, more granular data provides for greater flexibility in the other analysis techniques we need to undertake.

It requires extra effort to break data down and then to store it in more granular form. It also takes effort to request and record extra data during the research process itself. So, whatever level of data granularity we use should be for specific reasons, and to address specific research questions.

Deconstruction represents a powerful analytic technique in its own right. By isolating concepts and ideas, and exposing them to scrutiny on their own, deconstruction highlights the existence of untested assumptions and ‘sacred cows’.

In this sense, deconstruction is often used to analyze problems or situations to which we need to formulate a response. This use of deconstruction allows us to test the reality of perceived constraints: by isolating each constraint to the design, and looking at the conditions under which they may hold true, new possibilities can open up that may otherwise not have been possible or feasible.

Dangers in Deconstruction

There are dangers in deconstruction that are worth mentioning here. At the end of the day our work should lead to something substantively new. This can be difficult if we lose sight of the macro-level problem in pursuit of an understanding of the data in finer and finer detail.

Secondly, in studying the fine detail of our data we can miss seeing the patterns in our data that help drive insights and accelerate the transition to design concepts. At the same time, some patterns only become visible or apparent when we reach a level of granularity appropriate for the data.

Deconstruction can also generate noise in our data which obscures our sense-making abilities. This noise may be the result of data overload – simply having too much information to allow for processing; or it may be that small-scale, natural random variations are masking higher-level trends or patterns. In these cases, the use of summation and aggregation techniques might be an appropriate contrast to the deconstruction technique.

Deconstruction in practice

Deconstruction can often be used in very close association with other analytic techniques. For example, we may break data down into more granular form to facilitate manipulation of that data as a means of inspection or ‘eye-balling’.

In the same vein, we may manipulate or transform our data to allow us to zero in on a particular characteristic – deconstruction in the critique sense of the term.

It may help at this point to look at some examples to help illustrate the different uses of deconstruction as an analytic technique:

User Interviews
A typical interview scenario involves asking participants a series of questions (usually open-ended; sometimes based around topics rather than using a strict question set) and recording the responses. Recording may be through the use of written notes, audio recording, video taping, interviewer/observer notes; and may include a combination of the above.

To begin drawing connections and identifying themes between interviews we need to break down – or deconstruct – the interviews to the level of individual ideas or concepts, feelings, thoughts etc. The medium we use to record each of these ‘objects’ is not important: a spreadsheet might be used just as effectively as Post-It notes or index cards.

Once the data is in this more granular form we can carry out further analysis on the interviews. We may, for example, want to look at the prevalence of positive versus negative feedback.

Note, however, that the need for deconstruction is entirely dependent on the questions we are trying to answer through our research. For example, if our intent was to formulate an impression of the overall level of satisfaction for each interview subject, the deconstruction would be an entirely unnecessary task.

Diagnosing Causes
When faced with a failure in a complex system – such as the inability of users to complete a multi-step process, or the appearance of a previously unplanned-for edge case – it is typically quite difficult to diagnose the cause of the failure (in the absence of error handling designed specifically with this in mind). In order to identify the root cause of the failure we undertake a deconstruction exercise to help isolate the components of the systems.

Designing a Car: Highlighting untested assumptions
If we were to begin designing a car we might begin with a brain-storming session and list out all of the components or features that are needed. That list might include items such as “wheels”, “engine”, “fuel”, “doors”, “seats” and a whole range of others. We can now look at each of these features and ask why it’s there, and what it says about our notion of the solution.

For example, ‘fuel’ presupposes a form of combustion engine which, increasingly, may not be relevant. More importantly, ‘fuel’ highlights a range of assumptions – mostly tacit – derived from our mental model of the object ‘car’.

Once these assumptions are exposed we can begin to question their validity in the context of the problem – instead of pre-defining a solution in the statement of the problem. Such questioning, enabled through deconstruction, opens up a broader perspective on the design of a solution.

Conclusion

Deconstruction serves a dual role in our analysis work: as both a preparatory technique to get research data ready for use in other ways; and a method of isolating, exposing, and testing assumptions deeply embedded in our mental models.

The technique is not without its drawbacks: more granular data requires effort to gather and record, store, and analyze. It can also generate ‘noise’ in the data, which can obscure instead of illuminate.

Understanding the role of deconstruction in analysis can help us to better target it’s application to the solution of specific research questions.

Photos by s1mone (card sorting), andercismo (magnifying glass), smiling da vinci (interview)

Personally I’m a big fan of graffiti (when done properly)… but I can understand that a lot of people experience it as urban decay. Fortunately today I came across a great looking experiment where you can digi-spray paint on a screen. For a first demo it looks pretty nice.

The above experiment was done by combining a Wiimote, beamer and Flash actionscript. This is a pretty cheap and easy way to start experimenting with interactive screens. You can buy a Wiimote for about $35 and do all sorts of experiments with it, and you don’t even need a beamer for it… a computerscreen will suffice.

After checking the above demo out I came across another experiment with the Wiimote and spraying. It’s really impressive to see the accuracy of the Wiimote, especially when you consider that it will be even better with the updated version (soon to be released):