In two weeks Sweden’s top UX conference, From Business to Buttons, will be held. And this gave us the great opportunity to do an interview with one of the speaking teams. We talked to them about the importance of ergonomics and the challenges of convergent design.

Jeroen van Geel: For those who don’t know you yet. Could you shortly introduce yourself?

Lennart Andersson: I’m Lennart Andersson, director of interaction design and partner at Ergonomidesign. I started my professional design career in a company I started with a few friends after I graduated as industrial designer 1999. We played around a lot and quickly realized the importance of converging product design and interaction design to create good products, not very common back then. Since we merged with Ergonomidesign in 2004 I have continued this work, but now in collaboration with our great human factors team, designers and strategists. I’m happy to say I learn new things every day!

Thomas Nilsson: My name is Thomas Nilsson and I am the director of human factors and design research at Ergonomidesign. I’ve been with the company since 1994, became a partner in 1998 and have, to be perfectly honest, lost count of all products that I’ve been involved with. I’m a curious guy and truly passionate about making stuff better for people to use.

JVG: How did you get into product design?

TN: Well, I started with LEGO and then it kind of accelerated into more advanced products and interactions… While at technical college I quickly noticed that I did best at the “non-technical” courses such as physiology, cognitive science etc. So, for me, combining technical and human skills was the best compromise. During my last year we made a study visit to Ergonomidesign, I was stunned by the creativity flowing and inspired by their focus on the user. I convinced them to let me do my thesis work there and the rest is history.
I still enjoy LEGO.

LA: Being a construction engineer at an architect office I realized that the architects got to do all the fun stuff, so I decided to become an architect. But during my time at art school I met an industrial designer and realized that was exactly what I wanted to do. Endless freedom of doing any creative stuff I wanted to. Then at the end of my industrial design education at Konstfack I was seduced by interaction design. The importance of how products behave, what to expect from them and how people actually use them. Mixing the physical and digital worlds fits to my way of thinking.

JVG: Thomas, you are one of Sweden’s leading experts in the field of applied ergonomics. What does a designer with a background in ergonomic design bring to the table?

TN: When people ask me what kinds of products I work with I tell them that I don’t work with products. I work with people. Being an ergonomist you are trained in the human being’s capabilities and limitations and methods how to collect and analyse user needs and behavior. I call this user insight. Insight in the sense that you have understood, not only collected data. This is what ‘we’ bring to the table.

Doro Care Electronics

JVG: There seem to be different fields within applied ergonomics. What are they and what are the differences?

TN: let me introduce them one by one:
Physical: By understanding the constraints and capabilities of the human body we can design products, services and environments that are effective, reliable, safe and comfortable to use. Mastering physical ergonomics is fundamental if you want to create products that people are able to use and enjoy using. And of course to avoid strain injuries and minimise the risk for accidents.
Cognitive: By understanding how people perceive, interpret and understand the world around them, we know how to develop solutions that are easy to understand and use. Mastering cognitive ergonomics is extremely important in digital solutions, particularly with the development of complex, high-technological and automated systems.
Emotional: By understanding the end-users emotional relations to different brands, and their products and services, we know how to develop design solutions that are engaging, rewarding, aesthetically pleasing, and fun to use. Mastering emotional ergonomics is crucial in brand building and to increase customer loyalty.

JVG: What kind of firm is Ergonomidesign? What makes it stand out?

LA: We are ranked as one of the top design consultancies in the world, considering the facts that we are quite small (55 people) and with our head office located in the northern corner of Europe this is really an achievement that we are proud of. Our 40 years in the business have made us confident in saying that, through our people-centred approach, we believe that we can develop more profitable and higher quality design solutions than most other design agencies. One of the main reasons is that our knowledge about ergonomics is second to none. We always look at the whole picture of the human being in our search for people-driven innovation. And our knowledge within ergonomics³; physical, cognitive and emotional ergonomics that Thomas explained, are crucial when designing something that have the power to shift paradigms.

Maquet Servo-i, designed by Ergonomidesign

JVG: In some of the products Ergonomidesign makes the physical and digital ‘interfaces’ come together. How do you manage this in the design process?

LA: First of all you need to make sure you talk to the right people at your client. They often have different teams for software and hardware development. Coordination of these teams is essential, either by us or by them. At Ergonomidesign we start with people from all necessary competences already from sales and work tightly as a team during the whole project. The earlier in the process, the more we work together; research, insights and early ideas. Then as the project moves on through the phases we gradually do more individual work, but always with regular workshops and meetings with our team and the client.

We do not have any specialists in convergent design. It is a way of thinking and with a few exceptions, most of the processes and methods we use are well known. The trick is to have experience from various fields, so you can wrap your head around complicated projects and think outside your own box. The project leader also needs to be perceptive to a wider scope and being able to communicate with a more differentiated team.

JVG: More and more interaction designers without a background in ergonomic design are designing physical interactions. What do you think of this? What are the challenges?

TN: I think it is good. However, one must be aware of the difficulties that are linked to anything that has to do with the human body and brain. I spend my entire day dealing with this but I’m still amazed regarding the complexity of even simple interactions. What I mean is that it is difficult. In my experience the tangible physical interaction between a user and a product or a service can be just as difficult to deal with as the more intangible cognitive processes that go on inside the users head. I think that often interaction designers have a better understanding of these cognitive processes but sometimes lack knowledge about the human body’s physical capabilities. This is the challenge.

JVG: During From Business to Buttons you will give a talk. Could you tell us what this talk will be about?

TN: At From Business to Buttons Lennart and I will share our view on how to work with convergent design and how to bring the “natural” into user interfaces. One of the cornerstones of anything ergonomic is that it is natural for the user. Physically natural, cognitive natural and emotionally natural.

LA: We will also talk about how insights about human behaviour affects the design work. This is a knowledge you do not find in questionnaires, you need to be on site to watch people in their natural environment, let it be a workplace, at a cafe or at home.

JVG: Isn’t there a danger in making it natural on all parts (physically, cognitive, emotionally)? How do you find the balance often referred to as ‘most advanced yet acceptable’? Or is that not important?

TN: Yes I agree to some extent. Exploring new technology, ways of working and interacting will mean that this is new and unfamiliar to the users. However, just because it is new it does not have to be unnatural (in a negative way).

LA: Some companies rely heavily on new technology in the early phases of a product life. It’s working as long as they have a unique and desirable product and customers are willing to sacrifice things like ease-of-use. But competitors can quickly ‘copy’ and sweep away customers when they come with a similar product. Wii, iPhone and Microsoft Surface are three good examples of new technology that brings new natural interaction with new technology. Not instantly natural for all people but very natural when you understand the shift from traditional (but often) awkward user interfaces. I believe this is a major shift in how we perceive technology and what we will expect new products to do for us. We develop new expectations and products get new affordances, even old products.

JVG: What methods do you use to research what the users want, don’t want, need, expect, etc? How do you integrate this in the design process?

TN: We use a mix of generative (collecting insights to spark the design process) and evaluative methods during our process. Often we engage in co-creation activities in order to explore latent needs of the end-users. As all good researchers we rely on both subjective and objective tools. At Ergonomidesign the designer is an integrated part of the research process, often the research is entirely handled by the creative team. This means that all insights are in a good way translated into solutions. Let me finally say that I really do like the word “Insight”, what this word means is that you have UNDERSTOOD what it is all about. Too often the researchers are just collecting information, not trying to understand.

JVG: Earlier you mentioned convergent design? Could you tell us what this is?

LA: Convergent design is merging the design processes of product design and interaction design, recently also incorporating service design. The borders between the physical and the digital world are being increasingly blurred. One example is writing with Anoto’s digital ballpoint pen we designed several years ago. By just grasping the pen and writing as you were taught as a child, you also interact with digital functions and services, e.g. filling out forms digitally and receiving confirmations as MMS to your mobile phone. Another example is a system of wearable medical devices we designed. The users live with these devices 24-7 and interacting with these devices sometimes means using a screen, other times blindfolding through your clothes. The user experience and results are very much depending on how well the hardware and software works together in everything from mapping of buttons, remote control functionality to audiovisual and tactile feedback.

Some companies are actually great at this today, but I would claim that most companies still have problems in coordinating product design and interaction design. 9 out of 10 of our clients do not have a synchronized process (other than a few common milestones) when we meet them. It is a challenge to change established processes and sometimes half the R&D organization to achieve a true convergent design process. We believe this is a key to be innovative and create desirable products for people.

JVG: Thank you very much for the interview.

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.

Want to tackle the Mozilla challenge? Here are three starting points:

1. What do you want to achieve?
2. What’s the situation?
3. What’s out there?

And from that: do you want to work macro or micro?

1. What Do You Want to Achieve?

Firefox is arguably one of the frontleading browsers (check out all the extensions!). So, you can explicitly choose to target power users and early adopters (don’t forget, there are still a lot of people around who don’t use Twitter … or Skype for that matter). However, there are other options. Youtube founder always thought about “the grandmother from the Midwest”. You may even want to take cues from screen readers – in real life they’re nothing like Bladerunner or Iron Man, but are pretty powerful when you see a demo of them. JAWS demo

2. What’s your Situation?

The strange trend is that while the browser has flattened from many windows to one, devices and data have gone the other way. The variables have changed.

From the devices angle, even though we’re in an era of Minority Report-inspired multi-touch, I’d say Back to the Future II got it right in how we like to split screens up.  I personally use dual screens and love it, and dual screen laptops and phones are beginning to emerge. The interesting issues that come to the fore with extra screens is how applications such as a web browser live in them (you may want to have a browser in one screen and a document in another. Or, as I’ve done sometime, you may want to pull a password from an online account and input it somewhere else).

In a previous article in this series, Dave Malouf warned against using symbolic metaphors (there’s been a recent discussion on the IxDA forum about how many people now wouldn’t know that the save icon is a floppy disc!). However, spatial metaphors are very different. In the book Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson suggest that (for Western societies at least), “spatialisation metaphors are rooted in physical/cultural experience, they are not randomly assigned”. Examples they give include:

• COMMUINICATION is SENDING (his words carry little meaning)
• HAVING CONTROL OR FORCE is UP, BEING SUBJECT TO FORCE OR CONTROL is DOWN
• FORSEEABLE FUTURE EVENTS are UP (and AHEAD)
• TIME goes PAST US from FRONT TO BACK (we are looking ahead to the following weeks)

These cues are worth keeping in mind when making decisions about how users will move through pages. What’s the difference between moving through layers in data (as in pre-tab browsers and programs such as Photoshop), as opposed to moving along (as in tabs)? What’s the significance of moving in and out? Where is home?

Also worth keeping in mind is Fitt’s Law about where it’s easiest to find things: either at the edges of screens (top left is the best), or right next to a mouse (if you’re using it).

Conversely, data that was previously constrained in the browser is shifting beyond. OK, AIM was always offline, but now people are choosing to download applications for their Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, and to read the New York Times. While some browsers such as Flock (see below) are incorporating these feeds in amazing ways (which you may wish to explore), another way to take this is that maybe some of these datastreams can be best dealt with away from the browser. Because of this, you might wish to ‘bracket’ examples such as these rather than trying to create concepts that cover all aspects or navigation. (Or not – you can choose to embrace the idea of the browser as dashboard).

3. What’s Out There?

Browsershots - I count 20 different browers here alone!

Just as some people don’t know that tabs exist (they’re the people on IE6, and yes, I know first hand that they’re out there), you may not know about some of the more niche browsers out there. For example, if you use Browsershots to check your websites, you have a choice of 20!

What’s great about existing browsers is that, unlike concepts, they’re already fully resolved. (But be careful: it’s easy to get blindsighted by what someone else has done).

A couple of examples to look at are:

• Shiira (Mac): multiple pages are shown across the bottom of the screen, much as with Microsoft Vista
  

  The Shiira Browser

• Flock (Win/PC): this browser uses tabs, but also sorts media (video, Facebook updates, Twitter feeds) into separate areas. (Sarah Perez has written about the pros and cons of their approach)
  

  The Flock browser

• SpaceTime 3D (Win): one of the (many) browsers experimenting with 3D. (See also Browse 3D and 3B , both Windows.) View with an eye to whether it would be actually used.
  

  Space Time 3D

Back in 2007 Smashing Magazine did a compilation on some of the lesser known browsers out there (you can tell it’s pre-iPhone era since they call Safari a minor browser!) which is well worth checking out.

Beyond that, some interesting examples include Apple Spaces (though I have to admit, I can’t use it), the docking systems for both Apple Leopard and Windows 7, and Prezi (zoom in and out presentations).

Final Points

Given the range of angles to take the challenge (and there are many), I’d suggest that there are two ways to attack the concepts:

1. Macro: create a scenario, explore the overall concept, work down. This is the usability and wireframes technique, where you investigate the scenarios and then fill in the process. You could be making storyboards and low-fi screenflows. My advice with this approach is to create a realistic but interesting scenario that allows you to explore options.
2. Micro: focus on a small element, and make it amazing, reach up. This is the ‘rich description’ technique, as used by craftspeople or sci-fi writers. Rather than trying to resolve everything, you find an element that you can base everything else around; its ‘essence’ in a way. Example include the Digg button, the Google searchbar, the ipod clickwheel/coverflow, the Apple OSX transitions (and yes, probably the Firefox tabs up until now). This approach needs a higher level of finesse to really make it sing (proper animation, full renderings), but the payoff is the impact it has. Having something fully detailed also allows you to propose

Then you can bring them together: as Adaptive Path did in the Aurora Concept:

The Macro: collaboratively investigating weather data

The Micro - radial click sequence, mouse controller

Combining these different angles will help you create a design solution that is both immersive (you can work through what you need to do in it) and engaging (thoughtful details that make it a pleasure to use).

Good luck!

This article is written as part of the Mozilla Design Labs Challenge: Summer 09. For this Design Challenge we are focusing on finding creative solutions to the question: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”

I’ll admit it. I was multitasking while writing this. With multiple projects on my mind, my work set-up demonstrated it. I had several Firefox tabs open with different types of sites, ranging from blogs to newspapers, Gmail to random research. I was saving bits and pieces of information into Evernote.  Books were laid open on the table. TED talks were playing in the background for inspiration. Let’s not forget Twitter, or the email notifications reminding me that I was missing some late-night work action. I was mentally all over the place, and to my detriment, was not finishing what I started.

Let’s face it, I created most of this situation. Much of my success depended on my ability to stay focused (which could be an entirely different article), but I’m not alone in feeling the need to stay on top of so much at one time.  Everything seems urgent, we don’t want to fall behind, or worse yet, miss something.

We need to understand what drives and motivates multitasking, so that we can design the right mix of freedom and constraint into the products we create. Perhaps we can help the multitaskers of the world to multitask more efficiently or, better yet, reduce the need to multitask at all.

What is multitasking?

According to Merriam Webster, multitasking is the performance of several tasks at one time.  Such a simple definition masks the complexity of it. There are three important dimensions to explore:

The ability to multitask, both physically and mentally
The requirement of multitasking, both self-created or as-designed
The effectiveness of multitasking, both perceived and actual

Ability to multitask

Is it even possible to perform several tasks at one time? Many have written (and much research suggests) that it is a great myth. Dave Crenshaw, author of The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets Nothing Done writes,

When most people refer to multitasking, they are really talking about switchtasking. No matter how they do it, switching rapidly between two things is just not very efficient or effective.

But wait, I can drive my car and talk to my husband. I can walk down the street and talk on my phone. Isn’t that multitasking? It is, but often you’re dealing with tasks that have been learned, are repetitive, and require different parts of your brain. Regardless, cognitive load research would suggest that even with the appearance of simultaneous control, the appropriate attention you are able to give to any one task may be compromised. Sources of input, types of output, and physical actions required need to be considered.

Requirement to multitask

Is multitasking required to complete a greater task or goal? Is the need as-designed (ie. an airplane cockpit) or self-created (ie. four monitors with different programs running, books laid out, music playing)? Not all multitasking is created equal.

There is a lot to be learned about life-critical and mission-critical systems, such as medical devices or control panels at nuclear plants, much more than can be covered here. The important thing to note in these cases is that the purpose and impact of the system is mainly known, and great care needs to be taken in automating repetitive tasks, creating alerts when focus needs to be switched, and providing the right combination of information and controls that are needed at any one time.

Even in the systems that aren’t life threatening, we often inadvertently create a requirement to multitask by our design decisions. We create too many options, which in turn can increase the time it takes to make a decision. We provide a dashboard of everything rather than progressively disclosing information and controls. We don’t automate tasks that we know people perform all the time. We don’t create default setups to help those who are new to a product, and whose lack of experience creates a need to attune to more details than an expert.

For the things we can control, we need to consider where along the multitasking spectrum we want our products to sit:

Require multitasking
Demand attention across multiple variables

Constrain multitasking (or at least the need to)
Force focus, build in natural barriers, enable automation

Enable multitasking
Allow a person to decide if, when and how much to multitask

Effectiveness of multitasking

While we may not be fully attentive to everything we’re doing at the same time, we certainly want to feel as if we are doing well. In some ways, when we create our own multitasking contexts, we feel like we’re exerting control over the chaos. Everyone wants to feel like they’re succeeding at staying on top of it all, or even more simply, that they’re doing what they need to be doing, and doing it well. We can learn a lot about these situations by seeing the work-arounds people create in their own environments to accomplish their goals. What can we be doing within the products we design to address this?

In required multitasking situations, we need to understand what are the minimum and maximum number of tasks that need to be completed simultaneously, for effectiveness in this situation can often be critical. If there is sequence to the events, understanding dependencies is vital. For those systems where everything is available, much relies on the person’s understanding of what needs to be used, and when, and the affordances of controls.

This is where automation of, and even prevention of, tasks has really helped people’s perception of effective multitasking. With the advent of notification systems, we don’t have to literally go into our email client to see if we have any new mail. I can bookmark all of my critical sites so I don’t have to memorize URLs nor type it in. Automation can even change our lives by giving us insulin when we need it rather than us manually checking it all the time. Maybe someday people won’t be able to text while driving because the phone will ‘just know’ that you shouldn’t.

Consider the impact of multitasking in your design

Like it or not, people are being asked to do more in less time in many facets of our lives. Technology is also seen as the great enabler of this.  We can’t even begin to predict how our products will be fully used, and we certainly can’t prevent people from trying to multitask if they so choose. We can, however, learn a lot from social science research, from design principles and from user-centered design. The broader our consideration for this, the more deliberate we can be with our design decisions. If such consideration were always made, perhaps in the future I could tell the computer about my deadlines and it would prevent me from task switching. I like to think that Design can save me, one less distraction at a time.

Images by Steve Kay, cackhanded & Sorosh

This article is written as part of the Mozilla Design Labs Challenge: Summer 09. For this Design Challenge we are focusing on finding creative solutions to the question: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”

All businesses (profit and non profit) rely on sales and marketing to survive.

After finishing studies at University in Australia and promptly started my first job, I never really understood the value of selling. There was no class dedicated to teaching how to sell or how important it is. But know this – at some point in your life you will be required to sell – sell yourself, sell for someone else and sell what you do.

I have never attended a sales course or read any books on selling. I don’t know why, but I always thought of selling as something cheesy or cheap. It always seemed to me that a sales person, with an obvious approach, was always trying to force you to buy something.

I did complete 4 years of theater training which has helped a little in terms of stage presence and voice projection. But more importantly, I have spent a lot of time (and continue to do so) observing how people across all walks of life present, share and communicate what they do. For example, when I go to a conference, I will listen to the subject presented but also look at how the speaker is engaging the audience. I will look at how much they love their subject. Are they passionate? I will look at whether they are over selling or when they are able to adjust on the fly. The best presenters, consultants, writers, experts, leaders, designers, Doctors, managers, comedians, late night show hosts and business people to name a few, are all people who can sell themselves clearly and effectively to further their ideas.

So what I have seen and learned from watching people? What makes a great sales person? Great sales people:

• Are passionate about what they are selling - they love the subject matter and when they talk about it, you feel embraced by their energy. You want to be around them.
• Are informed and current - they are people who are reading up on the latest and greatest and like to share their knowledge.
• Communicate clearly – they know how to get to the heart or sweet spot of what they are selling so people can understand it. They avoid jargon.
• Are honest – they don’t make stuff up and if they don’t know the answer to a question, they say “I don’t know”. But they do find out and its their honesty that helps them form stronger relationships with the people they meet.
• Are focused – they stick to a few ideas or concepts and find ways to explain these clearly to people they meet.
• Have real goals – these may be sales goals i.e how much stuff they want to sell, but may also be larger goals that pertain to growing a community of interest, bringing people together, getting themselves and people around them motivated to do more.
• Are trustworthy – people trust them and have networks of trust. So when they introduce people to other people in their network, there is an inherent trust and value in those connections.
• Are connected – they know people who can help other people. They value and protect their network. They do not network for the sake of networking, handing out hundreds of business cards. Nor do they grow their network for the sake of growing their network.
• Go beyond and reach out - they go beyond comfort zones, their own communities, reach out and think about things holistically.
• Are open source - they don’t shut down ideas or people. They are open to ideas to help inform their own ideas. They create environments where people feel comfortable to express their needs, concerns, excitement towards something more than themselves.
• Are storytellers – they like to tell stories to help make people understand concepts towards their sales goals. They engage.
• Know when to speak and when to shut up – they know when to present a story and when to listen and learn. Yes, there are times when you don’t have to be the one shouting the loudest in the room.
• Tweak and learn (repeat) - they know how to pilot their story and continually improve it along the way. They know the way you sell now will probably change in the next year. The tools you use to tell a story will probably also change as the business and social landscape changes too.
• Are human – they are able to be themselves and make others feel comfortable too. They are able to make fun of themselves and also know that its OK to make mistakes. That its OK to fail.

Does any of this sound familiar?
If so great! It means you are already selling yourself or your team or your profession.

Rewind

In 1998 I was working for a usability team in Australia and decided to stop and take time to travel and explore the world. So, like many Australians, I put the backpack on and off I went. My last stop before going back to Australia was Hong Kong.

When I landed in Hong Kong, I started looking for jobs in usability. The problem was there were none. In fact there was no Usability/UX/IXD community or industry to speak of at all. Hong Kong was in the middle of the Internet bubble and people did not seem to care too much about what it meant to improve product and services experiences. It was more about getting rich quick though VC and start ups.

So, one day while standing over a whiteboard together with my partner, Jo Wong, I started drawing a systems lifecycle diagram to talk to Usability and User Centered Design. I wanted to see if we could morph our business (doing small scale web design and development at the time) into something else. I explained Analysis, Design and Testing and a few Usability methods that lived in each stage. Jo understood some and at other times she zoned out. Was I selling? Yes, I was selling. I was pitching a business idea. I was selling the idea of starting our own Usability business. We were at the early stages of putting together our first sales pitch and business plan on what it would take to sell Usability to Hong Kong.

Our first Sales Kit
We had no sales team, no business development manager and no sales plan. I had only really consulted inside a company, done some training and this was usually to project teams who at least had some interest in the Usability team’s offerings or were made to. I was never really required to sell to anyone outside of that? So what did we do? We put together our first diagram to explain what we do and added it to our sales PPT. We LOVED this diagram and used it for many years. The problem with it though (apart from what you might think about the methodology or design) is that its full of jargon. We were confusing some of our prospective clients with our own industry speak and we did not even know it.

We all speak our own jargon! It happens all the time in discussion lists, conferences, books and articles. In fact, we love speaking our own jargon so much that at times it seems we can’t get enough of it. We like it, because it feels safe. I liken it to watching Doctors get together in a safe haven to talk medicine without having to deal with their patients.

Shared Language of success
Our community is frustrating at times using terms like UCD, IXD, IA, UX, CX to name a few. It’s not surprising that at times our buyers don’t know what they are buying. I appreciate the need for definitions and pursuing these conversations (it’s important towards clarifying understanding), but we should also be working on a “common vocabulary” towards helping ourselves sell what we do more effectively and helping our clients reach product success.

We all have our own language – Engineers talk their language, Product Managers talk their language, Designers talk their language; perhaps it’s not about convincing people to use your language but about coming up with a shared understanding of what our shared end point is towards success. What are we all building towards?

What does all this have to do with UX?
I don’t know what % of time is dedicated to sales in business, but there are situations where it is critical if you want to be successful in UX:

• Selling what we do – selling what we do to people outside and inside our field. Do they understand? Are they inspired? Do they get it? What language are you using?
• Planning what we do – developing research plans to help our customers create better stuff. Do they understand what is in the plan? Do they understand the end result?
• Showing what we have done – selling our results and communicating the improvements. What will you use? How will you present? How will you persuade? What do you want to leave people knowing after you present? Note – not everyone will fully understand or appreciate what you have done and depending on who you are speaking to you will need to provide additional background.
• Doing more of what we do – communicating next steps. How will you sell more of what you have done? Have you done enough to demonstrate value?
• Sharing what we have done – communicating with peers about our projects, lessons learned and how to tweak our language so we can reach beyond our own comfortable UX communities.

Ripe organisations
We all have to sell to and work with different organizational and market cultures who all with different levels of receptiveness to our message. Some organizations are more ripe to the UX message than others. There are “cultural patterns” that indicate healthy interest in UX and show that people are buying into UX:

• Management is using the UX lingo – terms like User Experience or Customer Experience are being used in presentations to stakeholders or shareholders.
• Hired a Director or VP of UX - this does not always promise UX success because it often depends on how savvy that person is in promoting and selling their team services. But it at least shows some organisational commitment to what we do.
• Usability testing of products is a given – some process is in place for critiquing products and services with customers. There is a constant flow of customer feedback being embraced and fed back into Product Development
• Money is flowing to bring in new UX’ers - budget has been allocated to grow UX in the organisation. The UX army is growing.
• Product managers claim that UX is a strategic advantage – some form of UX involvement has helped them improve their products, make more sales and make them look good. They are also selling for you.

Lead with language that works
This is the signature I attach at the end of my emails:

===

Daniel Szuc
Principal Usability Consultant
Apogee Usability Asia Ltd
www.apogeehk.com
Usability in Asia

The Usability Kit – www.theusabilitykit.com

===

Is Usability the best term? Do we need to revisit the language we use? Probably yes. What term should we be using? I am not sure yet. But the point is, use language that your prospective clients understand. Lead with what works in your market. Lead with what you are comfortable with.

Uncomfortable situations, taking the lead and when its time to stop selling
Sometimes life puts you into uncomfortable situations and force you to adapt and change. If I would have never moved to Hong Kong, I would not have understood what it means to sell UX in another market. What it means to sell outside of an organization. I would never have reached out beyond Hong Kong to UX communities around the world to learn more about their successes and pain points.

Don’t be afraid to take the lead in your own market. But also try to remember that you are also representing and growing the UX field. The more people who know what we do and the value of what we do, the better for everyone.

My wish is that I no longer have to talk about selling UX in 2-3 years time (maybe less). Why? Because everyone will already know our value and people are buying more of it.

What Is Your Goal?
Here’s the good news: We’re seeing trends like innovation, design thinking, mobility, gaming and terms like customer experience that are having a positive impact on what we do and helping sell the UX story. I will leave you with some food for thought.

1. What is your goal?
2. Where do you want to be in a few years’ time?
3. How can your approach to selling UX help you get there?

I look forward to an ongoing discussion with you and to learn from your successes and failures.

Want to hear more?
Daniel Szuc is presenting on “Selling UX” at UX Australia 2009 – a 3-day user experience design conference, with inspiring and practical presentations , covering a range of topics about how to design great experiences for people. It will be held on 26-28 August 2009, in Canberra (Australia).

Thank You: Steve Baty, Gerry Gaffney, Paul Sherman, John Rhodes, Josephine Wong, and the UX community in all its forms for helping to promote a worthy field.

Photos by Logan Cyrus

As many may know, language is really important to me. I’m one of the first people to jump into any mud wrestling battle drenched in “defining the damn thing”. I love semantics, or more importantly I treasure appropriate semantics. So to support the design challenge, I thought I’d write about metaphors, and more specifically about the metaphor we are so happy to be-friend: the tab.

Lately, metaphors have been growing on my mind like ivy on the side of a Boston rowhouse. First, there is my recent talk on Foundations of Interaction Design that I did in Vancouver in February. But if that wasn’t good enough I did a cut-down version of it in Washington, DC for ReDUX DC. Then I’m in the midst of teaching a Perception & Cognition class as part of my job at the Savannah College of Art & Design where my colleague and co-teacher for the class, Bob Fee, reminded me so poignantly that not only is metaphor in everything digital but a good 90% of our language structure and semantics is rooted in metaphor. Finally, this fine publication along with the organization I helped to establish, IxDA, partnered with Mozilla Labs to create a summer Design Challenge whose topic is tabs in a browser.

Why metaphors at all?

Before we can answer why, we have to answer what. Well, we all took grammar in school and were told that a metaphor is an analogy that unlike a simile does not use the words like or as to declare a relationship.

My life is an adventure whose journey passes through wonders ridiculous and sublime.

Microsoft Bob, the worst metaphor OS ever

Of course, life is not an adventure, but at times has the feel of an adventure. As one of my students stated earlier this week, by creating the analogy without a prefix of like or as it is reinforcing the analogy as a truism which can’t be easily rebutted.

But why? Why do we need metaphors? What value do they add? The answer is quite simple. There is a density of complexity in the world around us. Analogies by themselves often create mental maps between intangible concepts that are difficult for us to understand. And tangible entities that have properties that we can associate between them, thus creating a definitional relationship, which we can use to aid our comprehension of the intangible concept.

A great example is how we talk about expenses: we say they are either rising or falling. Value or Expenses are neither additive or reductive. They just are. We give them a sense of size so that we can relate it to the experience of stacking coins which can go up as there is more, but prices, expenses, value in and of itself has no physical embodiment especially none that relates to altitude. Time is also very tied to metaphor. Does time really “pass”? I don’t think so. Nor does it fly or slow down.

In the digital world the metaphors around us are easier to see. Trashcans, files, folders, paths, etc. And our new favorite metaphor The Tab.

Tabs have existed in user interfaces for quite some time. With files & folders already among even the oldest WIMP (Windows Icons Menus Pointers) operating systems, it only makes sense to continue the office supply metaphor. I don’t know when they first entered the world of the GUI, but I remember them in the world of Windows settings dialogs as a way of presenting collections of options in usually arbitrary categories

I think the next major use of tabs was in the web world. Not in the browser (other than in dialogs) but in web sites themselves. The #1 prognosticator of the use of tabs as a form of web navigation was Amazon.com. They were also the first to realize and deal with the fact that tabs as a navigation/organizing form does not scale.

Older than Amazon but oft forgotten is that Microsoft Excel was using tabs as the means for navigating worksheets for quite some time.It was the main example of using tabs as a means of organizing separate work environments with minimal relationship within a single window instance. Following on its coat tails rather quickly was Visio (before its acquisition by Microsoft and after).  The assumption by both these applications was that there was no need for scaling up to lots & lots of tabs (just like Amazon).

Other applications like Fireworks and Dreamweaver then by Macromedia started using the tab metaphor to manage multiple canvases within the same windowing environment as well. And around this same time tabs were introduced through Netscape’s Navigator and then Mozilla’s Firefox to the browser world (now a de facto standard of all browsers).

The Challenge

The Mozilla Design Challenge for this summer put forward the following.
First the design challenge question:

Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?

Then this explanation:
“Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin Internet, where ten browser sessions were “many browser sessions”. Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless. And tabs don’t work well if you use them with heterogeneous information. They’re a good solution to keep the screen tidy for the moment. And that’s just what they should continue doing.”

And they are correct. Tabs for many users are broken. A quick poll of my class demonstrated that they are indeed not fulfilling the user requirements mostly in terms of scalability, but also not in terms of mapping the need of organizing their browsing experience (as it is done today) compared to that of tomorrow. And this is where it gets interesting. The line “… the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; …” complicates things tremendously. It implies something greater that needs to be done which contradicts the seemingly limited question of the challenge itself. I don’t say this to be critical, but to guide (and I will not be a judge in this competition) participants that maybe “redesigning tabs” is not really the right question, just like “designing a bridge” is not always the answer to “Design me a bridge”. Sometimes you just need to design the appropriate means of getting from point A to point B across water or air.

Dissecting the metaphor

All metaphors should have a solid analog in the physical or tangible universe and Tabs is clearly in that category. When a metaphor fails, you should go back to its analog. Does it fail in that space? If it does maybe it means the metaphor itself is inappropriate. If it doesn’t, you need to understand what about its physical incarnation gives it advantages over its virtual.

In the case of Tabs there is one piece of the dynamic that must be understood when doing a proper analysis. This is that Tabs in the real world have depth. This means they can scale a lot more than the 2D virtual version.  This depth allows for stacking which means the only limitation becomes not the tabs but the depth of the draw in relation to the thickness of the content being held within the tabs themselves. And before anyone goes out there and build 3D tabs, please realize that 2D UI controls in 3D interfaces are not usable to the mainstream, at least not w/o major advancements in the UI control methods.

My advice

Continue doing three exercises:

1. dissect the existing problems;
2. explore what it means to transition from data delivery system to window of a cloud-based computing architecture;
3. understand not the usability of tabs, but rather the orientation of human needs towards organizing multi-tasking, and cross-referencing.

I hope other smart people will offer their advice for participants in the comments below.

I’d like to close, though, with the first part of Adaptive Path’s Aurora concept browser for inspiration:

This article is written as part of the Mozilla Design Labs Challenge: Summer 09. For this Design Challenge we are focusing on finding creative solutions to the question: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”

Our entire lives we’re busy protecting everything around us, ranging from our children’s health to the car we drive. It’s not always made easy for us to do this. So, being a product designer, I’ve come up with some possible solutions that could make our protecting lives easier.

Shacklie

Among all the belongings I’ve ever had, the item I’ve lost most must be the umbrella (except for love). So I decided to start protecting it. I thought the half circle of the handle could extend more to make a complete circle, which works as a handcuff like lock…

Smoke Detecting Maternity Badge

In Japan, there is a “maternity mark” used for asking for courtesy towards pregnant women in public places. It’s widely used in badges, cell-phone straps, posters, signs, etc., but unfortunately there are still some people who are ignorant about it. I’ve even seen a few men who started smoking even when there was a pregnant woman around.

This white badge actually does exist, but it’s for the people around her to know that the lady with it is pregnant. So how about using it also for herself? It detects smoke and tells you glowing blue with a sign “Don’t smoke!” and the annoyed faces. It would be good for the expectant mother so that she can quickly notice smoke and get out of there.

Crooked closure

Everybody must have once opened a snack bag in such a way that it won’t close via the bag closure anymore. Yeah, you can eat up the snack and there’s nothing to worry about. But when you want to leave some, what do you do with it?

So how about a crooked closure so that you can seal it?

Normally we review books full of design pattern or interaction logic, but this time we’re going more abstract: problem solving. As designers we face complex challenges and have to make loads of decisions, will Problem Solving 101 make this easier? Hopefully.

About the book

Problem Solving 101 was written as a guide to teach Japanese schoolchildren critical thinking skills. After that it quickly gained popularity among adults. In the book Watanabe uses simple and funny examples to learn the reader how to approach a problem. He uses three cases to educate the reader:

• A band called The Mushroom Lovers don’t seem to gain a larger audience. How will they solve this?
• John the Octopus wants to become a famous CG animator and needs to save money for a computer.
• Kiwi is a soccer talent who wants to become a star. Which soccer school should she choose?

While the last two examples are great to read and learn problem solving, it’s mainly the first case I want to write about. In the field of interaction design there are often situations where you have to make decisions. Problems arise where you, as a designer, have to decide how to approach it in order to solve it. The case of The Mushroom Lovers provides some interesting examples in how you should approach this.
Without describing the entire case (and thus copying the book) I want to show you some of the examples in the book:

Logic tree

A logic tree helps you break a problem down into categories without leaving anything out. You group similar items under the same branch. It will help you “identify all the potential root causes of a problem and generate a wide variety of solutions.” This is a great tool when you have a certain question and need to investigate the possible outcomes. When forcing yourself to make certain nothing is left out, you also force yourself to approach different options. A great and simple way to make sure you don’t go for the first (and most obvious) solution.

Yes/no tree

A logic tree can be transformed in a yes/no tree. This form of tree helps you find the root cause of a problem or decide how to solve a problem. By creating the tree you are forced to structure and make a complete overview. At the end of the tree you’ll find the different causes/reasons why the problem could have arisen. From here on you can start investigating which of the reasons is the real root cause.

Problem-solving design plan

After you found the possible causes you have to find the root cause. In order to do this you’ll have to research which of the causes is the most important one. You could directly jump into research, but that’ll probably cause more problems than help you. So first: setup a problem-solving design plan. In this plan you’ll setup a hypothesis and rationale in order to focus your research. This is a very good approach since it will give you focus during the research, enabling you to ask the right questions in order to tackle the problem. Out of this also follows a good way to do the research.

After the research you can map the results on the yes/no tree and see where the root cause lies. And than it’s up to you to solve it.

Conclusion

Problem Solving 101 is a book which you can read in a single evening. It’s very clearly written and in it’s core focused on children, but don’t let this put you off…. When you are dealing with challenges and have to solve problems, take your time to read this book. It gives some very simple but effective tips and methods.

Book details
Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book for Smart People
author: Ken Watanabe
publisher: Portfolio
details: 111 pages, hardcover

Game company Ubisoft is coming with a new strategic game – RUSE: Truth is the first casualty of war. Although I’ve mainly seen screenshots, I think this will become an interesting game. But it’s not the game I want to talk about. No sir… it’s the trailer of the game that teased my inspiration.

In order to promote RUSE the creators decided to make the trailer you see below. This time they’re not showing the game as it is played, but how it should be played in the future. And maybe it’s just me, but I’m getting really excited about this idea. First, check it out:

Wow. Great isn’t it? I know some aspects aren’t thought through, but as a whole it’s a pretty solid concept (and that for just a trailer). This is the new way of playing Stratego: having a multitouch table with different strategic challenges on it. No more Axis & Allies you have to put away every time your wife wants to put dinner on the table…

There could be different ways to play around with this. I like the players having a position opposite of each other. It really triggers the imagination of being ancient field generals. Of course this does limit the way you can play scenarios. You could also have multiple players moving around the table, moving their forces all over the battlefield.

It’s a really good idea to place the battlefield on a table. Almost all strategic computer games have a top down view, so it is a logical decision. But actually being able to physically stand over the battlefield really makes all the difference in comparison to a standard computer, in my opinion.

Again, I know it’s just a trailer. But my dream bubble hasn’t popped yet. Because I know there is a table around somewhere that has multitouch technology inside it: Microsoft Surface. So all we have to do is kick some asses over there and force them to make this possible for us.

Mozilla Labs Concept Series, together with IxDA and your very own Johnny Holland, have launched the second in their series of Design Challenges. The Summer ’09 challenge – Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – closes on June 21st.

About the Design Challenge

The Design Challenge is a series of events to encourage innovation, and experimentation in user interface design for the Web. The aim is to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Open Web as a whole.

Design Challenge: Summer 09

For this Design Challenge Mozilla Labs decided to team up with IxDA, a network dedicated to the professional practice of Interaction Design, and Johnny Holland (of which we’re really proud). Each one of us will provide two panelists and we’ll also be available for help (via @ixda or @johnnyholland). During the challenge Johnny will provide the teams/designers with inspiring articles related to the subject. In this Summer 09 challenge we are focusing on finding creative solutions to the question: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”

Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin Internet, where ten browser sessions were “many browser sessions”. Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive.

However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless. And tabs don’t work well if you use them with heterogeneous information. They’re a good solution to keep the screen tidy for the moment. And that’s just what they should continue doing.

So why are you still here? As Dan Saffer urged us: don’t wait for permission and face the challenge.

Recently I did an interview with Bill DeRouchey about his view on the field of interaction design, the challenges we as designers face and about authentic experiences. Check out what he has to say in the interview. And if you like what he says, come with us and listen to him live at From Business to Buttons in Sweden (June 11-12).

Jeroen van Geel: For those who don’t know you yet. Could you shortly introduce yourself?

Bill DeRouchey: Hello there! I’m Bill DeRouchey and I live in Portland, Oregon, US. I’m currently directing the Interaction Design group at Ziba Design, where I get to help design the experiences for a wide variety of challenges, from handheld devices to appliances to medical products to websites to retail spaces. It’s an amazing variety. I am also on the board of directors of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) where we strive to connect, inspire and support interaction designers worldwide. On top of all that, I’m co-chairing Interaction 10 in Savannah Georgia next year, and when I can, research and blog about the history of the button.

Bill doing The Billy, a bad version of The Johnny

JVG: There is a constant discussion about the definition of interaction design. What is yours? What does it touch? And what does it not touch?

BD: Oh boy, the definition question. A lot of definitions have been put out there about interaction design and I believe that’s healthy and even unavoidable. We’re a relatively new field in a rapidly changing technology environment, so everybody is trying to figure it out. But this point is important to me: Define to understand, not to divide. Defining should be an exercise to test your powers of understanding and brevity. But can we ever really define it? Like Andrew Hinton once said, how do you define “sports”? You know it when you see it, but how do you clearly describe borders around it?

We can all probably agree that interaction design is somewhere in the murky intersection of people and technology, or really any artifact or system, as long as that thing engages back in some way. Interaction is a two-way street, it’s a conversation. Yes, as Robert Fabricant spoke about at Interaction 09 Vancouver, interaction design is about designing behavior. But for me a key component of designing behavior, and the one key question that interaction design asks that other disciplines don’t explicitly ask, is “what do I do next?” It’s sequence and flow. So one of the elements of interaction design that fulfills “I know it when I see it” to me is addressing the flow in engaging a product/service/system. At minimum, smooth and effective. Ideally with elegance, enjoyment and beneficial.

JVG: Traditionally our discipline was part of digital media, but with the rise of mobility and ubicomp we are also moving outside of our box. Because of this we are coming in contact with other disciplines, like architects and industrial designers. How does this affect the role of an interaction designer?

BD: I view it as interaction design is the result of different mediums merging. When engaging in this necessary/futile exercise of defining and understanding, it’s crucial to view it in the context of time. In the mid 1990s, we had software and eventually the Web. Most of our digital experiences happened with a computer screen, keyboard and mouse. The boundaries were more or less contained, the challenges were a bit simpler. A “webmaster” did all the programming, the architecture, and the visual design. But now, with larger scale projects, no one person can do everything so skill sets have to specialize. The information architecture grew out of this specialization. Then as web technology grew, and interaction increasingly happened within a page instead of between pages, the lines blurred again. Who’s the person responsible for motion or behavior? Need to specialize some more…

Elsewhere, other people were designing for devices. Watches, microwaves, medical, industrial, etc. “Interaction design” fit here because “interaction” frankly feels like a word with a physical component. But now that the lines blur between devices, computers and systems, so do the job skills and tools necessary to create Things.

Now consider 10-15 years from now. Materials science has evolved so that surfaces can be dynamically shaped, can display information, and can accept input. Fabrics, flexible plastics, or other materials become input, output and form. Disposable physical interfaces. We’ll potentially have new specialties like Kinetic Design for specializing in the movement of objects, Shape Engineering for specializing in the programming of dynamic surfaces, or Gestural Design for specializing in human movement as system input. The possibilities of interacting with technology will increasingly become more complex, yet there will still need to be a role that stitches together human cognition and behavior with system architecture and behavior. Can this still be called interaction design? I don’t see why not.

JVG: The number of tangible devices that have a digital interface is growing. Here product and interaction designers meet. What is the challenge we face here and how should we deal with it?

BD: It’s true. The roles of product/industrial designer and interaction designer have come to overlap much more in recent years as physical products increasingly have digital interfaces. In my five years at Ziba, I’ve seen this in a bunch of projects. So how do we deal with it? Easy. Design it together in collaboration while recognizing each other’s specialties. The overlap of roles is clearly the physical interface. How many buttons? What do they do? How are they positioned? Both the product designer and interaction designer should have equal say in this discussion because the elegance and effectiveness will be found by working through it together over iterations. Once the basic configuration of the physical interface is agreed upon, each side can then focus on its specialty. The interaction designer is responsible for what happens onscreen and what the buttons do. The product designer is responsible for form and feel. Yet both sides should be free to give input to the other. The biggest challenge is simply getting them in the same room, or even the same building.

JVG: In June you will give a talk at From Business to Buttons in Malmo, Sweden. What will the talk be about?

BD: At Business to Buttons I will be talking about “Designing Humanity into Products.” It asks the question, how can companies better connect to its customers? The answer is simple: Speak like people, not like machines. It’s about the need to remove the corporate faces from the products and services we create and instead let personality shine through. More and more, people are craving authentic experiences from the world around them, and that means a simple human-to-human connection. In our “user experience” world, this means when people use a website, software, product, etc., people should somehow experience the people that created it. Connection. So I’ll highlight examples of companies that have successfully done this and provide a framework within which to understand it.

JVG: In product design designers have been looking at a company and their products as a whole for years… How come that digital designers are so much behind?

BD: First of all, product design as a discipline is decades older than digital design. That’s a big headstart. Simply, product designers make actual tangible things that you can hold. It’s a much more personal exercise than creating something that exists only onscreen. Digital designers also face the challenge of creating something whose borders are completely amorphous. Websites are never really complete. Data is pulled from somewhere else. People are contributing content. There is never a final “this is done” moment. But when products are manufactured and come off the assembly line, they’re done. It’s a well-defined thing. I believe it’s core in our human nature to ascribe more personality to a physical thing than software. We’ve been interacting with things for millions of years. Software, thirty years max for most of us.

JVG: What are your ideas on the role of culture and cultural changes on enabling this authentic experience?

BD: There’s a large cultural trend around transparency right now, for companies to reveal who they are, for people to reveal who they are. It’s all about removing the masks that separate ourselves from one another, and simply be ourselves. Transparency leads to authenticity. This has interesting implications for design because typically the artifact produced becomes its own entity, separate from its designers. But if we apply the transparency and authenticity filters here, users may want to see and connect with the designers themselves, and not just the artifacts.

JVG: Where do you personally really miss an authentic experience? Where would it really be an added value?

BD: Fascinating question. Banking is a really interesting example. I have strong memories of being a little kid and bringing my money to the corner bank to deposit as savings. You got to meet the people that were taking care of your money. Now, money is incredibly abstracted. I almost never enter banks due to ATMs, online banking, etc. Convenience and automation have replaced connection. The recent economic crash has shown us what can happen when money becomes too abstracted, when you lose connection where that “dollar’ is actually going. This can explain the success of microlending sites like Prosper or Kiva, where people can lend their money to actual people and see the results of their help. As another example, a few years ago, Ziba partnered with Umpqua Bank, a bank local to the west coast of the US. Ziba proposed the concept of slow banking, where your goal is to not rush in and rush out, but to instead slow down, connect with your neighbor bank, maybe do some other errands while you’re there. It’s been a great success.

JVG: Do you have any simple advice for UX designers in improving the authenticity? What can WE do?

BD: The best advice I can offer here is to focus on the writing. I think authenticity shines mostly through voice. Do the words sound like an actual person wrote them? Or do they sound stale and corporate? The problem that most companies have is their writing sounds too formal, even formulaic. The fear from sounding unbusinesslike has created a culture where companies are afraid to say anything real or with personality, resulting in a formal tone, yet formality is designed to create barriers or distance between people. It’s a power game. On the flipside, informality is where connections truly occur. When you let down your guard with someone, that’s when the authentic you shows up. That’s when you connect. So write as if you’re talking to someone, not writing to them. And as you’re writing, actually say the words out loud. This is the simplest method of all to spot the clunky constructions and weed out the odd phrases. It boils down to “Write as you speak, and speak as you write.”

JVG: Thank you very much for taking the time for this interview. We’re looking forward to your talk at From Business to Buttons in June.

BD: Thank you Jeroen. I look forward to seeing everybody there!