When you’re knee-deep in wireframes or CSS it’s all too easy to end up in a bubble of IxD books and blogs. One option is to take inspiration from vintage art and nature, but what about what other smart people are doing in their respective disciplines? In other words, why not steal from them? Here are my picks of a few other fields with ideas worth appropriating, or at least glancing at.

Social Sciences (Anthropology, Sociology)

Easy pickings: Genevieve Bell, Michael Wesch
If you’re keen: Erving Goffman, Bruno Latour, Claude Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Joseph Campbell

Why: Social scientists are starting to get noticed by IxD, whether they’re being hired by top technology companies (Genevieve Bell at Intel) or keynoting at conferences (Michael Wesch at the 2008 IA Summit).

Their training (by the way, anthropology deals with people and cultures, while sociology focuses more on the structures and systems of society) specifically makes them very useful when it comes to seeing how people use technology.

“When people research technology [they often start at] the point at which someone picks up the telephone or starts typing on the keyboard. For me that’s already far too down in the process.You want to know; Where does that PC live in someone’s home? How did they acquire it? What else is around it? And even one step back further than that: What do people care about? What motivates them? What gets them up in the morning? What do they do when they get up in the morning?”

Genevieve Bell, Intel Outside interview, January 2007

But what is it that they actually do that’s so useful to design? Social scientists are essentially professional observers, using ethnographic tools to understand what they see, and manage any potential biases they might have. My favourite ethnographic technique or term is that of ‘thick description’: coined by Clifford Gertz as a way to sum up how we should analyse objects including their multiple meanings, rather than just what it was (a ‘thin description’).

Other concepts worth knowing about via sociology/anthropology are:

• Erving Goffman‘s idea of front and back stage actions (for example, how waiters act in the public part of the restaurant vs. behind the swinging door, amongst other examples)
• Cultures use myth, storytelling, and rituals in similar ways to help make meaning and sense out of the world – Joseph Campbell lays this out in his book “The Hero With a Thousand Faces”, while Claude Levi-Strauss does it more densely in “The Raw and The Cooked“
• Actor-network theory (ANT) – created by Bruno Latour and others with the main gist that a lot happens between people and other agents (even inanimate objects), and that this is in a continual state of change.

Also, if you just want a reference of anthropological imagery and diagrams, this flickr collection is a must.

The general steal: ways of understanding people and societies, and methods by which to observe them.

Architecture

Easy pickings: Stewart Brand, Christopher Alexander
If you’re keen: Kevin Lynch, Bernhard Tschumi, Situationist International (SI)

Why: While architecture may seem to be at the opposite end of the design spectrum to IxD – we deal with the personal and ephemeral, they the collective and permanent – it has a few points worth noting:

1. a need to deal with complex living systems
2. a history of encouraging research in their field (something that pushes it far ahead of say, industrial design)
3. and a general philosophical bent to their work (no wonder Ayn Rand was able to set a book and ideology behind an architect!)

It’s also worth keeping in mind that Italian design schools traditionally trained all their design students as architects, no matter what their professional speciality would be later in life – and they’ve turned out some pretty cool designers (even more recently in interaction design).

Many of the concepts we are dealing with in interaction design about use and patterns have already been touched on in the past in architecture. For example Kevin Lynch explored what we’d now describe as experience design back in the 1960s in his book ‘An Image of the City’:

“The observer himself should play an active role in perceiving the world and have a creative part in developing his image. He should have the power to change that image to fit changing needs. An environment which is ordered in precise and final detail may inhibit new patterns of activity. A landscape whose every rock tells a story may make difficult the creation of fresh stories. Although this may not seem to be a critical issue in our present urban chaos, yet in indicates that what we seek is not a final but an open-ended order, capable of continuous further development.”

Kevin Lynch,  An Image of the City, (1966), p6

Stewart Brand took a similar route with his book (and later adaption into a 6 part TV series) How Buildings Learn, investigating how people adapt their dwellings after architects move out.

Toyo Ito has created fascinating structures based on virtuality and space.

Tower of Winds - Toyo Ito

If you really want to go into spatiality, there was an entire movement from the 1950s-70s known as SI (Situationist International) movement, concerned with looking at the nature of space.

If you’re more interested in mapping and patterns, again there are some interesting things to be had from architecture. Bernard Tschumi, a prominent postmodern architect was exploring mapping back in the early 90s back with his ‘The Manhattan Transcripts’, a project that “offer[ed a] different reading of architecture in which space, movement and events are ultimately independent, yet stand in a new relation to one another, so that the conventional components of architecture are broken down and rebuilt along different axes.” – p10

The Manhattan Transcripts – from moma.org

And well before that, Christopher Alexander wrote a book called A Pattern Language (1977). Despite the subtitle ( Towns, Buildings, Construction) the book of 94 patterns is now arguably more acclaimed in IxD than architecture!

The general steal: architecture has tried to deal with the big issues of design for a long time, and explore ways of managing people and spaces.

Psychology

Easy pickings: Indy Young, Don Norman, Oliver Sacks (albeit a bit off topic)
If you’re keen: J.J Gibson, Carl Jung, Max Wertheimer (and other Gestalt psychologists)

Why: Mental models didn’t start with Indy Young, and affordances didn’t start with Don Norman. Some of the ideas behind affordances can be traced back to the Gestalt theorists – a school of thought believing in the importance of patterns and that the sum of something is greater than the parts.

Elements of gestalt theory

Archetype Diagram

J. J Gibson (later appropriated by Norman to give the word ‘affordance’) emphasises in his book ‘The Ecology of Perception‘ that affordances are meant to capture the potential of objects and their relationship to people. (For more on the difference between Gibson’s and Norman’s affordances, check out a great comparison article from interaction-design.org).

Other psychologists worth having some knowledge are Jung and his archetypes – these sets are today often used in branding to help identify psychographics and what stories to tell them, and Oliver Sacks for his case studies/vignettes on mental illness (“The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat“) and more recently on music (“Musicophillia“).

Linguistics

Easy pickings: Lakoff and Johnson, Richard E. Nisbett, basic semiotics
If you’re keen: Derrida, Habermas

Why: There’s been a growing discussion in the last few years on the role of language in design, including Adaptive Path and Cooper. However, linguists assert that language has a profound effect on how we perceive the world in general. Lakoff and Johnson’s ‘Metaphors We Live By’ is a classic that suggests we have fundamental linguistic metaphors that shape our lives e.g.:

• IDEAS are CONTAINERS
• TIME is IN FRONT OF US and we MOVE THROUGH IT
• HAPPINESS is UP, SADNESS is DOWN

However, it’s also worth keeping in mind that different cultures think differently. Richard E. Nisbett’s ‘The Geography of Thought’ highlights the differences in language and perception between the USA and China (for example, books for Western children focus on objects and the self, while those for Chinese focus on community and relationships).

Beyond that, we get into semiotics – a field of linguistics that separates reader from writer, sign from signifier and signified, and also investigates the communication channels.

Magritte's painting is a famous example of the difference between signifier and signified

A nice 101 guidebook is available online. Also worth looking at is Roland Barthe’s Mythologies – essays on (then current in the 60s) popular culture. Those brave enough to venture into what Barthes coined as “death of the author” or deconstructive criticism will want to read Jacques Derrida’s “On Grammatology” (excerpt)

The general steal: It’s easy for us to underestimate the power of words, language, and symbols. Linguistics helps us be more aware and thus more informed.

Literature

Easy pickings: William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Douglas Adams, Italo Calvino
If you’re keen: Nicholas Baker (The Mezzanine), Emile Zola, Jean Baudrillard

Why: Interaction design or experience design is about just that – interactions and experiences. Literature explores these thing – slowly, carefully, leaving room for interpretation. It’s easy to take this as a meaning to rush towards sci-fi novels (on that matter, there’s a great list of the Top 10), and for that matter, there are treasures to be found there – William Gibson (not relation to J.J!) has inspired many a designer with the cyberspace of Neuromancer and the Sandbenders computer in Idoru, and even Douglas Adams provided some stunning insights into gadgetry with such things as the Babelfish translator. However, where literature really becomes interesting and useful is when it begins to deal with real life.

Sci-fi writer turned social commentator is one type of example of this (Shaping Things is a classic), but beyond this we can venture into more naturalistic pieces such as the Mezzanine, with stream of consciousness commentary about his shoelaces, lunch and being on an escalator (benign but so detailed as to be engrossing), short (each chapter is less than 200 words!) poetic tales of “Imaginary Cities” by Italo Calvino, witty aphorisms and musings of Jean Baudrillard and (for those with the reading stamina) the works of Emile Zola.

The general steal: The ultimate in low-fi experience prototyping, literature can give inspiration and a method of slowing down.

Science and Horticulture

Easy pickings: David Holmgrem , McDonough and Braungart
If you’re keen: Gregoire Nicolis

Why: As I’ve mentioned before, it’s pretty common to take inspiration from nature, be it in terms of aesthetics or more scientifically through biomimicry.

But what exactly is it that we can get from the sciences? Apart from a sense of beauty in the real word (for example, see this -270Mb size PDF – astonishing book of flora and fauna illustrations ) we can also get an understanding of complexity and structures. This is touched on in Alex Wright’s book Glut, and also beautifully shown in the Powers of 10 video by Ray and Charles Eames below:

Should you wish to go into more depth on this topic, books include “Exploring Complexity” by Gregoire Nicolis.

On the horticultural side: it’s no surprise that the word ‘ecosystem’ seems to be the buzzword of the last few years, as IxD more actively embraces systems, something ecology is about nothing if not about. One rising mix between ecology and design is the permaculture movement. While much of this is related to sustainability, some of the other principles are more general, such as the O’BRIEDEM technique:

• Observation (understanding functions and relationships)
• Boundaries (physical and abstract)
• Resources (people, finances, potential)
• Evaluation (taking stock)
• Design
• Implementation
• Maintenance (adjustments to keep an optimal state)

Anyone serious about ecosystems should also read “Cradle to Cradle” by McDonough and Braungart.

The general steal: Nothing we’re working on can be anywhere near as complex as what happens in the world of science. Here are methods of managing complexity without sacrificing beauty.

And …

What other fields do you steal from? Please leave your comments.

Title image: / CC BY 2.0
[Update 28 October: there's also been some great discussion on the IXDA list around the topic - well worth checking out.]

For some the second day of EuroIA 09 started with a hangover, for others with interesting talks. But all of us had a great time at EuroIA 09 day 2. I am going to bed now, but I hope you enjoy this writeup.

Jason Hobbs: From Enterprise IA to Enterprise UX – Creating a User Experience Framework for a (big) Bank

How to you get an organisation to adopt UX in an effective, sustainable way? Jason Hobbs shared his experience of trying to do this for a large bank.

The objective of the project was to create a unified set of design artefacts to govern, standardise and optimise UX and interface design across multiple channels. The framework was based on stakeholder workshops, research, and a huge amount of relevant information from across the business. The result were UX principles, which informed guidelines, IA documents, and design templates. Jason stressed that principles are an important tool to measure success and allow traceability back to the business objectives.

To ensure the sustainability of the principles and the usage of the framework, UCD needs to be institutionalised in an organisation. A way to achieve this could be a core UX team, supported by decentralised, strategically placed allies. Jason’s team involved and trained the bank’s business analysts – a nice example of opening up the boundaries of our discipline and enabling others to be more user-centric.

Jason’s recommendations:

• Don’t get lost in detail. Version 0 of a UX framework should be a strong container, broad and shallow, but robust;
• It’s hard, so throw your best people at it;
• It won’t work without an executive championing the UCD approach;
• Make sure to integrate all parties and stakeholders;
• Be prepared for iterations, it’s not a quick shot;
• Focus on the users’ mental models.

Jason pointed out that they were lucky to come in at the right time, a time of change. The bank tried to overcome silos, stakeholders started talking to each other, and different projects supported and complemented the UX framework. The whole organisation was ready to take a leap, and UX was a small part of this.

Organisational change is hard, and Don Norman said it’s often impossible. Frameworks are important groundwork – championing them takes passion, patience and persistence.

(the above piece is written by Johanna Kollman)

Panel: A Thin White Line

In this panel the discussion focused on the challenges UX professionals face in Europe. What’s the current situation in the different parts of Europe? And are the differences as big as everybody thinks? The panel consists of four people, coming from all parts of Europe. Leisa Reichelt (United Kingdom), Hubert Anyzewski (Poland), Mark Kassteen (The Netherlands) and Luca Mascaro (Switzerland)

The first question they got was: “How is UX Perceived in your country?” Anyzewski answered that a few years ago it was pretty hard in his country. Clients had never heard about usability testing let alone user experience design. Four years ago he did the very first usability test in Poland… These days it is much better. According to Luca the Swiss and North-Italian areas are both very ‘creative’ markets. Clients used to trust mainly on marketing and didn’t really trust methodologies such as user centered design. But what Luca did was sell more hours of graphic design and creativity which he internally split up between design and research. These days it is much better. On the other side Mark says that UX has had a solid ground in the Netherlands for some years, even though it is still a struggle to get budget for proper research. Last but not least Leisa shared her thoughts about the UK. She said that it is a huge market, where a lot of organizations never heard of UX. But she also said that it really depends on the context. When you work in a mature organization like Flow you’ll attract mature clients, while as a freelancer you will see all sorts of clients.

After this there was a lot of debate about the problem that clients don’t understand what we can do for their business. Some said that it was really important that they understand the deliverables. Andreas Resmini, who moderated the talk, asked whether this was really interesting for a client… and Leisa jumped in by statingthat this is totally not interesting for a client. They don’t care for our deliverables, but they do care what we can do for their business. I think we need to learn to speak the clients language and translate our value into their business vision.

Reinoud Bosman & Joe Lamantia – The Architecture of Fun: Emotion, Interaction & Design for Massively Social Games

figure 3. Four Kinds of Fun

Reinoud and our own Joe gave this very interesting talk. They kicked off by saying: “All games have one thing in common: they are fun.” But there is more to this than you think, which Joe explained to us. Nicole Lazarro, a game developer, designed a model in which she divided fun into four different types (see graphic on the right). And by understanding these types of fun you can design better experiences. What Lazarro did was compare Massive Multiplayer Online Games to Facebook and what she found out was that Facebook had a lot more social benefits than MMO (a.o. the messaging is more open and cross-platform + it is easy to add friends). So she came with the idea of Massively Social Online Games: games connected to social platforms. By doing so she touched two types of fun: hard fun and social fun. And by combining these two you create a game that can have a long lasting value, that goes on beyond the time you actually play. This is where Killzone 2 comes in.

Killzone 2

Killzone 2 is a very popular Playstation 3 game developed in the Netherlands. The team focused mainly on creating a hard fun game, a hardcore 3D shooter. But what they wanted was to combine this with a huge social network (people fun). This resulted in the creation of Killzone.com, a website that was (and is) completely integrated with the game.

Here are a couple of things the team created for the website:

• The right to brag: make it easy to show that you are good at something, that you won and achieved personal goals;
• Integrate the ability to communicate cross-platform. So you are able to chat with in-game players via the website and vice-versa;
• Translate numbers in appealing graphics;
• Motivate everybody, even the lowest on the list, by chopping up the context depending on your position;
• Show a small part you are good at when somebody is low, and give a huge overview when you are the best.

It really sounded like a very good approach to a game. And I really believe that this way of looking at fun can be used in different types of projects, not just games. It is all about touchpoints.

Leisa Reichelt – Bare Naked Design

Our own Leisa shared her experience on the D7UX project with the EuroIA audience. She started by stating that not the product, but the community was the biggest challenge in this project. At the start she was already a bit aware of the fact that it would be a massive experiment, but it really turned out to be a tough job.

Almost all open source projects that are completely run by the community have a sub-optimal user experience and good graphic design, it just doesn’t go hand in hand with the way the proces goes. The only open source projects that are able to manage this have very strong direction on the collaborative proces. This strong direction requires dedicated resources with a lot of authority. Succesful examples are Firefox and WordPress. An open process means transparency and involvement, but it doesnt mean democracy. That would make the process endless and frustrating.

It was difficult for Leisa to bring the user centered design message across in the Drupal community. It began with the developers not understanding that there were any other users beside themselves. And explaining what the strategy of the D7UX project was going to be proved a failure, it wasn’t understandable and felt irrelevant for the community. This made Leisa and her design partner come up with pencil personas, simple but clear. With these personas and a couple of project principles the community started to understand what the goal was: make Drupal usable for a wide variety of people, not just developers. But this caused another problem. How do you bring the message across that we design for the 80% and make it great for them, while this will make it less usable for the developers themselves? And that was something that became very difficult to overcome. Especially since there was a core group of developers in the Drupal community that didn’t want these changes. So did the D7UX project end in failure? Partly… but it also created a series of good learnings:

• Its not Designers vs Developers thats the problem: its Framework vs Product;
• Designing in the open is a great thing to do for your peers. We don’t get to see each other work very often;
• It is possible to survive sporadic personal attacks for up to 6 months without going completely bonkers.

The end

And so ends EuroIA 09, an intimate conference with a lot of energetic people. Until next year, in Paris.

About 150 UX professionals are gathered in the center of Copenhagen to talk, listen and at EuroIA 09. Johnny was invited to the party to cover the event and bring the good stuff to you. So enjoy the show.

Scott Thomas – The Power of Design

Obama Presidential Campaign website

The opening keynote was given by Scott Thomas, aka SimpleScott. He was the design director for the Obama Presidential Campaign, which was one of the graphical highlights of the past years. Thisis such an interesting case because of the strong graphical style that was created throughout the entire campaign. One style, one message.

Scott kicked off by saying that this great end result was reached by a lot of nights and very hard work. When listening to him I figured there were two main reasons why it worked out so well:

1. First of all there was a strong creative team that understood the power of good design and branding: bringing a clear consistent message across. This consistency created a good organized and balanced feeling, which was new… previous campaigns used multiple slogans, graphics styles and didn’t understand the concept of branding.
2. The other point is: listening to the users. By constantly adapting to what the public was thinking, saying and doing they could create empathy. But more concrete: they checked out analytics… and this helped them find the best balance: should the button be red or blue? Will the copy ‘Own a piece of this historic campaign’ lead to more donations or ‘Last chance to make an impact’?

By combining these two forces: design expertise and user centered design they managed to make a very powerful campaign. And by constantly changing the website they created a story and sparked human emotions and intellect.

Wireframes don’t sell

A good lesson Scott tried to bring across was the power (or lack of it) of wireframes. When working with executives, or in his case politicians, you have to understand their vocabulary…. and wireframes aren’t in it. Where we can visualize an entire website when looking at a wireframe, they see a boring set of boxes. It just doesn’t help to sell the story, they are the floorplanes of UX.

When Scott clicked through his wireframes I noticed an interesting difference between them. In one you saw the functionalities being described, containing stuff like: ‘main feature’ and maybe ‘sign in’. This is a functional wireframe most interaction designers use. But in another wireframe he hit an interesting spot, showing boxes that contained the following words: ‘persuade’, ‘localize’, ‘represent’, ‘educate’ and ‘activate’. What he did in that wireframe is break the page up in different messages and seeing the website as a story. This is a really good approach, showing the strategy of the page.

Cennydd Bowles – The Future of Wayfinding

Wayfinding is one of the most fundamental skills people have. When it fails we are in deep trouble, imagine ambulances getting lost and people arriving late at important meetings. The way we navigate is done in several ways, done with different knowledge. That’s what Cennydd’s talk is all about and a lot of this he explains in his article ‘Wayfinding Through Technology‘.

Beside the topics he addresses in the article he also talks about other interesting stuff:

Cennydd describes the different types of signage around us. He explains how important it is to design these based upon rules, in order to create a consistent use of them. This is so important for the user experience… there are just too many different wayfinding systems and rules to follow.

The different signage types:

• Identification (‘This is a crossroad’)
• Directional (‘Go to the left’)
• Orientional (‘You are here’)
• Regulatory (‘Stay out’)
• Vernacular (‘Please use the other door’)

One of the challenges in wayfinding we face is the control of user generated wayfinding: people designing their own maps, with their own logic and rules. There is a beauty in this, but it also creates too much diversity that doesn’t help users.

At the end of the talk Leisa Reichelt made a very interesting comment. She stated that all the modern wayfinding systems focus on the destination, while forgetting the beauty and enjoyable aspect of the journey itself.

Andrea Resmini & Luca Rosati – Bridging Media

In this talk Andrea and Luca started of by showing us a customer journey in 1999, where a guy buys tickets in a store and travels to Copenhagen. His journey isn’t fluid, because of several bad experiences with having to go to a shop for a ticket and having to sort all of his photos. After that they show the same journey, but in 2009. Here you see a more digital approach, where the person buys tickets online and has digital photos. Unfortunately a lot of frustrations remain, with bad functioning touchpoints (mainly digital services)…

And then 2019 through the Sixth Sense concept: a fluid experience with constant feedback. This is the future we are trying to reach. But who designed this? The future is not being designed by UX people. Why aren’t we innovating and creating these kinds of concepts? What’s going wrong? In order to reach this goal Andrea and Luca state that we should become “the connector between different media and different contexts and provides experiential continuity to products and services.” And in order to make that possible they created a manifesto (starting at slide 32):

The Sixth Sense concept

Sabrina Mach, James Page – Effective Ethnography Techniques for Low Budget Projects

Sabrina and James held an interesting talk about etnography. They explained the power of ethnography and especially the fact that you need to do it for a long time, in order to get it right. You really need to immerse yourself with the culture in such a way that it becomes part of you.

One of the biggest problems of etnography is that it takes a lot of time and budget before it generates interesting results. With Webnographer Sabrina and James are trying to set up a tool that can change all this. It basically helps the researcher do research from a central position. He can collect all the data via the web, collecting it directly from the source. It has four important aspects:

• Digital: self running test run from a central point
• Conventional: there are meetups where the team gets together
• Team: the entire team can easily access the incoming research data and make direct changes to the process
• Concurrent: it’s an ongoing process

But the biggest advantage seams to be the possibility to directly use the incoming data for the design process. And when you have a healthy agile design process you can adept the design when new data comes in.

The main question that the audience had was: is this really low budget? And the answer to that wasn’t necessarily yes. The main advantage of this method is that you spread the cost over a longer period, while you have feedback in between. Which is definitely interesting.

Utopians & Idealists

Another of the presentation was about the different customers you have to design for, who can be utopians or idealists. This basically means they are open for change or prefer stability. If you want to know more about that, I recommend the article Sabrina and James wrote: Utopians & Idealists: Who Can Handle Innovation?

Sylvie Daumal – In the Field: IA Survival Guide in a Hostile Context

How do you sell UX in an organization that doesn’t know anything about it and feels that it is already successful? That was the main question Sylvie had to solve at the company she works for: Razorfish. Here is a list of the main ideas she proposed:

• Focus on user experience – you will be the only one;
• In projects you should focus on user journeys, they need your main attention;
• Explain the user centered approach in your organization. Help people understand the benefits;
• Organize formal presentations to explain what you do. Split this up in a general presentation with a big group and smaller ones with specific audiences (like account managers);
• Teach your discipline whenever it’s relevant;
• The client can be your best friend, meet them as much as possible;
• The user is one of your most valuable allies, embrace this;
• Limited budget and time are manageable; zero isn’t;
• Keep delivering high quality: staying professional with limited means is probably the main challenge.

James Kalbach – Human Factors in Innovation

This talk is about the core of innovation. James starts off by explaining what an innovation is. It basically originates from an invention, which originated from an idea:

1. Idea: a concept, thought or vision
2. Invention: physical, proof of concept or hardware
3. Innovation: social information or software

When looking at Thomas Edison. He came up with the idea of creating better light and invented a light bulb. But his true result was the innovation: bringing electricity into people homes.

Innovation in business contexts is ultimately about the adoption of an invention. A lot of technology driven innovations fail because they never meet a social need. Innovations must be embraced in order to succeed… but who’ll embrace it?

Perceived attributes

When you want to create a true innovation you need to touch certain points:

• Relative advantage: is it better?
• Compatibility: is it appropriate? Does it align with what the user wants?
• Complexity: does it feel good and usable?
• Triability: can you try before you buy?
• Observability: is it understandable?

When these are all met you have the potential of achieving innovation, but it still needs to be adopted. And for that James comes up with another list of points that need to be met.

Phases in adoption

• Knowledge about it
• Persuasion
• Decision
• Implementation
• Confirmation

Innovation in UX

At the end of the presentation James hits the same spot that Andrea and Luca touched earlier on the day: where are the innovations in the UX world? We are fundamentally about innovation, but we aren’t doing it. Let’s change that.

See you tomorrow

It was a long but rewarding day. I am going to bed.

After a night of engaging conversation over dinner, drinks, as well as Brad Pitt and George Clooney sightings, the second day of IDEA kicked off. The speakers of the second day had big shoes to fill after the great speakers from the day before. Needless to say, they all rose to the occasion effortlessly and gave attendees plenty to think about for their trips home.

Tim Queenan – The Dawn of Perfect Products

During the opening session, Tim laid out what perfect products used to look like in the past, and more importantly, what a perfect product will look like in the near future. He started off by asserting that “The assumption that social media makes products better is wrong”. The truth is, products have flaws and some of those flaws are there by design. The social media ‘silver bullet’ can’t fix these flaws, or even hide them.

Types of flaws:

• Volume – How much space does it take up?
• Physical Decay – How long will the product function, or stay relevant?
• Usability – Is it easy for the intended consumer to use?
• Usefulness – Does it provide any value to its consumers?

The view of a perfect product is no longer accurate. In the past, to reach product perfection it needed to:

• Fulfill a need or want
• Have a niche or mass market
• Provide the business with high margins
• Be perceived to give high value
• Have customer replenish or repurchase the product
• Allow the customer to be easily up-sold or cross-sold

So, how is this view changing? Some emerging ideas are that the perfect product of the future will focus more on human behavior and needs. These future products will need to be intuitive, elastic, intelligent, and polarizing. The challenge for us is that many companies don’t understand this yet, and user experience professionals are the ones best suited to teach them.

Christian Crumlish & Erin Malone – Social Design Patterns Mini-Workshop

The book “Designing Social Interfaces” written by Christian and Erin is set to be released this October. Over the course of this mini-workshop they showcased 5 Steps, 5 Principles, and 5 Anti-Patterns from their book. The workshop portion of the session was a companion card game that showcased the importance of a variety of social design patterns.

5 Steps to follow:

• Give people the ability to identify themselves and their work.
• Ensure there is a way to create objects in the system that people can relate to.
• Give people something to do. Mark favorites, define tags, and collect objects. Start out simple, and let the network grow as is necessary.
• Enable a bridge to real life events, because aspects of events occurs both online and off.
• Finding interesting content shouldn’t be a selfish act, allow people to easily share their interests with others.

5 Principles to consider:

• Pave the cowpaths, see what shortcuts people make and then lay down the paths.
• Talk like a person, and make it conversational. People want to know what has been written was done by a human.
• Be open and play well with others. It’s ok to keep private information private, but take advantage of openness where it makes sense.
• Learn from games. Games are becoming more social everyday and they have many lessons which we can learn from.
• Respect the ethical dimensions. Consider what you will do with the private information you collect.

5 Anti-Patterns to avoid with your social network:

• Cargo Cult – The act of performing particular behaviors and setting up certain scenarios expecting past outcomes that were actually dependent on outside forces.
• Don’t Break Email – People have standard behaviors and habits when it comes to their email, don’t run the risk of alienating them.
• The Password Anti-Pattern – 3rd party services are training people to sign on using their service rather than an internal login system.
• Ex-Boyfriend Bug Anti-Pattern – Though it appears a specific relationship should exist, there may be a good reason why it doesn’t.
• Potemkin Village – Building out many groups and relationships when a population can’t support them decreases the overall value of the network.

The card game that followed the presentation was very entertaining, once our team learned all the game mechanics. The basic flow of the game was to start with a social object card, e.g. Urban Farming, and create a social product for a specific audience delivered through a defined channel. The team is dealt cards, and team members place a balance of social feature cards, delivery mechanism cards, and target demographic cards around the social object card until they have created a completed social digital product. The more balanced the resulting social network is, the more points the team accrues.

Social Media Card Game

The game is currently in beta, so keep an eye out for its release date.

Matthew Milan – Innovation Parkour

Using Parkour as an analogy, Matthew’s presentation dispelled some common misconceptions about innovation and instructed us on some activities we can adopt as designers to practice being more innovative. To start off, he identified innovation as “creating a better way to deliver value.”

Some of the myths that Milan attempted to dispel is that innovation is expensive, requires a ton of time, and takes a special kind of person to do it. To the contrary, he argues that innovation is rather cheap; takes some practice to train the mind to look for it; and is a collaborative effort.

In order to reach the stage where innovation becomes second nature, Milan argued that people need to achieve a certain level of skill. The degrees of mastery are unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence (True Mastery). In order to reach the level of unconscious competence it is necessary to practice:

• Visualizing
• Seeing
• Collaborating
• Trusting
• Participating
• Being Open

The session ended with an impromptu interview with Dennis Schleicher Jr on how practicing the art of Parkour trains the mind to do all this.

Mari Luangrath – If You Build It (Using Social Media), They Will Come

The story of Foiled Cupcakes and its owner Mari is truly inspiring. When she started her business, she didn’t understand the importance of social media and how it could affect her business model. The lesson was quickly learned though when she beat her initial sales projection by over 300%. This was all done without a single storefront location.

She found her customer base using social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, and LinkedIn. Rather than approaching them as a sales person, she looked to forge a personal relationships with people. Through her activities on these networks, people generated a lot of buzz for her business, which eventually made its way into local news media as free press. Though she had a target market, she quickly found other untapped markets through the events she planned online.

In the course of just six months, she has gone from being a social media novice to one who is dominating her local market. The use of social media has become the single most powerful driver of her business today.

Stephen Anderson – The Art and Science of Seductive Interactions

The task of closing out IDEA fell to Stephen with an intriguing view on how to persuade users into becoming more engaged with the products we design. He said to the engaged audience in the MaRS auditorium that by using the art of seduction, we are able to draw people deeper into the interactions of our designs. People are able to engage in a desired form of behavior that is both fun for them, and informative to the system. Using the psychology that lies behind seduction, designers are able to motivate people to overlook any usability potholes that make certain actions difficult to perform. This isn’t an excuse not to fix these flaws, but it gets the user engaged and having an overall good experience.

Steven continued by informing the audience that in order to seduce people into engaging with your designs, it’s necessary to understand what motivates them. These motivations can be uncovered by observing the way people interact with others. Things to remember are that people are emotional; can be both irrational or rational; eager to learn; desire the familiar; and inclined to do what is easy. Looking for the behavior that drives these desires allows us to create something that plays on their curiosity and encourages them to behave in a variety of ways. A quote by Kathy Sierra was shared that best sums this up, “Brains pay attention to what brains care about, not necessarily what the conscious mind cares about.”

Thus ended the IDEA conference of 2009. Thanks to all the conference organizers, the Information Architecture Institute, the MaRS Centre, and Toronto for providing everyone with a fantastic  experience.

After a daylong workshop given by Nathan Curtis of EightShapes, The Information Architecture Institute’s IDEA09 officially kicked off on September 15th. The conference took place in Toronto at the MaRS Centre this year, with an approximate attendance of 250 UX professionals from around the world.  Many of the conversations that took place over dinner and drinks were fueled by the sessions of the day, and extended the conference’s experience well into the night.

Luke Wroblewski – The Impact of Social Models

Luke’s unique position at Yahoo, and some data collection applications on Facebook, allowed him to present on a variety of social models a social network can use, and how that model influences member behavior and contribution. The data used to validate these social models was derived from Yahoo Answers, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.

The social models of he identified were:

• No Relationship – No clear definition exists between the users of a network
• Community – A simply defined meaning to a large group of users
• Group – Clearly defined relationships that can be a subset of an overall network
• Symmetrical – User acknowledgment of a relationship brings personal meaning to a connection
• Asymmetrical – Loosely connected relationship that don’t require any confirmation

All of these models work on the fact that people naturally organize with other people based on the context in which their relationship exists. The level of user feedback and involvement in the network also influences how active an individual person’s contributions becomes.

Leisa Reichelt – Bare Naked Design: Reflections on Designing With An Open Source Community

Based on her experience working on the Drupal 7 UX Project, Leisa offered the audience insight and lessons learned based on her team’s interactions with an open source community. Over the course of the project, her team has had to foster involvement and gather feedback from a community that is diverse and global.

The first piece of insight offered was how to successful lead the design of an open source project that must remain open and be transparent in order to encourage community involvement. Though there are many voices that need to be listened to and demand to be heard, the design process can’t be a democracy. The design team must show a strong sense of authority in order to lead the project in the right direction.

Another great take away was the process her team used to gather user feedback and solicit ideas from the community. Using YouTube, the UX team on Drupal 7 showcased their thought process, ideas, and prototypes. Her team even created usability kits in order to crowdsource some usability tests using the posted videos. The community responded with follow up videos, or ideas of their own posted on Flickr.

Thomas Malaby – Making Virtual Worlds: Games and the Human for a Digital Age

Thomas offered attendees a view how the digital worlds that are present in many of today’s online games are becoming extensions of our real world societies. In many of these games, concepts like social status and community involvement are being reflected and encouraged based on the game mechanics of the virtual world.

Virtual worlds are becoming more and more persistent in nature (persistent games in nature? awkward sentence), with no real end. Game developers are able to continually add new ‘spaces’ and features, which keeps the worlds alive and challenging. Players, or residents, of these persistent worlds are required to put forth effort in order to stay on top, or to ensure their current social status level. In order to maintain their quality of ‘life’ in-game, certain objects need to be acquired through the games virtual economy or by accomplishing goals. The digital avatar is becoming more of a digital extension of the person engaged with the game.

The major crux to these persistent worlds is player involvement. If there isn’t a large engaged population, the world will slowly fade way. Or as Thomas puts it “Something isn’t interesting unless there are a lot of people involved. Be it virtual or physical.”

Christina Wodtke – Social Space Online: Lessons from Radical Architects

Sessions that follow lunch are always tough, but Christina did a great job getting the crowd engaged by comparing the world of user experience with that of architecture. As a profession, architecture understands the importance of designing for a specific environment, and there are many lessons that translate to the world of design.

One of the best examples of properly designing for an environment is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Japan. Since earthquakes are common in this region, many aspects of the hotel were designed solely for withstanding and recovering from an earthquake. The lesson here for us, as designers, is to consider all the possible digital earthquakes that may occur in the projects we are involved with.

Types of Digital Earthquakes:

• Technical Execution
• Maintenance
• Scale
• Bandwidth
• Trolls
• Spammers

Another interesting concept she shared is how the mode of travel, and the velocity of that travel, has a direct influence of the architectural style of a time period. As we drive by buildings faster and faster, bigger and more eye catching signage is required to draw us in. This concept translates to the web, for many times we don’t consider how fast our users are going when traversing the web and how best to capture their attention.

Maya Kalman – Does Designing a Social Experience Affect How We Party? Of Course It Does!

What made Maya’s session so great was how everything she said turned into an analogy for what User Experience is all about. Maya runs Swank Production, an event planning agency in New York City. Her business is all about planning personal and meaningful experiences for her clients.

During her presentation, she provided us with a down to earth definition of Social Experience Design. “Social Experience Design is mean to connect people in new and meaningful ways.” She continued by detailing the reasons why good design is important. Good design helps to put people at ease and gets them to relax (aren’t those the same thing?). This helps to remove social barriers and encourages people to open up and be more social. Also, a beautiful design gives everything associated with a presentation a higher sense of value. This concept ties into the cognitive nature of aesthetics and how it effects the perceived value of an object. For experience design is experience design, whether it is done using pixels or party hats.

Jeff Dachis – User Experience as a Crucial Driver of Social Business Design

Social Experience Design can be hard to sell, but Jeff gave the crowd a great framework to use in order to help convince our clients. The framework for this was called ‘Social Business Design’ and is made up of four main aspects.

• Ecosystem – The connections a person, or business, has with others.
• Hivemind – Businesses need to stop hoarding all its information and open it up for collaboration.
• Dynamic Signal – Inject your company into the overall conversation, for this conversation is happening with or without you.
• Metafilter – Define the meaning in all the noise that comes along with your ecosystem and by being a hivemind.

In the near future, a company that is hive-minded, dynamically signaled, with a meta-filtered ecosystem will be better than any other.

After hours of great presenters and high quality content, Day one of IDEA closed.

Top image by Small

When I design new gadgets I  try to think of a human behavior that can be associated with it. Then I make up a personified character based on that movement. The character naturally decides what kind of gadget it will become, how it should be formed and what other functions it should have.

Page visitors

I want to know how many other people are browsing the website I’m watching. If there are a lot of people visiting the page, the article must be worth reading. But it is very boring checking out statistics or numbers of replies.

“Visit the page” sounds like a person physically comes to the website from somewhere else, so that’s what I wanted to visualize. If there are actual human figures we can see around the web browser (on the desktop), we can instantly see how popular the site is at least at that moment. When people walk away very fast it isn’t that interesting, if they stay for some time… it must be worth my time.

iPhone relaxation

I have an iPhone and always have it with me: at work and at home. When at work, I change the setting to the silent (vibration) mode in the office, but when it vibrates on my desk, it makes even louder noise than a beep. But it won’t rattle on something soft such as a sofa. An iPhone slacking off on a sofa? But (human) lazybones must love hammocks much better than sofas….

So I thought a hammock style would be more fun. I also added a parasol, which would be requested by such an idle guy, that works as a solar power battery charger. You open and flip the parasol in the sun to get electricity and close and fix it on the hammock to charge your iPhone.

Although social networking sites have become the commonplace over the past eight years since the introduction of Friendster in 2002, designers have not yet explored two important notions: 1) What kind of social experience do social networking sites foster?; and 2) Do social networking sites encourage community?

Introduction

This past year social media, and social network sites in particular, have reached new heights of popularity and adoption. It is no longer unusual for clients to request that designers “add Facebook” to their respective sites, mainly for the purpose of increased engagement and community building for their brand as a part of a greater social marketing strategy. Although social networking sites have become commonplace, designers have not yet explored two important notions:

1. What kind of social experience do social networking sites foster?; and
2. Do social networking sites encourage community?

The Anatomy of a Social Network Site

The Facebook wall

Although many of us utilize social networking sites on a daily basis, it is important to step back and understand the various components that make up a social networking sites, as well recognize that social networking sites are fundamentally different from other social software. Social network sites differentiate themselves from blogs, wikis, and social tagging sites, by three distinct features: profiles, friend lists, and comments[1]. According to Rosen[2], unlike the “proto-social networking sites of a decade ago [that] used metaphors of place to organize their members: people were linked through virtual cities, communities, and homepages,” today’s social networking sites “organize around metaphors of the person, with individual profiles that list hobbies and interests.”

The fundamental feature of a social network site is the profile. A profile is constructed through a pre-defined web form that each member completes for the purpose of describing themselves to other members of the site. The most basic profile fields include demographic details such as age, sex, and location, followed by relationship status, educational level, political and religious affiliations, as well as tastes in music, movies, and books, a photograph, and open-ended descriptions. These fields exist because Friendster – originally designed as a dating site – was the first popular social network site and was subsequently emulated by newer social networking sites.

Once the profile is created, members are than encouraged to look at others’ profiles and add those people to their Friends list. The creation of a friends lists is what makes up the “social network” component of the sites.

Social networking sites also provide a means for communication among Friends. This is most commonly done through comments posted on “The Wall” in Facebook or the “Friend’s Comments” section in MySpace. The comments are publicly displayed and viewable to anyone with access to the individuals’ profiles. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “the most popular way of communicating via social networking sites is to post a message to a friend’s profile, page, or ‘wall’.” [3]

The Social Experience of Social networking sites

According to Jenny Preece[4], “an online community is first and foremost a social experience that changes according to who is present, the number of people involved, and the type of discussion that occurs.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, social networking sites tend to foster an narcissistic experience, where users goals become to collect friends, feedback, and attention. There is very little sense of being part of a larger group, and little motivation for establishing connections with strangers. By following the daily activities of “Friends”, people do begin to feel, what Leisa Reichelt [5] coined as “ambient intimacy”, which is a sense of a stronger connection to weak ties, such as long lost school friends, dispersed colleagues, or relatives. However, the binary friend/not friend designation found on social networking sites often collapses all relational contexts, turning the semi-public space into a broadcast medium, where others can voyeuristically observe interpersonal interactions.

Some of these experiences are dependent on the design of the friendship mechanism in social networking sites. Sites like Facebook which require reciprocal approval from both parties to become connected, encourage users to limit connections to people who they already know, and don’t particularly dislike. In essence, Facebook truly is just for friends. Sites like Twitter, where a reciprocal connection is not required, people are much more likely to follow strangers that may be of interest. However, there is a proliferation of spammers and bots which often clutter the stream and diminish the experience.

For all social networking sites, the temporal aspect combined with an ever growing connection list creates a significant strain on attention. People often find it difficult to follow individuals of interest because they get lost in the stream, especially if there is a particularly active individual. The situation gets even more complicated as people join more than one social networking sites. In this instance, individuals often pick a primary social networking sites, which they will check and interact with frequently, while others will be visited occasionally.

Social Networking Sites and Community

Multi User Dungeon

Over the years, as technology has progressed, so have community designs. Moving from text-based MUDs (multi-user dungeons) and MOOs (multiuser object oriented technology), to threaded discussions such as usenet groups, listserves. and bulletin boards, and most recently social network sites. According to Preece, online communities are made up of three parts: a purpose which is supported by technology and guided by policies. The purpose of social networking sites is generally thought of as creating connections, or building up the social network through friends list. This purpose is fairly generic compared to community sites of a decade ago, which ranged from interest groups to education, business, and health support.

The community sites of a decade ago were explicitly situated within the context of the domain under discussion, while individuals and their relationships with each other were invisible. In social networking sites, the individual and their relationships are explicit, while the community becomes invisible or imagined. The interaction is centered on individual actions and reactions, with little sense of a larger group. Currently, social networking sites are designed to increase the strength of ties between individuals, instead of fostering a sense of community.

Looking Forward

Google Reader's Like functionality

As we look into the future, we should not forget the lessons we learned in the past. Community designs such as threaded discussions, provide for rich content, a sense of being part of a group, feelings of support and belonging, as well a common interest upon which new relationships can form. Perhaps social networking sites, although incredibly popular, are not always the answer to increased engagement and community in every context. Designers should think about ways of combining the rich context of threaded discussions along with aspects of social networking sites. Is there a way that we could surface content, but at the same time provide pointers to individual contributors? Google Reader is currently taking first steps to this approach with their “Like” functionality, which allows all Google Readers users to mark a post they like, and also view others who liked the same post.

I challenge designers to stop emulating designs that have not changed since 2002, and take the concept further through the creation of context appropriate designs which balance the larger community and the individual. The next time you are designing social network features, think carefully about what kind of behavior and social experience you wish to encourage. Do you want people to connect with their existing contacts, such as found on TripIt? Or do you want them to discover resources from strangers, such as found on Delicious? Additionally, think carefully about the value proposition of your social networking sites. Why will people choose to use the features on your site versus the several other sites they are currently using? What personal benefit does your site provide aside from social networking sites?

References

[1] Boyd, d. and  Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11.

[2] Rosen, C. (2007). Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism. The New Atlantis, 15.

[3] Lenhart, A., and Madden, M. (2007). Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview. Pew Interent & American Life Project, January 7.

[4] Preece, J. (2004). Designing and evaluating online communities: research speaks to emerging practice. Int. J. Web Based Communities, 1(1).

[5] Reichelt, L. (2007). Ambient Intimacy. Available at: http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/

We are relying ever more on technology to help us out. In this article I am discussing how people form mental models of urban environments, and how technology can augment and even replace our wayfinding skills.

This article is an extract from my upcoming talk at EuroIA 09, The Future of Wayfinding.

Mental Models

Faced with any complex system, we form a mental model. Cities are no exception. Our models (known in the wayfinding domain as cognitive maps) combine cues from across our environment. Some cues are implicit, woven into the fabric of our surroundings: urban density, landmarks, or even the flow of traffic. Others are explicitly designed to describe the structure of a city, such as maps, signs and street naming conventions.

As with any designed system, some cities are more learnable than others. Contrast the regular grid, tall landmarks and self-explanatory street names of New York with the organic sprawl of London:

Maps of New York and London at the same scale (from OpenStreetMap.org) demonstrate the difference in structure of the two cities.

New York has information architecture baked in; London does not. Kevin Lynch named this quality ‘legibility’ – an apt term implying, as does its typographic equivalent, a deep relationship with the identity and DNA of a system.

Survey Knowledge

Good cognitive maps make use of survey knowledge, an understanding of the topological structure of an environment. Centuries of designers have built survey knowledge by printing maps. Some are, of course, more successful than others. The famous London Underground map is so long-standing and ubiquitous that it acts as an ersatz cognitive map for many Londoners. Unfortunately, being designed to show connections below ground, it doesn’t correspond well with London’s surface geography. The map, as they say, is not the territory, and ironically the Tube map hinders effective wayfinding, as people take Underground journeys they would be better off walking.

Survey knowledge gleaned from maps is orientation-specific (this is why maps favour the principle of forward-up equivalence – ‘up’ on the map means ‘straight ahead’). However, we learn areas better by exploring them, which gives us survey knowledge that isn’t based any particular direction. This means that cognitive maps are fluid, changing with context and time to form more coherent wholes.

Different wayfinding tasks

• naive, or exhaustive, search – where the user doesn’t know where the destination is (eg. finding a postbox in a city he doesn’t know)
• primed search – where the user knows the destination’s location (eg. driving to his parents’ house)
• exploratory – where there is no set destination (eg. going for a walk)

User experience folk will no doubt notice parallels to digital information retrieval, including the understanding that most wayfinding tasks will mix these modes. For example we may use a primed search to navigate to a shop found on a shopping mall directory, followed by an exhaustive search for the right aisle within the shop. We can also recognise other concepts from the digital world: the concepts of information scent and berrypicking are both entirely relevant to real-world wayfinding.

Complementing survey knowledge is procedural knowledge: the means of getting from A to B, via C. Sometimes this can be sufficient alone. Plan a route in advance or get directions from a passer-by and you may well find your destination, but if the instructions are flawed or there’s a change in conditions (roadworks, for instance), procedural knowledge collapses quickly and you’re left to improvise or retrace your steps.

Knowledge

Screenshot from the Trails iPhone app

Good wayfinding takes survey knowledge, procedural knowledge and also landmark knowledge, an appreciation of the locations of notable points of interest. Building these three platforms has traditionally been the domain of wayfinding designers, architects and town planners, but now the technologists are getting their turn. Online maps and route planning software have revolutionised the wayfinding business, and computer scientists are attempting to standardise the language of geography through systems such as KML.

While it’s important to know the environment, the user must also know where she is. Technology can be a great help here, with GPS today’s crown jewel. However, although it’s tempting to think that this solves the location problem, GPS is only accurate to 3 metres and, being a line-of-sight technology, doesn’t work indoors or in heavily built up areas. We also need another layer of codification and processing to turn longitude and latitude into human vernacular such as “Junction 12 of the M1″ or “tenth floor of the Empire State Building”.

Mobiles are of course well suited to act as the vehicle for GPS and this codification layer, and have been an understandable vehicle for wayfinding technology. The typical limitations of screen size and user context apply, but the advent of GPS and compass technology in mobiles has led to a sudden commercial interest in ‘augmented reality’, already well on its way to becoming the next misappropriated buzzword.

Nearest Tube iPhone app from Acrossair

Beyond mobile devices, wayfinding provides an excellent stepping stone into the world of ubiquitous computing. Unlike many other ubicomp applications, wayfinding is highly task-driven, meaning many of today’s UCD approaches could be relevant. Imagining a world of ambient informatics, we see thousands of potential output devices. Public LCD displays, signage, buildings, even the street beneath our feet can be our canvas.

The ideal system

The ideal wayfinding system dissolves into behaviour. It requires no inputs, and automatically knows our location and destination. Its feedback to us can take the form of subtle visual, audible or tactile cues – highlighting the path ahead on some display, or even providing a gentle tap on the shoulder when we move in the wrong direction. However, it’s not easy for systems to truly anticipate our wayfinding needs. Although early adopters are habitually advertising both location and destination via services such as Dopplr, FireEagle and Latitude, systems aren’t particularly good at inferring intent. We often don’t navigate rationally – we take scenic routes, stop to pick up lunch, or become distracted by window shopping.

Ubiquitous Computing

We can consider some technologies (such as QR codes, RFID and GPS) as bridging points between the digital world and the real world. At these touchpoints, we are effectively designing an API that allows both worlds to interact. The information architecture must be harmonised, and the correspondences should be carefully aligned. As a prosaic example, labelling and signage used in digital systems must correspond to those used in the real world. It’s clear that the roles of the UX designer and wayfinding designer will start to blur.

Bringing wayfinding into the ubicomp domain might also allow the dimension of time to affect our wayfinding choices. Spimes could help us navigate by highlighting the past actions of others. It’s helpful to know that 95% of all previous travellers to the stadium turned left at a particular turning (of course, this is nothing new to the animal kingdom). Collapsing the past into the present also opens up exciting opportunities to reintroduce our favourite digital mechanisms into the real world. Collaborative filtering, recommendations and other ‘wisdom of crowds’ phenomena could mean wayfinding is no longer a solo pursuit. The notion of anthropocentric wayfinding has impact far beyond technology. It causes flashmobs, football riots and even political revolution. It mobilises us as a combined unit and could even be said to demonstrate emergent hive intelligence.

As with any dream of the future, this picture is utopian and perhaps unrealistic. Much of the world doesn’t yet have running water, let alone a broadband mobile network. Even when these systems are in place, the interaction between people, places and technology will inevitably prove both overly rigid and frustratingly sloppy in various contexts. And isn’t there some joy in getting lost in a new city and stumbling across something beautiful? The advertisers certainly think so:

Finally, in the words of McLuhan, “every extension is also an amputation”. It is conceivable that we will find ourselves relying on technology to such an extent that in the event of its inevitable failure we will struggle at even the most basic wayfinding tasks.

There are clearly challenges ahead. However, getting lost and getting found is an inherent part of human life, and therefore wayfinding is well within the domain of future user experience work. With skill and empathy, we can bring a layer of humanity and usefulness to wayfinding technology.

Interested in more? I will be presenting a session on ‘The Future of Wayfinding’ at EuroIA.

You know what needs to be designed. You’ve listened to your business stakeholders and to your users. You’ve made models of the strategy and of the design research. And now you are staring at a blank piece of paper or screen. You have to, well, design something. This is where ideation has to happen.

This is a chapter from Dan Saffer's book 'Design for Interaction, 2nd edition'

Once you’ve come up with tons of ideas, how do you choose which ones are worth pursuing? You use a set of design principles that will not only help select the best ideas, but guide the design through refinement, prototyping, development, and beyond. But first, let’s diverge and come up with concepts.

Creating Concepts

The purpose of brainstorming is not to find the one perfect design for your project. That will come later. Instead, the reason to ideate is to generate many concepts as rapidly as possible. At this point in the design process, quantity — not quality — is what matters the most. You want a wide variety of concepts that approach the project from a wide variety of angles. Even ideas that seem outlandish and completely unfeasible are welcome.

As an ideal, each brainstorming session, even a short one of an hour, should generate dozens of ideas. For a new product, you should brainstorm over several days to generate hundreds of ideas, concepts, and fragments of ideas. It doesn’t matter if they are variations on an idea, or even if you or others have thought of them before. Just put them down and move on to the next idea.

Ideation - courtesy oCricket

What you want to do is get every idea you can possibly come up with out there, on paper as a sketch not in words (although sometimes giving your concept a name is helpful later, as are words to explain a part of the sketch) so that they can be considered later. Be as specific as you can be. No “Fix the thing with a drop down” type notes. Draw the solution you’ve come up with. The quality of the drawing doesn’t matter.

Brainstorming requires some tools. First, because of the limitations of today’s available technology, brainstorming should never be done digitally; it should be done with paper, pencils, pens, markers, and possibly whiteboards and sticky notes. You need to be able to jot down an idea quickly, set it aside, and move on to the next idea. Fumbling with technology just gets in the way. You can capture your ideas with a digital camera later if necessary. For now, analog means pencil and paper work best.

When brainstorming, designers should have all the research and models close at hand and in view (taped to walls perhaps) for reference and inspiration. Also, brainstorming doesn’t have to be limited to the designers on the team. Inviting stakeholders, developers, engineers, and even outsiders can sometimes lead to productive ideas you might not have thought of. Just be sure they understand the “rules” of brainstorming:

• There are no bad ideas. There is no judgment about anyone else’s ideas.
• Stay focused. Put stray thoughts or unrelated ideas into a “parking lot”: a physical place in the room where those sorts of wayward ideas can be captured, but not discussed.
• Don’t spend a lot of time on any one idea. In the initial brainstorming sessions especially, the goal is to generate as many ideas as possible. Save going into depth on any one idea for later. For now, more is, indeed, more.
• Use the whole room. Post things up on walls. Simply seeing all the ideas may generate connections between them or generate new ideas.
• No multitasking. You can’t do brainstorming well when you are focused on answering email, IMing, texting, or working on other things. It’s a concentrated activity, so all distractions should be removed as much as possible.

(…) brainstorming should never be done digitally; it should be done with paper, pencils, pens, markers, and possibly whiteboards and sticky notes.

Getting Started

Ideation requires being able to make fast mental leaps and connections, so start with a warm-up exercise to get everyone’s brains working. For instance, first dwell on the subject at hand in the broadest possible sense. For example, on a project to build an installation for a museum, spend 10 minutes doing a word association game on what art is or what a museum is. Or do drawings based on famous artists. Or have all the people in the room talk about their best (or worst) experience at a museum. What the exercise is doesn’t much matter: the point of the warm-up is to get brains, hands, and mouths engaged before starting to generate ideas.

At this point in the design process, no idea is a bad one.

Mind map - courtesy Squallwc

Set aside a fixed amount of time for brainstorming—usually not more than two hours at any given time period. Allow for breaks between sessions. It’s tiring work and without breaks, it quickly becomes frustrating and tedious. It’s also ideal to spread brainstorming over several days. The unconscious will work on the problem while you are sleeping, in the shower, walking, etc. and possibly provide you with concepts and ideas slowly over time.

At this point in the design process, no idea is a bad one. Set aside most of what you know about the technical, user, or business constraints (you’ll add them back in later). Right now, you want to ask yourself the question Alan Cooper challenges interaction designers to ask: How would it work if it was magic? Meaning, if all the constraints were gone and the user could just push a button, what would happen? How would the system accomplish the task? What would the feedback (see Chapter 7) be like?

Structured Brainstorming

Alan Cooper’s “magic” framing is just an example of structured brainstorming. If you’ve ever sat down to do anything creative, you know that one of the hardest things is to begin. Without any structure, it is easy to stall after one or two ideas or simply stare at a blank page.

Some common structures to use in brainstorming sessions are:

• Pain Points. Hopefully one of the things learned in design research was what part of the process or activity is problematic or difficult. These moments make excellent focus points to brainstorm around.
• Opportunities. Likewise, if there are known places for innovation, those can be points to begin.
• Process Moments. If there are known steps in the activity, you can ideate around each of them. Of course, you will eventually have to put the pieces together, but each piece can suggest a greater whole, a framework (see Chapter 7).
• Personas. Personas generated by design research can also serve as structure by focusing solely on addressing the direct expectations, motivations, and behaviors of one particular persona. Do this for each persona in turn.
• Metaphors. Human brains work in metaphors. We can harness this natural ability to compare unlike objects to aid brainstorming. Sometimes by using metaphor, you can discover a framework that can wrap around the whole project. What is this product like? What is the product not like? For example, what if you thought of a mobile device as a toy? As a musical instrument? As a cooking utensil? Sometimes, the oddest metaphors will uncover a previously unthought-of direction for the design.

Spend a fixed amount of time (30-60 minutes) on each pain point, opportunity, process moment, etc., then take a break. Then move on to the next session.
There are many other known brainstorming techniques that can help structure your ideation sessions. Here are samples that are especially good for interaction designers:

• Brainwriting. Each person writes down or sketches the beginning of an idea silently on a piece of paper. This could be as simple as a single word or a shape. After three minutes, the person passes the paper to his neighbor, who continues the idea. This repeats around the circle until it gets all the way back around to its originator.
• Break the Rules. Rather than ignore the constraints you (hopefully by now) understand, you list them and one-by-one figure out how to break them.
• Force Fit. Distill the problem down to two words that are in opposition, then put those words together into a phrase. For example, “intense peace.” Ruminate on what exists in the world that embodies that phrase, then try to apply it to the project for inspiration. Nature and art often work well for this.
• Poetry. Reduce the problem down to a haiku or short poem. Such a small form makes you figure out what is most important.
• Questioning. Start with a very general concept and keep asking two questions: how and why. For example, “We are going to build a social networking site.” Why? “So record collectors can exchange albums.” How? “By uploading their rare albums.” How? Etc.
• Laddering. Laddering means either moving “up” to a level of abstraction (“What is this problem an example of?”) or moving “down” to something concrete (“What is an example of this problem?”). Laddering is especially good for getting unstuck.
• Swiping. Swiping means stealing the best ideas from another field or domain. It starts by abstracting your problem (“This is about finding something small”) and asking what other products or fields have ways of doing the abstraction.
• Bizarro World. Pretend you wanted to make the opposite product or the opposite outcome. Invert everything: what is good is bad, what is desirable isn’t, etc.

It’s not a bad idea to incentivize idea generation as well. Small rewards or prizes for the most ideas generated, or a group reward once you reach 100 concepts, can do wonders for enthusiasm. To be more egalitarian, give everyone a raffle ticket for each concept generated, then pick a prizewinner at the end of a session.

Organizing Concepts

Once you’ve generated your concepts, it’s a good idea to spend some time organizing them. Just like with data generated via design research, it’s good to cluster, name, and sort all the ideas you’ve created so that it is easy to examine and discuss them.

Give each idea a number, or better yet, a descriptive name, especially for major concepts. Collapse similar concepts together, as there will likely be duplicate ideas.

As a way of comparing concepts, it might make sense to sort them by various criteria. You can put them on a 2×2 matrix (see Chapter 5) to show where each falls on a continuum. You can put them into a spreadsheet, labeled by attribute (“safe,” “powerful,” etc.).

The purpose of organizing concepts is so that when you have your design principles, it is easy to use them as a lens on the ideas you’ve already generated.

Creating Design Principles

Once you have your concepts, how do you determine which ones are worth pursuing? That’s where design principles come in.

Design principles are a set of phrases designed to help guide design decisions throughout the remainder of the design process—and even beyond, after the product launches. They can be thought of almost as design requirements, except they should not be a specific prescription for solving a particular problem; rather, they are general statements that apply across the project. Think of them as a design strategy, the same way there is a business strategy.

Design principles are a set of phrases designed to help guide design decisions throughout the remainder of the design process…

Let’s say, for example, you are designing a new recipe display for kitchens and you’ve noticed people’s hands can get covered in flour or other foodstuffs while cooking—too soiled to be able to operate most controls easily. Thus, one of your design principles might be Operate with Messy Hands. It’s almost a requirement, but it applies across a number of features and suggests the concepts that might work well for the product, such as touchscreens, voice commands, or maybe a gestural interface. Using this principle would also stop you from designing small buttons or using materials that couldn’t be cleaned easily. And it might also cause you to discard many of the concepts you came up with during ideation.

Design principles are a combination of three things:

• What is known about the users, the context of use, and the design strategy.
• The best ideas/themes that emerged from ideation sessions.
• What the designer thinks is necessary for a successful project, based on experience or subject matter expertise.

Using our recipe display example, other design principles might be Help From Across the Room, Allow for Improvisation, and Act Like a Sous Chef.

The best design principles are:

• Pithy. A short phrase is best. If it needs to be described, you can do that, but make sure it has a short phrase as a lead-in because you want it to be…
• Memorable. The best design principles can be remembered easily by everyone on the team. Funny, witty, and provocative statements and plays on words work best.
• Cross-feature. Design principles should be applicable across the product. If you can’t apply it to more than one feature, it’s probably a requirement, not a principle.
• Specific. Easy to Use is not a design principle. It is too general, and doesn’t give any guidance on making a decision between options while refining (see Chapter 7). Of course it should be easy to use (and intuitive, and delightful, and innovative, and other clichés) but what about this particular product is unique?
• A differentiator. After you’ve made your design principles, see if they as a whole could be applied to a competitor (if there is one). If they can, then they probably aren’t specific enough (or your product isn’t differentiated enough).
• Non-conflicting. You want the product to be harmonious, and you don’t want to pit one principle against another, so be careful not to create principles that might be in conflict once applied, such as Never Ask Questions vs. Give The User Total Control.

Once you have your design principles, you can use them as a measuring stick against the concepts you’ve generated to see which ones best fit. Hopefully several ideas will work within the guidelines, or could be tinkered with to fit.

But design principles can also be used from this point in the process forward to help make design decisions. When there are multiple options to choose from (“Should we ask users first, or just do it for them?”), the design principles can sometimes help make the correct decision clear.
Design principles can sometimes outlast the specific product itself, or even be extended across lines of products to give them all a similar grounding.

Summary

Brainstorming can be mysterious. Frequently an idea will come to you when you are not in a brainstorming session. Ideas seem to have a life of their own, but they can sometimes be coaxed into existence, and that’s what you hope ideation will do.

The design principles you create are a way—granted, a subjective way—of measuring your ideas for value and feasibility. Of course, the only way to really tell if an idea is a good one is to play with it, test it out, and refine it. That is the topic of the next chapter.

For Further Reading

• Six Thinking Hats, Edward de Bono
• A Technique for Producing Ideas, James Webb Young
• Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques, Michael Michalko
• The Seeds of Innovation: Cultivating the Synergy That Fosters New Ideas, Elaine Dundon

Photos by oCricket, Squallwc

The world is getting more digital by the minute. And that’s not bad… I actually enjoy the way we innovate. But every three steps we move forward, we also move two back. One of the valuable things we lost thanks in exchange for digital interactions is tactility. Now let’s claim it back.

The benefits of tactility are clear: you feel what you are doing… Who couldn’t type text messages on his mobile phone without looking at it? And who doesn’t like the confident feeling a button makes when you actually feel and hear it click? Tactility gives us valuable feedback. Most of this is getting lost with new technologies. It is interesting to see how new technologies such as multitouch and augmented reality help us forget good user experiences… we tolerate the nuisance because of the coolness of the product.

The solution arrives

Fortunately user experience wins in the long run. What’s happening right now is that new technologies are being developed that give you back the feeling of interacting. Below you find two such technologies. The first one is very concrete, giving us tactile touch screens… Nokia is working on a similar technology called Haptikos. The other technology is developed in Japan and enables physical feedback in augmented reality. This technology has a whole new kind of potential. I already imagine myself playing games and getting physical feedback all over my body… feeling the impact of hitting a ball or playing a piano.

We are still at the beginning of this kind of tactile feedback. It will be years until we can mimic the current tactile feeling. The question is whether we need to mimic it, or can we introduce new feelings?