To-Genkyo, a Japanese design studio, offers a new way to mark the freshness of produce. Based on the amount of ammonia in a product the label will darken in color until the barcode is no longer readable. This is an interesting interaction for produce, where we often look for the longest shelf life as we go shopping. How does this relate to interactions though? Can applications have shelf lives? Can the barcode on the Creative Suite darken until unreadable letting us know the next version is around the corner? Or do interactions themselves have shelf lives?

As interaction design has developed as a profession we have seen various platforms and tools wax and wane; Flash was used as a key tool for many system that are now being developed with the newest html and css scripts. Is it valuable or even possible to determine time stamps on interaction models? When will the accordion fall by the wayside to something else? Or when will the save icon be represented by something other than a floppy disc? Produce isn’t timeless, and this is for health reasons. However many systems (especially business systems) are implemented for significant periods of time and are not updated as often as might be expected. What could visual expirations of software and interaction models provide to designers, customers, and businesses as a whole?

_{Images: The Dieline}

This May, Dan Brown will be speaking at UXLX in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of our media partnership with UXLX, Johnny Holland got the chance to interview Dan on a topic that he has been the go to expert for years now, Effective Design Documentation. We’d like to thank Dan once again for taking the time out of busy schedule for this interview. Hope you enjoy.

JohnnyHolland: Given all its moving parts, design can be a challenging thing to document properly. What advice would you give to design teams that are attempting to get proper Design Documentation injected into their organizations process?

Dan Brown

Dan Brown: “Design documentation” is shorthand for the collection of techniques to capture and communicate design ideas to other people on the design team. Those ideas may be half-baked or they may be well-cooked, and designers have various reasons for creating documentation. “Documentation” may not be a printed PDF: it can come in many forms, including interactive prototypes. Regardless, documents are any tool that communicates a design idea and ensures projects run smoothly.

Let’s now unpack “proper design documentation”. Different organizations face different challenges, and documentation that works for one group may not be “proper” for another.

The central challenge we see time and again is ensuring consistency: different designers communicate the same concepts differently. Consistency remains important, since different designers may be working with the same stakeholders, developers, and quality engineers. Imagine being on the receiving end of those deliverables, not knowing what to expect from one project to the next. One designer provides painstaking detail of every interaction and the other leaves more to interpretation.

There are lots of things a team can do to normalize their deliverables, but using templates is not one of them. Ultimately, the content of the documentation must be driven by the project itself: forcing people to fill in the blanks yields unreadable deliverables. Instead, to ensure consistency, the design team should meet regularly — monthly or quarterly — and share their work, examining their deliverables as a single portfolio. They should identify opportunities to streamline and align so that readers of their documents aren’t bombarded with a new approach in every project.

How has EightShapes Unify helped design teams create and manage the documentation they create?

Early in EightShapes’ history, we established ourselves as a firm that didn’t just do design, but also helped design teams communicate better. This can mean a few different things:

• translating mature design systems into re-usable components to speed up the design process and ensure consistency in the resulting designs
• preparing guidelines around the use of design systems
• running workshops to help teams correct the discrepancies in their approach to documentation

When Nathan conceived and implemented EightShapes Unify, however, we had a real opportunity to make a broader impact. Through much soul-searching (and expensive lawyer meetings) we decided to release it for free. We can’t know how everyone uses it: it’s been downloaded more than 15,000 times, by teams of multitudes and teams of one.

Everyone at EightShapes has a different perspective on the value and impact of the documentation system. For me, the beauty of EightShapes Unify is the freedom from meaningless templates. I remember using meaningless templates earlier in my career, answering questions like “Who are the actors of the system?” and “What are the dependencies?” These questions are either so broad or so irrelevant that the document becomes a mish-mash of trite responses.

Instead, the system provides “page patterns” — simple page layouts used frequently for common tasks like explaining a wireframe or comparing two approaches. This task-based approach to documentation mirrors our design philosophy

How has UX documentation had to evolve over the past few years? Did this have any influence on why you wrote a new edition to Communication Design?

There are two factors exerting pressure on documentation–the design problems and the project participants. My experience shows a marked increase in both over the last several years.

People generally point to new interface conventions (carousels, accordions, fly-outs, mega-menus, ad nauseum) as driving the evolution of documentation. But web sites went from nice-to-have to essential business tool overnight. The range of new UI patterns is only a small fraction of the story: more companies are trying to do more work online. This means increased complexity in transactions and depth of information. These sit at the heart of new design problems, and they force us to reconsider the tools we use to describe our solutions.

At the same time, there are more people involved in the web design process. Our projects incorporate team members with a greater range of experience and broader perspectives. They have different interests in the project and different agendas for the outcome. All of this puts pressure on the design documentation, serving more needs and purposes.

I wrote a new edition of Communicating Design to scratch an itch—much of my thinking around documentation had evolved over the preceding five years. These two pressures—new challenges, new participants—contributed substantially to the changes in my thinking.

Considering the current trends towards mobile, tablet, and in general ubiquitous design, how will UX documentation have to evolve yet again to support these new challenges?

At EightShapes, we’re exploring how interactive prototypes cooperate with other kinds of deliverables to document the entire user experience. Coming from a passion for good communications, we acknowledge that increased complexity demands a multi-pronged approach for defining experience.

Luke Wroblewski’s “mobile first” design approach resonates strongly with me: in a recent project, while I was sketching concepts, I started with the tablet version of the application without even really thinking about it. If the trend continues, however, we designers will need to separate further from specific platforms and start with the underlying models.

The biggest challenge for designers will be the increasing emphasis on abstraction. As data becomes available everywhere, the models we use to define its structure across multiple platforms must divorce themselves from any one specific platform. If the available information and its inherent structure is one factor driving the design of an interface, we need better tools for designing those structures. In short, the more abstract side of information architecture receives greater emphasis.

Why is creating good documentation essential to a designer, regardless of what their current role is?

We are purveyors of stories. We design products to support the stories of users’ lives. We design products that presumably bring about a change, going from “Eli suffers from situation X” to “Eli benefits from product Y”. This is how we do design and how we describe our ideas to other people involved with the product.

A design document tells a little story in and of itself: for example about how a particular feature works, or the conclusions stemming from user research. A document a also contributes to the overall narrative of the project. But the most important story is the one about the product, how it works to bring about change. This multi-layered approach to storytelling is the essence of designing an interactive product.

User experience designers must be able to create good deliverables because they should be able to tell a good story.

What are the dangers of going from the whiteboard to design/development?

There may be none, but that’s not true for every case. Planning is crucial to both design and development: knowing what you’re going to do before you do it can prevent wasted effort and unnecessary detours. Experienced designers know how much planning and design they need to do based on the nature of the problem, the existence of well-established patterns, and the composition of the team.

That said, no amount of planning can ever replace the brute force method of trying lots of different things. Discarded ideas might not be a sign of wasted effort, but a necessary by-product of the creative process. One might argue that successful creative endeavors depend on the balance between planning and trying things out.

Some signs that you might need more robust documentation include:

• Working with new team members, where communication conventions have not yet been established
• Working on a project with multiple streams of work, where keeping track of progress on each stream is crucial
• Working on a project with clear milestones, where the project team expects each phase to come to a solid conclusion
• Working on a poorly-defined design problem, where taking the time to define boundaries is time well spent

I’d recommend creating more documentation in new situations just because it forces you to communicate clearly and acknowledge constraints. If you start creating documents for the sake of demonstrating productivity (rather than moving the project forward), perhaps its time to go back to the whiteboard.

How can designers move beyond being all about the documentation? How can they stop being deliverable monkeys?

As I thought about this question, I really wanted to understand what “all about the documentation” and “deliverable monkey” means. (And if you think it’s easy to get past the picture of a thousand monkeys sitting down at a thousand MacBooks, you are wrong.) I came up with two things:

First, designers in our field can often feel removed from the product. We’re pushing boxes around a page, composing annotations that no one reads. We’re writing mark-up and code strictly for the purpose of demonstrating an interaction, but know full well it will be tossed when it comes time to build the product. Our involvement ends once we’ve told the story, capturing the experience sufficiently for someone else to build it.

We feel like we’re paid to create things that are at once essential to defining the product and are still so far away. This demand to churn out wireframes all day long makes us feel like, well, monkeys. (No disrespect to our primate cousins. I’m sure they lead very productive, fulfilling lives.)

Second, in order to feel connected to something, designers sometimes focus more on the deliverable and less on the product. We pour our ego into the PDF, reflecting our passion for the product in the documentation, something we control.

Both of these things come from designers themselves. That is, if you think treating these issues depends on a systemic intervention, you’ve looked too far for a cause.

Here are some things that have become ingrained in my work, that help prevent any possible devolution:

• Determine the barest minimum that needs to go into the document in order to communicate the ideas effectively. Try not to do much more than the barest minimum, but definitely don’t do less. Can the team sufficiently understand your intent with some rough wireframes and light annotations? Perhaps embellish those with some context through business objectives and user requirements, but avoid doing much more.
• Treat the document as a framework for a conversation, not as a final product. By thinking of it as a means to an end, rather than as an end in and of itself, you approach it differently.

How could proper UX documentation have prevented the Cylon Uprising?

Products sometimes behave in unexpected ways. Some ways are delightful, like when you discover that shaking your iPhone “un-does” your last action. Some are disturbing, like when robot servants rebel against human oppression. While good documentation should capture all the functionality of a product, we can’t predict how people will use it, and people always find new ways to use (or abuse) products.

UX Lisbon 2011

Dan Brown will be  speaking at UX Lx: User Experience Lisbon, one of Europe’s premier user experience events. The second annual UX LX conference takes place May 11-13, 2011 in Lisbon, Portugal.

The Super Bowl. That one Sunday a year where the majority of Americans crowd around their televisions to watch the championship football game — or, more commonly, the commercials. Volkswagen’s 2011 contribution, entitled The Force, was not only one of the more memorable ads, but also an intriguing study of emotion.

In The Force, a young child, dressed as Darth Vader wanders the house trying to control items with the Force. Failing, he hears his father come home and is excited when, through remote key start, the engine revs up.

While this is a cute commercial, what makes it fascinating the the child’s expressions.

The child in question is wearing a Darth Vader mask that offers no emotion and is designed as such. Still, at every event of attempted force control we clearly read his disappointment. Up to the point where he runs past his father to the car and the surprise on his face when it starts. I am not alone in this observation. Everyone I watched it with and spoke to afterwards felt they saw the same thing.

But this is impossible. By design Darth Vader has no face and no emotion. But the creators of the Volkswagen commercial were able to make us look past this and to the face behind it. Universally the audience knew the looks on the young boy’s face as defeat after defeat until he finally mastered the Force. Maybe this is because deep down we all remember being children wanting to be a Jedi (or a Sith). Whatever the reason, it is impressive the writers created so much empathy from a masked character. Authors employ this a lot – in novels, films, and now commercials. How can systems evoke emotion without a face? A lot of designers humanize their products with humanizing features but how can technology be humanized in a more subtle and evoking manner?

Otto, Dental Floss Dispenser

——–

Otto image from Alessi

Had you been paying attention? Bruce Sterling had, and wove together several strands of topics from the conference into his closing plenary, whilst also giving the audience a scathing wake up call. Also up included a galvanising Brenda Laurel, Jason Bruge’s inspiring ambient architecture … and the revelation that the Windows 7 Phone interface is actually pretty darn cool….

This daily report wouldn’t have been possible without the writing skills (and energy) of Pieter Jongerius, Anna Offermans, and Patrick Sanwikarja.

The Neuroscience of Usability — Charles Hannon

Our brain likes patterns. Especially patterns which we have seen before and which behave the same as they did the previous times we used it. The brain cant help looking for patterns because it is rewarded by the chemical dopamine when it finds patterns that lead to success. The pleasure is repeated each time we recognize the pattern, and the pattern recognition proves true. According to Charles Hannon, the validation of these patterns is not the only thing that gives us the delightful feeling. The dopamine is also released when we only see a pattern of which we think it will lead to success.

What happens if we don’t recognize a pattern? The App Store, for example, presents the price in a button, which has to be clicked to go further with the purchase. This isn’t a pattern many people are familiar with, since most web shops use a buy button next to or below the pricing information. We are not sure about what to do and get the feeling of frustration.
And what if something looks like a pattern we know but it doesn’t behave like we expect it to do? It gives us the feeling of panic: “oh s%&t!”. Of course we want to prevent the users from that feeling. The good thing is that this also leads to better learning about what patterns lead to success and what patterns don’t.

So, to give people a delightful feeling while using our products, we should use patterns people are familiar with. This leads to a dilemma; how can designers introduce new patterns which at the same time people are familiar with?

Charles concludes with saying that computing can be very invigorating, frustrating and emotional. Let’s hope it will stay like that in the future since it means that we as designers apparently keep on trying to introduce new innovative patterns which in the end will make life more easy!

Up with Complexity! Challenging Users for Fun and Profit — Josh Clark

Complexity is not a dirty word, it gives our lives texture. We shouldn’t just aim for ‘Dont make me think’, but also embrace ‘Make me think’. Our job is not to eliminate complexity, but to make it uncomplicated. According to Josh, there are a couple of ways to do that:

• Just enough is more: Instead of ‘less is more’, we should design ‘just enough is more’. We should hide complexity, but we shouldn’t patronize users by hiding too much. As an example he talks about ‘Umbrella’, an iPhone app that anwers just one question: will I need an umbrella today? But most people don’t want dumbed down apps. They want uncomplicated apps, so there should be weather apps that offer more detailed weather forecasts, too.
• Manage complexity through focus: The app Momento is a microjournal, that allows the user to capture ‘moments’. Most part of the screen is taken up by controls, so there is not enough room for the actual moment. The Twitter iPhone app, however, use a “hidden door” for access to more feature, to make room for writing the actual tweet. The trouble with secret panels is that they’re secret. Josh proposes to uses animations to reveal the hidden controls the first time, or better: to keep showing them until the user demonstrates that they got it. So it’s not about secrets. It’s about giving the user information and tools when asked for.
• Manage complexity through conversation: One of the biggest challenges in managing complexity is that people think: more features is better. It’s up to us to guide them. Tap quality is more important than tap quantity. People don’t mind having to tap more, it’s about the effect of the tap. To Josh, buttons are a hack. They’re an abstraction, an extra layer between the user and the content. Touch will help sweep away decades of menus, folders and controls, and lets the user work with the content directly. So to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan: ‘the message is now the medium’.
• Manage complexity through exploration: Until now, software has mostly been a tool to get things done. Now, software is an accessory. It’s content, not just utility. People are looking for distraction. Because of that, people are more open to complexity than we think. Apps like Runkeeper and calorietrackers are videogames for narcissists: they encourage people to slow down and find the story in data. Exploration is the killer app.
• Create friction: Finally, it’s alright to create a little friction now and then. Josh tells the story of the six year old daughter of his friends, who drew a detailed plan to trap her grandma, involving a cake to lure her into the trap. The bottom line: complex schemes take a lot of thought, so spend time to find ways to uncomplicate complexity.

Applying Film Making Tools to Interaction Design — Adam Connor

The way film makers try to grasp the essence of the story they want to tell is inspirational and useful for our field. Adam Connor recognised this and jumped into the fold of film making, trying to discover interesting connections between it and interaction design. He found several

• Beat Sheets are a way for film makers to capture all the important aspects that should be in a movie. It is a scene-by-scene outline describing plot points, actions and the effect on the audience. The way this is captured might be very interesting in our field as well, since we don’t just want to draw screens, but want to think (and capture)the emotions of the audience and the effect we want to achieve.
• Mise en Scene is all the aspects a film maker has that aren’t dialogue, such as lighting, staging, acting, set design and costumes.
• Motion is (obviously) important in film making: the way the camera, people and other things move largely define how things are perceived. In Western culture we see movement from left to right as progress and vice versa as going back of against the stream. Film makers use this by letting bad guys enter on the right. Movement from top to bottom enhances the feeling of inevitability and anticipation, while bottom to top is struggle.
• Another aspect of motion is rack focus. By changing the focus on screen film makers can force viewers to look at different parts on the screen. What if we could use this technique in interaction design? Could we change the focus on a screen?

I really enjoy the approach Adam takes. He has the feeling that there is an interesting connection to be made and dares to present it as a starting point. I look forward to the next steps.

Marketing is not a 4 letter word — Megan Grocki

People moved to get out of the room at the start of Megan Grocki’s talk. Grocki, (head of Mad*Pow’s marketing team) indeed warned us that we had some highly controversial generalizations ahead. So, we put on our flight goggles and sat tight. It turned out to be an interesting ride. We guess it’s fair to say that Megan made some strong points in the interest of marketing and design.

Marketing, of course, isn’t just about cold hard sales driven by the classic 4P’s. It’s about ads, packaging, social media, word-of-mouth, PR, and much more. In a sentence: it’s about companies establishing & growing relationships with customers. Duly noted: companies may be non-profit, governmental or otherwise. Also customers may be other end-users, such as patients or citizens.

Marketing has come a long way since Philip Kotler and is helped forward these days by people like Seth Godin. Megan acknowledges however that marketing has its bad apples. And some of those have been very bad indeed, like the selling of cigarettes even when health consequences became apparent, the use of incorrect health claims for products, or the selling of expensive or addictive items to people who really can’t afford them. Those practices have given marketing a very bad reputation indeed.

“You ARE a marketer. Deal with it” – Kathy Sierra

It is high time though that we realize that marketing and design have a lot in common. Designers and marketeers share the dream of creating delightful cross touchpoint experiences. In this quest, one discipline can not do without the other. Megan gave some great examples of this: the experience in and around Disneyland, the integrated approach to various Netflix services and Zipcar. In all of these cases, a strong notion of brand, fair business propositions, great design and compelling copy come together in a powerful way.

“I’m a matchmaker”, Megan closes, throwing at us one of her charming smiles. She suggests that both designers and marketeers could use some good conversations around the campfire. Get together. Talk. Understand each other. We feel she is right. Designers need market reach for their products. Marketeers need great designs to sell and do their work effectively. Marketing deserves our attention and, most of the time anyway, our respect.

Designing Immersive Online Environments for Kids — Debra Levin Gelman

What better way to start off the day than with Alice in Wonderland? Debra Levin Gelman used this analogy to great effect in her fun and useful talk on some of the unique issues with designing experiences for 6-8 year olds, which come down to three areas:

• Identity:
• Self-expression: Offer the right tools, allow permanent object creation, make it a game .
• Community: broad ground rules, privacy, collaboration and safety.

Gelman finishes with results from a study that suggest US kids are less creative now than they were 10 years ago, based on an experiment on things a person can do with a spoon (kids came up with far less examples than they did a decade ago) But while it’s easy to blame technology, she believes these can be catalysts for activity if we learn how children think and  process.

Computer Engineer Barbie: How Interaction Design can entice a new generation of women — Cheryl Platz

Many a girl geek (and a lot of guys) were in the room for Cheryl Platz’s impassioned talk on getting girls into interaction design.

Beginning with the recently released Computer Engineer Barbie, Platz highlighted that girls have been driven out of the computer science (CS) workplace since 1982 because of stereotypes. And in a Mean Girls world, perception is everything.

Girls picture CS as the guy in the room at 2am, creepily looking at his mouse!

What’s interesting is that while not many girls are in computer science (10%), many are  studying related fields: visual design is 48% female, cognitive psychology 71%. Many of these women could be interested in interaction design. Giving the example of her own CS class (proudly starting with a record number of girls that quickly dropped out), Platz also pointed out on of the turn-offs: the material is taught in the abstract rather than in context, removed from society. What’s more, a recent study shows that many female — and male —students capable of studying computer science don’t take it up because they “would rather be more people-centred or work with computers in another field”.

In other words, many girls who don’t study computer science could be interested in interaction design — if only they knew about it, which often they don’t. Platz advocates for us to make interaction design more visible by talking at career fairs, hosting job shadows, set up workshops, helping educators show the societal benefit of CS, and proposing interaction design additions to existing programmes:

spread the good word about IxD to students and education in your community — you might just save a life!

Photoshop.com 2.0—the making of an experience ecosystem — Ethan Eismann and Geoff Dowd

Dowd and Eismann ran us through the (naturally very good looking) Photoshop.com experience, They summed up their ecosystem redesign with 6 principles:

1. Know where your user is going, not where they’ve been. (i.e. look at disruptors, and how to prevent shift). They looked at competitors such as Aviary, and tried to anticipate why users might want to move to them in the future, and how to design around this.
2. Paint an Ecosystem Picture. Also including the choice quote “No Lorel Ipsum. Ever.” The team looked to understand all the touchpoints of the website — a previous failing with the earlier version, which had locked customers out of upgrades such as Lightroom — and looked where it would be used (e.g. in-the-browser for Facebook pictures).
3. Tell a great story with great detail. From the beginning. The redesign always used high-fidelity mockups to understand the experience — they did risk premature sign-off with this strategy, but felt it worth it.
4. UI is brand. Despite this being a free product, the team took pains to make the language the same as the paid-for Lightroom, to allow for a seamless experience if users moved up.
5. Apps are better than billboards. Free is good (if you can afford it).
6. Beauty runs deep. Above all, draw the product you want.

Adobe’s talk was unusual in that it was from a mature brand with a history of design (they do sell high end design products after all, so in a sense, like Apple, have the advantage of designing for themselves), but still with interesting elements to take to any project.

Personal, Relevant, Connected: Designing Integrated Mobile Experiences for Apps and Web — Mike Kruzeniski

AKA the “OMG the Windows 7 phone UI is actually pretty cool!” talk, Mike Kruzeniski talked through Microsoft’s new UI strategy — and, much to people’s surprise, won over the audience. Microsoft is looking at “how you remove the chrominess of the experience”, which is already evident if you look at the Kinect (removing the interface) or their Futures 2019 concept video.

In today’s “apps are everything!” era, it’s a hard task to encourage ongoing use — most are downloaded only once, and only 1% are used on an ongoing basis in the long run. What’s more, they’re almost a rebuilding of the web (even 2/3 times for each platform), For apps to be meaningful and longlasting, Kruzeniski suggests they must be (as the talk is titled) personal, relevant, and connected:

1. Personal: “mine, cares, knows about my stuff”. Examples, contact aren’t just contacts, also info about what they’re doing, gallery stripped back w/ typography.
2. Relevant: “I’m always somewhere, sometime, doing something, with someone.” Allowing people to get back to life — how can we bring information to the surface? Trying to use smart info e.g. searching for Bouldher hotel in Boulder – maps. The Windows 7 Phone brings up location based information by default, assuming that since you’re here you don’t want to read about it.
3. Connected: “give me everything where I am”. Making sure everything (e.g. avatars) connects easily between devices to create stories. Gruzeniski pointed out that the XBox poses an interesting challenge — how goes a game go from a console to the PC to the TV? — answering that it won’t be the same, but about a thread, with a hub and spoke model (e.g. jumping from music to last.fm). Above all, it’s important to be appropriate for different contexts — he pointed to Evernote as an exemplar for doing it right.

Gruzenski put forward the wonderful concept of weaving — being able to pull things up to the top that are important to you — in order to create a greater story, an integrated seamless experience. For example, weather has untapped potential to be woven with other information e.g. weather (nice day) + social (see that a friend has free time) + running (you both like to run). People left the talk both excited about the talk, and the Windows 7 Phone examples used to show the exemplars. Eat your own dog food indeed.

Healthcare interfaces: How interaction design can help fix medicine — David Cronin

According to David Cronin of Smart Design, we are at an inflection point in the history of healthcare. We know enough for most people to live long healthy lives, but we have become concerned with people’s health far too late. The most common and expensive diseases are preventable and controllable by lifestyle choices. We need to decrease costs and increase quality and access of healthcare. Interaction designers can help in three ways:

• Encourage healthy behavior It all starts with information. People need to understand the correlation between their actions and the consequences on their health. We can redesign lab reports or design products that help people track their behavior. FitBit is nice example, but the feedback experience is too far removed from the activity. Knowledge is the enabler. Emotion is the motivator: Nike+ – trash their screen
• Bring home care delivery We should help people to do part of their healthcare at home. A great example is a new syringe by Smart Design that magnifies the force so thatpeople with rheumatoid arthritis self can confidently self-administer. Are androids the future of home care, such as the Japanese Actroid-F? An important part of healthcare is not medicine, but face time, the personal touch. If we can reduce time of routine visits, doctors can have more personal time with their patients.
• Improve care in clinical situations Medical informatics is like enterprise software 10 years ago: the UX is really bad. Even the most advanced systems don’t offer good tools for documentation, communication and collaboration. So there’s a big opportunity for interaction designers to help clinicians there. It’s big challenge, because clinical data is incredibly complex, but in the end it will save costs. Another field where we can make a difference is remote care: surgeons operating at one locating, while the patient is in another. We can help by designing better decision support and better data display. Again, if tele-health can be as good as the real thing, this will have a huge saving in costs.

To me, David’s talk was hugely inspiring. It’s upsetting that there has been so little attention to good user experience where it is needed most: in healthcare. Especially now that more and more people need it. I really do hope that interaction designers can play a much bigger role here. As David said: “we’re not just talking about abstract interaction design principles. We’re talking about the health of your friends, family and children”.

Afternoon Keynote —Brenda Laurel

We should have expected something extraordinary to happen. However, Brenda Laurel’s keynote caught us a little off guard. While we were expecting to get nostalgic about the classic designs that came to form our industry, we got more than we bargained for.

In a very personal and candid review of her professional life, Laurel shared some of the major innovations that she was involved in. She started out by showing us a convincing chromatography of technical innovations, with in it’s spectrum ‘dimensions’ such as impact on technology, actors, culture, nature and emergence. She coupled each innovation to what she calls a Hinge. Each hinge she then defined along the dimensions of her model.

So starting in the mid 70s, she told us the story about Cybervision, a computer and television based concept that would allow for gaming, but was way ahead of its time. She continued with the now classic 1976 Atari game computer and presented the early 80s Atari 400-800 which could do games and also ran some educational applications and music programs. She believed this to be a great innovation. Much to Brenda’s frustration, this concept was criticized as being “a fad, just like jogging”. Luckily, she got a lot of help from Alan Kay, who defended her within Atari by explaining to some that Brenda was “okay, but just a little misguided”.
Brenda went on to show decades of inspiring cases, such as Dynabook, Hole in space, Habitat, early nineties VR, along the line not suppressing her gripe with Mattel Inc (it acquired her computer-games-for-girls company Purple Moon and then killed it). Referring to her experimental work without any sign of regret, she elegantly stated that she had been “a crash dummy more times than I can count”.

And while she continued showing these key innovations, slowly but surely, a more profound social and ethical theme emerged, consisting of two intertwined parts:

1. A great call for great authoring, driven by the strong notion that we as humans don’t have the luxury to see technology as something other than us. We created it. We use it. We are it. This comes with responsibility.
2. Technology has evolved from serving single users, to dual users, to small groups, mobs, and now masses. Brenda shared her vision that this can only lead to the next great hinge, which is sure to be a true Gaian hinge.

In a dramatic closing, Brenda called upon us to start authoring for the whole of earth. Create a symbiosis at the level of our dear planet, our home, as seen from space. Great applause. Standing ovation. Some tears. And a mission.

Making mistakes fun: Game mechanics are not a panacea, but they are kinda useful! — Paris Buttfield-Addison

Loads of people see gamification as an easy way to create great experiences, but during this talk Paris Buttfield-Addison tries to give us a reality check. It isn’t just about adding badges and playful aspects. As a designer you need to move beyond adding fun and start thinking about engagement. The thing you want to do is create a relationship. One of the examples that stood out here is Bottle Bank

Pass it Back! Kid Apps on Grown Up Devices — Nina Walia

Long After the Thrill: Sustaining Passionate Users — Stephen Anderson

Stephen started his presentation by asking the audience who is in a longterm relationship. Many hands went up. And then he asked: would you like to stay in it? Obviously, no hands went down. Unlike his previous presentations and his Mental Notes, this talk was not about getting people to fall in love with your applications, but about getting people to stay in love with them. Or as Stephen calls it: sustaining passionate users through delightful challenges.

He made an analogy to teaching. Having been a teacher himself, he sees three attitudes to teaching:

• Apply it yourself. This stuff is boring, but you have to learn it anyway.
• Sugar coating. This stuff isn’t all that interesting, but layers of fun are added. This is what ‘gamification’ is.
• Mastery. Something is inherently interesting or fun, so that you really want to learn it.

To Stephen, a game is fun when there is play & challenges + goals & rewards. This means we should find the game that is inherent in most things rather than sprinkling it on. Designers should consider whether the user is after a performance goal (i.e. getting an A in French) or a learning goal (i.e. wanting to learn French). As an exercise, Stephen asked the audience to think of characteristics of an existing game and then use them to make a time tracking application more fun. His own example was: what if you would add status? Then time tracking would not only be something you need to do, but also something you can get good at, either compared to others or to yourself.

But in Raph Koster’s words: delight, unfortunately, doesn’t last. Sustaining passionate users takes more than delightful experiences. When asked about why people use applications they have been using for more than three years (Gmail, Facebook etc), they answered such things as ‘because it works and continually improves’, ‘reliability’ and ‘friends use it’. But where is the love? The apps that are most used aren’t the fun and sexy apps, but the ones we need to use.

So in the end, Stephen presented the Kano model, which he thinks can help us to design applications that satisfies both on a basic level and on a delightful level. The model consist of two axes: high satisfaction vs low satisfaction on the vertical axis, and not (or poorly) implemented vs fully implemented on the horizontal axis. The more we can get an application into the upper right quadrant, the more sustaining its usage will be. We need to combine delighters with satisfying the basic needs. So: buy flowers on Valentine’s day, but don’t forget to close the lid of the trash can every day.

Stephen’s presentations are always fun and engaging – he does a good job of involving his audience. It would have been nice though if he had elaborated more about the Kano model and how to get people to stay in love. That part still felt a bit rushed. Guess we’ll have to look out for another opportunity to see him talk. I personally look forward to it.

Afternoon Keynote — Jason Bruges

Jason Bruges brought both a change of perspective and country with inspiring case studies (this year’s Dan Hill?) from his London-based eponymous studio. Showing rather than telling, there were none the less themes of ambient environments and tangible interaction in his myriad examples, which included:

• The wonderful and award-winning WWF Panda Eyes exhibit
• Exploring the ‘off-grid’ and ‘on-grid’ design, such as Phosphor Fields, Ropemaker (“scavenging energy”), Wind to Light, and Aeolian Tower
• Engaging the public, such as the Memory Project (as it turned out, people gamed the installation to get pictures of themselves, someone Bruges loves), or the Narcissus inspired V&A Mirror Mirror , or wonderfully tangible Dotty Duveen
• Tower Bridge for Switched on London — a visualisation of people’s Bluetooth consumption going over the bridge (this decade’s Live Wire?)
• Physical pixels with the Sunderland Train Station’s Platform 5 (glass tile ‘pixels’ feature looping videos of volunteers — “Lots of people think there are people behind the wall.”)
• Current and future sporting work: Oregon’s Game Show and Fast, Faster, Fastest for the London 2012 Olympics

Above all, Bruges believes in learning through failure (i.e. from pushing the limits) and proving through prototyping: both important as they’re often challenging technological constraints with their ambitious pieces.

Accessibility is Not a Checklist — Jimmy Chandler

Chandler gave a insightful and practical guide to designing for computer accessibility (aka A11Y ). He is wary of accessibility ‘checklists’, comparing it to site validation — many well-designed sites do not validate, and vice versa — and so instead gave a checklist of accessibility practices:

• An iterative process is the best way to implement accessibility. Developers probably haven’t been trained in accessibility, early feedback is key, as this means accessibility does not become a painful and expensive add-on at the end. “When people say accessibility is expensive, they’ve done it wrong.”
• Design for mobile first (ala Luke W’s post on this topic). The constraints that are imposed in designing for mobile first are also helpful for accessibility.
• Include people with disabilities in your usability research. Chandler couldn’t emphasise this enough, as it’s key to understand how disabled people use your product. Shawn Lawton Henry’s ‘Just Ask‘ has a wealth of advice on methods.
• Don’t assume people with disabilities don’t want to use your site. A blind person may use a driving site to help their children get their licence.
• Don’t punish your customers to solve your business problems. Captcha may stop spam, but is more likely to make users abandon the form (this can particularly affect dyslexia users)
• Get people to drive themselves. If you design with awareness of iOS’s built-in Voiceover & Speak Auto-Text, you can do blind and many other disabled users a huge service. Glenda Watson, a woman with cerebral palsy, has blogged about how the iPad has changed her life [and the site in general is an eye-opening and inspiring read].
• Have people define their own time. Don’t use auto-advance or time limits — this disadvantages older users or those with reading difficulties.
• Protect your audience. The more people can access your product, the better!
• Accessibility is not just about blind people. It can be about temporary disabilities, other disabilities (again, dyslexia is far more common than we realise), and even cellphones!
• Provide help in an accessible manner. Increasing contrast and esp adding texture helps with vision difficulties (and printing in b/w!) Accessibility is not just about blind people.

If there was one major takeaway from the talk, it was to test your products with at least one disabled user (Chandler said that “if you do that, I’ll have done my job”). For more information, check out his comprehensive list of accessiblity resources.

Closing Keynote — Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling was a cracker pick to finish. For those not in the know, he’s renowned for provocative talks, and having been around for the entire conference, he took no prisoners when giving his own spin on themes that had popped up over the last three days (diginity, our discipline, empathy).

Sterling chastised designers for being overly empathetic to their users (“you’ve got user Stockholm Syndrome”), challenged them to consider what it means to be an a moral designer

You don’t do morality. We talk about it, but don’t go there. You’re no better than engineers or computer scientists … Raymond Loewry pleased his clients (Coca-Cola, Lucky Strike) with great design that killed people later on. If you designed cigarettes now they’d be individually wrapped, with a thumb space … Our successors will reframe what we did and subject us to the same judgements we do to Ford.

Amidst discussions of critique and craft, he pointed out that the former is useful but not necessary, and that Steve Jobs succeeds because he isn’t afraid of anything, even death: “Critique won’t make you a better designer. What will make you a better designer is a fanatic dedication to craft and no fear of failure”

He challenged the place of the IXDA (or “icks-da”) both as an institution (“IxDA is a social network formerly known as the design profession”) and alongside institutions such as CHI (which was flamed by a couple of speakers:

Look at your white haired relations in ACM SIGCHI, and learn — they have history, regulations, decades of effort, and research. Don’t just viscerally react to those that came before you, otherwise you’ll disappear sooner than they did as people move towards another social network.

He finished with a thanks to Boulder (“because examples trump abstractions”): “It’s like Austin but paler and more zen walking around. I’m sure the thinkers of the world wouldn’t be impressed with Boulder. But it has a forgiving lapserian sleeziness about it that took lots of iterations to form. And a quirky charm.”

Perhaps his most inspiring quote was about being an interaction designer:

I can’t give you everything you need, and you can’t give me everything I need. Because I’m an adult. So stop trying. You could take an oath not to ruin my life. (But if you did, I wouldn’t believe it). The best you’ll come up with is a morality in permanent beta, which might be a good thing.

Many on twitter complained afterwards that he’s a science fiction writer rather than a designer, but as he said himself: “I’m your victory condition — an outsider who drank your kool-aid and joined you.” And I’d argue that, in a discipline sometimes overly obsessed with DTDT, sometimes it takes an outsider to tell it like it is — Emperor’s New Clothes anyone?

——

And so rounded up IXD11 (well, apart from the Microsoft party later that night with both a Kinect and absinthe — a deadly combination). Next year the conference goes across the pond to Dublin. For more, check out the IXD12 site.

After a day of talks and a night (or even two, depending on when you got in) of parties, day 2 of Interactions 11 eased up the pace a bit. After a morning of presentations, attendees were let loose in Boulder with afternoon activities ranging from designing with junk to tea tasting.

This daily report wouldn’t have been possible without the writing skills (and energy) of Pieter Jongerius, Anna Offermans, and Patrick Sanwikarja .

Opening Keynote — Richard Buchanan

Richard Buchanan stripped it back — no slides, no holds barred, even a riff on clothes and not wearing them (more on that later) — in a pointed talk on interaction design that deftly interweaved his ideas with those from earlier talks .

First up, he addressed a recurring theme of being concerned about design not having a subject. According to him, this is a good thing. “Design has no subject matter – that’s what make this a powerful discipline. We MAKE our subject matter.” There had also been talk of the definition of interaction design, and in this light he gave his:

Interaction is how people relate to other people through the mediating influence of products — with products being either physical or digital.

Starting with “the triangle of doom” of product attributes (Lisa Strauss’s “useful, usable, desirable”, or what he calls “Logos, ethos, pathos”), he reminded us that if we can’t identify with  a product, it’ll not come into our lives, and therefore as a designer we need to balance all these attributes (e.g. it’s more important for a fireman’s suit to be usable, but for a ball gown to be desirable).

Buchanan’s core tenet is that there are four orders of design.

1. Mass communication
2. Mass industrialisation
3. Actions (the realm of interaction — or inter-action — design)
4. Environments (participation, the natural counterpart of actions)

Mass communication and industrialisation (the 1st and 2nd order of design) are natural counterparts, and have been around for nearly a century. However, the 3rd order of design is action (e.g. a chair as a site of activity). To understand action is to take into account greater needs such as content strategy and business goals (the Mayo Clinic is a great example).

But this isn’t enough. We need to consider action’s natural counterpart and the 4th order of design: environments (such fellow speaker Erik Hershman’s Ushahidi project).

So, what type of designer do you want to be: thing-thing, person-person, person-environment, participatory designer?

Taking up on the previous day’s discussion on material and principles, Buchanan suggests that “the material of interaction design is the purposes and values of people we serve, which come to us as clay.” Furthermore, “the principle behind interaction design — no, all design — is human dignity”. We should aim for justice.

If one action came out of Buchanan’s talk, it was to know your history: Erving Goffman and his ‘inception-development-fulfilment’ cycle; John Dewey’s principles of inauguration, interaction, leave-taking, everything about George Nelson (his most brutal comment of the audience “You don’t know much about the history of design or philosophy, do you?”). He pointed out that design industry is usually 25-30 years behind academia (e.g. Dewey’s work was conducted in the 1930s but only taken up by the New Bauhaus in the 1960s). While his references may have been nothing new to his former CMU students, to those not familiar with their works (apparently the majority of the audience) it was a valuable lesson. As someone tweeted: Vintage UX Bookclub, anyone?

Macro vs. Micro — Kalani Kordus & Karl Adam

Kalani and Karl gave a duo presentation about the power of small teams. Before starting their current company Smudgeproof, both worked at Yahoo on the Messenger app for iPhone. Now, they design and develop mobile apps (including the Interaction 11 official conference app). In their talk, they compared designing and developing within a large organisation and as a small startup. At Yahoo, there were lots of people and many departments involved: Design, Engineering, Quality Assurance, Product managers, Marketing managers. Now at Smudgeproof, it’s just the two of them: a designer and a developer, doing everything from research to testing and marketing.

Traditional processes (many sequential design and development phases) don’t work. At the milestones, or ‘traffic lights’ as they called it, the team often has to go back to previous phases, because stakeholders can’t agree on signoffs. In other words: lots of red lights. It is much better to have ‘roundabouts’, so they can take an exit at any moment: they can jump from any part of the process to another, in any particular order. For example, from an idea to trying it out in code, or from applying research insights directly into marketing. Design and engineering are like yin and yang. One can’t do without the other, because if it never gets built, it’s just an idea.

So now, at Smudgeproof, they have a completely different, trimmed down process, which basically consists of getting all ideas and sketches on a whiteboard (never on paper) for all to see, making very little documentation, and creating full fidelity visual mockups, that are then build. How they work is based on three principles:

• Wear more hats. They are able to stay small because each plays many roles. Not only interaction, but also visual design. Not only development but also testing.
• Fewer formalities. No red lights. Get to know the people you’re working with and trust them.
• Be like water. It can be very powerful and if something is in the way, water can go around it. Keep flowing.

The bottom line: two people can do the same as many large departments, or at least much faster. At Yahoo, a very simple bug would take days before it got fixed, due to many stakeholders and formalities. At Smudgeproof, it gets fixed in a minute, because it’s only one line of code. To me, this sounds a lot like Agile. This is easy to organize when you are your own company, but how can this approach be implemented in large organizations, such as Yahoo? Should product managers be eliminated altogether? Should design departments be cut in half? Unfortunately Kalani and Karl didn’t really touch on this.

Design for Evil: Ethical Design — Kaleem Khan

One of the most sobering, yet relevant talks of the day was given by Kaleem Khan. During his lightning talk he addressed the importance of ethics in our field. According to Kaleem we as designers don’t think enough about the impact of design. He states that we should be conscious about the artefacts we design, the clients we work for and the way we design, because design isn’t something that just stands on its own, it affects everything, including the future. Basically, if we are aware that a client (or their products) hurt people in any way, we should think twice before doing work for them.

Kaleem took a very direct and holistic approach to ethics.  However, by showing only high impact examples  — the fifteen people that committed suicide at Foxconn (the Chinese company manufacturing the iPhone), how working for a gambling agency is bad —I believe he lost some of the power of the point he was trying to make. The real issue around ethics is that they are very personal and never black and white: where one person might  get angry and step away from a client, another may find reasons for staying involved. In order to really understand ethics and how we should deal with it we must start at a different level, one that Buchanan hit on the head: human dignity.

Introducing IA, ID and UX into New Media Pedagogy, Journalism and Content Publishing — Stephen Johnson

The publishing industry is changing. According to Steven Johnson, graduating journalists have to be able to write, edit, shoot, design, code, publish, edit, do social media, and in doing so, become a new online-savvy type of journalist. Steven teaches his students at CSU the principles of IA, ID and UX, so that they will have a better understanding of the new media and efficiently create content for those media.

He recommends the classic UX readings, tells about the tools we use and makes his students create wireframes of existing webpages, in order to get a great understanding of concepts and processes that most new media professionals now take for granted. The fact that he made his students create wireframes with lorem ipsum instead of using real content was questioned by some people in the audience. As content is becoming more and more important in UX design, it felt strange that a content creating company would not use content in its designs. Steven answered that in some cases it is important to be more abstract, in order not to distract the attention from the things which are important at that moment.

In an attempt to prove that the power of content sometimes pushes towards solutions that meet scepticism with interaction designers, Steven went on to show some nice examples of very long home pages of news sites: the Norwegian VG Nett had no less than a 12,500 pixel deep homepage; The Huffington Post, 10,000 pixels; The New York Times ‘only’ 3,700. Yet all of these sites are very successful and attract large crowds.
Back in 1999, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times used print fonts in the headers of their articles to try to keep fidelity with the printed version and the Los Angeles Times still tries to keep up with the traditional newspaper by only using rollover colors for links instead of blue underline text.

To conclude, Steven refers to the story of the blind men and an elephant where a group of blind men touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. The interaction designer should be the one to see it is an elephant.

Human-Centered-Design and the Intersection of the Physical and Digital Worlds — Lindsay Moore & Austin Brown

Moore and Austen illustrated how industrial design and interaction design need to come together and consolidate their respective practices so that they can be combined in the grey area of physical-digital products. Lindsay and Austin demonstrated this by suggesting a number of principles, and two very concrete design cases.

First, they argued that there are currently three major principles to User Centered Design (that industrial designers have been dealing with for a long time):

1.  Align with users’ mental models, for instance by using affordances. As once proposed by Don Norman: the compatibility of interface elements with the human properties, such as the size of hands and those of handles.
2. Provide appropriate feedback. All products should make clear what state it is in, so the user knows what are the possible interactions in that state.
3.  Eliminate the opportunity for error. Use constraints. For instance, because of a number of safety guards, a kid cannot accidentally start a car and drive away.

However, interaction designers similarly have more practice at working with behaviour and information, and thus can bring these principles to the table:

4.  Use adaptive displays: Learn & adapt the interface to user behavior
5.  Motivate users: with game and social mechanics
6.  Use information visualization: Let information spark understanding & delight

Powered with these six paradigms, they switched from “the design of everyday things”, to “the redesign of everyday things” (alluding to the work of Donald Norman, who fought for improved usability of our designs by using some of the above-mentioned principles).

Lindsay and Austin attempted this by suggesting two redesigns: a dish washer, and a home thermostat.
The dish washer case primarily focused on adaptive display and information visualisation, attempting to restore the user understanding of the underlying principles of the dish washer. This enabled him to make educated operating choices to accommodate specific needs such as saving time or energy.
The home thermostat case aimed at improving user friendliness by offering an easier and more advanced way of entering weekly schedules and overrides, conceptualized through a wifi-powered iPad.

Evidently, a lot of positive energy went into preparing this talk and the presented designs. Still the talk fell short in inspiring us to really go at it. Maybe this was in part due to the absence of great current examples from the industry (students tittered in the audience that the thermostat is an introductory assigned design project). Maybe the somewhat obvious design principles lacked an innovative edge. However, at the end of the day, the introduction of specialized interaction designers in the realm of what until now has been the exclusive field of industrial design engineers is something to applaud, as there’s much to be gained in combining the strengths of these great disciplines.

Out and About in Boulder

In the afternoon, conference attendees got the chance to try out one of a range of experiences — sound engineering, perfume making, hiking, even mixology. We’ll be putting in photos from the activities as they become available.

After a morning of familiar discussions on classic IxD topics, the afternoon sessions broadened the discourse to include a new range of audiences and contexts from further afield. These fell into one of two tracks: design from the inside out, and design and branding.

Stream — Inside Out Design

Design for the Developing World (Susan Wyche), Growbot Garden (Carl diSalvo) and Tacky
Proud: Brazil’s Tecnobrega Audiences (Ana Domb)

Chloe Gottlieb (R/GA)

The four speakers explored the impact of design within environments where it works as a disruptive force for change; from a new innovation lab in Kenya to techno dancehalls in Brazil.

While all speakers touched on examples of crowd-sourced innovation, the environments they are working in have varying degrees of access to the technology, tools, and materials that most of the designers in the room probably take for granted.
Susan Wyche, Computing Innovation Fellow at Virginia Tech’s Center for HCI, used her research on white collar workers in Nairobi to remind us of the dangers of imposing existing design values on different cultures, . She encouraged moving beyond assumptions to ‘Intentional Interactions’ which do not assume ‘access, anywhere, and anytime’ is always possible or culturally appropriate.

do not assume ‘access, anywhere, and anytime’ is always possible or culturally appropriate. – Susan Wyche

Carl Disalvo showcased growBot Garden (also see our earlier Johnny article), a series of workshops that bring together designers, researchers, artists, farmers, and gardeners to collaboratively explore how robotics and sensors can be used to support small-scale agriculture. In the role of Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Carl’s R+D team has five years of funding to explore this emerging space. He discussed the challenges of co-creating with non-designers and how important it is to use materials that are native to the environment, as in the case of constructing a pesticide-detecting robot with a farmer who did not want to use pesticides on his land. He also highlighted the nature of “cultural imaginings” — the unspoken values that we use to frame how things such as technology should look — and like Wyche, emphasised the need to research specific situations rather than use blanket assumptions.

In contrast to earlier talks in the day about usability driven-design, Erik Hersman set the stage for the necessity-driven innovation emerging in Africa. What happens when invention comes directly out of need? Rather than having five years to conduct research, the Ushahidi team of mostly-African programmers may have no more than a few hours to roll out an open-source platform for crowdsourcing information. Ushahidi is a web application originally created to map incidents of violence happening during the post-election crisis in Kenya, but has been adapted for crises in Haiti and Chile.  In many respects, the technology constraints have given African countries the opportunity to leapfrog developing countries, especially in the mobile sector. Africa is the fastest growing continent for mobile subscriptions and as seen in the cases below, for mobile innovation (with such companies as iYam, MXit, medicine quality app Pedigree and M-Pesa).

Finally, From the city of Belem, Brazil comes an example of social innovation in the form of Tecnobrega (translation: ‘cheesy techno’). Local DJ’s and musicians were willing to forgo copyrights in favor of an open-source system which allows fans to customize music and participate in its distribution and profit-sharing.  As opposed to business driving design, in this case, the business model responded to the community. Ana Domb’s MIT master’s thesis was an ethnographic exploration into the symbolic currencies and the value of audience participation in this Tecnobrega movement. It’s an interesting example of the creativity that emerges when design and technology are built from the bottom-up as opposed to designing from above.

Stream — Design and Branding

While the design for the Inside Out stream looked at different societies, the branding strand looked at the wider corporate reach of interaction design, from Flash to iPad apps.

Keynote Lisa Strausfeld

Pieter Jongerius (Fabrique)

Lisa Strausfeld, partner in Pentagram’s New York office and long time “interactive information designer” presented a highly personal talk, showing much of her work from as early as mid-nineties until today. It gave an inspiring insight in the motivations and emotions of Lisa as a designer.

Some of the work she presented was truly inspiring in terms of simplicity and effectiveness, such as the virtual 18th century dining table  in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Other highlights included work for Time magazine, such as a visualization of terrorist activity, such as Open Source Spying.Lisa went on to present a number of Flash-designed sites that clearly dated back a while, ending with the recent and refreshing GE Power Consumption Data Visualization.

Lisa tried different ways of categorizing for the work she presented, such as the powerful acronym LATCH, which gathers 5 ways of organizing information: location, alphabetical, time, category, and hierarchy. Ironically, the clear and normalized structure of her data visualization work stood in stark contrast to her rather fuzzy selection of design properties and messages, as well as her hasty explanations of the underlying concepts to her work . Because of this, the audience might have just been left with a very strong portfolio presentation and the question: now what?

The Visual Interface is Now Your Brand – Nick Myers

Patrick Sanwikarja (Fabrique)

Amidst all the talks about interaction design there was a refreshing presentation that focused more on visual design of interfaces and its importance to brands. Because design has become more strategic, this will be a bigger challenge for us as designers.

Nick started by defining what a company’s brand is: it is the primary source of its competitive advantage and a valuable strategic advantage. This means that often heard characteristics such as ‘intuitive’ and ‘simple’ are not going to be enough anymore. Companies and designers can influence their brand, but in the end the customers define what a brand is. Considering that for many brands, most contact moments are now digital, Nick concludes that the visual interface is in fact the brand.

With software, it’s more difficult to apply branding, compared to with traditional media. This is because software is not fashion. The development of software can take a long time and the software itself should last long too, so software needs to feel timeless. Therefore, the identity of a brand is in the details. The visual identity cannot be judged on its own, but should always be explored in context.

To me, the most important learning of Nick’s presentation is that strong brands should have ‘signature interactions’: interactions that can differentiate and add delight. This means we should not use design patterns; they are not memorable. Nick showed a nice overview of examples of signature interactions that included Apple Cover Flow, Google Street View, XBox Kinect and the Playstation XrossMediaBar. The interaction doesn’t necessarily have to be very advanced or special. As long as the visual design is of high quality, the interface can be memorable and distinctive (such as with Playstation).

Nick ended with a quote from Apple’s Jonathan Ive: “Its easy to be different, but it’s difficult to be better”, which nicely illustrates the challenge for interaction and visual designers. Is it possible for all brands to develop their own special signature interaction? It would be nice, but I doubt it. And even if they could, I can imagine that with many different ways of interacting, this wouldn’t benefit overall usability. On the other hand, this can be an argument for not just focusing on the interaction itself, but just as much on the visual quality. Nick has made clear that visual interface designers need to be involved earlier and more often in the strategic phase, if a company wants to make a difference. The examples of signature interactions that Nick showed were by big, resourceful companies. Can they develop signature interactions because they’re big, or are they big because they have signature interactions?

Leaning Back With NPR: How We Created A Relaxing Experience For The iPad – Scott Stroud

Patrick Sanwikarja (Fabrique)

Scott Stroud from NPR (National Public Radio) talked about the challenge of designing and developing an iPad app in less than four weeks. When research showed that 5% of NPR customers were planning to buy the (then unreleased) iPad, the company made a (near) last minute decision to make an app.

The extreme pressure of  the time frame (as half of the four weeks was needed for development, the design phase was limited to two weeks) meant that he had to use counterpressure i.e. committing fast to core assumptions. Next was deciding the method. NPR had already been applying Agile methods, which works very well for ‘tactical design’. For conceptual design however, Agile does not work well. But Scott couldn’t afford to start from scratch, either. So they relied on Apple’s human interface guidelines for the iPad to design a good usable interface, such as: physicality/realism, stunning graphics, handle orientation changes, support gestures appropriately and restrain hierarchy.

Their first concepts were indeed usable, but mundane: it looked like a massive iPhone app. So other than not meeting the deadline, he uncovered a less obvious risk: being too conventional. They therefore decided to focus on a “leanback experience”: a relaxing iPad app, with enough “NPR-ness”. They had a nice way of expressing this: they wanted the app to be like Michelle Norris’s (a radio host for NPR) relaxing voice. He went on talking about more things that were critical in making the app, effectively and efficiently:

• Don’t have secret handshakes: make sure it is obvious to the user how to use the interface.

• Reuse what you have. Because of the limited time, they ported some (less important) functionality from their existing iPhone app.
• Negotiate to deliver. The developer wanted to use the initial design, but showing that iPhone code could be reused helped.
• Consider future cross-platform use (e.g. using cards)
• Do user tests, despite the timeline. They managed to do quick user test (e.g. paper prototyping) and improve the final design from the insights.
• Trust reactions from smart people. Videos for the NPR iPad app featuring users’ initial response showed how it has maintained the brand: serendipitous, deep, curious.

I admire Scott’s ability to not cave under the pressure. Instead of just getting a functional app on the iPad he stayed true to what the NPR is to its customers: a way of relaxation. To me, the end result still feels a bit conventional to me (I haven’t used it myself), but judging from the video testimonials, I’m sure it worked well for them.

—-

Top image from Growbot on Flickr

It is that time of the year again: hundreds of interaction designers from all over the world rush towards the Interaction conference. This year it takes place in Boulder, Colorado (USA). Yesterday there were pre-conference workshops and today the conference itself was officially kicked off. And as always Johnny is there to deliver a daily write-up for those who weren’t able to attend (awwww).

This daily report wouldn’t have been possible without the writing skills (and energy) of Pieter Jongerius, Anna Offermans, and Patrick Sanwikarja

Keynote Bill Verplank

Bill Verplank (who Johnny interviewed last year) kicked off the conference with the words from calligrapher Hella Basu: “in all object making, that aspect which relates to its conceptual interpretation is art, that which relates the object to an intended purpose is design, and the quality of its execution is craft”.

From then on (bar a couple of video clips), Verplank sketched (or as he calls it, “thinking with a pencil)” his way through his knowledge of design and systems, mainly covering his well known  diagrams but also peppering it with informed asides (even if his comments about CHI did cause some consternation). One interesting new story was on path-like vs map-like systems, using the example of a vending machine (a closed machine versus one with a glass window): the former might be easier to maintain, but the latter is easier for users should something go wrong (e.g. a can gets stuck), and arguably even better for business.

Verplank’s presentation shone with experience as both a designer and researcher. He explained different ways of thinking — enactive (do) , iconic (see) , symbolic (know), based on Piaget and Bruner, — and other relevant theories on multiple intelligence.

Verplank believes that we’re coming into the third —  enactive — age of computing, made commercially real with the release of the Wii, and that people should be using haptics in their products to make them smart by taking cues from people such as Hiroshi Ishii. That said, there are interesting exceptions, for example how computer scientists have moved to the Mac because the Terminal allows them to retain the language they learned in teletype machines but it now irrelevant with GUI.

We’re coming into the third, enactive, age of computing.

Verplank also emphasised the importance of understanding systems through control and feedback, and finished by elaborating on his well known but misunderstood diagram ontypes of design

• Most design is currently in the form of media (e.g.  Negroponte)
• However, fashion is becoming important (look at Steve Job’s vision)
• People/AI (e.g. Winograd) are not about designing people as much as life forms (an interesting example being Karl Sims’ ecological computational forms)
• Tools are like vehicles, and underpined by infrastructure — having common platforms as was done with unicode and fonts is key.

Proximus Maximus: Design Imperatives from the Roman Empire to the NASA Space Program and Beyond – Michael Meyer

If you don’t create anything, are you actually a designer? That’s the main question behind Michael Meyer’s talk. It’s his belief that we must completely understand the product or service we work with. As long as we don’t understand every little detail we’ll never be able to create superb solutions or understand the consequences of our design decisions. By showing beautiful examples ranging from craftsmanship to a video of the NASA Space Program he gradually shows us the power of trully understanding what it means to be a great designer: it’s all about empathy.

There are three things a designer focus on:

• Empathy. An emotional closeness. A deep, intuitive understanding of the materials you work with is important to get the most out of your work;
• Core. Each person (but also object and service) has a certain core. This is essential material that you have available to craft the product, service, experience. Discovering and understanding this core is really important when working together with other disciplines. There are (for example) often frustrations when engineers and user experience designers work together, this is because they have a different core. When you start not just understanding your own, but also the other cores, you’ll be able to work together in a situation where everybody can be a hero of his core.
• Proxy. This is the thing that represents the sum of your knowledge, to communicate your understanding and ability.

Note: this summary is partly based upon our report from The Web and Beyond in 2010.

What do you do, anyway? Describing IxD to the Outside World – Carl Alviani

This is DTDT with a difference. Carl started off with a video where he’d asked several people to give their definition on interaction design. One of the comments? “Well, it’s magic.”. While that got more than a few laughs, for Carl this sums up most of the problem he wants to address — the impenetrability to the outside world of what exactly is is we do.

When we talk about who we (interaction designers) are, we talk about the value that we have and the products and services that we try to improve. We define ourselves in characteristics that are actually so general that they also apply to other fields such as industrial design, game design, fashion, etc. It’s important to find a clear definition of what we do in order to quell backlash. When you look at other fields and the way people define them you notice that they talk a lot in terms of artifacts. Carl showed an example where web programmers are being defined people by HTML and CSS. And it’s on that level that we should start. We should be where the listeners are and have a tangible starting point for a discussion. If this means that we start saying that we draw boxes and arrows or that we stand in front of walls and put post-its on it than that’s what we need to say.

Consume Consume Consume – Peter Knocke

It’s always a delight when a speaker manages to keep a crowd at the tip of their seats while showing only one slide. Peter pulled it off. In a convincing buildup he made a strong appeal to designers to consider the consequences of their work.
How many of you regularly take Facebook mobile to the bathroom? (27%, apparently). Peter explained to us that when he was once creating a persona, Tim — a heavy consumer of social media, mail, and other interactive media — he realized on reading it back that this persona might be realistic, but not necessarily one to be proud of as a designer.
Peter started logging his own activities and soon found out his life was not much different. He discovered three types of activities:

• Consumption
• Curation (the selection and assessment of items around you)
• Creation

He was startled to find that most of the time he just consumed, and that the act of creation was a rare event. This is because our environment, the media and products all around us, stimulates this behavior above others. This notion was the main driver for this talk. We have to find a better balance in these three types of activities. We have to help our users to create more. This was the real call for change: use your personal perspective, get a bit more greedy. Design for youself if you have to. Design for creation.

Scandalous Interaction – Tim Wood

What is a scandalous interaction? For Wood, it’s daring to challenge the idea of using design patterns (he damningly called pattern libraries as “the clip art of interaction design”). That wasn’t his only ‘scandalous’ comment, as he proclaimed “Usability is overrated. Jakob Nielsen just rolled over in his grave. Wait, he’s not dead.”
But beyond that, his reasons for legitimately reinventing the wheel (with some actual examples) were for such reasons as challenging the constraints of traditional thinking. He used the example of the iPhone keypad as having a legacy back to old fashioned typewriters (though this is in itself an unusual case as they are challenging patterns.)
However, his real reason to challenge patterns is about allowing new interactions to be understood (much in line with Indy Young’s work on mental models). He finished off with an example of an interface and how working down and back up on chain of display logic—core logic—concept could allow for new visual interactions.

The Rhythm of Interaction – Peter Stahl

Peter Stahl is not only an interaction designer but also with musical interests, combining the two in his inspiring talk that it can be useful to design rhythm and flow into our interfaces. There is rhythm in changing TV channels, in driving a car, in gaming and in viewing a Powerpoint presentation: new slide-title-bullet-bullet-bullet-new slide-title-bullet-bullet-bullet. When speaking about surfing the web, there is rhythm in filling out forms, in Twitter feeds coming by, and in watching Youtube video’s. To have rhythm, Peter says, interaction should be simple, repetitive, steady, and it should always be clear how to continue. If you want a user to think, you should interrupt the rhythm to get the user’s attention.

To have rhythm … interaction should be simple, repetitive, steady, and it should always be clear how to continue. If you want a user to think, you should interrupt the rhythm to get the user’s attention.

However: rhythm only is not enough. If we want a user to be totally involved in the activity, that time flies while performing tasks and that the experience itself is rewarding, we have to add flow to the rhythm. Like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Peter helped us pronouncing this exotic name: “chick-sent-me-high-e”) already told us about flow in 1996: “…Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost…”

In our artefacts and deliverables, it is important not only to show the “feature interface design” but also a more concrete form of “user interface design”. A wireframe is not enough any more. To give better insight in the rhythm of interaction, we should add people to our storyboards. We should show how and when they are involved and what reaction or emotion we intend to get from a user at a certain point.

Peter was running out of time, the rhythmic flow we were all getting into unfortunately was brutally interrupted. Looking forward to hearing the rest of his talk some time soon.

It’s not just about talks…

Interaction is the annual conference organized by the IxDA and has grown into the biggest gathering of interaction designers in our field. Right now there are over 600 people attending the event. But despite that huge amount the organization is still managing to give it a special and personal feeling. This is mainly due to all the (un)official events going on in between and after the talks. Below you’ll see an overview of some of the social events going on:

The Officially Unofficial Johnny Hollands & Friends Dinner at the Dushanbe Tea House (image courtesy: Giles DeMarty)

Doing the Johnny during a hike

Lunch at St Julien

Doing workshops at Interaction 11

Party at the Boulder Theatre

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Is the dark side always evil? Sometimes, it’s just a matter of perspective.

Recently Harry Brignull shared his thoughts on Dark Patterns at UX Brighton. If you have not had a chance to listen to the presentation, I recommend it for anyone in the UX field, especially those engaged in Ecommerce and marketing. In short, Brignull discusses the notion of what could be perceived as malicious or evil design – not in the sense of design that hurts the user, but by subtly adding unnecessary features to a customer’s cart, making it difficult to unsubscribe from a distribution list, or by simply hiding the cheaper more likely choice in lieu of more profitable options. I should say, I agree with the existence of these patterns and the overal gist of what is said.

Much of what Brignull discusses is around the e-commerce realm. Purchasing of insurance or extra premium packages, subscribing to email threads, and spamming your twitter feed (remember Twifficiency?)

How might additional checks and balances be implemented on an application to support user goals and workflow? What if the system recognized an external email address and automatically checked the box for additional verification to ensure sensitive documents are not sent to the wrong third party? Or if the application is able to buffer a transaction with downtime and additional forms? These would not be seen as Dark Patterns, as they are intended for positive reinforcment of a task. But where is that line drawn? The difference between a Dark Pattern and a positive hurdle is a matter of perspective. As users become more aware of this technique, it will be harder to sneak in unwanted features. First Five Followers is one example of this, where after the backlash from Twifficiency the developers have made it abundantly clear to ensure the privacy of the user’s public feed. So as Dark Patterns become more common and expected, and designers resolve new methods to sneak in additional options, how are these used for positive interactions? Not all dark patterns are done with malicious intent. Even Luke used the dark side of the force from time to time for positive results.

Johnny Observed brings you bite-sized nuggets of interaction-y goodness. Seen something we should share? Send us a tip.

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_{Top Image: Star Wars, Return of the Jedi, 1983}

Here at Johnny, we’re bringing you bite-sized observations of all things interaction-y. This week, we’ve spied some robots ….

While I don’t see us bowing to the robot overlords after the Skynet uprising just yet, the latest from Aldebaran Robotics is impressive to say the least.

Stated to be permanently evolving, Nao robots measure just two feet tall and are packed with sensors, servos, and gadgets making them physical artifacts not to be taken lightly. Compounded with graceful motions and some emotional responses the Nao is a formidable opponent for the Furby pets that plagued us back in 1998. Aldebaran promotes their technology primarily for educational purposes sporting an easy to use and visual programming language for all but the most complex of tasks. While the educational applications are intriguing, the industrial or healthcare applications are endless. Imagine a child sized robot engaging with an autistic child or socializing with contagious patients? What if this simple machine could navigate wreckage and comfort survivors until help arrives? The opportunities are endless and development has barely scratched the surface. The clip from the Nao Robot Show says all I need to welcome the Centurion army with open arms though.

As Experience Design broadens to take on the challenge of delivering experiences that are clearly related and consistent regardless of context or channel – the aim of customer experience initiatives in many large organizations – we run the risk of failing in our attempts if we persist in adopting terminology relevant only to a single context, and focused only on a small portion of the experience itself.

As Experience Designers we are running the risk of failing in our attempts to enable experiences that are clearly related and consistent regardless of context or channel. Our persistent use of terminology relevant only to a single context, and focused only on a small portion of the experience itself, hampers the efforts of customer experience initiatives in many large organizations.

To design experiences that are consistent across different contexts and environments we need to focus on the qualities of the experience that do not change, rather than the means through which we enable that experience.

Experiences are a combination of the actions we take; what we perceive through our various senses; and our emotional response to both.

Form constrains

Actions are constrained by the physical or technological environment within which the experience takes place. A person’s behaviour, and context, are inexorably tied to this environment. The form of an object or space both implies and constrains its use. The availability and type of controls; the physical or virtual dimensions; the presence or absence of pathways; all contribute to, and constrain, the range of available actions.

Similarly, the range of senses we can stimulate is also limited by the environment. Digital environments lack smell and touch, producing a greater reliance on thought, sight and sound. Physical environments provide different perceptual constraints, allowing for the use of aromas, for example, to enhance the experience. At the same time, the presence of these additional stimulants also acts to dull the influence of all sensual influences.

Our focus, then, falls to the emotional response participants have when undertaking these activities, and perceiving through their senses. It is the emotional response that provides a consistent design intent across environments, touchpoints, interactions.

Articulate design intent

We need to articulate our design intent using the language of emotion so that the same resultant experience can be delivered across the various environments within which customers might interact; working within the constraints of action and perception imposed by each environment.

The transition from usability and HCI-type practices to one of user experience has been represented by a shift in focus from the functional characteristics of a system or interface, to a focus on the slightly more abstract qualities of those functions when executed in a certain way.

We need to articulate our design intent using the language of emotion

This can be seen in a lesser reliance on measures such as task-completion and time-to-complete, and the increased use of descriptors like ‘ease of use’ of a system, or whether a system is ‘intuitive’ to use. These are qualities of the functional implementation. And whilst these contribute to the emotional response a user may have when interacting with the system, they can be seen merely as descriptors of the qualities of the actions undertaken within one very specific type of environment; and then only at the plane of interaction between user and system. Descriptions of perceptual attributes within this UX tradition are similarly narrow. Talk of “speed” and “performance” provide some level of broader application – to, say, the efficiency of a service – but focus solely on one type of perception – namely the passage of time.

Emotive qualities

UX designers with a more visual bent, coming from a graphic design or visual communications tradition, (typically) speak more to the emotive qualities of a visual language or aesthetic. And it is here that we really begin to see an appropriate descriptive focus for the resultant experience, albeit within the realm of the visual domain.

The process of arriving at an emotive description often works in reverse, however, with the designer choosing an emotive language to describe a particular visual exploration or aesthetic, rather than receiving a direction in experiential or emotional terms to begin. Where that direction is given, such as through the guise of brand values or personality, the description is of the organization – not the emotional response of the customer or user.

Such descriptions tend to fall short in two, significant ways:

• the perspective and focus of brands is, by definition, around the personality of the organisation; and;
• this emotional perspective is kept distinct from the work of designing the activity and perceptual qualities of the system/service.

Whether we look to the qualities of actions undertaken as described in usability/HCI circles of the UX field; the narrow perceptual lens of time; the broader perceptual lens of aesthetic; or the language of brand personality, we fail to articulate the qualities of an experience we may wish to reproduce in a consistent manner across environments.

Mac App Store

An articulation of the emotional qualities of our intended experience is, therefore, essential when we take on the more holistic challenge of designing systems or end-to-end service experiences. For example, when aiming to deliver an online experience consistent to one delivered in-store – such as with Nespresso; or when extending a product line into a product-service system – such as the introduction of the new Mac App Store.

Coming back to the example of the phrase ‘ease-of-use’, let’s explore why such descriptors are insufficient as a means of articulating the experience intended. Something is easy-to-use when the actions possible within the context of the system are clear, well-ordered, work as expected, and do not require complex or complicated input sequences in order to achieve some desired end.

Express our intent

However, our desire for such ease-of-use – from the perspective of experience design – is not an end in and of itself. Our aim might be, for example, to instill our user with a sense of confidence, capability, or willingness to act. Perhaps our aim is simply to avoid frustration and maintain a sense of calm.

When we express our intent in these terms, we’re much better equipped to execute across different contexts and environments and achieve the same experience. “Easy to use” might be a useful descriptor for a digital interface, but it is inappropriate, and therefore largely meaningless, when designing, say, a retail presence or the logistics capability for an online purchase. Much better to employ ‘willingness to act’ as the desired experiential characteristic.

To what extent are organisations attempting to craft the type of consistent, multi-context experience for which these emotional descriptions are needed?

Similarly, we find ourselves woefully ill-equipped to make decisions about other experiential elements that become relevant in different context. For example, how should our retail environment’s lighting be designed? What aromas or smells might be appropriate?

Vice versa, if scents or lighting are being used in a physical environment – such as the signature smell of some hotel chains – do we simply ignore them when designing a customer’s interaction with a call centre? Or is there an emotional intent behind the use of a particular scent which can be translated into a contact-less environment like a call centre?

Is this really a concern, however? To what extent are organisations attempting to craft the type of consistent, multi-context experience for which these emotional descriptions are needed?

Modern practice in architecture, systems, interaction and service design all require the type of multi-context consistency described above. Corporations and Government agencies in Europe, North America, Australia and Asia are actively pursuing projects designed to introduce ‘customer’ experiences designed around an holistic, unified set of characteristics – and mostly failing to achieve the level of consistency desired or needed.

Let us ensure alignment

We can better ensure alignment across contexts and environments if our objective is described in terms more suitable for such application. Once we begin to think of experiences as experiences, rather than actions or perceptions, we become much better able to critique each specific incarnation of that experience in whatever context it might occur.

We cannot ignore the actions customers will want or need to carry out; nor should we. Similarly we should not ignore the characteristics of customers’ perception. However, it is the emotional qualities of the experience that provide us with the means to translate the full range of experiential qualities of one system or service component to another, thereby delivering on the promise of experience design.

A very special thanks to Janna DeVylder, Livia Labate and Leisa Reichelt for their ideas and feedback on this article.