UX Techniques is a new iPhone App designed to act as a pocket guide for UX practitioners. Built along the same vein as IDEO’s Method Cards UX techniques shares simple and concise definitions of 45 common UX practices.

UX is predominately about digital interface design, whether online or via an application, but it is also how an interface behaves and understanding user needs and behaviour.

While the design of the application leaves a lot open to the imagination as far as visual appeal the cards themselves are quite helpful. In my review of the application, I came across a few methods I was less familiar with or had forgotten about entirely. The real benefit comes from the supporting links. Each card has a link to additional information viewable from your iPhone, whether it is a link to UIE or Boxes and Arrows, the authors have located a valuable and more detailed source for further investigation. This is an added detail not provided in all other UX reference guides.

While far from perfect, the application is a nice reference when on the go. This won’t replace your stack of books at home, and won’t replace practice for a particular technique, but it can help in some sticky conversations with clients and coworkers. While some might say this adds another set of definitions to a field with many differing opinions already, this application doesn’t define their stance as the end all be all and instead offers more places to look. UX Techniques can act as a catalyst for further conversation and investigation.

Still not convinced? UX Techniques allows you to email the content of the cards with a single click (though unfortunately this, like the additional content, leaves the application). Similarly, UX Techniques Lite is offered with a subset of the cards for a try-before-you-buy test drive.

I am in constant pursuit of the “clay” of interaction design (IxD). Even if that clay is intangible, if we are to consider ourselves a true design discipline there must be something that we are manipulating. Once we understand what it is that we are manipulating we will be better able to communicate to all our stakeholders the intentions of what it is the interaction designer designs. One possible property of said “clay” may be motion or movement.For almost all interactions we place our body in motion. Even speaking requires muscles to move in order to work. There has been a ton of work done on motion as an aesthetic quality towards an audience, even if that audience is just perceived. What I’m interested in is motion as an aesthetic regardless of perceived or real audience. The question I ask is if certain movements just feel better than others at an aesthetic level and further that perception is manipulated by other interacting factors.

The Foundations: A Recap

A couple of years ago I started positing that there are foundational elements to IxD. If we are to discuss material and medium in IxD there must be properties that we can use to describe and differentiate and even qualify what it is.

Why I pursue foundations as a concept is strongly influenced by Roweena Reed Kostellow (founder of the Pratt Institute’s Industrial Design Department) and her six foundations for three-dimensional design: line, luminance & color, space, volume, negative space, and texture. It isn’t just that these foundations exist for their own sake. They are a basis for two important requirements for the education and practice of design—educating craft and a basis for criticism.

Another growing influence is the work of Bill Verplank. His three areas of concern for the interaction designer are articulated beautifully in his video taped lecture he gives in Designing Interactions for his former colleague Bill Moggridge. In it he suggests that the Interaction Designer is concerned with three things that all start with “How do you …”. It’s worth the watch.

What is unclear to me from Bill’s explanation is how do I manipulate things to achieve the outcomes that he describes. Further it seems that he is only discussing the end result or point of interface that people interact with. This did not seem to map against my idea of what interaction design is. For me interaction design supports the interface by defining both the desired behavior of a product or service and the desired behavior of the people who will interact with that system.

So, with this in mind I’ve been working out a collection of foundations that I believe make up the “clay” of how to do just that. I have three original elements: Time, Metaphor, and Abstraction.

• Time is in many ways the most multi-facetted of the three. It breaks down into the following attributes: pacing, rest, duration, frequency, attention. These properties all combine to create a relative sense of time amongst people using the system, the same way that one experiences anything.
• Metaphor is related to what Richard Buchanan calls the “Poetics of Design”. It is the way we need to use analogy as the bridge between the intangible complexities that are forged through digital technologies (and other complex intangible and abstracted systems such as services) and the tangible world where our senses and cognitive abilities evolved to embody.
• Abstraction is really a value property. It relates to combined physical and cognitive activities that takes place to initiate an activity and when it is perceived to have been occurred.

The rest of this article though is about a new type of foundation that I alluded to when I presented at Interaction 09 on motion or movement.

Background on Motion

We are using a larger variety of motions with our primary computing devices than ever before. The devices are in motion like when we shake an iPhone to initiate an undo, or we are in motion & our devices can sense the movements we make. The previous tap which mapped almost exclusively to a mouse-click has been extended with new gestures like pinch, flick and swipe. Like the ubiquitous mouse-click there are a variety of contexts where these gestures are used changing their meaning, and emotional contexts. Mouse down, move, mouse up is commonly called “drag & drop”. How we combine movements within specific contexts can effect how we interpret their interpersonal meaning and the feelings we have associated with them.

One aspect of motion and movement comes from dance and martial arts. I love to dance and I used to practice both Tae Kwon Do and capoeira (two fairly different martial arts). Dance and martial arts requires a practitioner to be fairly aware of how they move in the world. Yes, you can say this is about balance and agility, but it is also about understanding what brings about balance and agility. It also forces you to understand your place in the world physically compared to everything around you. To me, this spatial awareness is to motion the equivalent that attention is to time.

spatial awareness is to motion what attention is to time

I spent more focused attention on my practice of capoeira as an adult. In doing so I realized quickly that how I felt emotionally doing a movement directly correlated to whether or not the movement itself was successful. On watching capoeira I noticed similarly as an audience member that beauty occurred within the success of those playing (you play capoeira instead of fighting it because of its history as a covert mechanism to learn how to defend yourself within the context of being a slave in Brazil.)

Compare the act of moving a file from one container to another with the act of panning a map. In this example the motion is almost the same but there is a clear difference that effects the aesthetic quality. The level of precision required for panning a map is substantially less than that of file-folder management depending on the level of graphic resolution and other factors related to Fitt’s Law. The motion of panning can in fact have a comparable flick like quality to it, especially when the user knows they are several lengths of motion away from their desired target. Targets themselves are usually approximations as well. Applying Fitt’s Law to this activity, an approximate target has a cognitive equivalent of just being a fairly larger target than an absolute target.

The Case for both good & bad motion design: Twitter for iOS

What got me to return to thinking about motion almost two years later was my own impressions using the newly released Twitter for iPad app and comparing those to my other iPad and iPhone apps I use. Specifically, there are new gestures introduced by the designer of both Tweetie for iPhone (now Twitter for iPhone) and Twitter for iPad, Loren Brichter formerly of Atebits.

On Tweetie, Loren brought to the iPhone world a whole new gesture. Playing on the existing metaphors of gravity & friction in other iPhone gestural interfaces, he used the existing playful springiness at the end of a list as a spring-loaded trigger to call for a refresh of the results of that same list.

The now-standard spring refresh on iPhone

This first gestural innovation was so successful that a host of other applications have taken it on as their primary means of refreshing a result list. For me the adoption of the new gesture so permeated my standard use of my iPhone that I now expect this gesture to be available in every app that I use. That is a pretty successful independent major UI paradigm to design.

When I opened up the new Twitter for iPad app, I was ready for some goodness because of all the hype I read before I downloaded. It is very well designed and is completely different from its iPhone sister. It takes advantage of the unique properties of the iPad. (For those not familiar with the app, the motions are all shown below).

The new iPad app puts the details of a single tweet in a right column, but instead of putting an “X” icon or other “button” to close or collapse the detail view, Loren invented a new gesture/action combo where the user swipes (a common gesture for deletion) to literally push aside the right column, which disappears for portrait view and squeezes it and clips it in landscape view. In so doing he both creates a new motion gesture and uses that new gesture as a means of reducing abstraction through what appears to be a tangible equivalent of pushing aside a pile of paper on your desk. (Yes, it is also an abstract metaphor and also has attributes of time associated with it.)

Clipping Columns

Understanding Aesthetics of Motion

Using all these apps I began to get new critical thinking that I could apply to the foundations I mentioned above. Whether it is the original flick-scroll that Apple designed with the launch of the iPhone, or the spring-refresh, or the swipe-dismiss there is a commonality for how the gestures are engaged. The movements share a lack of control and/or precision. This has as much to do with the size of the targets as it does with the complete lack of target for ending. These free-ending gestures work because of their ease, but also because of the extended range of motion creates an aesthetic quality to them that more precise and controlled gestures do not. In turn they add to the overall aesthetic quality of the interface around feelings of play & personal satisfaction.

I’ve also noticed some other key areas when using my iPad that have, compared to my iPhone, triggered similar emotional responses due to gestural differences. In general, scale of motion adds a lot aesthetically. As in dancing, extensions are just more beautiful.

The area that I find really different is in typing and general tapping. When I compare the typing experience on my iPhone to my iPad I notice the difference greatly. To really feel it open an iPhone app that requires data entry. Normally though we type on an iPhone with the single finger peck or by thumbing. I’m a big thumber. Even when in the correct form factor (and I’m pretty good at thumbing on my iPhone) the feeling of being more constrained & swaddled is there when compared to the openness & bounce you feel when typing on an iPad.

I’ve equated this feeling to the scene in Star Trek Generations when Data, with his new emotion chip, is singing while tapping away on his glass console screen. I’ve felt this so strongly that I’ve even been searching for a Star Trek console wall paper. I’m also constantly singing Data’s refrain when using my iPad, “Life forms. Tiny little life forms. Where are you? Da da da Da!” (Star Trek: Generations. 1994).

The added scale of space allows one to almost feel like they are dancing with their two hands on a glass dance floor.

When looking at any system of evaluation it isn’t only important to look at what works, but also understand what doesn’t work. My example here also comes from the iPad Twitter app. It has 2 other gestures that are applied to new outcomes. Both are related to revealing something in a new context without any visual cues that it is there. Like the swipe to reveal actions in the iPhone app.

The first of these is is two-finger gesture. With two fingers target a touch holding it down and swipe down. If there is a conversation related to the targeted tweet then it will reveal itself.

iPad Twitter Replies—two finger swipe

The other one also requires two fingers. It uses the the reverse pinch to reveal the detailed view of the tweet.

Pinch Open

Without going into why we need these gestures (I kinda feel they are “easter eggs” more than really usable functionality), they both have properties that lead to their lower performance or evaluation.

First, because they are two-fingered gestures it is less likely that a person will discover these behaviors accidentally. People do not use two fingers regularly accept in specific contexts that are well understood like zooming. For example, I was recently struggling to figure out how to scroll an inset frame without scrolling the surrounding container. It never occurred to me that I should use 2 fingers to scroll. When hearing that, I thought, “that’s messed up” and I tested it on 5 avid iPad users who all failed to figure it out as well and all complained that they were having the same problem.

The second problem is more about the reverse pinch activity then it is about the downward two-fingered swipe. With the reverse pinch the amount of fidelity required to do it is just too high. While the ending point is unimportant there is something about how to start the gesture that might require more precision and higher resolution than the system can handle consistently. For the two-finger swipe down to reveal the conversation, the difficult part is that you need to remember to keep your fingers on the glass or it will disappear. This leads to the constant repetition of the task lowering its utility. It is just easier to tap once on it and have it reveal itself that way.

How to Design for Motion

So what does all this mean for me?

First it means there is a huge opportunity. Loren made a huge name for himself as an accomplished iPhone designer/developer by innovating a new gestural paradigm. It catapulted his app into the limelight and eventually got him “acquired,” in this case by Twitter itself.

I don’t know what methods Loren used to come up with his spring-refresh design, but I can look at the work of Kicker Studio and their case study they published for the gestural TV remote control they designed. What is clear is that sketching & prototyping now requires a new methodology. We all need to learn to become solid actors if we are going to design interfaces that require the user to move in new ways outside of buttons, pointing devices & keyboards. When it comes to mobile devices and touch screens especially, we need to all become actors.

I’m reminded of the case study that Bill Buxton wrote about in his amazing book Sketching User Experiences on how the Palm Pilot was designed. They used a block of wood & a cut off pencil and played with various forms & felt how various gestures would play out. Binging our prototypes into the physical is going to be key as we design for mobile gestural platforms. We are going to have to act out scenarios of use, dance out gestures to complete new choreographies. We need to see gestures both as dancer and as audience.

One of the reasons these gestures work is also related to the visual cues for all the states of availability, direction, activity and completion. Rehearsing the gestures in front of others will cause people to ask questions like how do you know it will do something? And how do you know it when it is complete?

Gestural interface design is still very new. We can deeply appreciate the work of Apple , Microsoft, and Google in their leadership efforts but there are still lots of opportunities in this area to innovate even more. Having an understanding of all four of the foundational elements of interaction design will help you design more solid interfaces & interactions for better overall experiences.

Concluding Thoughts

I am cautious about adding this as a foundation of interaction design because it feels like it might fit within the context of “interactive design” or “interface design”. For now though I believe that there is a behavioral property that moves beyond the point of interaction itself towards embedding behaviors within human beings that become embedded culturally. The motions themselves then become akin to affordances of there own even though they do not connect to any visually perceived markers. They just become expected on one hand and they imbue an emotional aesthetic all their own.

References:
Foundations of Interaction Design article on Boxes & Arrows, and related podcast,
Revised article on Johnny Holland
Interaction09 Motion and Movement video and slides

Earlier this year we discussed Volkswagen’s superbowl ad and some of our observations around emotions and design. Now, the innovative automobile company does it again, this time with a mobile application. (Note, you cannot access the application through iTunes in all regions).

The application is quite simple in design – offering a brief description of a vehicle and details around some of Volkswagen’s innovative technology. As their video describes though, it is difficult to simply describe the function so the remainder of the application allow customers to test drive the functionality. By selecting a function, one may place their phone over the printed ad and steer their avatar – in this case a Volkswagen vehicle. Depending on the feature selected – lane assist, adaptive lights, and adaptive cruise control, the car reacts differently when the mobile device is placed over the street in the printed ad. Watch the lights follow the curve of the road, the vehicle vibrate when touching the edge of the lane, and more.

While augmented reality isn’t new to the cell phone, with applications allowing you to type while still seeing what is in front of you, superimpose social network information over people’s heads, and more, this is one of my first experiences with it as a strictly marketing technique. In reality though – this goes beyond marketing. The Volkswagen ad is a simple prototype. As interaction designers we spend a lot of time talking about sketching, prototypes, and development. Often that is defined as a tangible representation of a model. In this case though, holding a phone is nothing like driving a car. Still, this simple prototype, or tool, demonstrates a complex interaction, can inspire conversation, and excite people to invest in the product, and ultimately purchase a vehicle. Aren’t these the same goals we aspire to when developing websites and software? What tools can be used to create prototypes outside of the screen to communicate what a technology might be like, without building the entire system, or by building a different one entirely?

_{Images from VW Innovations}

As a UX Manager, adding a new person to your team is one of the most difficult and critical things you’ll ever do. Adding the right person will dramatically increase the quantity and quality of the work your team produces. However, adding the wrong person can create morale issues and even decrease your effective throughput.

Who Do You Hire?

You want the new person to be an asset to the team. What type of person should they be?

Do you want someone who broadly understands many areas of UX? Or do you desire an individual who has a rich and deep experience in an important area, such as interaction design, information architecture, user research, or visual design?

The Specialist: If you see your team lacking in a particular area, it’s tempting to fix it with someone who brings those talents to the team. With the specialist’s unique experience and skills, they could blast through assignments in their area of specialty much faster than any other team member. This would enhance the team’s overall quality and expertise.

The Generalist: It would also be tempting to find someone with broad skills—someone who can switch between skill sets, as the projects demand. A generalist like this would have value regardless of the nature of the project, giving flexibility to the types of assignments the team could tackle.

Which do we hire, a specialist or a generalist? That’s the question we need to answer.

Avoiding the Compartmentalist

Make sure it's the right choice

Before we continue, there’s one point of common confusion I want to clear up: there’s a difference between a specialist and a compartmentalist.

A specialist brings a lot of skills and experience in one or more specialties. Maybe they’ve done a bundle of big and small information architectures projects. They’ve made a point of keeping up on the latest thinking and have perfected many new techniques. Their experience helps them assess problems quickly and pick a plan of attack that typically results in successful designs.

Some specialists are truly specialized. For example, you may find an interaction designer who has delved deep into institutional financial systems. They’ve accumulated thousands of hours of designing for the unique problems of this specific domain. Their knowledge of the challenges in institutional finance management and how to work past them would be exceptionally valuable to your team, if you were designing for that.

A great specialist, however, isn’t restricted to work in the areas of their specialties. They can adequately (or better) produce work and results in other areas. For example, an experienced user researcher could also have great wireframing and prototyping skills. More importantly, they understand how that work is performed and what makes it successful.

A compartmentalist, on the other hand, is a myopic breed of specialist—a person well versed in their specialty, but doesn’t know anything beyond that. Compartmentalists throw their hands up when the work goes beyond their area of expertise or produce poor results.

Of the three types of team members—generalists, specialists, and compartmentalists—the compartmentalists are the least valuable to your team. Unless your team has so much work in the specialty that you can afford someone who is occupied full time, a compartmentalist will frustrate your efforts to deliver great results. Even then, their lack of understanding of how other team members do their jobs will make any hand-offs inefficient.

For the harmony of your team, you want to look to specialists who have a solid understanding of all the areas of user experience. Think of a great orthopedic surgeon who, like most medical specialists, started with general medical training and residencies before they chose their specialty. The surgeon could deliver a baby if they had to, and understand what other doctors do and how they do it.

You want to avoid the compartmentalist, who only understands their one thing. But that brings us back to the question we started with: specialist or generalist?

Conditions Favorable To Specialization

Imagine an organization trying to blast through a flood of highly technical information architecture projects. Hiring a person who can tackle that work expertly and quickly would be really valuable. In simple economic terms, that organization would see more value (and thus pay more money) for an individual with those skills and talents than they’d see for a lesser skilled professional.

However, the increased value from specialization only happens when there is enough work that the organization realizes a productivity increase. If the team only needs information architecture skills on a few sporadic projects, having an expensive specialist doesn’t really pay off.

Specialists will pay off best in large organizations where there is high demand for the specialized work. The more specialized the work, the more valuable someone doing that work quickly and expertly will be.

As the hiring manager, you want to ask, “How busy can I keep this person with their specialized work skills?” If the answer is 100%, a specialized UX professional will be a great deal. Once the number gets lower, it becomes questionable. At this point, a generalist becomes more appealing.

Conditions Favorable to Generalists

When your project work is all over the board and requiring skills from many different disciplines, you’re better off with a generalist. The broad skill sets of generalists allow them to switch quickly.

The best generalists will tackle a complicated interaction design problem on Monday, conduct thorough user research on Tuesday and Wednesday, help another team with their information architecture on Thursday, and sketch out some new page layouts on Friday. Their skills are not just within the specific disciplines, but also in understanding how to switch gears quickly and take on new projects.

Generalists pay off in fast moving organizations with a high-pressure fire hose exuding out small, targeted projects. The fast pace and variety of the work will energize a talented generalist, who brings value by connecting the disparate projects together to create common threads and elements.

When you’re wearing your hiring manager hat, you’ll want to look at the history of your project work. It’s valuable to take an inventory of the skills that your team needed to complete each phase and deliverable. How much of each project was information architecture? How much was interaction design?

The Passion Factor

As you review any candidates applying for the job, you’ll want to look at their previous work experience to see whether they specialized or generalized. If the majority of their projects focused in the particular specialty you’re seeking, then they could be the specialist you’re hunting for. If you’re looking for a generalist, then you’ll want to seek out those folks whose previous work demonstrates a wide breadth of experience.

You’ll also want to see where the candidate’s passions lie. Is a specialist candidate in love with their specialty, craving to learn even more about it? Is a generalist candidate wild about the variety of work, eager to apply their wide range of skills? If you can’t find the passion in their choices, they may not be the best candidate for the job.

UX Generalist or Specialist? It Depends

If you discover your work requires a spread of skills that’s constantly shifting around, then you’re in better shape hiring a generalist. If there’s a core group of skills that’s in constant demand—enough to keep a full time person busy doing that one thing—then a specialist is likely a better bargain. Either way, you want to avoid the compartmentalist.

Midwest UX

Jared Spool will be speaking at Midwest UX, a two-day event combining inspiring talks with hands-on activities and presented by a mix of regional professionals and international experts. The conference will take place  April 9–10 in Colombus, Ohio.

We always have these thought provoking articles. And other sites always have top 10 UX books… so I thought I’d introduce some lighter material: 10 non-UX books you should read

It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be – Paul Arden

Get the book: Amazon

Without a single doubt I can say that this is for me the best book around when it comes to attitude-changing books. In ‘It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be’ Paul Arden tells a simple, yet powerful story about the importance of doing what you believe in. It explains his attitude and beliefs when it comes to wanting to be the best in what you do. Like the back cover says, it’s “a pocket ‘bible’ for the talented and timid to make the unthinkable thinkable and the impossible possible.”

For me the best quotes in the book (I have tried them and they worked) are:

• “Do not seek praise. Seek critisism.” – because when you seek critisism you are able to improve;
• “It’s all my fault” – only by not pointing to others, but by making mistakes your own are you able to solve problems;
• “Do not covet your ideas” – share your ideas and more will come back to you.

Yotsuba&! – Kiyohiko Azuma

Get the book: Amazon

Each time an intern of mine leaves the company I give him or her a copy of Yotsuba&! Why? Because the stories in the book are a reminder that we are not the user…

Yotsuba&! is a manga series from Japan about a little girl with green hair called Yotsuba. As a reader you follow her around while she discovers the world. You see her go to a festival for the first time, see what she thinks of a washer and many other things. Her innocence and direct response to these things are for me a great reminder that we as designers are not the user and must always design for both the experienced and first time users. And besides: the stories are fun to read.

By now there are a total of 8 manga books published with the stories. They are available in English and are definitely worth your time.

Blink – Malcolm Gladwell

Get the book: Amazon

People make decisions all the time, but what we don’t know is that many of them are made by our subconscious. In a split second it’s possible for us to make great decisions, while our conscious decisions that follow afterwards can be wrong. In this book Gladwell takes us through a series of interesting stories while making slowly making his point about these subconscious decisions. One of the best examples he gives: a museum buys an extremely expensive mummy after months of deep analysis. But the first second an expert sees it he gets the feeling that it is a fake. After a long period they find out that it is in fact a fake mummy.

The book builds up to a theory that Gladwell calls thin-slicing. According to the author it is all about reducing the amount of information so that an easy decision can be  made. By picking out the slice that is relevant to you (with your specific expertise) it is possible to make decisions in a blink.

Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino

Get the book: Amazon

Invisible Cities is a book that is experienced, rather than read. Not in an expansive, descriptive way – the novel is a mere 166 pages – rather, as if Mozart had been a writer. Taking place as a series of conversations between the explorer Marco Polo and emperor Kublai Kahn, the book has the feeling of the state of mind between dreams and reality – evocing deeper meanings without ever being too clever about it  (though apparently the structure of the novel is very clever indeed, employing such techniques as the Fibonacci sequence and sine waves). We’re never entirely sure if the cities that are talked about – the titular Invisible Cities, Cities and the Dead, Hidden Cities – are ones that Polo believes he has visited, or fables for the grumpy emperor.

If I had to suggest a book that captured what magic was, it’d be this one.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat – Oliver Sacks

Get the book: Amazon

Just as truth can be stranger than fiction, the workings of the human mind can be more engrossing than any novel. ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat‘  brings together case studies (but think observations rather than papers) from neurologist Oliver Sacks‘ patients into an engaging insight into the effects of maladies of the mind – the title comes from a patient with visual agnosia (unable to recognise faces, he once mistook his wife’s head for a hat), while other interesting cases include synaesthesia and priopreception.

While Sacks has written many other interesting books that give the layman access into psychology, this remains my favourite because of its range of studies (his later books tend to focus on one subject, such as music).

Enchantment – Guy Kawasaki

Get the book: Amazon

How come that companies like Apple are able to create such enchanting products while others fail? How can one person with the same message get agreement from a crowd while another doesn’t even get their attention? In this book Guy Kawasaki explains to us the power of enchantment, which is “the art of changing hearts, minds, and actions.”

Through many different examples Kawasaki shows us what it takes to become an enchanting person. He gives tips about the clothes you must wear depending on the people you interact with. The stuff you say and moments you can swear and get away with it. And he jumps into the use of social media, where presentations, Twitter and e-mail are great push technologies and Facebook, Youtube and LinkedIn are pull technologies to pull the crowd in.

A very fun book to read that will not make you enchanting in an instant, but it will definitely put you on the right track.

Fun fact: did you know it took 260 designers to come up with the book cover? Check the story behind Enchantment’s cover.

101 Things I Learned in Architecture School – Matthew Frederick

Get the book: Amazon

We know like nobody else that we can learn much from other fields, among which archicture must be one of the most inspirational. So can you imagine what a wealth of knowledge is packed in this tiny book? Matthew Frederick wrote down no less than 101 learnings that he wants to share with us. He presents each thought with a short description and one image, making it very easy to scan and function like a little book filled with zen.

In the book he jumps from one level to the other, describing things about drawing techniques, ways of thinking, presenting, and of course how to create better architecture. And a lot of the ideas in this book are very usable for any designers. It absolutely inspired me the first, second and third time I read this book. Some of his learnings:

• An effective oral presentation of a studio project begins with the general and proceeds toward the specific;
• A static composition appears to be at rest;
• A dynamic composition encourages the eyes to explore;
• An architect knows something about everything. An engineers knows everything about one thing;
• Properly gaining control of the design process tends to feel like one is losing control of the design process.

Usability is often viewed as being inherently risk-averse, and even at odds with innovative ideas. The usability practitioner seeks to meet users’ expectations – or “mental models” – eliminate surprises rather than capitalize on them, and follow standards that provide consistency with outside interfaces. User experience designers employ design patterns that have been proven over time, and utilize prototyping tools that encourage the use of established pattern libraries. User testing also tends to focus on the first use, making it very difficult for seemingly innovative ideas to beat out the familiar and immediately recognizable user interfaces that employ well known design techniques.

As if to prove the point that usability hampers innovation, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been quoted suggesting that the company best known for it’s innovative products shuns market research and doesn’t involve users in the design process. It seems as though these quotes are often misused to suggest that Apple doesn’t perform user testing (which they certainly do), but the underlying assertion remains: don’t listen to users because users don’t know what they want.

Whether UX practitioners care to admit it, many of these claims are true. UX professionals don’t tend to be the greatest advocates of innovation, and our designs are often limited to what others are doing and the depth of our pattern libraries. These are the side-effects of lazy design, however, and not the nature of User Experience. User Experience designers have a unique opportunity to become the facilitators of holistic design and the advocates of innovation. By combining traditional user-centered activities with a greater emphasis on creating engaging designs we can bring usability into alignment with innovation in the design process. Here are some thoughts on how:

Changing Self-Image

We can come up with innovative products with a UCD approach.

Practitioners often view themselves as champions for the end user, defending helpless users from the villainy of miscreant designers and developers who would have them jump through flaming hoops to accomplish a task. While being an advocate for the end user is a noble cause, a broader view of responsibility to the user can produce superior results.

User Experience can no longer be just about ease of use, counting clicks, and conforming to standards; we as practitioners need to become the architects of beautiful user experiences. We can no longer just evaluate design, or even just create good design ourselves, we have to be able to foster user-centered creativity in our project teams at large to witness a truly user-centered experience come to life. Beautiful experiences start from the moment your user hears about your product and includes everything from your marketing message to ease of use, engaging interactions, and emotionally enriching design.

Apple can sell products with the same function and specifications for 20% more than competitors because they’ve created such an engaging holistic experience. We have to see the big picture, and if we don’t, someone with a wider vision will turn out an innovative idea that will send us to the back of the unemployment line.

Get to Know Your Users

Whether you choose to conduct marketing research or not, few will question the notion that we need to understand users to design for them. As Nico Macdonald suggested in Beyond human-centered design? “Understanding users more completely permits design creativity to be focused where it will have the greatest impact, leading to more innovation, not less.”

True, Steve Jobs swears off focus groups and is said to be fond of Henry Ford’s quote “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse,’” but does that mean user-research holds back innovation? While there is certainly some validity to the notion that users rarely think far beyond small alterations to preexisting solutions, focus groups are clearly not the shining example of user-centered design techniques.

Users will often say something that is immediately contradicted by their actions, and any good user researcher knows to pay greater attention to what the user does than what they say. It’s also the researcher’s responsibility to try to understand the disparity. Since focus groups strongly focus on what users are saying, with no validation by actions, this probably isn’t the best technique to employ in most cases. Other user-centered techniques are more appropriate for strengthening an understanding of a user base.

Ethnographic studies (such as contextual inquiry) and user personas are well suited to embolden innovative design. By watching users interact with interfaces in the context of their own home or workplace we learn a tremendous amount about them. These ethnographic techniques also help us to understand process flows comprehensively. By understanding these flows at a high level, user experience practitioners can identify opportunities to break down and rebuild a new process flow that forsakes the vestigial practices that have compounded over time, and brings in those missing elements that users find ways to incorporate on their own.

Ethnographic studies and user personas are well suited to embolden innovative design

Furthermore, if we take ethnographic data and create user personas, we can help proliferate a user-centered thought-process throughout the development team. A user focus needs to persist in all aspects of an organization, and personas create a shared understanding of who the user is and initiates thinking for those end users.

Place a greater emphasis on design

Probably the most unfortunate aspect of user testing is that a significant segment of the User Experience community has operated under the belief that any design when placed in front of users can then be evolved into an ideal solution. This notion often leaves projects with very little time allocated to up-front design, and quality suffers for it. The initial prototypes that are created are not well thought out and do not include innovative concepts, and in cases where multiple prototypes are being tested, they are often too similar to each other to provide any significant user data. Truly innovative design takes time, a lot of thought, and a variety of unique perspectives.

In order to change this practice user experience professionals and project leaders need to identify the importance of innovation in a design, and allocate sufficient time and resources to dreaming up innovative concepts. In Innovation by Design, Gerard H. Gaynor comments, “When brainstorming sessions deal with a new product or process they require extreme preparatory work, followed by a three-to-five day immersion session, and by subsequent evaluation, reexamination, and redesign sessions.” Innovation isn’t always going to be a priority, and won’t always be justified in a time or budget sensitive project, but for many interfaces including time for innovation is the difference between being a short-sighted follower and an industry leader.

In order to change this practice user experience professionals and project leaders need to identify the importance of innovation in a design

As Gaynor suggests, brainstorming sessions require extensive preparation to be effective. All too often visioning meetings get caught up in circular conversations, focus too much on altering current designs, or veer off course. A good plan is essential to draw out creative concepts and keep discussion away from current design problems and fixes.

Dream. Doodle. Design.

After dreaming up several potentially innovative concepts it’s important that UX designers avoid jumping directly into prototyping tools that utilize pattern libraries. At Interaction 11 Tim Wood aptly referred to pattern libraries as “the clip art of interaction design.” Working from established patterns is clearly not going to promote innovative designs, so rather than start your design in Axure, iRise, or Balsamiq; start by whiteboarding, doodle ideas out on a piece of paper, and when a concept is sufficiently developed, then dive into prototyping tools.

Draw innovative ideas from everywhere

Another commonly held belief that persists in the User Experience community is that interaction design belongs only to UX designers. The suggestion is that users are not designers, and should be curbed away from offering design ideas in testing. While this thought is accurate to a degree (for the reasons stated previously) it often devolves into an arrogance in design, or even territorial defensiveness. Innovation is inspiration, and inspiration can come from anywhere.

According to Eric A. von Hippel, 77% of scientific instrument innovations come from users. This is a staggering statistic that really calls into question the idea that a facilitator of user testing should shut down any design talk by the participant. This indicates that testing facilitators need to stay open-minded when it comes to users and design ideas. A test session can certainly be derailed by a user focusing click-by-click on altering an interface, but that doesn’t mean a facilitator can afford to shrug off all user-lead design ideas.

Developers also have a place in the creation of innovative ideas. Often times the people who build the products are the ones to think “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and can be an incredible source of innovative concepts. A good developer is going to be excited about working on something unique and engaging as well, and if involved in brainstorming and user testing, can become incredible advocates for user-centered design. Involving developers in the process and respecting and nurturing their ability to innovate will again move towards user-centered thinking from the entire project team.

Summary

While user-centered designers haven’t always been the greatest advocates for innovation there is incredible potential for UX professionals to become the champions of innovation and the leaders of holistic design. User Experience practitioners are in a unique position to reach out to users and across silos in pursuit of a beautiful user experience.

Furthermore, while innovation can come from anywhere only User Experience practitioners are equipped to evaluate whether a user population is willing to adopt an innovative idea. Innovation is inherently risky, and Usability can mediate that risk through testing.

Perhaps greater consideration needs to be given to how innovative ideas are evaluated in order to avoid focusing on the first use, but there is a place for User Experience in an world where innovation is king.

Touch screens allow you to touch anything on the screen, but what you’re touching is only a flat screen. If the object you touch has a height, the user interface will be dramatically changed. You can feel an object (half) reproduced on a flexible surface. Even if it’s not rendered fully in 3D, the feedback you get will be completely different from touch screens. So I came up with a concept called the FiiL.

Not a fake slider on a flat screen, but a realistic toggle switch can be used. Hopefully that click feeling can be realized too.

Buttons are now real buttons that you can feel the height of. You also feel the pressure when you push it.

Not leveled ground can be instantly scanned and rendered on the screen, which must be helpful for visually disabled people. Outdoor signage can also be instantly scanned and the braille is created on the screen.

In the physical world, you always get this type of physical feedback. So if we really want a user interface that can be truly intuitively understood, why not make it tangible?

With their February 24^th revelation of more features in the upcoming OS X Lion operating system, Apple may have taken its first steps toward an unfamiliar future… a future in which the file system does not exist.

Credit for this observation goes to Mike Rundle, who tweeted about being able to imagine “a future in which the Finder does not exist”. Documents would be associated with the apps that created them, like on the iPad. Mike went on to describe his vision in more detail, a vision in which users simply have apps. “Documents associated with them appear magically. Presto.” While this might sound like some kind of user experience utopia, I have a grave concern that eliminating a file system in this manner misses a huge audience.

Us.

While opening Pages to work on the family newsletter might make sense for casual home users of a computer system, it does not make sense in a professional context. In the professional world, we work on projects. Projects are composed of many different types of files. And yes, we might have the same apps open all day, but do we want to be forced to duplicate a hierarchy of information in every single application?

No.

Besides, “projects” are just one type of organizational scheme. As a user experience designer, I’ve seen a lot of professionals in other fields organizing a lot of stuff in a lot of different ways. So even attempts at inter-app organization around the concept of a project, such as Microsoft’s Project Center, are not effective replacements for an infinitely flexible organization scheme like simple folders.

Some Wheels Need Reinventing

The conversation that Mike’s comments sparked led us both to the conclusion that we still need a high-level organization system of some kind. And that is the challenge. It’s a challenge because that problem has already been solved by the file system. The challenge is to solve it better.

At Interaction11, Tim Wood called for designers to reject the “complacency artifacts” of the past, design patterns that have lost relevance in the modern world but continue to be used simply because that’s how things are done. He encouraged us to be bold enough to reinvent wheels that need reinventing, and that’s exactly where we’re at with file systems.

Gestural user interfaces, effortless portability, and ubiquitous network access… All these things and more are redefining how people interact with technology. UX designers need to recognize this and push themselves beyond the limits of our vision. Yes, we absolutely must continue observing people interacting with technology, analyzing those interactions, and synthesizing solutions that work in context. But what’s even more important now is that we rely on our raw creativity for that last part. There are old problems out there that need to be solved in new ways, and the file system is one of them.

——
Header image courtesy of Tim Wood.

Well, although cognitive scientists probably wouldn’t use the term “mind control”, they wouldn’t disagree that while we interact with physical elements of our environment, our brains are performing what’s known as embodied cognition, a sneaky sort of intuition that drives how we feel and behave and is breaking down century-old mind/body link claims with a vengeance. It may seem incredible to imagine that the boring coffee mug you held this morning while chatting with your kids, or the clipboard you held while filling out that interview this afternoon, were actively priming your behavior and emotions. How could these static, boring objects change the way you feel and act towards others? Well, fortunately there is a wealth of new research to back up these bizarre claims. While uncovering this research, I couldn’t help but think about how the design of everything from consumer products to education, could be transformed by the notion of embodied cognition. And so I dove into the ever-overlapping worlds of design and cognitive science once more, this time to unearth more about what it could mean to design with embodied cognition in mind, at the very least subconsciously.

The Research

Yale University’s John Bargh is among a small but international group leading the charge to understand embodied cognition and its behavioral priming capabilities. Bargh recently co-authored a paperfor the journal Science documenting the dramatic power of the sense of touch, when paired with the brain’s abilities to affect how the world is viewed. Bargh’s team found over a series of two studies that subjects:

• who read a passage about an interaction between two people were more likely to characterize it as adversarial if they had first handled rough jigsaw puzzle pieces, compared to smooth ones.
• sitting in hard, cushionless chairs were less willing to compromise in price negotiations than people who sat in soft, comfortable chairs.
• judge other people to be more generous and caring after they had briefly held a warm cup of coffee, rather than a cold drink.
• holding a heavy clipboard while interviewing job applicants took their work more seriously than their interviewing counterparts holding light clipboards.

Considering that none of the subjects in any of the experiments were told they would be tested on how they react to their physical environment, it’s all the more amazing that while their conscious focus was on a very specific task, their subconscious was deciding how they should feel towards literally everything around them, based on literally everything they were interacting with at a given moment, including the jigsaw puzzle pieces, the chairs, the cup of coffee, and the clipboards. An independent Dutch study titled “Weight as an Embodiment of Importance” dives even deeper into the notion of physical characteristics affecting abstract psychological concepts. Focusing on one concept, weight, the study found that people deal with the abstract concept of weight in an analogue way to how they deal with the physical characteristic of weight; they invest more effort. The study showed that weight, the abstract conceptleads to:

• greater elaboration of thought
• greater polarization between judgments of strong versus weak arguments
• greater confidence in one’s opinion

while weight, the physical characteristic, as in physical objects:

• require higher energetic costs to move or pick up
• have a greater impact on people’s bodies
• require more effort, in terms of physical strength and cognitive planning
• cause people carrying weight to judge distances to be greater and hills to be steeper (than those who do not carry the weight or who carry less weight)

A Linguistic Perspective

As groundbreaking (and awesome!) as this research is, it’s worth providing a bit of background in similar thinking, albeit purely linguistic as opposed to physical. In 1980 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published Metaphors We Live By, a seminal work that suggests that metaphors not only make our thoughts more vivid and interesting but that they actually structure our perceptions and understanding of the world around us:

“The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor. But our conceptual system is not something we are normally aware of. In most of the little things we do every day, we simply think and act more or less automatically along certain lines. Just what these lines are is by no means obvious. One way to find out is by looking at language. Since communication is based on the same conceptual system that we use in thinking and acting, language is an important source of evidence for what that system is like.”

Lakoff and Johnson proposed a new recognition of how profoundly metaphors not only shape our view of life in the present but set up the expectations that determine what life well be for us in the future. While they may have limited their research to the notions of using physical embodiments as metaphorical communication tools, Lackoff and Johnson’s link to current day embodied cognition research is undeniable. In fact, the Dutch study notes that weight is a metaphor for importance in many languages, including English, Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese, and that people:

• ‘weigh’ the value of different options before making a decision
• ‘add weight’ to place emphasis on important ideas
• judge opinions as ‘carrying weight’ if the source is considered knowledgeable or influential

Lakoff and Johnson discovered that we use embodied metaphors, such as weight, to tie abstract concepts and emotions to physical objects and environments, they just didn’t realize that these very same physical objects and environments are actually driving human perceptions, emotions, and behaviors. Lawrence Williams, who helped design the warm coffee cup experiment with John Bargh says “it’s no coincidence that we use the same word — warmth — to describe both a physical and an emotional experience. Somewhere in the brain, those two sensations are linked,” he says. Williams and the Dutch study both allude to the idea that embodied cognition could be developed early on in life – either starting in the womb (where the child would find love, comfort, and physical warmth), or at least in early childhood development.

A McLuhan Perspective

The notion of a designed thing performing a kind of hypnosis on its user would be nothing new to Marshall McLuhan, writer of the ever poignant if too often quoted “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” Author of the 1964 ground-breaking manifesto, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan was a purveyor of radical media theory such as the subliminal effects of what he refers to as “the medium”. Advocating that by by too narrowly focusing on the content, we are blinded to the actual character of “the medium” including its psychic and social effects. Bringing this into the realm of designing with embodied cognition in mind, take the electric light bulb as a classically referenced example. Upon initial consideration, the light bulb might be thought of as a product as opposed to a medium, however McLuhan would propose that the light bulb provides light, which greatly affects the perceptions and emotions of the people for whom the light bulb provides the light. Therefore, McLuhan gives us a new lens through which to look at designed products and interactions, not as cold, static things that we act onto, but as active participants in our perceptual and emotional world.

An Anatomical Perspective

There is no denying the volatility of McLuhan’s theories, but some neuroscientists, linguists, and philosophers, emblazoned with the new research on embodied cognition, are giving him a run for his bold money. These thought leaders claim that “human characteristics like empathy, or concepts like time and space, or even the deep structure of language and some of the most profound principles of mathematics, can ultimately be traced to the idiosyncrasies of the human body.” If we didn’t walk with two legs, grasp with opposable thumbs, or communicate with modern language, they argue, we would understand these concepts in completely different ways. Put simply, the experience of being human, of having a body, specifically our own body, is intimately paired with our intelligence. And since the experience of having a body is inherently tied to the objects and environmental factors the body uses to interact with the world, I would assert that the current suite of things and interactions available to people is really what frames the current state of human thinking.

Montessori Spindle Box — combining abstract concepts with embodied ones

Embodying Cognition

I think what makes embodied cognition so fascinating is how it deals with social responses to environmental factors. The fact that those people holding warm coffee cups perceived other people to be more generous and caring, and those people sitting in soft chairs were more willing to compromise makes me think three very interesting thoughts: that we never think in a vacuum, that we never, ever, stop thinking, and that designers, some of whom may have considered metaphor as a tool to deliver an experience that users can relate to another positive experience, now have so much more to consider when designing. As for the notion of a thought vacuum, I think its incredible to consider that no matter how bleak an environment you may find yourself in, or how dull an object you may find yourself holding, these things are always influencing how you think and feel about the people and places around you. Industrial and interaction designers are perhaps more aware than most, of how many unpleasant objects exist in the world, waiting to be held or touched, poised to take over our emotions and make us judge people. Granted, in order to keep costs down and ensure that the masses can afford to buy new things, high design and quality materials are often overlooked or kicked by the wayside. But high design is not what we’re talking about here. A warm coffee mug is not better designed than a cold one; same goes for the heavier clipboard – the opposite may be true in that case, in fact. So how can the design process be informed by the notion of embodied cognition? Is it possible to design better things through a deep understanding of the human mind’s disposition for connecting abstract emotional concepts with concrete physical things? For starters, we know that the sense of touch is an essential aspect of being human – physical concepts such as roughness, hardness, warmth, and weight being amongst the first that infants develop. And if we cross reference that with the design process, which often deals with materials selection, we can start to imagine how designers could use embodied cognition as a tool, even helping young children and adults develop abstract concepts about people and relationships. At the very least, I think it’s worth experimenting to see if designing products and interactions for specific embodied cognition applications can work. Wouldn’t it be cool if, while designing a new thing, we could test for embodied cognition affects in potential users? Want to know if your new laptop inspires greater confidence (with the opposite sex, let’s say) in potential owners? Slip it into one of John Bargh’s studies, give half the test group your new computer and the other half the competition’s machine, have them chat online with a blind date and collect data. Imagine what you could learn about users’ reactions to the physical characteristics of the laptop – the feeling of the keyboard, the weight of the metal body, the glossiness of the screen, the auditory feedback when you click. Testing for these things using embodied cognition experiments could become a new product development research standard. But what if using embodied cognition as a tool in the design process could extend beyond testing for emotional and behavioral responses to new products and services? What if designers could create interactions and products that enhance the ability to learn and memorize? Well, it turns out this may be possible. New embodied cognition research, aimed at identifying the value of physicality in education revealed that:

• children can solve math problems better if they are told to use their hands while thinking.
• stage actors remember their lines better when they are moving.
• subjects asked to move their eyes in a specific pattern while puzzling through a brainteaser were twice as likely to solve it.

Imagine using embodied cognition principles to transform education, shifting the focus from static reading, writing, and reciting to movement and simulation. Imagine if rehabilitative medicine specialists could use their understanding of their patients’ embodied cognitive abilities to help them recover lost skills after a stroke or other brain injury. This research proves that designers can use a knowledge of embodied cognition to re-investigate and invent new, more successful physical tools and interactions for a variety of applications. Designers could perhaps think beyond traditional ergonomics in the sense that we design things that fit the human form, that feel good to hold, to consider “cognitive ergonomics”, designing things that fit the human mind, that feel good to think about, or that make us think “nice” thoughts. Armed with a greater understanding for human inclination to embody emotion with physical metaphor and the ability of physical things to affect human perception and emotion, designers could take on the challenge of cognitive ergonomics. To figure out how to design for the mind, not just the body. After all, as Bargh points out, “The old concepts of mind-body dualism are turning out not to be true at all”. Altering the physical condition of the body affects how we perceive and understand, even for concepts that we think are nothing but metaphors. Our brains are intrinsically linked to our bodies and the relationship is an organic one. We think with our bodies and our brains. So let’s design things that embrace that link, that feel good to think about, that take the cognitive rough edges off, hone them down, and smooth them out. Let’s redesign our physical world with embodied cognition in mind.

Additional References:

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy NPR: Study Links Warm Hands and Warm Heart Boston Globe’s Report on Embodied Learning Touch and Gender Stereotypes (Psych Central) —— Coffee image CC by cogdog, Montessori Spindle Box CC  by 54mama,