Over the last 8 years I have seen a slew of questions on the IxDA site and LinkedIn about information regarding schools for interaction design and how do I choose a school and what not. After close to a decade, I don’t expect the questions to end, as people will always think that their take on the question is special or more relevant. So this is not an attempt to end the questions, but hopefully an attempt to aid people to think better about why they are asking and to be more specific about what they are asking for.

This post will be mostly about grad schools as almost everyone in my network asking is really thinking about grad school, so I’ll continue with that assumption.

Why do I need a degree at all?

Well this really depends. There are tons of high-ranking designers out there in the world who barely passed their BA let alone did any grad school whatsoever. But exceptions as they may be, most likely they climbed the glass escalator at a time when these degrees didn’t exist, or hell, they are just awesome. While I love the advice “Be Awesome!” I do think it doesn’t scale very well and some of us need a leg up from time to time to fill in the gaps and create new networks and design additions to our portfolio.

The best reason to go to grad school is not to break the glass ceiling (though it is a good reason depending on your area of interest). It is because you are hungry. You have a topic that you want to figure out to create a thesis out of, or you are hungry for more knowledge or skills (hopefully both).

While I understand that there is a strong voice out there advocating for non-institutional education, I don’t believe that everything is learnable in as timely a manner in a self-directed way, nor does everyone learn best without direction. And unfortunately my experience is that few senior designers out there have time/energy to dive deeply with apprentices in this day and age. Few organizations and work models today allow for it.

When you pay an institution for your education you are getting a few things put in place for you:

• Resources: tools, connections, curriculum
• Accreditation: As much as we argue about this, the truth is that parts of this system do indeed work and throwing out the baby with the bathwater makes no sense. Accreditation forces institutions to formalize and structure curriculum to map against agreed upon thresholds for assessment and outcomes. You can always surpass them, but you can’t go below them, too easily.
• A coalesced and packaged network of peers, alumni and faculty.
• A pig skin (piece of paper, possibly). While arguably important, for many types of organizations that masters degree is used as a gatekeeper to certain positions.

A very important & often glossed over reason for institutional education is the exchange between industry and education. You send us students, we create a space where we can more easily and arguably more cheaply create new knowledge. So many of today’s greatest companies came from the “incubator” of education, and many more ideas that are used by industry today as well.

Finally, many people go to get a formal graduate education because they are interested in a career in academia at least part-time. Looking at the previous issue where academia and industry are in dialog, we must assume that for this dialog to take place there can not only be students in the system but also masters and doctors (teachers & researchers).

Online vs. In person

The reality is that some people will not be able to travel to find the right program or their station in life (spouse & kids) don’t afford them the possibility of relocation and their current city doesn’t have a program that fits. So there are tons of reasons why an online program might suit you better than an in person education.

I would also say that an online education may be appropriate or not depending on the topic of study. Skills-based design programs that are trying to teach you tools, methods, and processes might work in this environment. Knowledge-based theory & research programs have even a greater chance to work in this environment. However, programs that are about teaching thinking, apprenticing applied knowledge within a studio environment have the least chance of success further if your chosen profession moves beyond digital it becomes even that much harder to emulate the studio–e.g. industrial design or even physical computing prototyping.

But let’s say all being equal. You want an HCI degree that is taught close by but also online. Would the education be better offline or online? I have the inclination to think that the portfolio of the student working offline who has access to a real professor face to face, who can work with her peers doing group projects together or otherwise gain shared knowledge and experience will be better. I say this cautiously as my own institution has some reputable (as in award winning) online programs some of which with studio work.

I personally think that in many cases a hybrid approach of both remote and in person education is probably best, though this model is difficult to fit within many institutions’ structural models and may not overcome all the obstacles that students face.

Questions to ask

While no one can tell you what program to go to, they can tell you what questions to ask the programs you are interested in and what questions you need to ask yourself.

Questions for you

• Why do I want to study?
  This question more than any other needs to be clear to you. The most popular reason is that I need a degree because hiring managers are asking for it. Ok, I can buy that, but graduate education is hard. It is a lot of work, a lot of time commitment and usually some sacrifice of financial resources, often considerable. That being said you better look a little deeper inside of yourself and find something else to inspire, engage, and energize yourself for the next 12-24 (sometimes up to 36) months of hard labor. Some better answers could be:
  • I am excited about a topic that if only I had the dedicated time I could really have fun diving down into.
  • I have come far in my career, but I am missing core skills that I could get from a graduate education. Those skills that I need are. The programs that are best at teaching me those skills are.
• What are the limitations I have in terms of resources and logistics?
  This question is pretty easy to answer, but articulating it out loud is still important. This is your technological constraints that are basically without drastic forces cannot be changed. These include:
• Money: do I have it in the bank? Can I take on loans? Do I have any white knights? Will my job help support this? Can I afford not to work?
• Location: Am I tied down to THIS spot? Can I go international (this may impact money)? Does my spouse have geographic constraints (how mobile or geo-versatile is their career)?
• Family life: married? children? older?
• When I’m done with my studies what do I want to be doing?
  Too many people go into a graduate degree not thinking about where they want to land when they are done. It’s OK that the plan you have changes during the experience, but it is really important that you go in with a plan. At minimum though you should be honest with yourself that the degree you are looking for is about you “finding yourself”.
  Something that many people don’t consider and I have hoped more would consider this is that not all masters degrees are equal. When it comes to the academic world there is something called a “terminal degree”. This is the degree in your profession that is considered the minimum for teaching within an academic institution (without justification by an accrediting body). If there is any bone in your body that is hungry to teach at an academic level please be sure you go with the right degree. In the United States this means getting an Masters of Fine Arts or Masters of Design in Interaction Design or a PhD in many of the HCI or Library Sciences.
  The other answer this question will bring up is what type of position are you looking to work in. Is it a design studio position or a research & engineering position? Answering this question will take you one way or another and there are few programs that handle both these paths equally well. I can’t think of either.
• Can I devote myself to a full-time course, or do I need to reserve much of my time for other endeavors?
  Not everyone can quit their job and study full-time (which is much more than 40-hours per week). And some programs to afford people the possibility of doing part-time studies both in person and online. I will say that online programs are much easier to do while working, and hybrid programs that require in-person class time, while offering mostly online remote learning are often the perfect balance for working students. These seem to be rare in the design community though.

Do your homework

Going to graduate school is not like going to undergraduate. Learn about the programs individually as in many cases there are issues that can directly impact your learning.

• Learn about the faculty
  What I mean by this is that your success in graduate school is tied to how well you fit with both the other students and more importantly the faculty you are studying with. In some programs you are not just studying with faculty but you are working directly for them doing their work. I realize that many think of education in our line of work as merely vocational, but even so, the topics that interest your faculty will take your work in specific directions that you may or may not want to go in.
• Learn about the industry relationships the program has.
  This will effect the types of project work you get to work on and what types of employment opportunities you might expect after finishing or even as internships in between.
• Learn about the alumni.
  Where did alumni end up after they graduated? This will most likely be the greatest networking opportunity and thus job placement resource you’ll have. Find out where alumni are ending up. You’ll most likely end up there or at least near by.

Do not look at HCI and Interaction Design and Information Architecture as comparable?

Many times I see online the question about what school should I go to to learn User Esperience and I want to cringe. I want to cringe because they’ll list such disparate programs in terms of focus of study. I know we all want to think that user experience is the same all over and that specifying anything under this umbrella is not helpful. However, this is not true at the graduate level of education. Generalization doesn’t do very well at this level of work. The purpose of graduate education is to dive deeper into a topic. The purpose of doing this is not necessarily because you will be diving in deeper in the roles of your career, but rather with depth comes breadth. This notion of depth leading to breadth is not well understood, but any good graduate program will require that someone diving deep will gain contextual knowledge of the breadth surrounding what it is they are working on. Further with depth comes wisdom and wisdom is something that can be applied broadly. Arguably wisdom is not reachable without depth.

If you do not know the difference between an HCI, Interaction Design and Information Architecture program, you might need to do some preliminary work first. Take the Cooper Practicum, go to a few conferences: CHI, IA Summit and IxDA Interaction to name a few that would help you out. It would also be pretty easy (and cheaper) to just join the different communities and see how they differentiate themselves and their practice disciplines. But in the end talking to people in person is key.

Conclusion

Having a list of programs is always a good start and there are many places to get a list of programs out on the Internet. What you can’t get (and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise they are lying) is an answer of what school to go to. This I’m afraid can only come from you. So as much as I’d love for everyone to come to my program, I would be remiss to give such advice without a thorough conversation that would include many of the questions that are above and an even deeper conversation.

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Image CC-SA2 by San Jose Library

Interaction and experience designers are often only afforded a very focused, tactical design problem to solve, but the real impact comes when you can widen that lens and solve larger design issues. But how can a designer gain this increased breadth of perspective and scope? In this article, I’ll explain how we turned a tactical hospital signage study into an exploration of the broader service experience for its visitors.

To a great mentor, this article in memorium to Sylvia Harris.

It’s not always instinctual to consider a hospital as a business, making decisions every day to manage against a financial bottom line. Perhaps we want to forget that hospitals have other interests they are balancing beyond our own care. Regardless, the business implications for a poor service experience are no different at a hospital than with any other client; in fact, they are elevated given what’s at stake: people’s health. I had the opportunity to work with a large hospital in the Northeast US on a pro bono visitor experience study. The hospital was ranked in the top 10 of US hospitals for their clinical care, but the patient services group felt that the experience of navigating the hospital – or wayfinding – didn’t match the excellence in care. The poor visitor experience was leading to late or missed appointments, which has a tremendous effect on scheduling and budget, not to mention leading to frustrated visitors, and the team wanted to address these issues through an improved wayfinding system.

Expanding Our Lens @ the Onset

We collaborated with Sylvia Harris Research & Design and Two Twelve Associates, who were in the process of redesigning the hospital branding, on the study. The focus of our work was intended to be on the tangible wayfinding system and signage. However, while working with the patient services stakeholders to solidify the project objectives, we asked them questions beyond just the wayfinding system:

• What resources do visitors use to prepare for their visit before they even arrive on campus (e.g. web site, campus maps, calling ahead)? What can improve the pre-visit preparation?
• What is the process for appointment scheduling? Who’s involved?
• Who are all of the constituents involved in the hospital service: patients, loved ones, volunteers, nurse staff, physicians, etc.? What is their role and influence in the service?
• Beyond the physical structure of the building and the signage, what else do visitors rely on to navigate the hospital?
• What are the diversity of reasons and scenarios for why someone comes to the hospital?

The exploration enlightened the stakeholders to the many facets required to create a successful visitor experience beyond solely the wayfinding system itself. We then co-created the long-term goal of the project, which you’ll notice doesn’t mention signs or wayfinding: to reduce patient & visitor stress and lateness, to ensure positive first and last impressions between the hospital and patients & visitors, and ultimately to match the excellence in care with excellence in experience.

Garnering Holistic Insights

Key sign indicating 'waiting room' is located to left of door, but not where most visitors approach (from right). Visitors walked straight past the room and asked clinical staff for directions.

Once we established the broader service lens through which we’d be evaluating the visitor experience, we needed to create a study that was equally holistic but manageable because it was a pro bono project.

To understand the interactions between the various hospital service elements, we observed for several hours the information exchange between patients & visitors and the information desk, which frequently represented the start of the on-site hospital experience. We noted the following: materials that the visitor had prepared (e.g., appointment slips were common), the request for help, clarity of directions given, comprehension by the visitor, and their general mental state. We then shadowed a sub-set of them, approximately 20, en route to their destination, noting how well they followed instructions, how they used the space and signage, and if they relied on any other resources along the way.

Doing so provided insights and recommendations beyond just the wayfinding system. For example, visitors consider all humans who work in the hospital – from security guards to surgeons – to represent the service provider, equally responsible to help them find their way. Therefore, hospital training for communicating with visitors should extend beyond just the info desk personnel. Also, the emotional aspects of being in a hospital cannot be underestimated. We frequently witnessed visitors enter a spiral of confusion about where they were, which led to them being overwhelmed and frantic, which in turn led to more confusion about the experience; the design solution – from the signage to the people – needs to not only empathize with this mindset, but help alleviate it.

visitors consider all humans who work in the hospital – from security guards to surgeons – to represent the service provider

The uninviting industrial door and fire exit (at the end of the hall) intuitively make visitors question whether they are going the right way. Signage earlier in the experience (front door) went unnoticed because of its location.

Surveys and interviews in a few waiting rooms helped us triangulate what we were observing through the shadowing exercise with the visitors’ own reflection on the experience without adding unnecessary stress or distraction to their already complex experience. While conducting these 50 interviews, we observed hundreds of interactions between the office staff and visitors. We observed confusing conversations over the phone about where they needed to go for an appointment or people showing up for their appointment, only to be told they needed to go somewhere else. No matter how intuitive the wayfinding system is, if the broader service experience and interactions among the clinical staff, the support staff, the information desk and the visitors is not orchestrated effectively, the system will continue to falter.

No matter how intuitive the wayfinding system is, if the broader service experience and interactions among the clinical staff, the support staff, the information desk and the visitors is not orchestrated effectively, the system will continue to falter.

Our last method was conducting scenario walk-throughs with six stakeholders and volunteers, giving them “tasks” (e.g., “find the Labor and Delivery room”) while we shadowed them. We asked them to articulate their behaviors and thoughts and probed with questions along the journey, which is not dissimilar from conducting a usability test. Involving stakeholders directly in the process illustrated to them first-hand what it feels like to be in a visitors’ shoes, interacting with the space, the signage, the people, and other various service elements of the hospital. Doing so also helped ensure that the stakeholders would continue to support the broader service lens we were applying to the project vs. suggesting we simply “evaluate the signage.”

Lessons for Designers

The hospital project originally intended to focus on the tangible aspects of the wayfinding system, but we very quickly acknowledged the need to explore the broader service experience of the hospital. Doing so requires a different perspective than we are accustomed to, one which does not have visitors as the ‘center’ of that experience and one which doesn’t focus on tangible design elements. Rather, it’s a decentralized, orchestrated system of elements with no single entity as the focus and one where intangible aspects – the communications between staff-visitors, the emotional considerations of the hospital context, the time it takes to find one’s way – are as important as the tangible ones.

A debate currently exists regarding service design and just how different it is from experience design. In short, if experience design is the proactive and strategic creation of a structure across interactions, channels, people, technologies, processes, objects, etc. within which you hope people have a certain type of experience, then I agree that service design has significant overlap with experience design. However, I fear that XD has become just another evolutionary definition of “usability” and “user experience” and question whether we’ve been able to successfully put the definition into practice.

A service by definition is a co-created value exchange among constituents, and the experience of that service succeeds or fails based on how well-orchestrated all of the service elements are. The burden and responsibility to design it right is deep. For experience design and interaction design professionals looking to have more impact in the design world, service design naturally affords us that opportunity because of its implicit broad and holistic perspective. Considering design problems previously thought of as tangible, focused, product-oriented experiences instead as decentralized, multi-faceted, service experiences may actually allow us the impact we aspire to have.

There are a number of elements that are common and fundamental to a solid design education. These include studio courses, a combination of methods, theory, and practice, small class sizes, and room for growth through informed trial and error. But what about producing founders, entrepreneurs who will start their own companies to drive social change through interaction design?

You’ll typically find the founder-model of education in business schools, where students end their programs with a pitch or “demo day” that displays their new idea to a group of potential investors. How about combining this with a user-centered approach to social innovation?

In this article, I’ll describe the intent of this approach we have at the Austin Centre for Design (AC4D), articulate some of the results, and offer some reflections on challenges I see our alumni — and future designer-entrepreneurs — facing as they continue to push their companies forward.

The Intent: Disruption

In a word, the intent of our educational model is disruption. At AC4D, we intend to empower our alumni to make a difference in the world, using the persuasive, thoughtful, and provocative ualities of design (or “design thinking” combined with “design doing”) as the mechanism. We feel strongly that design is a powerful force in shaping human behavior and culture, and that this force can be directed. The qualities of this discipline are largely evident and embraced in our corporations – look no further than the humanization of technology offered by Apple, and our willingness to celebrate their every new product launch. Apple asks, and elegantly answers, a question: how can we best design technology to support a popular culture and lifestyle?

But there’s another question that we ask, and strive to answer, and this question is more important: what should we design, in the first place?

But there’s another question that we ask, and strive to answer, and this question is more important: what should we design, in the first place?

The answer to this is disruptive, and controversial, for three reasons.

First, it implies that we can (and must) place a value judgment on our productive efforts as designers, and that not everything is equally worth our time and attention. Put another way, it implies that we must judge the value of a design. We’ve all likely heard that it’s “not ok to judge”, or that we “shouldn’t be so judgmental.” And if design work is judged at all, it’s commonly evaluated based on superficial qualities of aesthetics. Instead, let’s provoke our students to find their own answers to this question, and to examine the societal value of a design.

The answer may be difficult and threatening. It pokes at our careers, and for many of us, our careers are representations of ourselves. But if we recognize the power of design, and also recognize the finite length of our careers, we arrive at an interesting place – a place that demands we focus only on the most pressing, demanding, important, and critical work.
Consider that, in your career, you have about forty or fifty good, productive years to work.
Should you really be focused on creating a new UI for a thermostat? A new facade for a banking website? A new operating system for a mobile phone? Or are there other things – things that are more financially, culturally, or spiritually more valuable – that you could, and should, be doing?

Second, by questioning if all design efforts are equally valid, we force a conversation of cultural relativity, perspective, and shares values. We spend a lot of time discussing the qualities of values, morals, norms and ethics. We examine examples from other cultures, learn about and practice methods of empathy through ethnography, and discuss and debate the various methods of “designing with” vs. “designing for.” Again, these are challenging conversations. They threaten our views of a marketplace with produced goods and obedient consumers, they challenge the view of designer as rockstar or god, and they fundamentally change the skills a designer needs to be successful. If we are empowering others to design with us, the things we make, tools we use, and way we talk about our work changes dramatically. It’s not about “making the perfect thing” – it’s about providing enough tools that other people can make their perfect thing.

Finally, our initial question – what should we design, in the first place – alters the conversation about “career.” When we start to question the fundamentals of our industry and the economic system that contains it, we arrive quickly at a rejection of “corporate vs. consultancy”, “job titles”, and the other baggage of our jobs. Our students may still end up in traditional jobs, but our ideal outcome is that they go on to form their own paths by starting their own for-profit or double-bottom line enterprises. We emphasize financial independence, where students can support their operational costs and avoid the pitfalls of traditional nonprofits with their endless cycle of grants. This requires fundamentals in accounting, budgeting, and estimating demand – all skills taught in business skills, but things rarely covered in design courses. And it requires a degree of confidence, something that’s hard to teach in any program.

The Results: Four Successful Companies

Our process has been successful. In our first year, we converted four projects into companies. These are described, briefly, below.

• Patient Nudge
  After observing the limited time and resources case workers have to manage an increasingly large at-risk population, Ryan Hubbard and Christina Tran developed an online compliance and persistence tool. This tool – Patient Nudge – allows a care provider to automatically check in with a large population via SMS, aggregate results into compelling visualizations, and identify outliers in the data.
• Hour School
  Through participatory design research, Ruby Ku and Alex Pappas observed a dramatic change in self-esteem when the chronically homeless were empowered to teach something to their peers. The homeless have skills – often robust technical skills, such as information technology or medical abilities – yet are rarely provided an opportunity to utilize these skills in support of one another. Ruby and Alex developed Hour School, an online service that identifies people in your social network who can teach specific skills, and helps support the creation of impromptu classes.
• OneUp
  As Kristine Mudd learned more about the homeless teenagers in Austin through immersive research, she identified a particular at-risk group – teenage girls – as exhibiting signs of low self esteem. This lack of confidence made simple tasks – like opening a bank account or applying for a drivers license – seem impossible. She developed OneUp, an online tool that breaks down these tasks into small, manageable pieces, rewards the girls for completing these tasks, and shows them a sense of measurable progress.
• Pocket Hotline
  While conducting ethnographic research at a local shelter, Chap Ambrose and Scott Magee observed an overwhelmed and poorly trained desk attendant try to answer a variety of questions about services and operations. Through a process of prototyping and testing, they’ve developed Pocket Hotline, a distributed call center application that routes customer support calls to volunteers’ personal cellphones. They’ve spun off a variant of Pocket Hotline for the Ruby On Rails community — Rails Hotline —  which has generated some great press.

Nudge Project

The Challenges: Sustained Focus

I’m excited to see our educational model leading to success, and I hope other design programs begin to tackle some of the fundamental issues I’ve described above. But as I reflect on our first year, there’s one main challenge that I see in combining interaction design with social entrepreneurship. That challenge is on sustaining the focus, passion and interest of our students after they graduate.

Roger Martin describes the knowledge funnel as a progression from mystery to algorithm. Designers (and other passionate, curious people) look at the way things are, see a mystery, and wonder how they can unpack it, understand it, fix it, or improve it. Good businesses manage to package their efforts into an offering, and then duplicate this offering over and over and over. This emphasizes efficiency, with a focus on cheaper, better, faster. Martin notes that designers typically lose interest once the mystery is gone; for them, the most exciting and interesting part is solving the problem, not operationalizing their solution.

And this poses a problem for designers acting as entrepreneurs: how can they remain focused, passionate, and excited during the process of packaging, refining, detailing, and producing the actual offering?

Wow can designers acting as entrepreneurs remain focused, passionate, and excited during the process of packaging, refining, detailing, and producing the actual offering?

Our students ended their education with working prototypes of their ideas, and with a roadmap towards a successful commercial launch. But that roadmap requires months of hard work, always with an eye on an idealized end state and with blinders on to the churn and chaos of the world around them. And simply, this focus is hard. Very hard. Incubation efforts exist to help, and we’ve explored our own formalization of incubation. But fundamentally, this seems like the largest challenge for programs like ours, and it’s a problem I look to the community for help and support in solving. How can we better support design-driven entrepreneurs as they formalize their companies, drive towards their vision, and act to drive large-scale behavioral changes? What support structures, services, and new tools can we offer them as they pursue their dreams?

I’m proud to be a part of what’s emerging as the new design, a form of design that’s rigorous, empathetic, and magical. This new form of design helps to disrupt conservative models of commerce, and rejects assumptions related to “career path.” I hope we can help formulate community-driven guidance for the new generation of entrepreneurs, those focused on social change and on bringing innovation to problems worth solving.

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Header image CC David Roessli

One of the most interesting aspects of Google+ are the Circles. What could be the idea behind this? What’s the social function? I am trying to find out.

Twitter’s follow/follow back

Of all social tools still going strong today, Twitter’s use of the follow/follow back as a means of launching and gaining traction has been the most copied. I can’t think of a faster way to populate a new social service than to connect new members by means of following/following back. And it’s genuinely useful: users don’t have to think of who to follow — they are shown who they follow already, and asked to confirm or ignore.

The follow works so well because it is gestural. It places no obligation on the user followed to reciprocate, but is rewarding if reciprocation follows. It’s a social solution to a bit of technical awkwardness: how to initiate, invite, solicit, and communicate a connection request without doing so verbally or explicitly.

Google+ introduces Circles

It’s interesting to see, then, Circles in action these past few weeks. Circles are ostensibly a means of organizing friends and colleagues into groups that make a bit more sense of the social graph. Given that the social graph is already in many ways an imperfect and inaccurate representation of one’s social connections. (The social graph is flat. Social relationships are lumpy.)

But Google+ notifies Circle activity. What then might have been kept private becomes social. My act of adding people to circles notifies them of the fact, and the system notification by Google+ to those people in effect becomes a standardized follow notification. This works well for Google+ insofar as it quickly ramps up not just the user base, but also the activity of circling, and the connectedness of members.

Member connectedness is essential to any feed-based system. For connectedness is the filter on feeds. It’s what initiates the subscription to member activity (posts).

Ambiguity

What is perhaps unintended, however, in Google+ Circles notifications is the follower phenomenon, as well as ambiguity about the transparency of Circles. The follower phenomenon suggests to me that Google+ aims to make use of social capital, influence, popularity, and other social effects of a user base differentiated by quantity (number of followers/connections). The ambiguity around Circles utility stems from the invisibility of Circles to anyone but their author: notifications do not state what Circle I have been added to by somebody; nor do members of a Circle know about each other.

Google+ may have opted instead to preserve the personal social utility of friend grouping that seems the most obvious benefit of Circles. In which case, Circle notifications are already introducing the popularity bias that’s intrinsic to a public social follower model.

Google+ may also have intended to make visible shared Circles available, in effect offering groups. In which case, it will be interesting to see how well this works with the openness of the present feed model.

Flat social differences

Social technologies flatten social differences, providing access to people unencumbered by social boundaries and distances. To wit, Zuckerberg is Google+’s most followed user. Circles seems to have been designed to increase utility in a social networking world of easy access and flattened social hierarchy. But the reciprocity and mutuality of following/back that acts as a soft social norm in follower models commodifies relationships in the service of social capital, or popularity. So it will be interesting to see how the team navigates feature and design evolution, now that the floodgates are open on some social practices that to me, at least, seem possibly at cross-purposes.

At the BBC World Service we’ve got a user experience and design team which designs and develops news sites for the web and mobile devices in 27 languages, catering for audiences across world. In this article I will share some of our experiences with you.

A sample of The BBC World Service news sites. Clockwise: BBC Russian, BBC Arabic, BBC Chinese and BBC Brasil

The premise of digital news design

The digital news publishing cycle is too rapid for a bespoke design. Print designers create designs shaped by the news of that day. Online designers create an overall experience that is not specific to a particular item of news. The reason for this is the high frequency of change in the content. This means we design the site once, and the journalists populate the design with their content.

An example of bespoke layouts for daily news in print. Front page editions of the Israeli news paper ‘Yediot Achronot’ on the 26th, 27th and 28th of June 2011

Ultimately what the UX team produces is a palette of modules, and their associated behaviours. You could argue that this is no different to the design of most websites. That’s true, but what makes the difference is the sheer volume and variety of content types that can be displayed at any given time over the course of the day. Articles may appear as text only, or with images, with an image gallery, with video or audio. A big breaking news story is presented differently to a normal top story. And there may also be different editions to the front page – such as the weekend edition that differs in content and volume to that of the weekday. All potential displays are created and factored in as part of the design.

News site as a Bento Box

A traditional Bento box

I liken the design of a news site to that of the Japanese Bento box. There is a bounding tray and small dishes in a variety of shapes and sizes that can be arranged in different combinations. This is our site design. The food they hold is the changing news content. It is the harmony between the two, the box and the food, that determines the way we will experience this meal.

The food is the main attraction to the diner. But would it be so delectable if not presented with such finesse? To achieve this presentation the box designer has to understand the food (the content) and the diner’s needs and tastes (user behaviours).

Understanding the content – hierarchy, volume, tone

From the beginning of the design, we work hand-in-glove with the journalists. We familiarise ourselves with the various content areas, and ask editors to prioritize their importance. This yields a content hierarchy.

In addition we learn about the journalists’ production patterns to get a picture of the volume of content that will pass through the homepage during the day. For example how many top stories, how many regional, how many thematic. In most markets morning and lunchtime are peak consumption times and that’s when the team will be writing the most stories with the highest turnover.

Contact with the journalists helps us understand the tone, which we can echo in the design. Tone isn’t just the style of writing, it is also linked to the editorial agenda and user expectations and in the case of The BBC World Service, cultural differences.

The user research and competitor analysis that we’ve carried out over the years have exposed some interesting facts regarding our markets. For example we have found that in the Russian and Middle Eastern markets, the audience predominantly expects to see hard news of a serious nature. Whilst in the Brazilian market there is a strong appetite for the softer quirkier news. To reflect this, we balance carefully the density of information that is presented predominantly on the front pages of such sites. On the Russian site more ‘hard news’ headlines are surfaced in the first two folds of the page, on the Brazilian site the top folds are peppered with image galleries and ‘soft news stories’ from around the world. The nature and size of imagery along with the volume of text aid in achieving the overall perception of the nature of the content and reflecting the desired tone.

Understanding the user’s behaviours and tastes

News consumer behaviour tends to be described broadly in two ways. Users either skim or dig. Or they might alternate between the two, depending on mood and availability of time. In the morning before work a user might have little time to delve deep, whereas in the evening or during lunch-break that same user may have more time to read a full article, perhaps even a related item.

What qualities are appreciated, what tasks do users want to fulfil on a news site? Again here, statistical and user behaviour analysis tells us they like all of the following:

• To read the latest headlines at a glance;
• To see a rich variety of content;
• To know that content is fresh;
• To feel that the site is both relevant and familiar to them;
• To be able to look for news stories around a particular theme e.g. technology;
• To compare sources – seek many points of view about a particular news story;
• To experience a clear and pleasant environment to read;
• To believe that the news they are reading is delivered by a trusted source.

Delivering designs for the content and known behaviours

We have a palette of tools with which to create the Bento Box effect. Let’s look at some of them.

The grid
The backbone of any good site design is its grid. At the BBC there is a universal grid for all new sites. It is one of the components of the BBC’s recently-launched GEL (Global Experience Language). The grid is what helps create visual order. This grid is divided into 61×16 pixel vertical units to meet the BBC’s image and media player standard sizes. It can be split into two equally sized columns with a slightly wider third column (as shown below). The power of this particular BBC grid is in its ability to provide on the one hand the flexibility to present a wide variety of content, from entertainment through factual and all the way through to serious news. On the other hand it creates a visual uniformity that runs across all the BBC sites and articulates a single brand experience. Its additional remit is to accommodate standard ad size requirements.

BBC Global Experience Language grid showing two of the three grid combinations available

Clustering of information and labelling
In the news context we start of by assigning a place for higher orders of the content types as shown above. Next we get more granular in the distribution of the content types within the grid. It is based on the content prioritization that we understood from the editorial team. It is also informed by the user’s expectations, and where we want to match the patterns of competitors or express our unique offer to them.

Content hierarchy and grouping from the BBC Mundo news site

Each content group is assigned a label (excluding the top stories) that echoes the categories the site has to offer in the main navigation as well as some additional ones pertaining to the news of the day. On our sites the labels have a dual job of informing what an item or a group of items is about, and also serving as visual anchors throughout the page to enable scanning.

Example of Labelling for the thematic groupings on BBC Mundo and BBC Chinese

The combination of the layout on the grid, the treatment of content labels, spacing and imagery all create a certain rhythm on the page.

Structure – IA richness
There is a tension between the need to guide users quickly and efficiently to the specific content they want to find, and the need to expose the richness of our sites’ content. As an international provider we are faced with an additional problem: our news sites will almost always compete in a market in which there are dominant local news providers. So we need to think carefully about which and how many categories to surface, to make the site relevant to readers and to help them find content in a theme that interests them.

To explain this here’s a little user scenario: Maria wants to read about technology every day. She needs technology stories to be findable instinctively. Rodriguez wants to read any story about Hugo Chaves, wherever it may pop up. The structure should allow both to be satisfied at the same time.

For Maria, we have a set of top-level categories, such as “Technology”. The categories appear consistently in the same position, whether that is in navigation or somewhere on the main body of a page.

For Rodriguez we have a set of topics, such as “Chaves”. The topic can be appended to any story, in the same way that a tag can be appended to a story in a blog. So journalists are able to tag stories, but are limited to a controlled vocabulary unlike a blog – a controlled vocabulary that prevents sparseness of any particular topic, and also allows a governing editorial group to set the agenda.

So there is a mix between rigidity and fluidity in the composition of pages. The topic driven pages are automated whilst other pages like the homepage are ‘curated’ by the clustering of top-level categories into groups on a single page under broad themes like “Don’t Miss” OR “Features and Analysis”. This helps both wayfinding, and the surfacing of a more granular cut of themes to expose the full richness of the site: good for both Maria and Rodriguez.

Topic modules on the sites are used to expose a more granular categorization of the sites content

Typography
The most crucial part of a text heavy site is the way in which the type is treated. Technological advancement has made the control of type on the web possible like never before. The BBC’s GEL has embraced this opportunity with an ambitious set of guidelines that puts the role of typography back at the forefront of the design. Beyond decisions around font face and size, tight tracking and leading and the use of bold headers have all become part of the visual language of the sites. The employment of a horizontal baseline is used to aid with the alignment of elements and to control type setting. The attention to these details and their application is aimed at achieving a clearer stronger hierarchy and enhancing readability.

Because of the volume of information and the fact the our team works with 8 different scripts further work is done to apply it to the context of each of the news sites. Detailed work is carried out on font sizes and style to create a coherent hierarchy for headlines, short summaries, lists etc. Designers also do a meticulous job of working out tracking and leading for each of the scripts. These rules are then applied to each and every module and its many permutations: with different sized images, without an image, with related stories, and additional elements such as iconography for comments and denoting video etc. We build a full repository of modules containing every variant. (For additional details on the typography work we do see ‘BBC World Service Language Websites: user experience and typography‘)

Defining typographical hierarchy for the Burmese script

Sample of module types for the top story: with a video player and with text only

Timeliness
Time of publication is very important to news consumers. In fact many obsess over it. It contributes to a user’s opinion of the content’s credibility and relevance. In recognition of this we developed a component that we refer to internally as ‘Rolling News’. It is a module which functions like a news wire’s constant stream of headlines. It updates automatically, publishing headlines accompanied by time stamps. Clicking on a headline leads users to a short article describing the event. The module is positioned right at the top of the homepage along side the top stories of the day. It also appears on every article page.

Timeliness denoted via the ’Rolling News’ module

In addition we include time stamps on top stories for up to an hour from the moment they ‘hit’ the site.

Onward journeys
A high percentage of users enter the site through an inner article page, rather than via the homepage. For this reason we have dedicated real estate on every article page to bring out flagship content from the homepage and across the site, exposing the site’s breadth at every level. By doing so we encourage onward journeys. This approach is a recent idea. Previously, article pages had focused on exposing content that was deemed contextual to the article in question. The balancing act for designers is to retain a pleasant and readable environment whilst presenting a whole raft of additional site-wide offerings.

Article page as a mini homepage - the right hand column surfaces content from the homepage and across the site

All of this for one purpose…

In a news environment, there is ultimately one asset that the web designer has to enhance and protect. Credibility. News is all about telling a believable version of real life. A brand as well established as the BBC’s naturally goes a long way to distinguish its content from lesser-known, opinion-led publishers. But all brands are vulnerable to erosion if the presentation doesn’t do them justice. The painstaking work that goes into the BBC’s online output – the designer’s understanding of what its content really is, who its readers are, what flavours of content to mix, and the mastery of formal methods of presentation – is all part of the never-ending preparation and re-preparation of an enticing Bento box.

UXI Live 2011

Tammy Gur will be a keynote speaker at UXI Live 2011, the only UX conference in Israel, organized by UXI (User Experience Israel). It takes place between September 7th and 8th in Tel Aviv, Israel.

How can we combine sound and liquid in such a way that it’ll be fun? I came up with two different ways.

A xylophone meets a pitcher

Up until know you had to look inside a container to see how much liquid was left, but that’s over now. Just hit the container and hear the sound, listen to the pitch of when the pitcher is hit. Compare it with the pitch of the handle (working as a tuning bar) to know if it is empty or not.
 The tone of the tuning bar is the same as that of the pitcher body with no liquid inside. That way you won’t bother to open the lid while having fun.

Harmony Toast

This is a champaign glass with four horizontal lines marked on the glass. When making a toast you can change the sound of the toasting by varying the amount of liquid inside. When the champaign in both glasses are at the same level, they will make harmony notes. That way, making a toast will be much more fun and I’m sure we’ll clink the glasses more than twice.

Children need to be recognized as their ‘own’ target group with very specific abilities and needs. They have a strong purchase influence on their parents, are starting to recognize their role as consumers and also need websites with a good user experience. That’s why we need to focus on what children want, and include them in our user testing.

In 1929 Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist and philosopher, came up with the theory of cognitive development, which describes five stages of cognitive growth. Piaget used this theory to explain how humans acquire, construct, and use knowledge. And I believe that we can learn a lot from his theory. Usability is about bringing people and systems together; understanding what people know and think is an essential aspect of that. While systems change rapidly, evolution luckily happens rather slowly. So, even though almost a hundred years have passed, Piaget’s stages of cognitive development come in handy today when we are confronted with usability testing with children.

In this post I’d like to take a look at usability testing with children. Why is it so important to understand the cognitive abilities of different age groups? And what can a scientist from the beginning of the twentieth century teach us that we don’t already know? Let’s find out.

The Question-Answer Process

When you answer a question, you go through different steps from the first encounter with the question to giving the final answer. The question-answer process describes these steps. Originally, the concept derives from survey research. However, it can be applied to any research that involves questions and answers. Both social and cognitive psychology study the question-answer process as source of response effects that lead to measurement errors. There is a high chance that test results are not reliable if participants do not or cannot fulfill all of the following steps.

1. understanding the question;
2. retrieving relevant information from memory and ‘computing an answer’;
3. formatting the answer;
4. evaluating the answer;
5. communicating the final answer.

To make this a little more fun, let’s make a little experiment. Ask a colleague of yours about what he did last weekend and observe his reaction. He will think about it for a moment and then give a brief overview of the major activities he did, probably even in the correct order. Now, the next time you see a child, ask the same question and see what happens. You might be surprised of their different reactions.

The cognitive, communicative, and social skills of children are under constant development which affects the different stages of the question-answer process. Especially when questions are complex or information must be retrieved from memory, children have difficulties giving reliable answers. You see, the question-answer process is very important to consider when doing usability testing with children. You can read more about this topic in Bradburn’s article Understanding the Question-Answer Process (Bradburn, 2006).
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Growth

Piaget came up with the theory of cognitive growth that describes five stages of cognitive development. These stages offer a nice overview of the cognitive abilities from different age groups. Especially when doing usability research with children, it is important to be aware of their cognitive development. Pay attention to this lesson by Piaget:

1. Sensory-motor intelligence (0-2 years old)

In the stage of sensory-motor intelligence, researchers have limited options to investigate usability issues. Language and thought processes are very limited and coordination between vision and apprehension is only developing. In this stage, none of the five steps of the question-answer process can be fulfilled. The only possible way to research this age group is by observation or by interviewing parents.

2. Preconceptual thought (2-4 years old)

During this stage, children learn how to use and represent objects by images, words, and drawings. Children also learn to form concepts and perform mental reasoning. Furthermore, toddlers learn to speak and interact with others. In this age group, qualitative interviews that include ‘playing’ tasks can be carried-out and small focus groups can be held. However, all five steps of the question-answer process are still difficult at this age and both questions and answers must be evaluated carefully.

3. Intuitive thought (4-7 years old)

Language skills improve but comprehension and verbal memory are still limited. Both of these skills are important for step one (understanding the question) and step two (retrieving information from memory) of the question-answer process. Questions should be very simple and the words used should match the child’s language. Further, this age group is very literal, suggestible, has a short attention span, and does not yet understand depersonalized or indirect questions. Methods that can be used for doing research with children in the intuitive thought stage are; small focus groups and short qualitative interviews.

4. Concrete operations (8-11 years old)

Language develops and reading skills are acquired. However, depersonalized or indirect questions are still critical at this age and a careful research design is important for step 1 and 2 of the question-answer process. Keep it simple and be aware of satisficing. Satisficing means that children use only one heuristic to decide on an answer instead of going through the whole question. Motivation and concentration are also critical issues. For children in this age group it is very important to keep it simple, visual, and most of all fun! Methods you can user are surveys, semi-structured or structured interviews as well as focus groups.

5. Formal thought (11-15 years old)

By this age, children’s cognitive functions, formal thinking, negations, and logic, as well as their social skills are well developed. However, kids are very context sensitive at this age. This means that they might, for example, behave completely different in school than they do at home. Besides, they are easily influenced by their classmates, parents, or siblings. Social desirability plays an important role which especially influences step 4 (evaluation of the answer) and 5 (communicating the final answer) of the question-answer process. For this age group, all common research methods can be adapted but be careful with comprehension problems, ambiguity, flippancy and boredom. Again, keep it simple, and keep it fun.
From age 16 cognitive skills are adult like and age becomes a negligible factor for choosing a research method.

In short

In order to keep up with the ‘new’ and dynamic target group that children incorporate on the web, we need to focus on their specific abilities and needs. Usability testing with children is fun, but keep in mind that it can easily go wrong. For example, children might not understand your question, not know the answer or how to communicate it correctly, or simply lack motivation or concentration.

When testing with children, make sure you are aware of their cognitive, communicative, and social skills. Design your test carefully to match their abilities and ensure that you get reliable data.

Further reading
Borgers, N., De Leeuw, E., & Hox, J. (2000). Children as respondents in survey research: Cognitive development and response quality. Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique, 66, 60-75.
Greig, A., Taylor, J., & MacKay, T. (2007). Doing research with children. Chapter 9 (Ethics of doing research with children)