Print and digital: even now, commonalities

My background is print. However, this still has a lot of use in terms of the web (for Western audiences, at least). For example, research on users of digital text draws parallels between reading in print and reading on digital devices. In the West, we read top-left to right, and then down the left-hand side of the page. In print, the most important items are put in the upper-left corner, and we in the West read web pages in the same way. We have also been culturally conditioned to look for captions under images, and to respond to color more than to black-and-white.

Other people I know who’ve come from this route

My friend Bill Dorman made the switch from print to digital. Bill and I founded a literary magazine that lasted a year before he moved cities and began to work for one of the first magazines to review web sites. After that magazine folded, he transitioned into writing on-line copy, then SEO copy, and finally IA, taxonomy, and hierarchy. Bill now works freelance in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

What Did I Do

I began my writing career at my college newspaper (The Alestle at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville). The editors there taught me to write. After that, I published freelance for a few years, even starting my own magazine for year. After that, I moved into the business side of print with sales, sales management, and market research. Later, I worked in digital publishing with a national call center. I updated content both for a customer care intranet and for the company’s first Internet Web site.

Why I Did It

I always wrote strong prose and began writing for the college newspaper. Moving into print was a natural progression. Later, I moved into the business side of print. After I taught public school for a time, I explored places that I could find a new niche and I think that UX is a high growth market that is currently underserved, at least by UX experts.

How I moved into UX

I spend some time teaching public school and when I explored ways to move back into the private sector, I realized that UX was a growth industry. Also, many in UX have technology backgrounds, even though the research was suggesting that users reacted to web pages in ways similar to print pages. I am currently working as a freelance UX consultant with small businesses and not-for-profits that do not have a large budget for full-fledged UX projects.

What I Bring to UX from It

With my marketing background, my first thought is the customer—called the user in UX. One thing that surprises me in the UX culture is that the focus on the user is still being sold as the most important thing. In fact, I recently read a forum post that said to move into UX, one has to shift perspective to the user. This suggests to me that the focus on the user is not completely ingrained in UX culture. No one in marketing would say that to move into marketing one has to begin to focus on the customer: that’s given. I bring to UX design teams a complete focus on the customer/user. (I have to admit, I prefer the word customer.)

Another thing that I bring is a first-step approach to content over design. Much of the current writing on UX focuses on shifting the UX design first to the concept of the content and lastly to design of the look. Print publishing always begins with concept and then content first. The design is always focused on making the content more accessible. Good design surrounds the content, not the other way around.

What I’ve had to Work On

UX if filled with jargon that I’ve had to learn. There is also a large amount of technical aspects, mostly programs that are great tools for UX teams. Also, though many in the UX world say that UX is not design, many UX professionals have design or other technical backgrounds, and most UX job postings require technical backgrounds. My experience is in writing and marketing, not coding. I do have some HTML skills but not enough to sell my skills as an HTML expert. Given all of this, I have had to go back and learn some technical skills so that I can at least interact with designers and others on the backend of UX design.

Tips for Those Making the Move

A quick survey of UX job posting suggests that employers are still looking for designers. For a marketer, especially a print marketer, you’ll have to show that you bring concepts and processes to the table that others simply don’t have. Also, you will have to bone up on the technical aspects, especially the tools that are most related to marketing (A/B testing, eye tracking, mouse tracking, etc.) Don’t try to compete with designers unless you already have lots of design experience.

 For a marketer, especially a print marketer, you’ll have to show that you bring concepts and processes to the table that others simply don’t have.

What I’ve Found about Moving into UX

Most UX is outsourced unless it’s a very large company  (and even then maybe not). Even in the outsourced industry, many UX consulting companies outsource those projects to freelancers. So, a corporation may hire UX consultants for a site redesign, and then UX Consultants may contract with a wireframe expert, a testing expert, and so on. Be prepared to hustle for work.

Also, UX is a generic term for anyone who works on design. I’ve found that a number of designers will claim UX as a proficiency, even though a short conversation shows that he or she relies solely on individual judgment. The market right now equates page design with UX. So when you begin talking about thinking through ideas, testing, taking time, and so on, many in the UX field and many UX customers may not understand or even think that a marketing-based process is important.

Image NC-CC by martinaphotography

What caught my attention was how the writer reflected upon the social impact and relevance Sassoon had made through design:

Instead of styles that took an hour to blow dry, women [and] men could have stylish functional, yet beautifully designed haircuts that didn’t require half your morning to style. He did this by putting the emphasis on the process and technique of cutting hair, clean sectioning, precise geometric shapes, fastidious attention to detail and an awareness of shape, texture, tone and form that was unheard of before then.

This also came at the time of the “sexual revolution” of the mid 60′s when women started to aspire to something more that cooking and cleaning, they wanted the same freedoms that men had enjoyed, careers, independence and their own lives, laborious and bloated hairstyles had no room here.

In some ways, it didn’t matter what “specific” technique or process Sassoon used to create the look. It was the idea behind the work that made the difference. Or to put it in an analogy closer to home, it doesn’t matter if one device has a touch screen or not – it’s what one chose to do with it to change people’s lives.

It also points out how society has a way of proclaiming their latent needs and desires of the time (in this case, women wanting greater autonomy), and how observing and understanding society as a whole has a direct relationship with design. We would do well to look beyond just the digital world.

Last month we featured images from our travels to Austin, New York City and Dublin. This month we are looking much closer to home and finding ponderous interactions and objects within a few miles (and sometimes feet) of our front doors.

Why we can’t have nice things

My local cafe offers a small selection of lovely creams and lotions on the back of the toilet tank. I react thusly: “Ewwwww.” It’s one thing to put this in your home bathroom, or maybe in your office, where there’s a known and finite set of users. But this is a cafe along the highway. You don’t know who else has been using it, touching it, or not-washing-their-hands-and-touching-it! Or worse, I’ve seen some of the people that come in there and I do know who’s been touching it. Suffice to say that I do not want to be sharing cosmeceuticals with them! It’s the tragedy of the commons in the coffeeshop toilet.

Hooked on a feeling

The fitting rooms in Old Navy have labelled hooks to assist you in categorizing your prospective purchases. It’s what we do when trying on clothes anyway, and while it’s not a complete solution (e.g., where’s the place to put the clothes you are already wearing?), there’s something charming about how it acknowledges your process. Also, those arrows bring a real dynamic energy to a static aspect of the task. Small details, but fun.

Why use a wall?

There is not a lot of graffiti in the tiny town of Pacifica, CA where Portigal Consulting calls home. I passed this while walking from the office to the ocean one day and felt annoyed, but not because of the graffiti itself. I like to think I am an enlightened urbanite who appreciates the aesthetic enhancement, self-expression, and community color that street art affords. In this case, however, I was pissed off by the placement. See that ugly grey brick wall RIGHT BEHIND the fence? Yes, that’s the one; the unadorned, badly-in-need-of-anything-to-bring-it-to-life one. I can’t for the life of me figure out why the artist tagged the pretty white picket fence instead of the menacingly misfortunate wall.

Where’s my soul mate?

I spotted this sad scene on the sidewalk in front of our office. First I thought of the little girl who lost her shoe and would be upset, perhaps even scolded by her mom. And then I thought about the mother, recalling my own mothering moments of frustration realizing that my son or I had lost something of his along the way. And then I thought of the six word story penned by Hemingway, “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.” And then I waxed anthropomorphically about the shoe and her point of view. Yes, that little shoe looks like a lonely lady; one who has lost her sole mate.

The whole account is mixture of bad design decisions mixed with human error so easily brought about by panic and stress, which is exactly what happens in a crash, of course. Gruber quotes this section, which is the biggest indictment:

A minute after the autopilot disconnected, Bonin muttered something odd: “I’m in TOGA, huh?” TOGA stands for Take Off, Go Around. Bonin was apparently so disorientated that he believed he was operating at low altitude, in a similar situation to a pilot having to abort a landing approach before circling for a second attempt. Standard procedure on abandoning a landing is to set engines to full power and tilt the aircraft upwards at 15 degrees. But Flight AF447 was not a few hundred feet above a runway. Within a minute it had soared to 38,000 feet in air so thin that it could climb no more. As forward thrust was lost, downward momentum was gathering. Instead of the wings slicing neatly through the air, their increasing angle of attack meant they were in effect damming it. In the next 40 seconds AF447 fell 3,000 feet, losing more and more speed as the angle of attack increased to 40 degrees. The wings were now like bulldozer blades against the sky. Bonin failed to grasp this fact, and though angle of attack readings are sent to onboard computers, there are no displays in modern jets to convey this critical information to the crews. One of the provisional recommendations of the BEA inquiry has been to challenge this absence.

But there are other interface problems too, including the shift from analogue to digital in which the natural affordances of dual controls are lost:

Like all other aircraft in the modern Airbus range the A330 is controlled by side sticks beside pilots’ seats, which resemble those on computer game consoles. These side sticks are not connected to the aircraft control surfaces by levers and pulleys, as in older aircraft. Instead commands are fed to computers, which in turn send signals to the engines and hydraulics. This so-called fly-by-wire technology has huge advantages. Doing away with mechanical connections saves weight, and therefore fuel. There are fewer moving components to go wrong, the slender electronic wiring and computers all have multiple back‑ups, and the onboard processors take much of the workload off pilots. Better still, they are programmed to compensate for human error.

The side sticks are also wonderfully clever. Once a command is given, say a 10-degree left turn, the pilot can let the stick go and concentrate on other issues while the 10-degree turn is perfectly maintained. According to Stephen King of the British Airline Pilots’ Association, it’s an admired and popular design. “Most Airbus pilots I know love it because of the reliable automation that allows you to manage situations and not be so fatigued by the mechanics of flying.”

But the fact that the second pilot’s stick stays in neutral whatever the input to the other is not a good thing. As King concedes: “It’s not immediately apparent to one pilot what the other may be doing with the control stick, unless he makes a big effort to look across to the other side of the flight deck, which is not easy. In any case, the side stick is held back for only a few seconds, so you have to see the action being taken.”

Read the full account on the Telegraph’s website here.

While the idea of applying gamification to UX design has been around for a while, the topic has been generating more discussions lately. Høgenhaug recently wrote a nice article in which he identifies the different elements of a game and thereby making it easier to grasp how a design might benefit from gamification (or how it can ruin it). Using some practical examples he argues that when you’ve found the right balance, gamification can aid in improving the experience, but it doesn’t sell the product.

We are not looking to transform our products into games. Instead, we are trying to learn from an industry with an extremely engaged audience. We shouldn’t blindly use these theories; rather, we should adapt them to our needs and to the platforms on which we deliver our products, without compromising with the quality of our products.

Read Peter Steen Høgenhaug’s article on Smashing Magazine

Market research is based on opinions. Opinions vary from person to person. It would be ludicrous for a political pollster to sample 5 people in an attempt to predict an election. And even if we take a single person, his or her opinions will change over time, depending on what’s in the news, the other experiences they have, and how we phrase the question.

In contrast, user experience research is based on behaviour. Behaviour turns out to be remarkably consistent from person to person. For example, if you watch 5 people approach a door, and 4 of them attempt to pull it when the door needs to be pushed, you know there’s something wrong with the design. You don’t need to randomly sample 370 people to draw this conclusion. You observe that the door has a pull handle, and it’s probably that that’s causing the problem. So you replace the pull handle with a push panel, and see if you’ve fixed the problem.

User experience researchers can get away with small samples because they are looking for behavioural insights, not opinions.

Read the full piece over at Userfocus: How to tell managers they’re wrong about UX research and still get hired.

In our work, we’re always looking a bit closer at what’s around us, and always trying to make sense of what we see. Of course, we won’t always have the answers, but we find a lot of value in at least asking the question. We hope you will as well.

This is not a door

When is a door not a door? When the sign on it clearly states “Do not Touch, Pull, or Use This Door. Thank You!” I came across this (not a) door during a recent fieldwork trip to New York City, where I found myself invariably studying every door I walked by because they all seemed to have great stories to tell. Sadly, this story is one of inability to fulfill one’s useful purpose. What is a door if it is not a portal to some other place; a threshold to cross? Now it is a wall, and a window. I wonder if it will be repaired or replaced or reframed as an aesthetic relic that will remain in its present location and state of dysfunction.

I wish I was flat

This television was hanging out on the sidewalk in the Mission, right here in San Francisco. I am curious who labeled this anthropomorphized electronic with feelings of inadequacy. It could have been added by a passerby; a reflective commentary on the choice by the TV’s previous owner to upgrade and abandon. In fact, a man passing me as I shot this picture told me “I love rich people, man! They throw away the greatest stuff. I got a vacuum cleaner last week that works perfect.” Or maybe the words were put there by the person who left that unsatisfying TV on the street. A “Dear John” letter from consumer to consumed: It’s not me, it’s you.

Irish fuel tanker

When visiting Dublin, I was prepared for (and delighted to experience) all Guinness, all the time. What I didn’t realize was the supporting infrastructure required to make that happen. They’ve got tanker trucks of the stuff rolling down the street to meet the demand.

Kony on the street

Just days after the Kony 2012 video went viral, hitting the national media, images of the dictator appeared as stencil art on the streets of Austin. From Facebook and YouTube, the story touched the activism (or some say slacktivism) nerve. But what meaning is implied or inferred when the medium changes? Stencil art is hip, ironic, anti-mainstream. The street art form has none of the outrage of the previous forms. Is the previously unknown Kony now accorded folk hero status?

Next to being well told and fun to watch, the principles and guidelines he talks about can be applied to much more than the (by now pretty much iconic) animated films he has been using them on. Have a look!

Back in 2002, Don Norman did an about-turn on function leading usability and claimed “attractive things work better.” This impressive chapter on visual aesthetics, expands on this claim, with examples ranging from da Vinci to the iPhone. (Also keep an eye out for the Harry Potter skins!)

It should come as no surprise that the visual aesthetics of interactive systems, both hardware and software, may affect our evaluation of other system attributes. Hence, the suggestion that “beautiful is usable” that is, beautiful systems are considered by users to be more usable (Tractinsky et al., 2000).

They also give a framework with which to think about visual aesthetics:

Framework for Visual Aesthetics

For the full entry, see the InteractionDesign.org chapter.

Each year, when the new version of Encarta was finished, Microsoft would hire an agency to design the box. Looking at the finished product, they’d try to figure out how to convince people to buy the darned thing. It wasn’t pretty. Feature checklists and yellow stickers abounded. Imagine our chagrin when the features promoted on the box didn’t match up with where we’d put the most effort. Why had we bothered to build them in the first place?

For all the details on the excercise you’ll have to read the article itself, but here are the main steps:

1. Create a marketing launch page templatee with one headline and three subheads (12 words each);
2. Gather examples of launch pages;
3. Get others to help and include product managers, engineers, and anyone else who’s opinionated;
4. Set the stage, show the examples, and give people 15 minutes to individually brainstorm or mind-map their ideas;
5. Write the headlines by givinge veryone two or three blank templates;
6. Silent critique the work, because launch pages have to stand on their own in the real world;
7. Start designing.

Read the entire article and excercise at Design Staff.