There are so many interesting UX books coming out that it’s hard to know which ones are worth your money. So from now on we will try and be your guide. Each month we will share with you our opinion on the newest UX books. And as a bonus we will add a classic you must have.

This month we review Card Sorting, Designing Social Interfaces, Thoughts on Interaction Design, and revisit The Inmates Are Running The Asylum.

Card Sorting

Type: practical
Authors: Donna Spencer
Publishers: Rosenfeld Media
Details: 160 pages, paperback

With this book you can learn card sorting in a few days.

Card sorting is a method for finding patterns about how people categorise content and functionality on a website. In Spencer’s book she sets out to explain how you can successfully apply this inexpensive research method. And she did a good job at this. The book is a handy guide for anybody who wants to do card sorting, ranging from beginners to people who want to do it the proper way.

Spencer splits up card sorting into two variations: open and closed card sorting. In open card sorting participants are given cards which they have to group any way they think best. This version is very useful for creating structures for new and existing websites. Closed card sorting means participants are given cards which they have to sort in pre-defined groups. This version is useful when working with new content in an existing structure. In the book she takes you through every step to make both types of card sorting work.

If I had to name one thing I would have liked to see different in this book, it would have been the focus. Right now it presents itself as the definitive guide to card sorting, but all the examples, cases, and text focus on websites and intranets. It would have been more interesting to see how card sorting can be applied in a wider UX context.

But what I like about the book is that it’s honest and practical. Card sorting isn’t presented as the holy grail in user research, but as an interesting and useful part of it. Spencer notes that if you want to do proper research you have to also use other techniques alongside this one.

Designing Social Interfaces

Type: practical
Authors: Christian Crumlish & Erin Malone
Publishers: O’Reilly
Details: 478 pages, paperback

A practical guide for anybody who is working on social interfaces.

Are you currently working on a social media project? O’Reilly have once again published a trustworthy book full of principles, patterns and best practices. You can save yourself a lot of time on coming up with ways to make it a social environment that works, as long as you are willing to follow the patterns.

The book has been divided into five parts. Each one is a collection of principles, patterns and best practices. These aren’t pre-defined categories, but overlapping themes:

1. What Are Social Patterns?: introduction;
2. I Am Somebody: focusing on the notion of self, my online identity;
3. Objects of My Desire: about the type of activity you want to encourage;
4. A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood: focusing on the social network, shared activities and interest;
5. But Wait… There’s More!: creating an open experience.

The format makes it a wonderful resource you can grab when facing a specific challenge. And I am not just saying this because I think so, but because I actually used it. In the past I’ve bought quite a few practical books that never gave me the answers I needed.

Thoughts on Interaction Design

Type: theory
Authors: Jon Kolko
Publishers: Morgan Kaufmann
Details: 2nd edition, 155 pages, paperback

Understand the story behind our profession on an academic level, but with an accessible tone.

In 2007 Jon Kolko self-published ‘Thoughts On Interaction Design’. These 1,000 copies, now known as ‘The Green Books’, have become treasured items. Fortunately Morgan Kaufmann decided to republish the book (with a blue cover) so that every interaction designer has access to this thought provoking material.

In ‘Thoughts on Interaction Design’ Kolko and several other authors explain to the reader what interaction design is all about. They dive into the history of interaction design and its relationship to engineering and design. In an almost academic, but also realistic way they explain what we do (or should do), how and why. Even though there are several books that have attempted this, Thoughts on Interaction Design is the first that explains it in a way that sticks – it not only makes me proud as an interaction designer, but also gives me knowledge to apply in a discussion.

To give you a feeling of the writing style, here is a sample from the book’s website,

Interaction designers are trained to observe humanity and to balance complicated ideas, and are used to thinking in opposites: large and small, conceptual and pragmatic, human and technical. This is not a jack of all trades. Instead, it is a shaper of behaviour. Behaviour is a large idea, and may, at first blush, seem too large to warrant a single profession. But a profession has emerged nonetheless. This professional category includes the complexity of information architecture, the anthropologic desire to understand humanity, the altruistic nature of usability engineering, and the creation of dialogue.

A must have for every interaction designer.

UX Classic: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

Type: Methods
Authors: Alan Cooper
Publishers: Sams
Details: 288 pages
Published: 1999

See where personas started – and why we needed them in the first place

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, if you’re in interaction design you know about personas. The technique burst onto the scene in Alan Cooper’s 1998 book ‘The Inmates Are Running the Asylum’.

It’s perhaps fitting that a technique that has generated so much debate is found in a equally provocative book. Cooper spends much of  ‘Inmates’ setting up what’s wrong with current products and IT culture, mixed in with a few of his own software exploits for good measure. Luckily he a gift for clear, engaging prose and memorable catchphrases such as “dancing-bearware” (it’s not that it dances/functions well, it’s that it does it at all), “software apologists”, and (my favourite) “programmers act like jocks”. Yes, it can be over-the-top, but you can’t accuse Cooper of lack of passion.

Interesting with a decade of hindsight is Cooper’s horror stories of ’90s Silicon Valley projects. He documents bad products (VCRs, ATMs), Microsoft team battles, and a Job-less Apple scraping by on the power of its brand.

Still, while this is all great, its all a lead-up to Cooper’s tour de force: personas. Developed as “a precise description of our user and what he wishes to accomplish” (p123), Cooper goes through in detail their purpose and how they’re made (for the record, he is emphatic that they’re based on research and they they’re “discovered” rather than “made”). His case study of Sony Trans Com’s P@ssport IFE still holds up today in both demonstrating the process and the final product (the other studies have dated more). How would “Clevis McCloud, crotchety [but spry] septegenarian … slightly embarrassed about the touch of arthritis in his hands” (p126) use your product?

“The Inmates Are Running the Asylum” is worth buying even for the twenty or so pages on personas – it’s not only the first example of it, but still probably the best. Beyond that, it’s a great reminder on what can go wrong in IT. The day all of the examples are irrelevant will be a happy one for interaction designers indeed.

Buy UX Books

Overpromise and Overdeliver is a book on how to design and deliver customer experiences in order to create ‘unshakable customer loyalty’. Now the title does make one think this is yet another book trying to convey a theory on how to be the most successful company in the industry, and that assumption is completely right. We’ve seen a lot of them in the last couple of years, which made me wonder; does Overpromise and Overdeliver live up to the theory it’s trying to convey, and to which extend is it applicable to design?

Just to clarify things up
When I started reading the book I assumed that ‘Overpromise and Overdeliver’ means promising a remarkable product or service, and than to deliver even more. But that is only partially right. It’s about delivering exactly what you’ve promised.

The book

The book consist out of two parts. The first one is called ‘Overpromise’, and the second (of course) ‘Overdeliver’. In part one Barrera explains what a brand overpromise actually is and how you can build one. This is where he introduces what he calls ‘touchpoint branding’: the three touchpoints associated with this. These are:

• Product touchpoints: These occur when customers interact with a product or service;
• Human touchpoints: This is the case when a customer directly interacts with the company’s employees;
• System touchpoints: These include things like return policies or a website. Basically all other points of contact between a customer and an organization.

Barrera uses numeral examples and cases to explain why and how these touchpoints influence the whole customer experience (in fact I reckon that a good 60% of the book consists out of analyzed real-world examples). It might sound a bit simple, but it boils down to the fact that all these touchpoints must be in line with an organization’s overpromise in order to be successful. You start with a remarkable product or service and than make sure that the customer always gets what you’ve promised, and what he/she expects from you.

In part two Barrera explains how you can optimize these touchpoints in order to overdeliver. In case of a product/service touchpoint the keyword is ‘buzz’. Make sure people are talking about your product. When it comes to system touchpoints he claims that they should be as invisible as possible. Think of the lighting placed within stores; you want to create a pleasant lighting situation without drawing attention to the lights themselves. Human touchpoints are a bit of a different story because human emotions are involved. Though very important Barrera also warns for overreliance on human touchpoints because of the unpredictability of human emotions. The key here is to use human touchpoints only when situations are complicated, and when flexibility and initiative are required to save the day.

Conclusion

Though it’s an interesting and easy read I haven’t had the feeling I was reading something new. That isn’t very strange when you think of the enormous amount of real-world examples Barrera uses throughout the book. Every chapter answers the question stated in the title within the first three or four pages followed by 15 to 20 pages of examples and case-studies. It’s these examples and cases that make it a pleasurable read by sometimes providing you with some inspirational insights. It’s definitely not a ‘must-read’, but if you’ve got a couple of hours to spare… read it.

Book Details
Overpromise and Overdeliver: The secrets of unshakable customer loyalty
author: Rick Berrera
publisher: Portfolio, 2004
details: 240 pages, hardcover

When I picked up this book I thought it would be a biography of Steve Jobs, and doubted whether this would make an interesting read for interaction designers. But it turns out, it’s very interesting for designers indeed. Obviously, there’s a lot of biographical information in it, but it’s not a chronological story of Steve’s life… It’s a book about Steve Jobs’ vision on products, user experience and innovation.

The introduction starts about how Steve Jobs gives as much thought to the box his gadgets come in as the products themselves. Having recently bought an iPhone myself (my first Apple product), I know Apple’s ‘unboxing experience’ is very nice. What I didn’t know is that Jobs already paid a lot of attention to package design in 1984, for the original Macintosh. This illustrates how for Jobs it’s all about the user experience and that every single aspect must be very carefully thought out. I’ve picked a few of the chapter titles to tell you something about this book. Let’s have a look.

Apple’s One-Man Focus Group

This book confirms the image many have of Steve Jobs as a dominant man who likes to control everything and who shouts at his employees. That may be true, but the other side of this coin is that Jobs is incredibly passionate about what he does and truly has a great sense for good design and what the user wants.

People don’t know what they want until you show it to them

It is mentioned that when the Walkman was developed, all the marketing research said it was going to fail, but it they went through with it anyway – and the Walkman became the biggest selling gadget ever. That’s why Jobs doesn’t believe in focus groups. He is quoted: “For something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. People don’t know what they want until you show it to them”. So Steve Jobs doesn’t need user research, because Steve Jobs is a user experience expert. At Apple, ‘the user’ is Steve Jobs. Jobs thinks like a layman, demanding his designers and engineers to make the products as simple as they can be. If he can use it, anyone can use it. That makes Apple a user centered company that never actually talks to its users. Okay, maybe Steve Jobs really is a genius who knows everything best, but I doubt that this kind of approach works for all companies. I personally believe more in open innovation: getting users involved in creating new products, and other big companies show that this works too (take a look at Google).

Perfectionism: Product Design and the Pursuit of Excellence

Steve Jobs is as much of a perfectionist as perfectionists get. It’s not right until it’s absolutely perfect. In order to make things perfect, there needs to be lots of room for iteration. At Apple, only 10 percent of the time is really spent on designing. The other 90 percent is for making endless variations, prototyping and testing, constantly tweaking and refining. This is really the core of Apple’s design process: prototype until perfection. Even the first Apple Store was prototyped: a full-size mockup was made inside a warehouse. Steve Jobs practices his keynote speeches for weeks before the presentation. Apple’s design team make lots of variations of a single design, and lay their prints out on a table to discuss them over and over again. This is something I think interaction designers should definitely aspire to do more: spend less time on design, and more on variations, prototyping and getting the details right.

Instead of adding features with each iteration, Steve will always push his team to make the products as simple as possible. That means they need to focus. And focus means saying no. That’s a very simple truth, but I think we often don’t realize the saying no part. We know we have to focus in order to make good designs, but throwing things away we put time and effort in is rather scary, isn’t it? Steve Jobs has no problems saying no. He’ll cancel projects that have been running for years, if he thinks they are not part of Apple’s core business. That’s what he did when he came back to Apple in 1997 and that focus has saved the company and made it one of the most innovative brands in the world today.

Focus means saying no. Stay focused; don’t allow feature creep

What struck me is that actually, Apple doesn’t practice ‘user experience’ design at all – at least not as we here at at Johnny Holland often talk about it. Apple doesn’t start out with the user. They don’t start out wanting to create a ‘friendly’ PC. They start with the materials and technology, trying out how they can advance the state of the art. Design for them is a craft and an art, not solving user’s problems. In fact, Steve Jobs doesn’t consciously think about innovation at all, because “trying to systemize innovation is like somebody who’s not cool trying to be cool”. He only thinks about making great products.

Total control: The Whole Widget

This is the name of the final chapter and sums Steve Jobs’ vision all up: in order to create the best customer experience, you need to control every aspect. From the hardware to the software, from the packaging to the stores, every touchpoint with the user is controlled by Apple, and eventually, by Steve Jobs. He believes this total control is the only way to guarantee stability, security and ease-of-use, of which the iPod and iPhone are probably the best examples.

At one point in the book, Leander writes about Jobs’ historic speech at Macworld in 2001 about the digital lifestyle (where the first iPod was introduced). While I was reading it, I thought ‘I wish I could look at a video of that keynote’. I then realised I had one of Steve’s products in my pocket, so I took out my iPhone, found the video on Youtube and watched what I had just been reading about, and thought to myself: ‘How cool is that? The digital lifestyle he talked about has come to life’.

Conclusion

This book is a quick and compelling read, full of interesting facts and anecdotes. Its not only about Apple, but about Jobs’ other successful company, Pixar, too. Each chapter is followed by a bulleted list with ‘Lessons from Steve’, so if you don’t like reading a lot, you can quickly distill the essence from the book from those pages.

But this book is not just a bunch of business lessons. It’s an inspirational book that hit me in my designer heart. When I read it, I  really got a ‘I wanna be like Steve’ feeling: I admire his pursuit of excellence, not willing to compromise for quality. That’s something we designers are too often forced to do, with time and budget constraints, or clients who see it completely differently. The book inspired me to really want to put the user experience in the first place at all times and let everything else come second. Sometimes it feels like the praise for Steve Jobs is a bit too much, though. Leander portrays him almost as a god-like person. I think you need to put that into perspective and realize that Apple’s strategy is not the only way to successful products.

Whether you’re an Apple lover or hater, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in user experience.

Book Details
Inside Steve’s Brain
author: Leander Kahney
publisher: Portfolio, 2008
details: 294 pages, hardcover

Normally we review books full of design pattern or interaction logic, but this time we’re going more abstract: problem solving. As designers we face complex challenges and have to make loads of decisions, will Problem Solving 101 make this easier? Hopefully.

About the book

Problem Solving 101 was written as a guide to teach Japanese schoolchildren critical thinking skills. After that it quickly gained popularity among adults. In the book Watanabe uses simple and funny examples to learn the reader how to approach a problem. He uses three cases to educate the reader:

• A band called The Mushroom Lovers don’t seem to gain a larger audience. How will they solve this?
• John the Octopus wants to become a famous CG animator and needs to save money for a computer.
• Kiwi is a soccer talent who wants to become a star. Which soccer school should she choose?

While the last two examples are great to read and learn problem solving, it’s mainly the first case I want to write about. In the field of interaction design there are often situations where you have to make decisions. Problems arise where you, as a designer, have to decide how to approach it in order to solve it. The case of The Mushroom Lovers provides some interesting examples in how you should approach this.
Without describing the entire case (and thus copying the book) I want to show you some of the examples in the book:

Logic tree

A logic tree helps you break a problem down into categories without leaving anything out. You group similar items under the same branch. It will help you “identify all the potential root causes of a problem and generate a wide variety of solutions.” This is a great tool when you have a certain question and need to investigate the possible outcomes. When forcing yourself to make certain nothing is left out, you also force yourself to approach different options. A great and simple way to make sure you don’t go for the first (and most obvious) solution.

Yes/no tree

A logic tree can be transformed in a yes/no tree. This form of tree helps you find the root cause of a problem or decide how to solve a problem. By creating the tree you are forced to structure and make a complete overview. At the end of the tree you’ll find the different causes/reasons why the problem could have arisen. From here on you can start investigating which of the reasons is the real root cause.

Problem-solving design plan

After you found the possible causes you have to find the root cause. In order to do this you’ll have to research which of the causes is the most important one. You could directly jump into research, but that’ll probably cause more problems than help you. So first: setup a problem-solving design plan. In this plan you’ll setup a hypothesis and rationale in order to focus your research. This is a very good approach since it will give you focus during the research, enabling you to ask the right questions in order to tackle the problem. Out of this also follows a good way to do the research.

After the research you can map the results on the yes/no tree and see where the root cause lies. And than it’s up to you to solve it.

Conclusion

Problem Solving 101 is a book which you can read in a single evening. It’s very clearly written and in it’s core focused on children, but don’t let this put you off…. When you are dealing with challenges and have to solve problems, take your time to read this book. It gives some very simple but effective tips and methods.

Book details
Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book for Smart People
author: Ken Watanabe
publisher: Portfolio
details: 111 pages, hardcover

In the wake of the ever increasing popularity of gestural interfaces, Dan Saffer wrote his newest book: Designing Gestural Interfaces. In this publication by O’Reilly he tries to give us some valuable insights. But did he succeed?

Gestural interfaces are not new, but they are more popular than ever. Everywhere around us you see new ones popping up. And before everybody is coming up with their own interpretation and translation of what they should be and do, we must evaluate what has happened in the past and how we must deal with the future. Dan Saffer’s book is a great starting point for this exercise.

Let’s go through the book chapter by chapter.

The basics

The first chapter is an introduction to the subject. It gives a good and basic explanation. One interesting part of this chapter is ‘matching the gesture to the behavior’. This approach states that the best designs are those that ‘dissolve in behavior’. Here the product must become part of what the user is doing fluently. This is what good gestures should be, combining peoples natural behavior with a related action.

The human body

In the second chapter Saffer focuses on the human body, something a lot of designers often forget. The importance of understanding the mechanics of a human body is really fundamental in order to design good gestural interfaces. What is you body capable of doing? And what not? And we should not forget ergonomics. This is important even though there is no mouse. Saffer goes into this subject rather well, describing possible limitations and pointing us on some simple, but valuable facts (10% of adults are left-handed).

Patterns for touch, interactive & free form

After the first two chapters the book dives into possible patterns for gestural interfaces. It’s an important step Saffer tries to take here: trying to define an international set of patterns. Several companies are developing gestural interfaces and are creating their own patterns, independent of each other. Some, like Apple, are even trying to patent some patterns… so it’s really important to start describing a set that is recognized by users and freely usable by any company. It would be a great step if the patterns Saffer describes would be available online, open for discussion and growth.

Documenting gestural interfaces

Documenting static websites in the 90s was pretty straight forward. But with growing interactivity and gestural interfaces it is a challenge for designers to capture the way an environment or device interacts with a user. The fifth chapter of Designing Gestural Interfaces looks into different ways to document your project. The one I like the most is drawing storyboards, encapsulating not only the interface but also the context and how the user behaves in it. It’s a great way to test for yourself if the design works, but also a superb way of presenting the concept to clients.

Prototyping

When you’re done with the sketching you want to prototype an interface. In the sixth chapter of the book you get some low- and high-fidelity ways of prototyping. Amongst the low-fidelity is the creation of paper prototypes, which I really like. It’s an easy and really fast way of making a ‘working’ version of your product. You can give it to a colleague and let him play around with it. But even playing around with it yourself is really helpful, since you will ‘feel’ and see what it does. Of course paper prototyping is not always the best solution, since gestural interfaces can also be about bigger objects or even spaces. But these are also easily prototyped. Saffer gives some nice examples of these.

Communicating

For me chapter 7 “Communicating Interactive Gestures” was one of the more interesting ones. It learned me the true importance of communicating that there are interactive gestures or not. Imagine that there are some public spaces that have gestural interfaces, and some don’t… but it’s not communicated well. This will cause real stress, since people won’t know if, when, how and what they will trigger an event. It’s really important to be clear about this, stating when there is an interaction possible… what it triggers and how. But in order to achieve this we will have to find an international language, explaining this to us. It could be something as simple as an RSS icon, but it has to be something clear.

Future

In the last chapter Saffer tries to sketch his vision for the future. Unfortunately he plays on the safe side and only describes the main trends going on in the field. So when you follow the important sites in the IxD and UX field, you are covered and can skip this chapter.

Conclusion

Before I started reading this book I thought it would dive deep into the world of gestural interfaces. But I should have known better… Since this is the first serious attempt to capture the subject it is logical that it needs to introduce us to a lot of new things. And although only the first chapter is called ‘Introducing Interactive Gestures’ I have to say that the entire book is an introduction to the subject. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t give helpful information, but it never goes into the subject deep enough to totaly cover it. This makes Designing Gestural Interfaces a great book for people new to the subject, like students. Let’s take this book as the fundament and see some new ones building upon it, going more in-depth.

Book Details
Designing Gestural Interfaces
author: Dan Saffer
publisher: O’Reilly
details: 247 pages, paperback

Beautiful Evidence is Edward R. Tufte’s fourth book on visual evidence. His earlier books about this topic where ‘Visual Explanations’, ‘Envisioning Information’ and the highly praised ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’. Beautiful Evidence deals with analytical design and is a collection of critically analyzed (and very beautiful) images, principles and pitfalls which apply to everything from MS Powerpoint to sculptures.

Analyzing different visualization methods

The first four chapters respectively deal with mapped pictures, sparklines, links & causal arrows and words, numbers, images together. By critically analyzing beautiful images Tufte succeeds in explaining which characteristics make these methods work for a certain goal. Also for each method some principles are presented at the end of the chapter.

A great example of this is the analyses of Alfred Barr’s book cover / table of contents / history map for the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition in 1936, pictured here below on the left (on the right is Tufte’s stripped down version which he uses to explain the role the arrows play within this visualization).

Art-styles and a few artist are mapped on a grid of time whereas the color indicates if it was an internal (black) or neighboring (red) influence on Cubism and abstract art. The size of the nouns tells something about the historic relevance. The arrows represent causal paths (which only go in one direction). What it does so well, is focussing on causality and combining multiple sources and levels of data (which happen to be 2 of the principles mentioned in the next paragraph).

Although the causal paths in the art chart are complex, the idea of causality is simplistic.

Principles and pitfalls

After one hundred twenty-one pages of critically analyzing images, Tufte comes with a number of (fundamental) principles for analytical design which are derived from the principles of analytical thinking. He emphasizes that these principles apply broadly and are indifferent to language or culture or century or the technology of information display:

1. Show comparisons, contrasts, differences.
2. Show causality, mechanism, explanation, systematic structure.
3. Show multivariate data; that is, show more than 1 or 2 variables.
4. Completely integrate evidence; words, numbers, images, diagrams.
5. Thoroughly describe the evidence. Provide a detailed title, indicate the authors and sponsors, document data sources, show complete measurement scales, point out relevant issues.
6. Analytical presentations ultimately stand or fall depending on the quality, relevance, and integrity of their content.

He continues with some pitfalls which need to be avoided in order to apply these principles right. Important is that both cause and effect are shown because that’s how we can determine what happened, by comparing before and after. The most common pitfall is that people start ‘cherry-picking’ (making a selection of the content which only advances their point of view). Furthermore one should be careful that the conclusions drawn from the data aren’t overreaching and that meaningless content doesn’t replace the real evidence.

Microsoft Powerpoint and sculptural pedestals..?

Up till now, the structure of the book made perfect sense. From critically analyzing the most amazing images (from Galileo and Da Vinci to medical monitors) and coming up with principles and pitfalls, Tufte suddenly devotes an entire chapter to a full frontal attack on MS powerpoint in which he boldly states:

The PP slide format has the worst signal/noise ratio of any know method of communication on paper or computer screen.

The sudden change of topic might be strange, but the arguments he provides for his statements are solid. In twenty-eight pages he explains how powerpoint’s workflow forces people to create bad presentations. From the emphasis on bullet structures to providing the wrong layout for data visualizations. He thoroughly explains why powerpoint is contradicting with his principles. He even conducted comparisons of various presentation-tools using ten case-studies in which powerpoint was outperformed by all alternatives. In order to make better presentations we should use ‘good teaching’ as a metaphor in which explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism are the core ideas.

In the last two (short) chapters another rather strange switch of topic is made. These chapters briefly explain how pedestals influence the sculpture they carry, but they mostly consists out of photographs of sculptures (of which half are made by Tufte).

Conclusion

Beautiful Evidence is a typical ‘Tufte-book’, which means that it’s full with beautiful images and photographs, mostly from greats like Galileo, Da Vinci and Newton, which he critically analyzed. To me they’re all very inspirational and often work as eye-openers. They tell a lot about how people interact with and perceive visual information. Furthermore the book is full of principles and pitfalls which I’ve already written on a separate piece of paper to keep in mind for when I have to design analytical visualizations again. All very useful content.

The strange switches of topic make the book feel more or less like a collection of information then a solid coherent read. To me it feels like it does take away some of the strength of the book, however this doesn’t make me like the book any less. The chapter about powerpoint, though unexpected, was an eye-opener and also a very entertaining  read.

However, there are some topics in Beautiful Evidence which Tufte has already discussed in his earlier books, which sometimes results in somewhat of a deja vu when reading it. But there’s enough new content to keep me satisfied. I really like it and I would buy the book even if it was just for the critically analyzed images. A incredibly inspirational read.

Book details
Beautiful Evidence
author: Edward R. Tufte
published: Graphics Press, 2006
details: 213 pages, hardcover

Everybody wants to design perfect products. And to do this a lot of designers think they’re applying user centered design. But most of the time they’re actually using themselves as reference. Fortunately there are several methodologies which can help you to really understand the target audience. One of them is the creation of mental models, of which Indi Young wrote a book called Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior.

With Young’s approach to mental models we’re forced to not only understand the audience, but also to only design features that they might want.

Mental what?
The idea behind mental models isn’t new. It has actually been around for some time. “Mental models are simply affinity diagrams of behaviors made from ethnographic data gathered from audience representatives.” They are “a tool to help you conceptualize your product, before prototyping and testing something.” It forces you to really understand what moves the target audience. What are their needs? And what is their mission?

Young translates this research in a model which combines two kinds of data. On the top you see a visualization of the behavior of the targeted audience. For example showing what the ritual of people in the morning is. It’s really important to depict the importance of each individual part, because some are more important than others. Below this visualization you map solutions/features you came up with during the design process. Every feature can only be mapped against one behavior. If it matches more, it means you probably have to split up the feature. And features that can’t be mapped should be put aside, since they don’t match the behavior they are useless.

Features and strategy
With this model you get a good feeling of the behavior of your audience. You see what’s more and less important. But what’s even cooler is the mapping of the features I just mentioned. How often does it happen to you that you end up in an endless discussion about features? Something like this:
“This feature is an absolute must. If we don’t use it we’re definitely not going to win design prizes.
“Kill this feature. Nobody wants it. I wouldn’t use it…”
“But how cool would it be if we could have this feature.”
“No.”
“Yes..”
“No.”
“Ok, you’re the senior.”

This discussion happens at every design studio . Designers want the best for their product, but are also proud of their own features. But with Young’s approach to mental models we’re forced to not only understand the audience, but also to only design features that they might want. The importance of a behavior and the number of features mapped should match in some way. If a less important behavior has more features than an important one, something is wrong. It sounds so logical, that it just has to be true…

It feels difficult to integrate this methodology in smaller projects, where they can be just as useful…

The complete process
The mental model I just explained is the end result of an entire research process. It takes several steps to gain enough knowledge and insight to create this model. In the book Young takes you along every step needed. She uses the example of going to the cinema to visualize her method. There are eight steps you should take:

• Define task-based audience segments
• Specifiy recruiting details
• Set scope for the interviews
• Interview participants
• Analyze the transcripts
• Look for patterns
• Create the mental model
• Adjust the audience segments

As you can see a big part of the methodology is preparing and doing the interviews. After this you analyze the transcripts and look for patterns. According to Young this is a very intense process. In the book she describes a.o. how you should handle interviews, how this can go wrong and how you get something useful out of it. The honesty and directness with which she writes is wonderful. She doesn’t claim to know it all and admits that some parts can be boring. In a lot of other books you often find a very clinical approach, where only the perfect situation is explained.

Big projects only?
The good thing about the book is the practicality. Young gives a lot of examples and tips. She writes about the ideal scenario and at the same time writes how you can do things fast. But the process she describes still takes a lot of time, even in the smallest form. Of course I totally see the use of the methodology and am very willing to get my hands dirty on it, but I also have to be realistic. Almost all customers I currently work for will not have the budget (or time) for this kind of method. And even with all the tips Young gives, it’s hard to create a light-version that’s thorough enough to make a true difference.

On the other hand I have to say that the idea is glued in my mind. In several conversations within design teams I did use examples from the book, which is a positive sign. I’m really convinced we should create mental models and map the behavior against product features/solutions.

When using Indi Young’s mental models in your process you will without a doubt improve the quality of your products for the target audience.

Strategy
The book is interesting for different audiences. It helps designers define which way to go, and what features they should and should not implement. When you have a good mental model it’ll help you through a lot of discussions. But the discussions won’t only go better in a design team… it will also help on a higher level. Product strategists and executives can use the model to convince the management which route to take. And if we have to believe Young it works for over 10 years…

Conclusion
The first thing I liked about the book is the enthusiasm with which Young writes. From the beginning until the end you feel that she really believes in this methodology. She writes in an easy to understand way, giving practical examples. The book can both be used to read in the train and used as a practical handbook.

The book gave me a lot to think about regarding the design process. I think it is a must read for design teams. When using Indi Young’s mental models in your process you will without a doubt improve the quality of your products for the target audience. But I do have to make a not that it feels difficult to integrate this methodology in smaller projects, where they can be just as useful. The moment Young comes with practical solutions for this situation I’m completely sold.

Book details
Mental Models: Aligning Strategy with Human Behavior
author: Indi Young
publisher: Rosenfeld Media
details: 299 pages, paperback

“Every Thing Bad Is Good For You” is the title of the book Steven Johnson wrote in 2005. In this book he claims that “Against popular belief, pop culture is actually making us smarter”. And he explains this theory by using the term “The Sleeper Cuve” derived from the movie Sleeper by Woody Allan.

Johnson writes how TV shows have evolved from shows like Dragnet and Starsky & Hutch with a single plot line per episode to shows like The Sopranos and Lost with multiple plot lines intersecting and over 21 episodes. These new shows are challenging us to remember and connect multiple relationships over an entire season instead of just one show. This complexity was unthinkable 20 years ago. But in today’s society its different for we have been secretly trained to accept this complexity for the last decade. This is the Sleeper curve hard at work.

For decades we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steady declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the “masses” want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. But in fact, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less.

Complex games
Another fascinating thing which struck by me in this book is the way computer games influence us and affect our daily lives. Like popular TV computer games have become more complex for the last 20 years. Where Tetris and Donkey Kong require little time to “get”, we now have Grand Theft Auto IV and Medal of Honor. These games can be maddingly hard and present us with a lot more freedom and complexity then those early games. Computer games have been flexing our mental muscle for the last two decades which in turn has been helping us see the world a bit clearer.

Tetris for example trains our pattern recognition skills, while Sim City teaches us about the way economics work. Games in general help us with decision making and the way we analyze and solve problems.

Visual recognition
The book descibes a study at the University of Rochester where subjects were asked to perform a series of quick visual recognition tests like picking the color of a letter or counting the number of objects on a screen. The results showed that regular games consistantly outpreformed the non-gamer group, that the gamers turned out to be more social, more confident, and more comfortable solving problems creatively.

We as a culture are increasingly demanding more complexity and more intelectual challanges. We’ve grown to expect a certain “toughness” in the games we play and the things we watch on TV. We’re actively fostering a new generation of problem solvers, smarter, faster and more capable of filtering massive amounts of information, putting a strain on the way we develop new things. Creating a sort of “more-cleverer-then-thou” kind of culture among the designers and creative people alike. Always trying to one-up the competition with a newer snazzier way of doing things. How are we going to keep this up?

Top photo by: Jay Dugger