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.

——–

Image CC-SA2 by San Jose Library

Occasionally, amidst the rapid rise and fall of trends, fashion and fancy, we are faced with true revolution: paradigm shifts that throw out excess baggage of some kind and usher in new ways of thinking and seeing altogether. The catch is that you need to have the benefit of hindsight to truly measure their effectiveness. With this in mind, I believe that the interaction design community is witnessing an important revolution — an ‘IxD Bauhaus’ of sorts.

I’d like to start with architecture and its recent history, and then compare it with current changes in the way interaction design is being conceived and made. Lastly I’d like to discuss the effects of such a revolution in architecture, and provoke thought on what the implications might be for the design of user experience.

Remembering the Bauhaus:  a call to end ornamentation in the built environment

The Bauhaus Movement (1918-1933) was based on a German revival of a purer, honest design representation in architecture, art, typography and product design. Its philosophy celebrated an austere functionalism with little or no ornamentation. It advocated a use of industrial materials and inter-disciplinary methods and techniques. The  Bauhaus aesthetic and beliefs were influenced by and derived from techniques and materials employed especially in industrial fabrication and manufacture. Artists included Paul Klee, Wassilli Kandinsky, and Feininger. Architects and designers included Mies Van der Rohe, Phillip Johnson, Walter Gropius, Lazlso Moholy-Nagy and several others.

Walter Gropius who at Columbia University (March, 1961) clarified the intention of the Bauhaus saying -

“The Bauhaus was not concerned with the formulation of timebound, stylistic concepts, and its technical methods were not ends in themselves. It was created to show how a multitude of individuals, willing to work concertedly but without losing their identity, could evolve a kinship of expression in their response to the challenges of the day. Its aim was to give a basic demonstration of how to maintain unity in diversity, and it did this with the materials, techniques, and form concepts germane to its time. It was this method of approach that was revolutionary…”

This movement was a true revolution because prior to its time, the built environment had bloated in stimuli, caused by an excess of decor and ‘pastry-work’. As early as 1908, the Austrian architect Adolf Loos had said that architectural ornament was criminal, and his essay on that topic would become foundational to Modernism and eventually trigger the careers of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto,Mies van der Rohe and Gerrit Rietveld and other Bauhaus masters. The Modernists embraced these equations—form follows function, ornament is crime—as moral principles, and they celebrated industrial artifacts like steel water towers and other ‘Machine Age’ construction as brilliant and beautiful examples of plain, simple design integrity.

The Bauhaus liberated construction from the excessive need for ornamentation as a means of expression, be it in art, typography, graphic design or architecture. One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft, and technology. It freed itself from the shackles of historical ‘styling’ and attempted to create a fresh order of primary principles. Such radical thinking enabled a celebration of the purity and honesty of structure and looking for truth in things be it on a 2-dimensional canvas or a building. Anyone who’s marvelled at the Barcelona Pavillion or the Barcelona Chair (both designed by Van der Rohe) has experienced the essence of what the movement stood for.

The Bauhaus’s philosophy was that form should follow function and all other distractions and decoration should be avoided. It wanted space to be experience for its purity, stripped off all the ‘dirt’ and clutter of decor. This is something that’s been happening recently in the field of visual interaction design.

Cantilevered chair by Marcel Breuer

What’s the ‘IxD Bauhaus’ about?

If you’re the kind of interaction designer who starts getting a gradient-itch or delights in making buttons look like glass – think again. The times they are a-changin’.

There was a time when our sense of ‘modern’ in the user-interface was driven by concepts like these -

Concepts for the Windows Media Player by frog

Examine the words used to describe such a concept – “… a rich palette of visual surfaces for the media player and taskbars, giving XP a unique, consistent design language that challenges the traditional digital media experience. Analog-style, “rubberized” buttons on the skin of Windows Media Player offer classic, intuitive navigation and avoid the hyper-technical feel of other online players. Brushed aluminum textures, rich colors, and dimensional lighting add a satisfying tactile quality to the user’s online interactions, lending the experience a sense of the real.” The term often used to describe this kind of UI is skeumorphic. If pre-industrial revolution construction suffered from ‘nature-envy’, skeumorphic visual user experiences suffer from ‘object-envy’.

To quote an explanation from FastCompany’s article on it – Skeuomorphic apps take pains to reference or mimic physical, real-world features in their user interfaces. Apple is the current king of this design style, enshrining skeuomorphics in its Human Interface Guidelines: “Whenever possible, add a realistic, physical dimension to your application. The more true to life your application looks and behaves, the easier it is for people to understand how it works and the more they enjoy using it.”

Skeumorphic UI

It’s tough to compete with a force as dominant as Apple, in the realm of beautiful user-experiences, but the release of the Windows Phone 7 design guideline (codenamed: Metro), an impending revolution has been made official. The new IxD Bauhaus’ basic principle is that ‘Form follows Data’.

The Windows Phone 'Metro' Design Language

Windows Phone’s new design language is inspired by print in the digital age. Let’s examine the words used by their team (extracted from Mike Kruzeniski’s blog) to describe their UI design principles -

• Clean, Light, Open and Fast
• Alive in Motion
• Celebrate Typography
• Content, Not Chrome
• Authentically Digital

One could almost use these words to describe Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavillion, for example -

• Clean, Light, Open and Fast (Open space, pure exposed beautiful material)
• Alive in Motion (through albeit static sweeping horizontal lines in the design language)
• Celebrate Typography (celebrating structure – making it boldly present)
• Content, Not Chrome (no decor, just beautiful clean spaces)
• Authentically Digital (authentically physical)

Visual motion in the Barcelona Pavillion

There are so many examples that are beginning to exemplify this philosophy, some better than others. Examples of this ‘IxD Bauhaus’ (to name a few) are -

Flipboard for iPad, The Puma Phone,

The Fluid App for iPad and iPhone, Wired app for iPad

Some design their visual interaction with fiercely reductionist vigor. Others still show hints of a gradient itch. The revolution however, is definitely underway. Increasingly, our apps and OS’s hint on letting us focus on our lives and tasks and ‘getting the job done’ by focussing on ‘content rather than chrome’.

Increasingly, our apps and OS’s hint on letting us focus on our lives and tasks and ‘getting the job done’ by focussing on ‘content rather than chrome’.

This is an exciting and most welcome change in visual interaction design. It is also a huge challenge for designers, content-providers and business groups.  Inorder to see the revolution thrive and prosper – all these interest groups need to work even more closely. We need to learn lessons from history and not make the same mistakes.

The Good, the Bad, and the Boxy: What can visual interaction designers learn from the Bauhaus?

The point of this article is not to acknowledge revolution. That’s been done already and perhaps more eloquently. This stream of thought would like to probe the consequences of such a ‘reductivist’ philosophy and draw parallel lessons from history.

The Bauhaus movement had immeasurable value in shaping modern architecture and design to what it is today, but it also faced severe criticism. After living in them, or owning Bauhaus furniture – several found them to be too impersonal, sterile and devoid of any emotional value. All houses started to look vaguely similar, offices became cubicle graveyards while Bauhaus masterpiece-inspired furniture design knock-offs looked tacky and boring. Since the moved was fuelled by World War II and an industrial wave of mass production it killed ‘craft’ and ensured a sameness in the objects we started seeing around us. This was both good and bad.

Jacques Tati’s ‘Playtime’ (1967) was a brilliant cinematic critique of the ‘glass and steel’ forest that modern life had become as a result of the Bauhaus.

Jacques Tati's Playtime

Lets quickly summarize why the Bauhaus was important for design history, but was frequently criticized in people’s lives -

• Not all material is worthy of celebration, not all content is beautiful too.
  The Bauhaus movement was a huge challenge not only to designers but also to the people providing engineering, construction and material services. Everyone needed to up their game in order to make a beautiful chair, poster or building. Any compromise in quality ensured that material/content was revealed as poor in quality and tacky in appearance.In today’s times business owners, content-providers and other interest groups need to do some serious soul searching to ensure that their content alone will carry their online experience through? Just like in the Bauhaus movement, bad quality wood looked tolerable when it was decorated or concealed. The moment one stripped them off decor – it exposed nothing but ugliness.
• Beauty is in the details, construction, and structure.A bad visual experience will now be judged, not by the beautiful ‘glassiness’ of its buttons, but by its inherent structure and little details that are made to manifest from inside out. Interaction designers and developers alike need to collaborate more closely to ensure that experiences are built inside-out, rather than designers applying ‘skins’ to a detached user-experience development platform. Wireframing experiences in close collaboration with developers and content-providers, detailing points of interaction without applying visual clutter will suddenly become a bottom-line in interaction design.
• Ensuring familiarity without losing brand value and character.
  Visual interaction designers will now be faced with the stiff challenge of creating identity, character and uniqueness without the easier palette of ‘decor’. A failure to create differences could lead to familiar ‘Bauhaus problems’ of sameness and monotony.
• Industrial processes drove the Bauhaus, software development processes are driving the ‘IxD Bauhaus’.
  Mass production, industrial fabrication, pre-cast components and material technology spurred the Bauhaus movement to fruition in its time. Today, we need to acknowledge that the reductionist IxD revolution is being caused by a larger understanding that ‘apps’ might be the way forward in a ‘Cloud’ computing world. Designers, engineers and developers would need to ensure that pre-cast components were designed well, almost as ‘toolboxes’ in the design of user experiences so that parts were repetitive without being too rigid. Visual interaction designers would need to think big and small simultaneously – keeping overall architecture in mind while resolving smaller details.
• When all facades are glass, its hard to know where the door is
  Knowing when and how to provide cues for interaction becomes even more crucial for the design of a good user experience. Windows Phone does this through minimal, yet intuitive animations that delight and inform users. Other app-experiences and platforms need to think of their own ways of solving this problem. Since buttons need no longer look like buttons, designers need to ensure clarity in design language using color, typography, or other material to differentiate interactive elements from static ones.

Conclusion: How much of less is more?

The main question here is not when or where the ‘IxD Bauhaus’ movement began. Or if it exists at all.

It is more important to recognize this reductionist behavior as a refreshingly welcome change in how we plan and design our visual interactive experiences. While we can no longer conceal mediocre interaction design behind the facade of decoration and fluff, several questions remain unanswered. How much can we reduce, without compromising on usability , cognition and emotion? How much can we strip experiences of cues (formerly done through decor) without making them sterile?

Even though the movement is in its early days in mobile, table and desktop visual interaction design, its implications will be broad and deep, regardless of commercial performance. A lot of the movement’s success depends on how users accept such a reductionist approach to visual interactive experiences where there are many hidden cues and authentic digital behavior. It remains to be seen how users respond to the lack of familiarity in the new UX metaphors that were formerly mimicking the physical world.

We all like personalization, customization and a feeling of ownership of the objects and services that we interact with and consume. The Windows Phone Design Team has done a great job of showing the user their relevant content on an interactive start-screen experience. How will others respond, without setting off another clone assembly line that mimics rather than acts authentic? While personally praying for the success of such a school of  thought and action, there are hurdles that we need to be clear about and prepare ourselves for that would rush to quash the revolution at the first signs of duress.

If the Bauhaus movement in the early part of last century failed to resonate with users for reasons that we’ve discussed – can we as designers prepare ourselves to meet the challenges ahead?

——-

Marcel Breuer chair from Wikipedia
Skeumorphic UI from Fastcodesign
Concept sketches from frogdesign
Barcelona Pavillion from Travel with Frank Gehry
Barcelon Pavillion details from Sketchucation

Day Two started bright and early with a full day of talks, panels, and workshops. With Dan Willis as the morning keynote the room was crowded with coffee–and–ipad–in–hand designers.

Keynote, Dan Willis

Technology is the application of scientific thought to practical application

Dan (aka @uxcrank) opened day two with All You Really Need to Know About Users You Learned in High School and his presentation was anything but traditional (and there is video proof). He introduces this as the Hangover Keynote, being day two and the show didn’t stop there. Before starting beach balls fly through the room and a dance party starts getting the entire room moving and shaking. And after a few minutes of displacement, Dan starts his talk or as he puts it, his Sermon on Demystification.

Dan demystifies UX and our profession and shares that a lot of what we do we learned in grade school. This includes:

• Hall passes are bullshit, control is an illusion.
• The cool kids liked you for your car.
• You can’t trust new friends, online friends are not ‘move your couch’ friends.
• You’re wearing what? People group and act like sheep.
• People go to parties to get drunk and have sex with strangers, sometimes superficial is good.

Dan closes his talk debunking myths of runaway technology, the cutting edge, Web 2.0 and human to human connection, and mobile web. He drives up to be a designer and to have meaningful goals with our products as well as to drop the adjective adjacent to design and to focus on the work as a holistic problem solving process.

Agile’s Secret Step: Discovery, Lis Hubert

Lis opens by defining what she means by Agile as a project execution method that is, simply, different than waterfall. Then, after a quick survey of the room level sets that we have all had some form of exposure to the methodology. She moves to discuss that Agile’s secret steps are discovery and planning. Sharing her stories with a large financial services company nicknamed The Titanic and others she discusses the challenges of UX fitting into Agile.

Lis Hubert

Lis reminds us Agile is not the enemy and communicates how we can have UX coincide as a defined element within the Agile process. Lis equates a product backlog to the bottles of beer coming down an assembly line and the need to be informed what is next to run an efficient system. This comes not from an iteration zero but rather a strategy team in charge of the overall plan. Agile must continue to move forward and balance of discovery and appropriate planning can keep UX involved and balanced throughout the project life cycle.

Influencing Business Using a Wall of Knowledge, Heidi Mucn and Derren Hermann

Heidi and Derren, working at Nationwide Insurance, share their methods and experiences influencing business. They step away from corporate samples though and share personal stories that use their methods.

What is the Wall of Knowledge? In Nationwide, its the large spaces to hang up and present information relevant to the current discussion. Much like an affinity diagram, it collates and organizes in a fluid manner information for the team to be aware of only unlike an affinity diagram it can include facts, inspiration, and any other form of content. When in practice, the Wall is used to obtain unified by in and collaboration earlier on so that the large stakeholder meetings are more around head nodding and less around discourse of a direction and decision. Make the information public and social and everyone is more engaged.

Taming a Nine-Headed Stakeholder Monster, Geoff Alday

Geoff defines the nine headed stakeholder monster, its a shared challenge that we all face, and it is our responsibility to synthesize and understand stakeholder needs and opinions. He immediately arms us with his tips on how to manage the beast and defines nine archetypes:

1. User. The myth is they don’t know what they want but they do.
2. Customer. The myth is the customer is always right, but they really want goals to be accomplished.
3. Sales. The myth is all they want is more sales, but address their pain points.
4. Marketing. The myth is all they care about impressions, but they truly do know how to market a product and ask marketing for content support.
5. Support. The myth is they only hear complaints and they can offer a unique understanding of users.
6. Executive. Geoff admits all these myths are true.
7. The Others. While not stakeholders the myth is their opinion doesn’t matter and is dismissed.
8. Developer. Debunk the myth that developers can’t design. They might not have the visual skills but they can contribute conceptual and functional designs beyond a designer’s skills.
9. Designer. The myth is the designer is they can only make it pretty, but there is more thought behind it.

Geoff close with tips to speak to the monsters language and to not use jargon for jargon’s sake, to listen to the stakeholders, and to consider all angles before disagreeing with something. His final thought is to admit mistakes and to get over it, don’t take everything personally.

Winning Big in UX: Changing the Problem–Solving Culture in Organizations, Jay Morgan

Jay defines his cognitive science background as his kung fu grip. He discusses how we can succeed more in UX by interpreting motivations and behaviours, not only of users but of stakeholders. Jay shares a few heuristics, is A like B (representativeness, Start here, get to there (anchoring and adjustment), and How likely is that to happen (availability). Ultimately Jay charges that we as designers must do more than design and must leverage cognitive and social sciences to be ambassadors and to build relationships more than build things that simply look good or behave well.

Working Lunch: Every UX Person Needs a Portfolio, Abby Covert

The UX community discusses a lot around how to present work, what level of a portfolio is needed, and how to best present work, especially given constraints around NDAs. Over lunch Abby had the audience go through a series of exercises intended for self reflection to understand how we can communicate what we do. Abby communicated three key criteria a portfolio should have:

• Pride not Proof — have pride in your work.
• Quality not Quantity
• Passion and Process — what you do, how you do it, and why.

Abby stresses the need for an ‘About Me’ that is real and tangible. Ignore buzz words and companies, focus on what you do in layman terms. She continues to discuss format (readable, presentable, printable) maintenance and growth, and distribution. In the end the audience left with new contacts to continue the exercises and a completed workbook with the building blocks of their own portfolio.

Abby Covert

“This Product Sucks!” A Sampler of Product Design Issues, Darren Kall

Darren tells a story of a product he created that, after conversations with a client realized that parts of it sucked. Darren communicates how to tell if products suck and then, if they do, how to mitigate the issue. What makes a product suck is not if it is unattractive, broken, or tasteless but rather if there is a conscious design or business decision that reduces the ideal experience. We conclude with a series of different non web-based samples of sucky products and what, from our UX toolkit needs to be done to avoid the issue. Comical and lightweight, Darren reminds us all of what not to do and how to approach design.

The Nature of Information Architecture, Dan Klyn

IA/UX is a dated term and IA should stand alone. As a professor with the University of Michigan Dan communicates how IA needs to and deserves to stand alone and that it is not an IA slash UX (IA/UX) connection.

They learn about this thing Information Architecture and they enter a world that does not have IA by itself.

Dan breaks down the ontology, taxonomy, and choreography of things and reframes what information architecture is at a root level. Using the iPad and Apple’s taxonomy as a basis for the conversation, we analyze language and how different product are organized well or poorly, and the resulting effect on the overall experience. Taking a step back away from the deliverables (site map, product map, etc) we are left to evaluate where IA fits as a larger part of design and an equal level, not a slash to UX.

Thinking with Your Hands, Karl Fast

“An experience designer walks into a bar…” And with that Karl opens up with the simple observation that we all talk with our hands. But why? Our gestures help convey additional information about our story. Sharing research around how and when people talk with their hands Karl discusses the learned habits around gestures, and the rate and reasons for gestures.

Karl describes the three types of gestures: adapters emblems and gestures, and the different use cases for each of them. He realigns the meaning of gestures and by introducing the term emblems aligns the audience to what we actually mean by gestural interfaces. Tying the conversation to affordances Karl stresses that we need to understand and design for the implications and details around gestures. They are just as important as the details of a door handle, and it is our role to understand the connection between what we do with our hands and how we interact.

Destroying the Box: Experience Design Inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright, Joe Sokohl

Joe uses Frank Lloyd Wright as a basis to discuss design. It is not the material and tools we make but what is the experience and purpose. Joe references memes that came out of Interactions 11 in Boulder and by discussing architecture addresses the framework of design.

The reality of the building odes not consist in roof and walls but in the space within to be lived in. — Laotse

Some main theme Joe covered:

Content. Frank Lloyd Wright destroys the box and brings ‘the outside in and the inside out’. How can interaction designers break the bounds of the technology we use and still work within the constraints of our technology.

Clients. Frank Lloyd Wright knew what his clients needed and built homes specific for the people who would live in that space. As designers we must know our audience and design for them.

Ultimately Joe’s talk takes us beyond the screen and reminds us what is important when we design, and that other disciplines have much to give to IxD.

Keynote, Jesse James Garrett

Jesse’s closing can best be seen as a reflection with a call to change perceptions. Sharing popularized samples of web design Jesse paints his vision of where design and interaction across all media is moving. He communicates that UX can be applied to anything, not just the web and we need to continue to push those limits.

The user experience mindset is an acquired condition for which there is no cure

As we move forward with design we are challenged to answer how UX can capture so many different media. But what Jesse defines as design as is simply a mastery of a media, or mediumism. We are too focused on the tools and should not define UX as specific to a tool. Instead we should design beyond medium at which time we can focus on experience and engagement.

Jesse moves across emotion, interaction, and brings the conference to a close as he discusses perceptions of design and our need to get out of the interaction design echo chamber and to seek for more inspiration across all artistic tracks.

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_{Top Image: Stephen A. Wolfe’s photostream.
Youtube Clip compliments of brevadude.
Additional images compliments of @ixdiego}

It’s conference season. And we welcome MidwestUX to the mix, brought to you by IxDA Columbus and COUPA. A two day event, hosted in Columbus, Ohio, MidwestUX follows a two track program full of four keynotes, lightning round talks, workshops, and panel discussions. As always, Johnny is there to deliver a daily write-up for those who weren’t able to attend.

I should start by noting, while we had a jam packed first day and an equally full Day Two planned, the conference didn’t start Saturday morning. The conference organizers organized quite the welcome reception with a self guided pub crawl for Friday night for any of the attendees who planned to be there early enough for the pre conference festivities.

Keynote Jared Spool

Jared kicked off the morning with The Secret Lives of Links and shares with us the story of his daughter’s ‘secret’ live journal and evolved the conversation to the findability and secret nature of information on the web. Jared points out that we don’t talk about links, and that they are one of the most important parts of a page and how we communicate information. We discuss the nature of links and search, which as Jared puts it is BYOL, or Bring Your Own Link, as people type in the words they expect to see as links elsewhere in the page.

We never talk about links, yet they are the most important aspect of our sites.

Jared continues through various news sites, university sites, and turns his attention to marketing, ecommerce and other popular samples. He shares the history of links and breaks down why blue underline links don’t work and stresses that links want to look good. He leaves us with the thoughts of how we balance the presentation of links and their actual purpose; on how the power of a link is much more than what we present and how we often mix metaphors to confuse the purpose of links and navigation.

Follow Jared at @jmspool

UX Research in the Real World: Stories from Rwanda, Veronica Erb

Veronica shares her story of travelling to Rwanda to perform UX research around teachers. Three specific lessons were shared.

1. No schedule. When you can’t or don’t schedule your research in advance you think in chunks, not in specific time slots. Work with what is available to you.

2. No Recruiting. Working without a schedule at a new site each day, it was important to know your criteria for who you would like to research and who would be most beneficial gven the constraints provided.

At some point the director is going to come in and start using his filing cabinet and you can’t care.

3. No Lab. When conducting mobile research you are working in any space that is available. Working in a principal’s desk or classroom it requires additional fluidity and the ability to ‘roll with the punches’

Veronica closes with her perceptions on the success of the project: the passion of UXsters, the alignment with the stakeholders, and the willingness to always push for more. She also reminds us not to worry with the Rwandian phrase nta kibazo.

Follow Veronica at @verbistheword

Cooking UX with Cultural Leftovers, Erik Dahl

Erik takes the stage to discuss culture in design and the mutual impact culture has on our designs and design has on culture. We define culture as being more than context. It includes people, activities, context, emotions, motivations, goals, and more. It also includes an abstraction of patterns and stories.

Erik discusses how to suss out culture through observation, empathy and openess to stories and abstraction of differences across people and the world. He moves through definition to examples of where culture and stories are misaligned and it takes time and attention to recognize the effects a decision might actually take. With samples from America and Brazil, expectations and differences in culture help us realize the decisions we make have broader effects and require more focussed attention and thought.

Follow Erik at @eadahll

From Cancer to Bankruptcy, Brad Nunnally

Brad picks up where Erik left off – discussing the need for empathy during research as it helps build relationships as designers. With experience working with cancer survivors and working with retirement savings during the 2008 market turmoil, Brad shares how empathy and relationships are vital in emotionally tense environments. Sharing some advice with the audience, Brad communicates to:

• Never go alone, use the buddy system.
• Always show up on time. Be five minutes early but never late.
• Send a welcome packet, let people know who you are in advance including photos, bios and references.
• Humanize yourself and don’t be a stoic researcher.
• Take the glass of water offered to you and truly be a guest.
• Remember the user is just as scared as you are.
• Be honest.
• When the interview is over, leave. Do not debrief in people’s driveway.

Brad concludes by tying these relationships to different movies — suspense, horror, comedy, and anything else. Research isn’t a scripted science and like a film you have to follow the rabbit holes and follow the user’s stories while maintaining a focus. Brad also shares that it is OK to cry, laugh, and befriend your participant, and to be sensitive that some stories might haunt you beyond the duration of the interview.

Follow Brad at @bnunnally

Empowering Teens through Design Education, Larissa Itomlenskis

Larissa talks about her experience teaching architecture and design to teens in Columbus. Showing samples of work, Larissa communicates the constraints and implications of teaching children in a limited time and what we as designers can take from this experience. Larissa shares the inspiration she found by educating young students on design and by sharing the samples of their sketches and concerns left the room refecting on our practice and the influence we can have on youth. Children want to throw something away if it is not perfect and it is our job to communicate how to iterate and critique effectively, how to encourage discovery in an environment without failure.

In a proffessional environment you can’t just point to something and say that’s dumb.

From Mega Website to Mobile Experience, Edward Stull and Marty Vian

Edward and Marty share their perspectives on mobile experience design with their unique roles: Edward as a mobile app designer and Marty as a current client. Putting the addage to ‘Design for Mobile First’ on end, the duo shares ther story of developing the mobile application Manta based on the rich and extensive online presence. Slides illustrated the translation of functionality from web to mobile and the implications around reolution, environment, and controls. More a showing of their work, the talk acted as a catalyst for the later presentations on design for mobile and showed additional perspectives to a lot of the conversations on how and when to approach mobile.

Follow Edward at @esdc and Marty at @mvianl

Adaptive Mobile UX Design, Jen Matson

Jen shares her story of shopping for a space heater. Navigating the Sears website with Google’s support and through the mobile version and sharing her frustration when the information and experience is sub par. The sub par experience has led, in part, to the notion of Adaptive Mobile UX Design which may be defined as:

Creating web sites and applications that try to give each user the best possible content and experience tailored to their device and browsing context.

This need and definition isn’t new as tailored advertising often employs this as large billboards and targeting marketing spreads adapt to their audience and the context. Jen stresses the canvas or varying size, capabilities of what is available, and the context of the experience as the key items to consider around adaptive mobile ux design. Jen closes by highlighting technologies and methods currently available to employ and support adaptive design including HTML5, CSS3, geolocation, dynamic device orientation and more tools and kits.

Follow Jen at @nstop

Mobile Design Thinking Beyond Apple, Brad Colbow

Brad immediately changes pace from the mobile application design and shares a story of community and social interaction at a modern camp site. After sharing his story he moves back to mobile devices and communicates how the nuanced differences across platforms can be most critical in the overall success and failure of interactions. Sharing samples from Android, Apple, Blackberry and Windows Mobile Brad compares interactions across different platforms. With different hard and soft key placement and different menu paradigms mobile app design is not a one and done process and is not a standardized process. Brad concludes with a review of the different UI Style Guides and best practices of different interactions and motivates us to understand the differences across platforms and the opportunity to build interactions with care.

Don’t let your UI hinder the user experience.

Follow Brad at @bradcolbow

Don’t Watch TV – Experience It, Brian Stone

On avereage there are more televisions in a home than number of people living there

Brian introduces us to some stats: there are more televisions in many homes than people, televisions are more ubiquitous than computers in the home, television is used as a channel to more noise and a venue for social interaction. Yet despite 97% of homes in the US having a television it is wholly ignored from a user experience stance.

Brian calls out the lack of development for televisions wether it is the interaction, the applications, or supporting the experience while exposing the growing number of web-connected systems over the next few years. By sharing samples including Boxee, Hulu and other players he leaves us with three questions around user experience and television: What can it do, How does it do it, and How will it be different?

Users want more meaningful content on demand with a great experience when it comes to tv viewing

Keynote: Marc Rettig

Marc closed out day one discussing Design for Life and brought the theoretical and practical discussions of the day into his presentation. Marc immediately confronts the breakdowns around professional definitions and just as quickly assures us he will not be sharing those thoughts and ‘defining the damn thing’. Instead he uses that as an opportunity to spring board to the need not to define our work but to understand where it fits in the greater landscape. Marc discussed some of the history of user experience and placed us in the context of where we stand in today’s business; both geographically and socially with the amorphous seat at the table.

Marc defines our current status as the ‘UX Era’ and discusses how we communicate within our community and to the broader audience at large. He charges us to determine how to bridge the gap between human society and technology with business. Sharing his journey, there is much that resonated with the audience as he left no tangible action items but rather opportunity for further conversation. If anything Marc’s talk about connections and networks inspired attendees to reach out of their comfort zone and to meet new people during Saturday evenings events.

Follow Marc at @mrettig

_{Top Image: Stephen A. Wolfe’s photostream.}

Have you ever double-checked if you really locked a door? That wouldn’t be necessary if you had a lock with a clear indicator that says “I’m locked.” So is there a way to design this constraint into the product?

In the above example, there is no indicator that says which way you should rotate to lock the door. But even when there is an indicator such as a small circle, it doesn’t always mean it’s “locked”. It might mean it’s “unlocked”. So I was wondering if there was a way for anyone to be able to recognize it’s really locked and came up with the following idea:

Actually this does NOT physically prevent the rotation of the handle around its root. This hook is just a fake, but it makes you easily recognize that the door is locked when it’s at the lowest.

So that’s what I thought when reading Living with Complexity by Donald Norman, which I highly recommend.

Humans have a natural affinity for stories. We know this intuitively. When we’re trying to teach a child important lessons about ethics, caution and quick-thinking, we don’t work them through a series of Powerpoint slides on the subject in the hope that it will get our point across.

Rather, we tell them the story of Hansel and Gretel. Over the course of the narrative – as the siblings walk through the forest, dropping breadcrumbs, as they get taken in by the cannabilistic witch and then delay their transformation from youngster into dinner until they can turn the tables on their would-be murderer – the young audience engages, empathises, and learns.

Adults have a similar experience when it comes to stories. Whether it is the ancient oral tradition of encoding information about hunting or farming into folktales, or contemporary storytelling developments like management case studies, stories have a way of reaching us that mere description can’t match.

This cognitive resonance is what makes design stories a powerful prototyping tool. People can understand complex concepts underpinning a design more easily if they’re embedded in the narrative form. And there are even more reasons to use stories to prototype your design:

• They can be created right at the beginning of the design process, based on concepts and ideas. No coding or process engineering required – only brainstorming and a bit of writing time (although supporting user research efforts can be extremely valuable inputs).
• Used well, they paint a vivid, holistic picture of a future user experience in a way that users and stakeholders can engage with and empathetically critique.
• They provide context – in a story, the focus is not on the solution (eg a website), but on the users and how they go about interacting with it, to their benefit or peril.

And, incredibly importantly:

• Design stories create a mental “scaffold” for their audience. Once people have understood and embedded the user experience story, you can use that mental model to start adding in complexity. Discussions about business processes, technology, user interfaces can be tied back to the story, to help people make consistent sense of it all.

Planning an example speculative design story

Let’s look at how we’d go about using a design story to speculate on the future user experience – say, showing how some of the major technology and social trends we’re seeing today will change the world in the next decade. To plan out our story, we might first consider a few key storytelling elements:

1. Story coverage and size – what should the story cover, and how big should it be?

In terms of coverage, because the story is going to be speculative, I’ve decided to be a bit ambitious throw in a bunch of trends that I think will be influential in how we live our lives in a decade’s time. These are:

• Crowdsourced personal decision-making (asking your online social networks to help you decide on what to do, both in your personal and professional life)
• Social benchmarking (rating yourself against your online social networks)
  Augmented reality, bolstered by ubiquitous GPS usage (technology knowing where you are I a geospatial sense, and being able to “overlay” what you are seeing with additional information)
• Connected home appliances that are actually useful,
• Further convergence of many information devices into a single device (so that your smartphone, iPad, MP3 player, television etc all become functions of a single gizmo),
• Standards unification turning into integrated services across vendor siloes (so that your experience across the online services you use don’t fragment through the need to sign-on multiple times, duplicate information across services, not have access to data from service A while you’re using service B etc).
• Gestural and eye-tracking interfaces displacing (although not replacing) touch and mouse interfaces (getting UI’s off a screen and more integrated with natural interfaces like your hands and your eyeballs).

As for story size, I’m pretty confident that I can show how the world has changed by telling the story of a single, universal experience – waking up in the morning, and going to work.

2. The narrator – Who is telling the story?

Because the story introduces many new societal and lifestyle concepts, it’s important to focus on the protagonist’s thoughts, motivations and feelings, to help the reader quickly make a connection that will ground the speculative future being canvassed. To achieve this, I’ve decided to write in first person.

3. The protagonist – who is the story about?

I want to make the story about someone that the readers can at least somewhat identify with. So I’ve decided on a character who has certain types of common characteristics (25-35 age bracket, professional, urban, cares about health, relationships and appearance, tech-savvy) without making any of those characteristics come across so strongly that people who fall outside of the aggregate demographic will switch off to “owning” the experience that they’re reading about.

4. “Plot-driven” or “slice-of-life” – how is the story structured?

If I were writing a story about a specific service and its value to the protagonist, I might use a traditional plot-driven story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and where the protagonist faces a conflict that the service being designed helps him/her overcome to achieve his/her goal.

However, I am trying to show how life in general has changed as a result of an accumulation of trends. This makes me lean towards writing the story in the “slice-of-life” mode, where I can show a brief snapshot of a person’s life. I don’t need a plot, or too much context, or for the protagonist to develop over the story’s course – I just need people to give people a sense of what life is like in the “new world” I’m speculating on.

An example of a speculative design story:

So, taking all of that into account, here’s the speculative design story. Interestingly, I’ve had two distinct types reactions from people about it, which I’ll summarise with two actual quotes: “I want this now!”, and “Gee. It sounds like…a nightmare.”

This story could be told using many types of experiences as a basis – visiting a doctor, shopping for groceries, going to dinner. As long as the experience is one the audience can relate to and benchmark against their current state , it’s possible to scaffold the complexity and paint a vision that people can thoughtfully consider.

Regardless of the specifics of the story, the freedom that the storytelling form gives you means that you are only limited by your ability to imagine the world in a way where your ideas – as wildly ambitious as they might be – have played out.

Top image: Pawlowski

Chopsticks always go in pairs. But in a house where all the family members use chopsticks, there are a bunch of unpaired chopsticks in a cabinet drawer or a chopstick stand. For every meal someone has to find right pairs among all those chopsticks. Why not put them away in pairs in the first place?

Jigsaw Sticks

First of all: why aren’t chopsticks made to be bundled by themselves?

This jigsaw-puzzle-like projected part also functions as a chopstick stand. So when you place these sticks on a table, the tips are raised.

Chopstick Rest & Bundler

What about making a chopstick rest?

Stand it on its side and it works as a chopstick stand.

There is a magnet inside the back of it, so it sticks with another stand to make it more stable to stand.

Good design is hard to do. The very nature of human centred design is confronting, challenging and often uncomfortable. Every project builds up a collection of challenges along the way, which can pose significant risk to the project’s success, and if we don’t tackle them head on they can be detrimental for everyone involved. How can  we share and learn from each other’s challenges?

At Neoteny, we refer to the collection of challenges in a project as its ‘challenge pile’, given they’re exactly that; a pile of issues, constraints and problems. We keep track of the challenge piles using walls in our studio for each project. Some are collections of post it notes, others are photographs, drawings, diagrams, scribbles or hand written notes. Each week as part of our work in-progress meeting (team jam), we take stock of each project’s challenge pile.

We ask ourselves the following for every challenge:

• How did this challenge come about?
• Briefly establish the current reality, including:
  • What has it cost the project? Not necessarily in financial terms, what has been the cost to our momentum, resources, client expectations etc.
  • What is the potential impact? In what areas?
  • Could it have been avoided? How or why not?
• How have we handed it thus far? As a group, explore options for how we handle it moving forward.
• Agree on proposed solutions or new approaches and secure buy-in from everyone involved.
• We’ve found that this structure helps us stay out of the drama whilst understanding the drivers for each challenge, and then focus on solutions. This makes the process much more collaborative and productive, we aren’t sitting at our desks sweating over something we could probably work through together in a few minutes.

We recently had a team jam, and here’s what came out of our challenge pile review:

1. Customer needs and business requirements collide.

This project is in its early stages. The client came to us with a new product that they wanted to develop, the first step was to research the product feasibility and desirability in the market.After conducting research aimed at validating the customer need for a new product, we found that what the customer needed and what the client planned to launch, were two very different things.

We’re currently in discussions with the client to try to shift the project objectives and focus, to meet real customer needs. As a group we decided not to proceed to stage two unless we could get their buy in on a revised approach.

Question for readers: What would you do in this situation?

2. Budget streams are unclear for future phases of work.

We’ve been involved in projects in the past that have unclear funding streams for future work. This is especially common in large corporates, where steering committees assign funds based on a comprehensive business case analyses including return on investment predictions. These can’t necessarily be defined without first doing some work. The problem with this structure is that you have a team of stakeholders that can only see as far as the next steering committee meeting. This makes a design project with a strategic foundation i.e.  something that’s designed with the whole in mind, very difficult to manage.

This particular case was flagged early because we’ve seen the warning signs before. The signs included hearing things like:

• “If we build this…”, highlights the fact that the stakeholder doesn’t believe this project will make it to implementation.
• “We need to show results by June…”, if you ask why, you’ll probably hear something like “that’s our next steering committee check point”.
• “We won’t be able to build that”, if you ask why, you’ll probably hear something like “because the next budget release won’t be anywhere near that much”.

In the past, this issue has created a divide between the client or project stakeholder group and the design team. Whilst the stakeholder group is focused on securing the next round of funding to ensure that this phase can move to implementation, the design team is focused on exploring and exposing every possible opportunity for solving the design problem.

We’re currently working with senior management to ensure we have their buy-in throughout this project. In our experience, we’ve found that if the person signing the cheques is on board with the approach, the whole stakeholder group is much more relaxed and inclined to get their hands dirty in design.

Q: Have you experienced this before, and if so, how did you get around it?

3. Stakeholder groups have varying ideas of the project objectives

Have you ever been in a project meeting and realised that the client team doesn’t agree on the project’s objectives? This is an awful moment for a designer. It’s the moment when you move from designer to mediator. Playing mediator with your clients is generally not a lot of fun and not how you want to be spending your energy.

The design team typically work with clients to reach a shared set of project objectives. If you find yourself in a situation where you think this has happened but it isn’t the case, then it needs to be dealt with immediately. This agreement needs to be made before design work can start. Of course, these objectives may shift and be adjusted as part of the design process, but the aim is for adjustments to be made as a whole, not as a fragmented set of perspectives from different stakeholders.

We’re currently experiencing this on a scoping project we’re working on. It came about in a workshop, where up until that point, the team seemed aligned. We handled it by stressing the need for a shared project vision and refusing to move forward without one. We managed to facilitate developing a shared set of objectives, prioritising them and we’re currently working with the client to ensure that every stakeholder is in agreement on the vision for the project.

Without this shared vision, we put the success of the project at risk because no one is clear on what success will look like. We’re currently working through ways to communicate this in a more explicit way to our clients before we start on their projects.

Q: Perhaps it’s about signing off on the project vision, would that make people more accountable?

4. Mystery stakeholder stomps on the project.

Does this scene sound familiar? The design team is working away, the client is happy and excited, they’re getting involved and spending time designing with us. Then BAM! Along comes the mystery stakeholder who has significant influence, but just “doesn’t like blue”. In most cases, the mystery stakeholder is a fairly senior member of the client team who hasn’t been along for the ride and is looking at the design solution without any understanding of the brief, the agreed approach, the challenges or the project’s constraints. This situation can be crippling. Challenges like this can impact resources, motivation, relationships, momentum, time and budget. You could argue that it’s the design team’s fault for not ensuring that all stakeholders were engaged, the project owner’s fault for not engaging the full spectrum of players, or the mystery stakeholder’s fault for stepping in with the ‘I’m gonna leave my mark on this project regardless of how you got here’ kind of attitude.

We’ve started to enforce what we call a stakeholder roll call. At the start of every project, and within our terms and conditions we gather a list of stakeholders, their roles and responsibilities and have the project owner sign off on this list. The full list of stakeholders are required to sign off on all milestones and agreed deliverables.

We acknowledge that the stakeholders may change, but the terms allow for this situation and protect the progress we would have made in the project up to that point. The success of this approach remains to be seen, though what it does achieve is a level of accountability agreed up front for the potential impact of those ‘stomping moments’.

Q: How do you protect your projects from random stakeholder stomping? How have you dealt with this situation in the past?

Where To From Here?

As you’d expect, there’s a ‘magical box’ of learnings and insights created by each challenge pile. It’s what we choose to do with the magic that makes the obstacles and the heartache worthwhile. I’m sure we’ll learn a hell of a lot more as our company matures, but here are some of the more salient ones we’d like to share with you:

• There’s not always something ‘to do’, there’s something ‘to know’. There are situations we can’t ‘solve’ in the context of the project we’re working on. But being aware of the specific challenges and carefully managing expectations accordingly can be a very effective approach, one which better supports our potential success.
• As a company (and perhaps as an industry) let’s be more reflective. That doesn’t mean we have to wade into the drama or analyse it ad nauseam, but we do need to nip things in the bud, be honest with ourselves and the team, be open about the potential impact that the shifts might have, and involve everyone.
• Getting the players involved as the challenges arise. Rather than keeping our ‘dark passengers’ under our hat, and suffering in relative silence, all with a smile on our face, let’s face the challenges together! Clients and project stakeholders are often quite pleased when you invite them to be part of the solution. Any shifts to the project approach are also much more likely to fly if we’ve got buy-in from everyone involved.
• Sharing the good the bad and the ugly with our peers. Let’s foster a culture where we share both our triumphs and our failures, rather than keeping the latter closely guarded. As a collective mind, I’m sure we can come up with some inspired, insightful ways to circumvent and also completely avoid some of these challenges.

We believe that we can get better at this thing called ‘design’ if, as an industry, we can make the most of lessons we learn from these challenges. After all, they enable us to be more resourceful, they give us an opportunity to be more creative, to build stronger teams and deeper relationships.

So, what do you think?

Michelle is one of the speakers at UX Australia 2010, taking place 25-27 August 2010 in Melbourne, Australia. The conference has sold out, but workshops are still available, or you can go on the waiting list. See the UX Australia site for details.

This is part 2 of a two-part post. Read part 1.
In the last installment, we talked about the distinction between Hands contractors and Brains consultants. Hands are brought in by the team as an extra resource to complete work the team already knows how to do. Brains are brought in by the team to provide expertise and insight on the best way to do something the team is struggling with.

Hands and Brains require completely different skills, have different approaches, and run into different challenges. Knowing which you want to be is important.

The role of Hands

The UX professionals who make great Hands are passionate about producing stuff. Whether it’s a pile of wireframes or a boatload of usability test sessions, they can crank through them. More importantly, they tackle every single piece of the project joyfully and proudly.

The thing to remember is someone who signs up to be Hands typically doesn’t get to say how the project is done. The team decides that up front, often before the project is started. It’s up to the Hands to match the work exactly, making it impossible to know which elements came from the Hands and which came from other team members.

When it comes to how the work is done, creativity and previous experience aren’t playing big roles. In fact, they are frowned upon. While the team focuses on getting everything done by the end project, they don’t want to step back and take the time to rethink what they are doing.

The Hands will get management’s attention if they have tricks and techniques for speeding up production, while keeping the results indistinguishable from what’s been done so far. An experienced Hands contractor brings speed and agility, while playing the chameleon to match the work of their temporary teammates.

Bring in the Brains

This is a complete opposite to the Brains—who aren’t about production at all, but instead about strategy. The Brains, when at the top of their game, are the sheriffs, coming in to clean up the town. When a team is stuck and not making progress, and it feels like they’ve tried everything without results, they call in the Brains.

Unlike the Hands, the Brains doesn’t make a good producer. Their value is squandered if they spend the bulk of their project time churning out similar items. Of course, if the team is struggling with what to produce and how, the Brains can get them started, showing them the technique and coaching them through the work. But, in this scenario, the Brains quickly backs away, as soon as it’s clear the team members can produce their own results. (Some Brains will bring Hands into the project at this point, working jointly.)

Instead, the Brains’ real value is in strategic understanding of the situation. The Brains looks at the entire scope of the project, studies the goals, and assesses the team’s capabilities and flaws.

Then the Brains suggests a new plan. They get the team started on the plan. They train the team on the tricks and techniques that will get them through that plan. Then they leave town, just like the sheriff, to go off and clean up the next team’s mess.

Why The Difference Matters

Great Hands know how to produce. Great Brains know how to analyze and persuade. They are completely different sets of skills. Hands and Brains require different personalities. It’s very rare to find one person who does both.

Great Hands know how to produce. Great Brains know how to analyze and persuade. They are completely different sets of skills. Hands and Brains require different personalities. It’s very rare to find one person who does both.

The Brains aren’t challenged by production work. Once they’ve done one screen or conducted one test session, they’re ready to move on to something completely different. The Brains love the variety of the tasks—coming in to something new. The Brains love seeing problems and solutions nobody else seems to see. The Brains are energized when those problems are particularly gnarly and the solutions are deviously elegant.

The Hands struggle with strategy. They always feel they’re the wrong people to ask—that someone else should’ve figured this all out by now. They thrive on having a set of constraints, a schedule, and a near impossible pile of similar things to do. They love to crank through the work, seeing the Done Pile grow while watching the To Do Pile shrink. They don’t mind their work blending with the rest of the team’s—their contribution becoming invisible to anyone outside the team. They are energized by completion.

In other words, Hands thrive on walking into a project that’s well defined while the Brains thrive on walking into a project that’s poorly understood. That’s why it’s difficult to be both. It’s a very rare person who thrives on both definition and chaos. For everyone else, they need to choose one or the other.

I’ve seen managers who have tried to have one individual contributor play both the Hands and the Brains. Often this is because of resource constraints or not realizing there’s a difference. Unfortunately, this inevitably ends in disaster, because of the opposing strengths and weaknesses of Hands and Brains. Don’t fall into this trap.

What do you thrive on? What energizes you? Where do you get frustrated? Understanding this will help you figure out if you are suited for the Hands or if you ought to be the Brains.

Jared Spool is the keynote speaker at UX Australia 2010,  being held in Melbourne from the 25-27 August 2010. The conference has sold out, but Jared’s workshop and others are still available, or you can go on the waiting list. See  the site for details.

“To design is to have a ‘project’. Getting the design process moving is to expose and transform this ‘project’ in a conversation with those that it might eventually affect” (Buur, Binder, & Brandt, 2000).

In the early stages of design, rather than evaluate or validate specific user requirements or priorities, we are interested in exploring possibilities. As the opening quote suggests, we seek to engage with the various stakeholders the design project may eventually effect and gain an understanding of the unique design situation from their perspective. In Zimmerman et al.’s  (2004) framework for discovering and extracting knowledge during the design process, this is known as the Discovery phase of design. In this article we introduce Mobile Diaries as a field work method that can be utilised in the early stages of design to immerse into people’s everyday life.

This exploratory approach to self-reporting allows participants  to create and share a rich picture of their world, be they grandmothers, bankers, students, young parents or employees. In this article we describe Mobile Diaries, and provide examples of the kinds experiences they can enable.

A little background on self-reporting

In self-reporting, research participants are responsible for the data collection, allowing for the gathering of contextual data over-time and in situ, without the physical presence of researchers. Self-reporting can provide access into the private, personal and mobile aspects of people’s lives that are often difficult, or impossible, to access through traditional methods such as observation or interviews. The sustained personal reflection inherent in self-reporting makes available aspects that would otherwise remain tacit. So much of our lives are routinised and automatic, it is not until we are asked to document or consider certain activities that we are able to identify key junctures in our own understanding of a topic or a behaviour.

Self-reporting studies can take many different forms and the degree of formal structure is one of the things that differentiates approaches and determines the type of material collected. For example in the Electronic Sampling Method approach known as ESM (Larson & Csikszentmihalyi, 1983) or beeper studies, the participant is directed to systematically log specific things at specific times. In more open-ended approaches (such as cultural probes (Gaver, Dunne, & Pacenti, 1999) or visual diaries) data collection is only semi-structured around a particular topic. In this case participants are treated as active contributors and interpreters in the design process and select what, how and when to report. This encourages more playful and creative representations, important to an explorative and collaborative approach.

Over the last 10 years digital, online and mobile technologies have been incorporated into self-reporting methods in a range of ways (see end of article for some examples of other studies and platforms). These everyday tools can be easily integrated into people’s daily lives and support the generation of a range of different media forms such as video, images, text and audio.

Mobile Diaries

Mobile Diaries are a hybrid method that incorporate many of the creative and playful aspects of probes and emphasise the daily reflection of visual diaries. A range of different analog and digital technologies are used that allow participants to share and reflect on various dimensions of their day-to-day life.

A typical study

The exact design of the study (as always) is dependent on a number of factors such as:

• A definition of the problem space;
• The goals and objectives of the particular project;
• The theme of the study (e.g is it a personal project or focused on the workplace);
• Budget (how many people can we recruit and how, what kind of incentives might be required);
• The profile of the participants (e.g teenagers, adults or whole families); and
• Their current technology knowledge/competence and use (e.g how they might respond to the technology involved, how open are they to using new technologies).

Generally studies run from 1-3 weeks with between 1-10 participants. Topics explored depend on the study but could include, for example: sustainability in your everyday life; the role of mobile technologies in your life; or a ‘behind the scenes’ look at your job. Participants receive a ‘Mobile Diary Pack’ with various tools and instructions which direct the data collection around the particular design topic.

Mobile Diary Tools

A number of custom platforms have been developed to support online diaries, however, to date we have preferred to configure Mobile Diaries from existing platforms such as WordPress and Tumblr as this gives us greater flexibility over format, functionality and cost. Below we show the packs from a typical study (the list of available tools is growing and changing all the time, here we show typical ones we have used in the past).

During the study

Over the period of the study participants create collages, mind maps, videos and blog messages and send in mobile reports which appear on the blog. They also receive prompts, questions and reminders via the mobile phone and the blog.  The conversation is bi-directional: as we are receiving reports we are also responding with new questions or digging deeper into particular areas, and potentially redirecting the focus of the study as a result.

What do we see and learn?

The output of Mobile Diaries is a particularly provocative, experiential and sensorial insight into participant’s lives. As one of our clients described it “[we were able to] hear in people’s own words the challenges and learn about the context of sustainability in their day-to-day lives”. We share some examples below of the kinds of material generated and shared through this approach.

Life as it happens

Using their phone, participants capture images, text and audio and send this to the blog throughout the day. These reports give us a deeper appreciation of the activities that make up people’s daily lives and we are able to ‘see for ourselves’ actual examples and instances of things that might otherwise be anecdotal. Through these reports we can track events, locations, and a sense of participant’s emotions across the days and weeks. Over time, daily rhythms and habits emerge. The (near) real-time reporting increases the sense of immersion in people’s lives as we experience the activities ‘as they happen’ (Masten & Plowman, 2003).  This is complemented by more reflective accounts at the end of the day via the blog or with the video camera.

Personal Spaces and intimate stories

The use of video encourages in-depth descriptive accounts of events and surroundings from the participant’s perspective. The stills above are from one participant’s tour of their apartment building, which focused on areas relating to sustainability in the home. By giving participants video cameras and asking them to take us on a tour of their home we are able to explore and wander with the participant. This reveals some evocative spaces otherwise inaccessible to a design researcher; in addition to the explicit content being shared the video also conveys emotion and expression.

In another study focused on teenagers and their relationship to technology one participant gave us a tour of his shed, playing instruments as he told stories about the importance of this particular space to him.  These personal stories bring us closer to the participant’s world creating a sense of intimacy and proximity to the participants which is difficult to replicate in a one on one interview, discussion group or even during participant observations.

Inner thoughts and feelings, moments and metaphors

In addition to descriptions of external events and activities, Mobile Diary reports also capture emotions, feelings and inner thoughts. The examples above show emotional reactions and descriptions of personal feelings at particular moments in time. In some, the participant’s have used objects to serve as metaphors or symbols for representing emotions or ‘states’. This allows the participant to share inner thoughts and feelings that might have otherwise remained hidden. The open, honest and personal nature of these reports fosters empathy, often describing experiences we can relate to. That some are delivered in (near) real-time further increases the sense of connection; in that moment, we knew something of what the participant was thinking and feeling.

Action & Transformation

“Not only did it help us, the impact on participants and their way of thinking about sustainability was really interesting… the project really opened their eyes to their own patterns and behaviour and sparked some changes and definitely increased awareness” (feedback from client).

The process of self-reporting is an intervention designed to allow people to self-reflect and share aspects of their daily life; this process can also trigger participants to question their choices and everyday behaviours (Grinter & Eldridge, 2001).  The content of the Mobile Diary packs and the nature of the questions included can provoke new realisations and possibilities. For example, our self-reporting studies into sustainability in everyday life resulted in participants questioning personal behaviours and making changes in their lifestyles^[i]. For one participant, a discussion about sustainability with flatmates led to the installation of a composting unit in the household.

The interventionist nature of the method can be more intentionally activated through the inclusion of specific activities and questions within the packs. For example, in one study into sustainability we included sustainability challenges – new lifestyle habits -  that participants were asked to try and document throughout a week. These activities were particularly provocative at revealing emotional and infrastructural barriers to behaviour change.

And then…?

As the image below suggests, material generated from Mobile Diaries can be used in numerous ways. Mobile Diaries externalise aspects of people’s everyday lives through visual, tangible artefacts. These become shared resources that help us to understand current practices, provide a spring-board for ideation and allow us to envision how any future design might be taken up within the existing ecology of the participants life. For designers, the visual nature of the material allows for more active interpretation in ways not possible with written research reports.  For participants, the process of doing the Mobile Diaries means they are better equipped to reflect on and analyse their own practices, during follow up interviews and workshops (similar to primer tools), becoming active interpreters of the material and what it might mean for future designs.

The material generated through Mobile Diaries is not something to be reduced down into a traditional written report. The raw form of the material and the subjective picture it provides of the participants’ lives and world-view are essential to its immersive quality and its value for fostering empathy and connection with participants (Mattelmäki, 2005; Mattelmäki & Battarbee, 2002) ^[ii].

However, this does need to be balanced with normative business expectations of a ‘research outcome’, and the need to synthesise the data in a meaningful way for the client to then transmit to other stakeholders. Effective ways to share this tangible and personal material with those who were not directly involved is the subject of current research, e.g., (Sleeswijk Visser 2009). Our process includes the development of a multimedia ‘report’ that can support all the different formats of material generated. These reports introduce the participants through their own words and images, illuminate the themes that have emerged and identify some future possibilities to be considered. We have also found significant value in creating opportunities for co-interpretation of the material by clients and other designers, whilst this can be more time consuming, it is utlimately a more effective use of the material than simply ‘handing off the research’.

We have also found that the value of such methods is greater than their role as data collection activities. A personal connection is made with participants that can be of value well beyond the particular study. However, there is a tension between this and the day-to-day realities of client and agency practices and models which focus on deliverables and project phases, in between which there can be significant lags or breaks. There is still work to be done to articulate and communicate the value of such methods beyond their capacity to generate data ‘about people,’ and to embrace their ability to involve participants in a more ongoing and sustained way throughout the design process.

Mobile Diaries are a playful, immersive experience for the design team that allow us to discover something of the messy intricacies of participant’s daily life, valuable for both inspiring and grounding the design process as well as engaging directly with stakeholders. We’d love to connect with other designers employing similar approaches.

Acknowledgments

Big thanks to Chris Gaul for images & Will Evans for feedback and comments. Thanks also to Dr Toni Robertson and the @IDHuPLab at UTS, Digital Eskimo, Zumio, our clients & participants N.B Examples come from specific studies in which permission was granted for publication for the purposes of research. Our approach has been heavily informed by the ongoing research into generative methods inspired by Cultural Probes (Gaver, et al., 1999) and the work of Liz Sanders (www.maketools.com) as well as other research into self-reporting studies such as (Hulkko, Mattelmäki, Virtanen, & Keinonen, 2004; Masten & Plowman, 2003; Palen & Salzman, 2002).

References

Buur, J., Binder, T., & Brandt, E. (2000). Taking Video Beyond ‘Hard Data’ in User Centred Design. Participatory Design Conference PDC2000, New York, NY, USA.
Gaver, B., Dunne, T., & Pacenti, E. (1999). Design: Cultural Probes. Interactions, 21-29.
Grinter, R., & Eldridge, M. (2001). y do tngrs luv 2 txt msg. ECSCW, Amsterdam.
Hulkko, S., Mattelmäki, T., Virtanen, K., & Keinonen, T. (2004). Mobile Probes. NordiCHI 04, Tampere, Finland.
Larson, R., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1983). The Experience Sampling Method. In H. Reis (Ed.), Naturalistic approaches to studying social interaction: New Directions for Methodology of Social and Behavioral Science: Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
Masten, D., & Plowman, T. (2003). Digital Ethnography: The next wave in understanding the consumer experience. Design Management Journal, 14(2), 75-81.
Mattelmäki, T. (2005). Applying probes – from inspirational notes to collaborative insights. CoDesign, 1(2), 83-102.
Mattelmäki, T., & Battarbee, K. (2002). Empathy Probes Paper presented at the PDC 2002, Malmö, Sweden.
Palen, L., & Salzman, M. (2002). Voice-mail diary studies for naturalistic data capture under mobile conditions.  CSCW, Louisiana, USA.
Sleeswijk Visser, F. (2009). Bringing the everyday life of people into design (PhD Thesis), Technische Universiteit Delft, Delft.
Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J., & Evenson, S. (2004)  “Taxonomy for Extracting Design Knowledge from Research Conducted During Design Cases.” Futureground 04, Melbourne, Australia.

Additional examples of other remote self-reporting techniques & studies & mobile/online tools

Digital Ethnography (pdf)

Digital Diaries

Digital Cultural Probes

Sticky Research (Video Diaries)

Revelation

7daysinmylife.com

[i] There is no way for us to tell how permanent these changes were, we can only be sure that particular practices were bought to people’s attention, and steps towards change were made.
[ii] The original Cultural Probes (Gaver 1999) were not designed to gather specific information, but rather to be a source of inspiration and empathy. Rather than being codified, transformed or translated into a report, probe material was designed to stand on its own as a rich visual resource for designers.