This May, Dan Brown will be speaking at UXLX in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of our media partnership with UXLX, Johnny Holland got the chance to interview Dan on a topic that he has been the go to expert for years now, Effective Design Documentation. We’d like to thank Dan once again for taking the time out of busy schedule for this interview. Hope you enjoy.

JohnnyHolland: Given all its moving parts, design can be a challenging thing to document properly. What advice would you give to design teams that are attempting to get proper Design Documentation injected into their organizations process?

Dan Brown

Dan Brown: “Design documentation” is shorthand for the collection of techniques to capture and communicate design ideas to other people on the design team. Those ideas may be half-baked or they may be well-cooked, and designers have various reasons for creating documentation. “Documentation” may not be a printed PDF: it can come in many forms, including interactive prototypes. Regardless, documents are any tool that communicates a design idea and ensures projects run smoothly.

Let’s now unpack “proper design documentation”. Different organizations face different challenges, and documentation that works for one group may not be “proper” for another.

The central challenge we see time and again is ensuring consistency: different designers communicate the same concepts differently. Consistency remains important, since different designers may be working with the same stakeholders, developers, and quality engineers. Imagine being on the receiving end of those deliverables, not knowing what to expect from one project to the next. One designer provides painstaking detail of every interaction and the other leaves more to interpretation.

There are lots of things a team can do to normalize their deliverables, but using templates is not one of them. Ultimately, the content of the documentation must be driven by the project itself: forcing people to fill in the blanks yields unreadable deliverables. Instead, to ensure consistency, the design team should meet regularly — monthly or quarterly — and share their work, examining their deliverables as a single portfolio. They should identify opportunities to streamline and align so that readers of their documents aren’t bombarded with a new approach in every project.

How has EightShapes Unify helped design teams create and manage the documentation they create?

Early in EightShapes’ history, we established ourselves as a firm that didn’t just do design, but also helped design teams communicate better. This can mean a few different things:

• translating mature design systems into re-usable components to speed up the design process and ensure consistency in the resulting designs
• preparing guidelines around the use of design systems
• running workshops to help teams correct the discrepancies in their approach to documentation

When Nathan conceived and implemented EightShapes Unify, however, we had a real opportunity to make a broader impact. Through much soul-searching (and expensive lawyer meetings) we decided to release it for free. We can’t know how everyone uses it: it’s been downloaded more than 15,000 times, by teams of multitudes and teams of one.

Everyone at EightShapes has a different perspective on the value and impact of the documentation system. For me, the beauty of EightShapes Unify is the freedom from meaningless templates. I remember using meaningless templates earlier in my career, answering questions like “Who are the actors of the system?” and “What are the dependencies?” These questions are either so broad or so irrelevant that the document becomes a mish-mash of trite responses.

Instead, the system provides “page patterns” — simple page layouts used frequently for common tasks like explaining a wireframe or comparing two approaches. This task-based approach to documentation mirrors our design philosophy

How has UX documentation had to evolve over the past few years? Did this have any influence on why you wrote a new edition to Communication Design?

There are two factors exerting pressure on documentation–the design problems and the project participants. My experience shows a marked increase in both over the last several years.

People generally point to new interface conventions (carousels, accordions, fly-outs, mega-menus, ad nauseum) as driving the evolution of documentation. But web sites went from nice-to-have to essential business tool overnight. The range of new UI patterns is only a small fraction of the story: more companies are trying to do more work online. This means increased complexity in transactions and depth of information. These sit at the heart of new design problems, and they force us to reconsider the tools we use to describe our solutions.

At the same time, there are more people involved in the web design process. Our projects incorporate team members with a greater range of experience and broader perspectives. They have different interests in the project and different agendas for the outcome. All of this puts pressure on the design documentation, serving more needs and purposes.

I wrote a new edition of Communicating Design to scratch an itch—much of my thinking around documentation had evolved over the preceding five years. These two pressures—new challenges, new participants—contributed substantially to the changes in my thinking.

Considering the current trends towards mobile, tablet, and in general ubiquitous design, how will UX documentation have to evolve yet again to support these new challenges?

At EightShapes, we’re exploring how interactive prototypes cooperate with other kinds of deliverables to document the entire user experience. Coming from a passion for good communications, we acknowledge that increased complexity demands a multi-pronged approach for defining experience.

Luke Wroblewski’s “mobile first” design approach resonates strongly with me: in a recent project, while I was sketching concepts, I started with the tablet version of the application without even really thinking about it. If the trend continues, however, we designers will need to separate further from specific platforms and start with the underlying models.

The biggest challenge for designers will be the increasing emphasis on abstraction. As data becomes available everywhere, the models we use to define its structure across multiple platforms must divorce themselves from any one specific platform. If the available information and its inherent structure is one factor driving the design of an interface, we need better tools for designing those structures. In short, the more abstract side of information architecture receives greater emphasis.

Why is creating good documentation essential to a designer, regardless of what their current role is?

We are purveyors of stories. We design products to support the stories of users’ lives. We design products that presumably bring about a change, going from “Eli suffers from situation X” to “Eli benefits from product Y”. This is how we do design and how we describe our ideas to other people involved with the product.

A design document tells a little story in and of itself: for example about how a particular feature works, or the conclusions stemming from user research. A document a also contributes to the overall narrative of the project. But the most important story is the one about the product, how it works to bring about change. This multi-layered approach to storytelling is the essence of designing an interactive product.

User experience designers must be able to create good deliverables because they should be able to tell a good story.

What are the dangers of going from the whiteboard to design/development?

There may be none, but that’s not true for every case. Planning is crucial to both design and development: knowing what you’re going to do before you do it can prevent wasted effort and unnecessary detours. Experienced designers know how much planning and design they need to do based on the nature of the problem, the existence of well-established patterns, and the composition of the team.

That said, no amount of planning can ever replace the brute force method of trying lots of different things. Discarded ideas might not be a sign of wasted effort, but a necessary by-product of the creative process. One might argue that successful creative endeavors depend on the balance between planning and trying things out.

Some signs that you might need more robust documentation include:

• Working with new team members, where communication conventions have not yet been established
• Working on a project with multiple streams of work, where keeping track of progress on each stream is crucial
• Working on a project with clear milestones, where the project team expects each phase to come to a solid conclusion
• Working on a poorly-defined design problem, where taking the time to define boundaries is time well spent

I’d recommend creating more documentation in new situations just because it forces you to communicate clearly and acknowledge constraints. If you start creating documents for the sake of demonstrating productivity (rather than moving the project forward), perhaps its time to go back to the whiteboard.

How can designers move beyond being all about the documentation? How can they stop being deliverable monkeys?

As I thought about this question, I really wanted to understand what “all about the documentation” and “deliverable monkey” means. (And if you think it’s easy to get past the picture of a thousand monkeys sitting down at a thousand MacBooks, you are wrong.) I came up with two things:

First, designers in our field can often feel removed from the product. We’re pushing boxes around a page, composing annotations that no one reads. We’re writing mark-up and code strictly for the purpose of demonstrating an interaction, but know full well it will be tossed when it comes time to build the product. Our involvement ends once we’ve told the story, capturing the experience sufficiently for someone else to build it.

We feel like we’re paid to create things that are at once essential to defining the product and are still so far away. This demand to churn out wireframes all day long makes us feel like, well, monkeys. (No disrespect to our primate cousins. I’m sure they lead very productive, fulfilling lives.)

Second, in order to feel connected to something, designers sometimes focus more on the deliverable and less on the product. We pour our ego into the PDF, reflecting our passion for the product in the documentation, something we control.

Both of these things come from designers themselves. That is, if you think treating these issues depends on a systemic intervention, you’ve looked too far for a cause.

Here are some things that have become ingrained in my work, that help prevent any possible devolution:

• Determine the barest minimum that needs to go into the document in order to communicate the ideas effectively. Try not to do much more than the barest minimum, but definitely don’t do less. Can the team sufficiently understand your intent with some rough wireframes and light annotations? Perhaps embellish those with some context through business objectives and user requirements, but avoid doing much more.
• Treat the document as a framework for a conversation, not as a final product. By thinking of it as a means to an end, rather than as an end in and of itself, you approach it differently.

How could proper UX documentation have prevented the Cylon Uprising?

Products sometimes behave in unexpected ways. Some ways are delightful, like when you discover that shaking your iPhone “un-does” your last action. Some are disturbing, like when robot servants rebel against human oppression. While good documentation should capture all the functionality of a product, we can’t predict how people will use it, and people always find new ways to use (or abuse) products.

UX Lisbon 2011

Dan Brown will be  speaking at UX Lx: User Experience Lisbon, one of Europe’s premier user experience events. The second annual UX LX conference takes place May 11-13, 2011 in Lisbon, Portugal.

This May, Louis Rosenfeld will be speaking at UXLX in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of our media partnership with UXLX, Johnny Holland got the chance to interview Louis on a topic that is near and dear to his heart lately, Web Analytics and User Experience. We’d like to thank Louis once again for taking the time out of busy schedule for this interview. Hope you enjoy.

Johnny Holland: You’ve been spending a lot of time writing and presenting on Web Analytics and User Experience lately. From what you’ve learned so far, why do you think web analytics are being used more now than in the past?

Louis Rosenfeld: Design is a more strategic activity than ever before, and with more at stake, we’re all looking for evidence to help us make and validate our decisions.

Plus analytics tools are becoming cheaper and easier to use.  For example, there’s really no excuse for not at least trying out a tool like Google Analytics on your own personal site.  It’s free and, thanks to the great work of brilliant UX people like Jeff Veen, easy to use and understand.

How are teams commonly using analytics to measure the effectiveness of the user experience their product/service is providing?

Traditionally, teams have used basic analytics, like clickstream analysis, to measure conversions of all sorts, such as the percentage of customers that successfully make an online purchase, or the points at which prospective college students fail to complete an online application.  They’ve also compared behaviors among audience segments; for example, are international students having a harder time with that application than domestic students?.

Louis Rosenfeld

The challenge with traditional web analytics is that, while it’s a great way to determine what is happening when users interact with a product, it’s not that good at telling you why they do what they do.  Analytics will help you arrive at some great hypotheses–but for the most part, you’ll have to test them using other user research methods.  And it’s through those more qualitative methods–the one that UX people are more savvy with–that it becomes possible to learn why the new design is better, why the new content titling guidelines are worth following, and so on.

How can analytics help inform UX activities prior to performing user research?

Well, to be clear it is a form of user research, but sure there are many ways.  For example, I suggest reviewing frequent queries before determining what sort of task analysis you might do.  The “what” data of analytics helps you sharpen the “why” questions of qualitative research.

How can it be used following user research?

If you can segment your data by audiences that correspond to your personas, you can incorporate things like common queries and most-accessed documents into those personas.

How are teams misusing information gathered from analytics?

By not going beyond the reports.  By taking that what data–say, a factoid that states that “placing the button to the right of the address field increased conversion 13%”–as an important conclusion on its own, rather than exploring why that’s the case.  If we don’t go further, we only learn something about button positioning for some unique case, rather than something more generalizable about user behavior that can help us solve future design problems.

Is this why we see blog posts and articles on “Left aligned buttons work better for …”? How damaging can posts like that be?

Yes.  Those are very damaging when they’re presented as dogma and taken literally, rather than as points for discussion that, hopefully, lead to learning.  Thinking about the “what” is pretty pointless if you don’t explore the “why”.

Yes.  Those are very damaging when they’re presented as dogma and taken literally, rather than as points for discussion that, hopefully, lead to learning.  Thinking about the “what” is pretty pointless if you don’t explore the “why”.

Is the information being gained by analytics impacting boardroom decisions or business strategies at all? If so how?

I don’t spend a lot of time in boardrooms–for better or for worse–but I imagine that when you manage a large organization, even a non-profit, your main job is to supervise one or more tiers of middle managers.  That doesn’t scale well, so you’ll naturally resort to numbers to help track the performance of middle managers and the products they manage.  Those metrics may be poor, or they may be incomplete; either way, they’re likely to amplify what is already a dangerous approach to making important decisions.

Do you think it’s possible to become too married to the data that comes out of analytics? Where do you draw the line?

Yes, but that’s true of any form of research data, whether it comes from analytics or user testing or an ethnographic study.  Each, on its own, paints a woefully incomplete picture of reality.

But there are bigger risks with analytics data to keep in mind.  First, there is more of it, which will impress some people far more than it should–especially because some of it will be garbage data that should have been scrubbed in the first place.

Second, analytics apps provide us with canned, impressive-looking reports.  While these reports can be useful, they’re generic.  They don’t necessarily pertain to your users’ needs or your organization’s goals.  Analytics data becomes more useful when it helps answer one of your questions, but making it do that takes more effort than many organizations are willing to invest.

My favorite example here is Netflix.  They identify which movies are getting searched most frequently.  Of those, they identify the movies whose pages are getting the most visits.  Of those, they identify the movies which are getting added to customers’ queues least frequently.  That’s a report that’s hugely valuable for Netflix to study regularly; in fact, it’s not so much a report as the answer to a useful question:  “Which popular titles not being added to the queue?”  Either way, it certainly wasn’t anything their analytics application was going to provide automatically.

While writing your latest book (on Site Search Analytics), has anything special stood out to you on the subject?

I’m just shocked at how few people even bother to analyze what their site’s users are searching for–which is why I wanted to write this book and get the topic out there as a valid user research method.  This under-utilization of query data is due in part to ignorance–many of us don’t even know we can get at this data–and partly because it can be a little tricky to set up.

But there aren’t many better–or other–sources of such semantically-rich behavioral data.  In high volumes.  Without the taint of coming from a lab.  In effect, query data is our users telling us what content they want from our sites in their own words.  Really, they’re trying to have a conversation with us; are we listening and learning from it?

Search query data can not only to help us improve our search engine’s performance, but our content and our metadata as well.  So, if you’ve got a search engine, you’ve got query data somewhere.  Lots of it, likely.  Why wouldn’t you want to learn from it?

What can User Experience learn from Web Analytics? What can Web Analytics learn from User Experience?

This is one of those questions that could take a few pages to answer.  For sake of brevity, let me distill it this way:  Web Analytics is great at measuring and monitoring how well an organization is performing at meeting its goals (as expressed as Key Performance Indicators).  in other words, WA tells us about the world that we know.  UX methods, conversely, help us suss out patterns and outliers in data–they expose the world that we don’t know.  Each results in an incredibly valuable perspective, but the organizations that combine these will realize benefits far greater than the sums of their parts.

You describe the nature and personality of Web Analytics and User Experience as polar opposites. What if they had a baby together though? What would it look like? How would it behave?

That’d be one amazing (if somewhat schizophrenic) child.  He would pepper its parents with incessant “why?” questions, like all kids do, but just as many “what” questions as well.  He’d probably be quite odd-looking, but that’s another story.

UX Lisbon 2011

Louis Rosenfeld will be  speaking at UX Lx: User Experience Lisbon, one of Europe’s premier user experience events. The second annual UX Lx conference takes place May 11-13, 2011 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Johnny Holland is proud to be teaming up again with Mozilla Labs for their concept series. This time, Mozilla is working with the Participatory Culture Foundation to present “Collaborative subtitling — How can users quickly create a timed transcript of any video on the web?”.  We’ll be presenting a series of posts to inspire your concepts, and kick it off by talking to Dean Jansen from PCF  about the competition and some hints.

JH: Can you give us a bit of background about PCF?

DJ: The Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) began about 5 years ago when television and other mass media really began to move online en masse. Video is the most powerful medium in our culture and we saw an opportunity to push it in a positive and more democratic direction. Our initial strategy was influencing video publishing and viewing practices through popular technology; our goal was to encourage openness and empower the individual. For instance, our first project was an open source video aggregator (video watching application) called Miro that supports open publishing standards such as RSS. It currently has about 1.3 million users each month. PCF has started many additional projects since then, including Universal Subtitles.

You’re part of the Open Video Alliance. Could you give us some more information about the alliance?

The OVA is a coalition of non-profit organizations, companies, and other institutions advocating for open standards for online video. The OVA seeks to encourage better technological practices, as well as spark a social movement, since the basic qualities of online video have the power to influence the development of our politics and culture. Current members include PCF, Mozilla, Kaltura, and the Yale ISP, but we’re about to dramatically expand the scope and membership of the organization. Last summer we co-organized the inaugural Open Video Conference in NYC which brought together a diverse mix of filmmakers, academics, artists, technologist, entrepreneurs, activists, and many others to discuss the implications and importance of open video. We followed up with a series of panels at SXSW and are currently planning the second Open Video Conference.

What are some of the special challenges of working with video?

There’s currently a huge gap in the market for simple and user friendly solutions for doing video subtitles. A number of issues contribute to this gap, such as the lack of standardization in online video players. Flash has proven to be a good basic technology to deliver video, but it’s proprietary, so developing open solutions on top of it—things that would work across the entire video spectrum—have proven difficult. Another issue contributing factor is that subtitling interfaces seem to be geared towards professional subtitlers. We’re aiming for something incredibly user friendly, so that people who would never have thought themselves capable of subtitling are encouraged to pitch in and subtitle/translate their favorite videos.

We’re aiming for something incredibly user friendly, so that people who would never have thought themselves capable of subtitling are encouraged to pitch in and subtitle/translate their favorite videos.

Prototype Collaborative Tool Demo

Is there a difference with getting people to contribute knowledge as opposed to more usual UIs?

Subtitling is something that the vast majority of internet users haven’t done yet, so in that respect maybe this will be a more difficult challenge.  However, that gives us reason to believe that it will be a more unique, interesting, and ultimately, challenging UI challenge. We also think that the probable unfamiliarity with the practice will allow designers to approach the situation with virgin eyes, which is a big advantage in many respects.

Subtitling is something that the vast majority of internet users haven’t done yet, so in that respect maybe this will be a more difficult challenge.  However, that gives us reason to believe that it will be a more unique, interesting, and ultimately, challenging UI challenge.

What are your thoughts on Youtube Video Captions?

We think the initiative is great—it draws a lot of positive attention to the need for subtitles—these will not only make videos more accessible, but also leads to a much higher potential for cross cultural exchange via video. That said, it also has lots of room for improvement, since it relies heavily on machine transcription and translation (which is fairly inaccurate these days). The biggest issue is that these subtitles are only available on YouTube videos. Our approach is more manual and community driven, but we can certainly see using technology to augment the subtitling and translation processes. Our ultimate goal is to end up with an open and standard subtitling technology that YouTube can support on its platform.

What are you hoping to get from the concepts for the Mozilla Challenge?

We’ve thought a lot about a fresh approach to creating subtitles. We’re breaking the process into discreet parts, so instead of transcribing the audio and putting down in and out points in a single step, the user does it in two.

We’re drawing inspiration from video editing software, as well as video games, and we’re shooting for something very inviting and dynamic. Even with all the time we’ve put into this interface, we know there’s a ton of room for improvement —so we’re really excited to be part of the Mozilla challenge.

Do you have any tips for people taking the competition on?

To anyone considering the challenge who hasn’t tried subtitling a video, I’d suggest trying out some of the current solutions. Use YouTube’s subtitling tools (for example Caption Tube or You Tube Subtitler ) or a service like dotsub to add subtitles to a short video that you like. This will give a good idea of the current paradigm and makes a great starting point for imagining a better approach.

Entries are open for the Mozilla Collaborative Subtitling Challenge from now until the 26th of April. For more information, see the Mozilla Challenge site.

Paola Antonelli is the design curator at the New York Museum of Modern Art and a leading voice in the power of design, shown most recently in her acclaimed 2008 exhibition Design for the Elastic Mind. Antonelli talked to us about how her process for creating an exhibition, the future of design, and how we make people and objects more elastic.

You have organized a lot of succesful exhibitions at MoMA. What is your approach when setting up a new exhibition?

Paola Antonelli

My passion is contemporary design; to look at how people live today and understand from that what’s going to happen the day after tomorrow. I never do science fiction movies, but I like to give some idea of the way we are going to live maybe in two to three years from now.

In order to do so first of all, a theme comes to mind, an idea. An idea is a dollar a pound, and it depends on which one you decide to develop that really makes it worthy of talking about. Let’s say you decide to develop a certain idea, you start to look for examples in the world of design all around the world that supports this idea. Now, when I say the world of design it doesn’t mean just the bona fide designers that get published in magazines. Sometimes it’s products that are already on the market that don’t really have a name attached. But, you know everything that is built is a form of design, so there is a lot to look at. I usually gather a lot of different material and begin to sculpt the exhibit, I usually start with too much and as you really prepare the exhibition certain objects get abandoned and others come to the surface. It’s a process, it really is. In the end it all comes together, but it never is completely finished. When it comes to contemporary design it is best to leave the exhibition slightly unfinished to let the public finish it itself.

When it comes to contemporary design it is best to leave the exhibition slightly unfinished to let the public finish it itself.

One of the strong points of MoMA is the ability to ‘experience’ an exhibition digitally. How far do you want to go with this? How far will this go in relationship to the physical exhibition?

I started the museum website in 1995, because my very first short MoMA was a show about new materials about design. I figured it would be good to have a website. So ever since, I’ve had websites for every show I’ve done. I consider the website a place to archive everything, every website has all the materials and an explanation of all the objects in the show. Progressively it has becomes a place for an experience, and I feel the experience should be different than the show itself.

I don’t see the website as a surrogate or a substitute to the show itself, but rather a space all on to its own. For every show there are three main spaces, one is the gallery space, another is the catalog if you do it, and a third is the website. Each one responds to different laws, and they lead you to different experiences. The website for ‘Design and the Elastic Mind‘ was truly an experience, one that you would either love or hate.  It was completely in Flash – Yugo Nakamura, who is considered to be one of the kings of Flash, was the creative director – and required you to really float around on and explore to experience it in full. It had a personality that was very distinct. It had nothing really to do with the show, even though it contained the same objects though they were organized for the space of the website.

Right now the limit to what can be done on the web is the software. The limits are the crashes and the speed download. So much that we can do more without, I don’t believe in doing virtual galleries. That’s a bad use of the medium. So much is imperfect. We have all tried to do exhibitions on SecondLife, but I’m sorry, it was terrible.

When setting up a new exhibition, how do you try and capture the attention of the audience? How do you lure people into the exhibition?

Design and the Elastic Mind

I don’t know. It kind of comes naturally. There needs to be a good balance, of course you want to convey a certain idea and you hope that the idea will push the whole world a little further and forward. But, at the same time you need to do it with some grace without being too pandering and too heavy. So there are always a little sense of humor in certain objects, some lightness every now and then, even when you have a serious message to convey. Then there is also the idea that you want to show that design is a very creative discipline and that there is playfulness in it and talent, but there is also a lot of thinking and reasoning. And, more than anything, there is a lot of thinking about human beings.

However, people usually like it better when it’s not that abstract, where their lives are not at stake. So one of the best ways to make the exhibition engaging for people is to make them understand that it is about people.  What designs do is they really focus on people’s lives, even when they use the most advanced of technologies. They are the ones that guarantee that these devices actually work for people. It’s a mixture of that and the overall design of the space, ensuring its attractiveness, and the choice of objects. I always compare curators, especially curators at MoMA, to movie directors. It’s as if I was the director and MoMA was the studio. Each director has their own personality. It really has to do with the philosophy of displaying and the philosophy of exhibiting.

You see a lot of new forms of design popping up, like ‘critical design’ and ‘green design’. What new form of design appeals to you the most?

“Design for the Elastic Mind” was all about new forms of design. But, the type of design that I’m really interested in is all of them. I love the way designers work with scientists, biomimicry, and nanodesign. I love tissue design, behavioral design, and I’m interested in social design depending on how it’s done. I’m very passionate about informational design and visualization, I think it is one of the biggest avenues for designers in the future. In a way, I’m interested in any form of design that doesn’t start with an object but rather starts with reasoning. A reasoning about how people live and how they could live better in the future.

What, for the coming decade, will be an important influence/change for the way we approach design?

I think more and more it will be not about objects, but rather about other things. Or at least the objects will be in the computer screen. I think the designer that are going to survive are the ones that have studied how to make chairs, but are more interested in experiences, interaction, and interfaces. The next show that I’m working on is about this, called “Talk to Me.” It’s about the communication between people and objects. I really believe that’s what’s going to happen the most.

I also feel that designers will start to be employed more in policy making, and sociology and ethnography. Their knowledge of how people think and behave will be exploited better.

Over the last decade, which product has made the most impact on you and why?

The iPod, which then became the iPhone, really it’s the whole i-suite. I use a BlackBerry personally, but any kind of portable communication device that supports both text and email has revolutionized our life the most.

How do you see the balance between input from users and the brilliance of designers when designing new products?

It depends on the product, because every product requires a different balance. There are some products that are all about how people want them to be: these tend to be open source. There are others where people want the hand, or mind, of designer. They want the signature. It’s becoming more and more thinking before doing, and understanding where the object sits. Let’s say you want to buy a Cabana chair for $10,000, you don’t want your input in it. You want it to be their input only. Instead, you want to customize your Firefox, you want to customize it all by yourself. Your input is in the parts you decide to assemble and all the plugins that you want. So you see, there is a big difference between the functionality and symbolism of the object.

In an article you once wrote that “the figure of the designer is changing from form giver to fundamental interpreter of an extraordinary dynamic reality”. What did you mean by this?

What’s happening is that designers used to be those that made chairs, or those that made posters. Instead, right now they look at the way people live and they try to translate their observations into better products, better interfaces. Objects that are better, more flexible, more adaptable, and more elegant artifacts that we can surround ourselves with. Since people are changing everyday faster, and what’s happened in the past decade is the rate of change has become more rapid, what designers have to do is first and foremost be like anthropologists, or ethnographers. They have to observe how things happen and interpret them as fast as possible in a smart way.

What designers have to do is first and foremost be like anthropologists … observe how things happen and interpret them as fast as possible in a smart way.

In the same article you wrote this beautiful sentence “If design is to help enable us to live to the fullest while taking advantage of all the possibilities provided by contemporary technology, designers need to make both people and objects perfectly elastic” How do you make people more elastic?

People might become more elastic before you make them. But, it’s a matter of open-mindedness and getting people to accept change. The reason people call innovation distributive is because when it’s imposed upon society by the people creating it, they don’t give a damn about the people. They don’t care about the consequences of the innovation, rather they just pass on the innovation to society. Designers try to ensure that innovations are able to be used by people and it speaks the language that the people are familiar with. This is how you make objects more elastic, how you make people more elastic is by making them more comfortable with change as it happens. It’s not a one way street, both people and objects need to have better interfaces.

Interaction 10

If you want to meet Paola Antonelli in real life: she is one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 10. It is the third annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Savannah, Georgia (USA).

After over 2 years of extensive research, Todd Zaki Warfel has released the book “Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide”. I talked to  Zaki Warfel about his interest in the area, the surprising results of what prototyping methods practitioners actually use , and how he seeing prototyping being used in the future.

VT: What was the inspiration to write about prototyping?

Prototyping: A Practitioner's Guide

At my company, Messagefirst, we had starting doing more and more design of webapps and things that took advantage of modern technologies like AJAX to improve the user experience. We were finding that as detailed as our wireframe documentation was, it was falling flat when trying to show transitions like self heal and progressive reveals. We needed something that could show and tell the story of the experience better—we turned to prototyping.

How clued up is industry right now when it comes to prototyping?

Not very. I’ve seen a high degree of interest, but from practical standpoint, there’s a very small minority of practitioners doing prototyping as a regular part of their design process. I find it’s most common at the most extreme ends of the spectrum. Based on the research I did for my book, it was something that I found to be more likely in Agile-type shops and really large corporations with hefty budgets like Microsoft. That’s not saying that all Agile shops or corporations with hefty budgets are doing it, but those seem to be two environments where it’s more likely to occur.

Todd Zaki Warfel

While there is interest in prototyping, the two main things that prevent people from adopting prototyping into their design process are that they don’t know where to begin and they have a hard time convincing their client or boss that it needs to be.
There’s this misconception that prototyping has a high cost, adding significant time and financial cost to the design and development cycle, when in fact the exact opposite is true. Not that prototyping doesn’t have a cost, it absolutely does. The thing is, just like anything else, you’re going to pay now or later and prototyping has a much lower cost than paying later. Fixing something in the design process is much less expensive than trying to fix it once it’s been launched. Depending on who you ask, fixing a problem once your system has launched will cost 100-1000 times as much as what it would have cost had you fixed it during the design process.

Getting past the “cost” argument can be challenging for people who don’t have experience prototyping and can’t speak to it first hand. Fortunately, I’ve seen the benefits firsthand and have a number of stories I can tell about those lightbulb moments we’ve experienced with customers and clients that we’d never experienced with wireframes. I can also give our clients examples of how prototyping enabled us to uncover hidden problems, explore design solutions, and make informed decisions prior to launch that we simply couldn’t have done with out prototyping.

People just need to find the comfortable place to jump in and try prototyping, something small with a low initial cost that can provide some value they can show clients in order to make it a regular part of their design process.

One interesting concept in the book was using prototypes for communicating ideas (Robert Hoekman, Jnr. coined it “proto-communicating”).

The standard practice is to either use wireframes with behavior notes and or a spec document. Spec documents are the worst. They’re typically 60-200 pages, mostly text, occasionally include screen shots to illustrate what the text is trying to describe. It’s still a static representation of an interactive and dynamic experience.

Wireframes are a little better for communication, as they rely more on visual representations of the system with behavior notes. But like a spec or requirements document, it’s still a static representation of an interactive and dynamic experience.

Since the dawn of man, we’ve used pictures to communicate. Our first form of written communication was cave paintings—drawings. We are visual thinkers by nature. If I try and describe a system to you, your brain is wired to immediately draft a picture of what the system is, how it might look, the way you move from screen to screen, or state to state. Why not leverage that native visual thinking language?

Prototypes are about show and tell. They’re a visual way of communicating the design of a system. First and foremost, they communicate your design. That’s kind of ground zero.

You did a lot of research into the prototyping tools interaction designers currently use. Did you have any surprises?

Initially, I was surprised at the number of people using Visio and Excel to prototype. Let’s be honest, as a drawing tool, Visio is mediocre to decent at best, but as a prototyping tool, it’s pretty poor. And then there’s Excel. Who in their right mind would ever prototype in Excel? Turns out, someone who has access to it, knows it, and is comfortable using Excel.

This turned out to be one of the biggest influencers in selecting a prototyping method or tool: use what’s available and what you know. The thing is, that as bad as these tools are for prototyping, the worst tool you can try to prototype with is the one you don’t know, aren’t comfortable with, or don’t have access to.

There are a number of better prototyping tools available: Fireworks, Flash, Axure RP Pro, PowerPoint/Keynote, and HTML just to name a few. And while they might actually be better prototyping tools, if you don’t know them, don’t have have them on your computer, and need to prototyping something quickly and have it ready today, tomorrow, or in a few days, then you use what you know. Learning a new tool does have a cost. You just have to decide when you can afford a little downtime to learn that new tool.

Zaki Warfel's Prototyping Methods Matrix

What are your preferred prototyping tools?

Paper and pencil to begin. Every design I do starts with one of our sketchboard templates, a mechanical pencil and a thin felt tip pen. After sketching through several iterations of the design, I typically move right into the HTML/CSS prototyping framework we’ve built. We’ve plugged several different JavaScript frameworks into it: Prototype, jQuery, and most recently YUI. I’m really impressed with the strength of the YUI 3.0 JavaScript framework for AJAX-style transitions and interactions. jQuery is probably my favorite for doing things quickly, but YUI 3.0 has become really powerful.

I’ve also leveraged Fireworks from time to time. It’s a good tool, but not great yet. There’s some real quirkiness with the application (things like zooming won’t work on the window you have in focus until you click on the actual frame of the page). If they’d fix the buggy quirks, it would become a great tool. But my preferred prototyping tools are paper, pencil, pen and HTML/CSS with JavaScript.

Has doing the book changed how you prototype?

I’m continually evolving the design process we use, so it’s hard to say. It did open the door to some new tools that I was aware of, but hadn’t tried out yet, like Fireworks. In the past, I had only used Fireworks for visual design and production of visual assets, but not for prototyping. The more I learned about it, the more I wanted to try it out for prototyping.

We prototype almost exclusively in hand-coded HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—prototyping something in Fireworks is a significant departure from what we typically do. However, since writing my book, there have been a few opportunities where a Fireworks prototype turned out to be the most appropriate approach.

One of the things that did happen along the way, was that our prototyping process evolved to the point of being more and more comfortable creating production-level prototypes. Most prototypes are built with the intent of being a “throw away”—little if anything from the prototype will actually be recycled for production. Personally, I think that approach gives you a great deal of freedom and flexibility. And honestly, it’s the approach I would advocate for most people. Our situation is a little different. Most of our prototypes are created with the intent that eventually most if not all of it will be repurposed for production.

Since we’re creating prototypes that often make their way into final production, our approach is a little different. We use our own custom HTML/CSS framework to prototype. There’s nothing really proprietary about it—it’s all standards compliant HTML and CSS with Prototype, jQuery, or YUI! thrown in for AJAX effects. However, as part of the ever evolving refinement of our design process, I’ve rewritten this framework three times and am currently working with Jonathan “Yoni” Knoll to rewrite it again to make it even better.

I think the book has encouraged me to explore additional toolsets and continually refine our prototyping process and framework.

Are there many things in the design process you can’t prototype?

Not that I’ve found yet. The nice thing about prototyping is if you can fake it. One of my guiding principles is: If you can’t make it, fake it. So, there really isn’t anything I can think of that can’t be prototyped at some level. Some things are easier than others, but I can’t think of anything I haven’t been able to prototype to date.

In nearly every case in the past three years, prototypes have become our documentation. There are a few exceptions, where we need to include some supplemental documentation, say a 10-20 page document to specify some business rules that happen on the backend, which aren’t clear from the prototype. But I’m willing to do a 20 page spec document and a prototype instead of a 200 page spec. It still takes less time to build a prototype and write a 20 page supplemental spec than it would to write a 200 page spec and get consensus on it. And you still won’t know if it’s going to work or not until the system gets into production. Any design based on a written spec is a design based on theory. A design based on a prototype is a design based on experience and practice.

Any design based on a written spec is a design based on theory. A design based on a prototype is a design based on experience and practice.

Any predictions or hopes as to how prototyping might evolve in the future?

My hope is that it becomes more of a common practice in the design process of anyone making products. I know personally how much making prototyping a core part of our design process has changed the way we approach, design, and validate our assumptions. It’s also made our solutions much more creative at Messagefirst. Once we start to see how the system will work, it begins to inspire new ideas. We can also identify issues much faster and earlier in the design process. Those issues create opportunities for more creative solutions. And the earlier you find problems with the design, the cheaper it is to fix them. Frank Lloyd Wright once said “You can fix it on the drafting board with an eraser, or on the construction site with a sledge hammer.” Prototyping is the eraser. All in all, my hope is that I’ve given the community something they find will help them improve their design process, their designs and make it easier to communicate their designs to clients and colleagues. Less pain, more gain.

Frank Lloyd Wright once said “You can fix it on the drafting board with an eraser, or on the construction site with a sledge hammer.” Prototyping is the eraser.

Any other insights about prototyping that you’d like to mention?

Probably the biggest insight is that making prototyping a core part of our design process has literally changed the way we approach exploring, crafting, and validating our design concepts. Prototyping has given us the power to show and tell the story of our design solutions to any given problem rather than just tell the story waving our hands in the air to describe the magic.

I think another significant insight is that reactions we get to from our prototypes from clients and customers is far beyond anything we were ever able to achieve with wireframes and static Photoshop visual comps.

Example of physical prototyping (taken from Prototyping: A Practitioner's Guide)

One last insight is prototyping has not only given us the ability to test out our designs early and often, quickly uncovering issues with the designs, but has also given us a method to inspire new design solutions. It’s not until you start experiencing and playing with the design that we know whether or not our theory will really work. Once we start playing with it, seeing how it works, experiencing it, we often have those light bulb moments of “Oh, now that I see it does that, imagine if we take it a step further and do this…

Prototyping has given us the power to show and tell the story of our design solutions to any given problem rather than just tell the story waving our hands in the air to describe the magic.

Getting the book

Prototyping: A Practitioners guide is available now in paperback and digital format.
Thanks to Rosenfeld Media, Johnny Holland readers will receive a 20% discount on the book with the code JOHNNYHOLLAND when buying it from the Rosenfeld Media website. It is also available via the UX Bookstore.

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Images taken from the Rosenfeld Prototyping: (diagram illustrations) Flickr set. CC BY 2.0

I recently talked to Alex Wright, Director of User Experience at The New York Times, and author of Glut, a book on the history of information architecture from human evolution to the internet.  At the end of August he will be the keynote speaker for UX Australia. I talked to him about how a librarian gets into user experience, why the NY Times doesn’t talk about readers anymore, and how the web might have been better had history been different.

Alex Wright

Vicky Teinaki: Like many people in UX, you’ve had an interesting journey to where you are today. Can you tell us about your background?

Alex Wright: In my pre-Web life, I worked at various times as journalist, librarian, and for a very brief stint as a press rep for a government agency (where my claim to fame was writing the authoritative history of Massachusetts milk pricing policy). I stumbled into my first Web job in 1995, when I joined IBM as the managing editor of the IBM.com site.  Over the years that role morphed into more of a design management/information architecture job, and eventually I started calling myself a user experience manager (although no one really knew what that meant in 1998).  When I left IBM in 1999, I got swept up in the whole dotcom gold rush and moved out to San Francisco, where I worked with a little Web consulting firm called Phoenix Pop. After that, I spent about 7 years working for myself as a consultant. Along the way, I started to develop a deepening interest in the question of how people have organized information over the years, leading me down a research path that eventually led me to write my book, Glut, about the history of information systems. After my book came out, I got wind of a job at The New York Times, which has given me an opportunity to pull together some of these disparate career threads as a researcher, writer and designer.

You’re currently the Director of User Experience and Product Research at the New York Times. Can you talk about the work you do?

The New York Times iPhone App (source: NYTimes)

I manage a small team responsible for conducting research into how our users (formerly “readers”) interact with the Times, both online and in print.  We work closely with our design and product team to evaluate new product ideas, and to identify opportunities for improving the user experience.

In addition to traditional user testing, we also use a range of other research methods like ethnography, surveys, community panels and A/B testing, among others.  I have also had the chance to do some design work (e.g., on the NYTimes iPhone app), and to write an occasional piece for the paper.

The New York Times has made a name for itself as a leader in new forms of digital user experience. What recent and upcoming developments are there?

From a user research perspective, one of the most interesting areas involves e-reader devices like the Kindle. The market for these devices is still tiny compared to the market for print or Web media, but it’s growing fast, and the technology is still in its infancy. Soon we’re going to start new technologies like flexible color displays that could really transform the way people consume digital media.  One interesting research question involves looking into whether people will expect these devices to function like portable Web browsers, or whether they want an experience that approximates a more stable, print-like experience.  We’re currently in the process of trying to explore what an ideal e-reader user experience might look like.

You say that NY Times ‘readers’ are now ‘users’….

Traditionally, newspaper publishing was a one-way street: Reporters reported, editors edited, and readers read.  Now the Web is changing that equation: the lines between writing, reading and editing are all starting to blur.  “Readers” now edit the news for themselves using RSS readers and collaborative filtering tools; while many reporters now engage in direct, unflitered discussions with all kinds of people via Twitter, Facebook et al.  These days it seems like most everyone is part writer, part reader, part editor.  We’re constantly looking for ways to broaden and deepen those relationships.  So while reading articles is still a big part of what most people do with the Times, “user” seems like a more inclusive term for the range of ways people engage with us online.

I understand that you were once involved with a project like the Rosetta Stone…

Several years ago I helped The Long Now Foundation redesign the Rosetta Project, an effort to create an authoritative Web-based archive of all the world’s languages. More recently, I had the opportunity to give a talk at one of their Long Now Seminars, where I had the good fortune to spend time with two people I admire enormously: Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly.

Glut: Mastering Information Throughout the Ages

In your book Glut, you point out that we have had a number of information revolutions throughout history (written language, the codex, printed press, the internet) that enabled some valuable form of communication. Do you think that anything happening right now will be looked on in the future as the ‘next information revolution’?

The Internet will almost certainly go down in history as one of humanity’s great technological transformations, along with the printing press and the invention of writing.  It’s worth keeping in mind, however, that major technological shifts rarely go smoothly.  In the years after Gutenberg, Western Europe went through a period of violent upheaval that can be traced at least in part to the social and institutional disruptions wrought by the printing press. With the Internet, we are just starting to understand the potentially wrenching economic, political and social impact that this technology may trigger. It’s too early to predict what the long-term outcomes will be, but it seems like we may well be witnessing a literally epochal shift in the patterns of human interaction.

You’re giving a keynote at UX Australia. Can you give us a bit more information about what you’ll be talking about?

I’m going to talk about the history of early hypertext systems that predated the Web. For most of us who work on the Internet, the Web is all we have ever known – it’s almost impossible to imagine a world without browsers, URLs and HTTP.  But in the years leading up to the Web, visionary information scientists like Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson and others were exploring provocative alternative visions of how networked information technologies might work. I’m going to take a look at the heritage of these systems and explore what they might be able to teach us about today’s Web, in search of practical lessons for user experience designers.

Any particular one of those visions you wish had actually happened (or just really like)?

Each one of them had particular strengths that are lacking in today’s Web.  For example, Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson both believed strongly in the importance of two-way links. Doug Engelbart wanted to see better tools for group collaboration. Paul Otlet imagined the possibility of a top-down, hierachical classification system working in concert with a bottom-up, networked scheme. Of course, each of these systems had shortcomings as well. And part of the secret to the Web’s success has been its relative simplicity. So while I’d be reluctant to say that one of these systems would have necessarily been “better” than what we have today, it’s still instructive to look back at some of these alternative visions, because they still hold out a lot of promise for thinking about ways to improve the user experience of today’s Web.

Anything else you’d like to mention?

This will be my first trip to Australia, so I’m looking forward to seeing a bit of the country while I’m there, and perhaps enjoying a meat pie.

Alex Wright will be keynoting at the UX Australia conference, in Canberra, Australia on 27-28 August 2009.

Recently I did an interview with Bill DeRouchey about his view on the field of interaction design, the challenges we as designers face and about authentic experiences. Check out what he has to say in the interview. And if you like what he says, come with us and listen to him live at From Business to Buttons in Sweden (June 11-12).

Jeroen van Geel: For those who don’t know you yet. Could you shortly introduce yourself?

Bill DeRouchey: Hello there! I’m Bill DeRouchey and I live in Portland, Oregon, US. I’m currently directing the Interaction Design group at Ziba Design, where I get to help design the experiences for a wide variety of challenges, from handheld devices to appliances to medical products to websites to retail spaces. It’s an amazing variety. I am also on the board of directors of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) where we strive to connect, inspire and support interaction designers worldwide. On top of all that, I’m co-chairing Interaction 10 in Savannah Georgia next year, and when I can, research and blog about the history of the button.

Bill doing The Billy, a bad version of The Johnny

JVG: There is a constant discussion about the definition of interaction design. What is yours? What does it touch? And what does it not touch?

BD: Oh boy, the definition question. A lot of definitions have been put out there about interaction design and I believe that’s healthy and even unavoidable. We’re a relatively new field in a rapidly changing technology environment, so everybody is trying to figure it out. But this point is important to me: Define to understand, not to divide. Defining should be an exercise to test your powers of understanding and brevity. But can we ever really define it? Like Andrew Hinton once said, how do you define “sports”? You know it when you see it, but how do you clearly describe borders around it?

We can all probably agree that interaction design is somewhere in the murky intersection of people and technology, or really any artifact or system, as long as that thing engages back in some way. Interaction is a two-way street, it’s a conversation. Yes, as Robert Fabricant spoke about at Interaction 09 Vancouver, interaction design is about designing behavior. But for me a key component of designing behavior, and the one key question that interaction design asks that other disciplines don’t explicitly ask, is “what do I do next?” It’s sequence and flow. So one of the elements of interaction design that fulfills “I know it when I see it” to me is addressing the flow in engaging a product/service/system. At minimum, smooth and effective. Ideally with elegance, enjoyment and beneficial.

JVG: Traditionally our discipline was part of digital media, but with the rise of mobility and ubicomp we are also moving outside of our box. Because of this we are coming in contact with other disciplines, like architects and industrial designers. How does this affect the role of an interaction designer?

BD: I view it as interaction design is the result of different mediums merging. When engaging in this necessary/futile exercise of defining and understanding, it’s crucial to view it in the context of time. In the mid 1990s, we had software and eventually the Web. Most of our digital experiences happened with a computer screen, keyboard and mouse. The boundaries were more or less contained, the challenges were a bit simpler. A “webmaster” did all the programming, the architecture, and the visual design. But now, with larger scale projects, no one person can do everything so skill sets have to specialize. The information architecture grew out of this specialization. Then as web technology grew, and interaction increasingly happened within a page instead of between pages, the lines blurred again. Who’s the person responsible for motion or behavior? Need to specialize some more…

Elsewhere, other people were designing for devices. Watches, microwaves, medical, industrial, etc. “Interaction design” fit here because “interaction” frankly feels like a word with a physical component. But now that the lines blur between devices, computers and systems, so do the job skills and tools necessary to create Things.

Now consider 10-15 years from now. Materials science has evolved so that surfaces can be dynamically shaped, can display information, and can accept input. Fabrics, flexible plastics, or other materials become input, output and form. Disposable physical interfaces. We’ll potentially have new specialties like Kinetic Design for specializing in the movement of objects, Shape Engineering for specializing in the programming of dynamic surfaces, or Gestural Design for specializing in human movement as system input. The possibilities of interacting with technology will increasingly become more complex, yet there will still need to be a role that stitches together human cognition and behavior with system architecture and behavior. Can this still be called interaction design? I don’t see why not.

JVG: The number of tangible devices that have a digital interface is growing. Here product and interaction designers meet. What is the challenge we face here and how should we deal with it?

BD: It’s true. The roles of product/industrial designer and interaction designer have come to overlap much more in recent years as physical products increasingly have digital interfaces. In my five years at Ziba, I’ve seen this in a bunch of projects. So how do we deal with it? Easy. Design it together in collaboration while recognizing each other’s specialties. The overlap of roles is clearly the physical interface. How many buttons? What do they do? How are they positioned? Both the product designer and interaction designer should have equal say in this discussion because the elegance and effectiveness will be found by working through it together over iterations. Once the basic configuration of the physical interface is agreed upon, each side can then focus on its specialty. The interaction designer is responsible for what happens onscreen and what the buttons do. The product designer is responsible for form and feel. Yet both sides should be free to give input to the other. The biggest challenge is simply getting them in the same room, or even the same building.

JVG: In June you will give a talk at From Business to Buttons in Malmo, Sweden. What will the talk be about?

BD: At Business to Buttons I will be talking about “Designing Humanity into Products.” It asks the question, how can companies better connect to its customers? The answer is simple: Speak like people, not like machines. It’s about the need to remove the corporate faces from the products and services we create and instead let personality shine through. More and more, people are craving authentic experiences from the world around them, and that means a simple human-to-human connection. In our “user experience” world, this means when people use a website, software, product, etc., people should somehow experience the people that created it. Connection. So I’ll highlight examples of companies that have successfully done this and provide a framework within which to understand it.

JVG: In product design designers have been looking at a company and their products as a whole for years… How come that digital designers are so much behind?

BD: First of all, product design as a discipline is decades older than digital design. That’s a big headstart. Simply, product designers make actual tangible things that you can hold. It’s a much more personal exercise than creating something that exists only onscreen. Digital designers also face the challenge of creating something whose borders are completely amorphous. Websites are never really complete. Data is pulled from somewhere else. People are contributing content. There is never a final “this is done” moment. But when products are manufactured and come off the assembly line, they’re done. It’s a well-defined thing. I believe it’s core in our human nature to ascribe more personality to a physical thing than software. We’ve been interacting with things for millions of years. Software, thirty years max for most of us.

JVG: What are your ideas on the role of culture and cultural changes on enabling this authentic experience?

BD: There’s a large cultural trend around transparency right now, for companies to reveal who they are, for people to reveal who they are. It’s all about removing the masks that separate ourselves from one another, and simply be ourselves. Transparency leads to authenticity. This has interesting implications for design because typically the artifact produced becomes its own entity, separate from its designers. But if we apply the transparency and authenticity filters here, users may want to see and connect with the designers themselves, and not just the artifacts.

JVG: Where do you personally really miss an authentic experience? Where would it really be an added value?

BD: Fascinating question. Banking is a really interesting example. I have strong memories of being a little kid and bringing my money to the corner bank to deposit as savings. You got to meet the people that were taking care of your money. Now, money is incredibly abstracted. I almost never enter banks due to ATMs, online banking, etc. Convenience and automation have replaced connection. The recent economic crash has shown us what can happen when money becomes too abstracted, when you lose connection where that “dollar’ is actually going. This can explain the success of microlending sites like Prosper or Kiva, where people can lend their money to actual people and see the results of their help. As another example, a few years ago, Ziba partnered with Umpqua Bank, a bank local to the west coast of the US. Ziba proposed the concept of slow banking, where your goal is to not rush in and rush out, but to instead slow down, connect with your neighbor bank, maybe do some other errands while you’re there. It’s been a great success.

JVG: Do you have any simple advice for UX designers in improving the authenticity? What can WE do?

BD: The best advice I can offer here is to focus on the writing. I think authenticity shines mostly through voice. Do the words sound like an actual person wrote them? Or do they sound stale and corporate? The problem that most companies have is their writing sounds too formal, even formulaic. The fear from sounding unbusinesslike has created a culture where companies are afraid to say anything real or with personality, resulting in a formal tone, yet formality is designed to create barriers or distance between people. It’s a power game. On the flipside, informality is where connections truly occur. When you let down your guard with someone, that’s when the authentic you shows up. That’s when you connect. So write as if you’re talking to someone, not writing to them. And as you’re writing, actually say the words out loud. This is the simplest method of all to spot the clunky constructions and weed out the odd phrases. It boils down to “Write as you speak, and speak as you write.”

JVG: Thank you very much for taking the time for this interview. We’re looking forward to your talk at From Business to Buttons in June.

BD: Thank you Jeroen. I look forward to seeing everybody there!

This February is the second annual Interaction Design Association (IxDA) Interaction 09 conference which is being held in Vancouver, British Columbia in conjunction with Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Dave Malouf, one of the founder’s of the IxDA, was kind enough to allow me to interview him recently about a workshop he will be giving, his take on the field of interaction design, and some thoughts about where the field is going.

[Will Evans] How did you get your start in Interaction/Information Design?
[Dave Malouf ] Well, I started in the web world. Back then doing HTML 1.0 meant you were a designer. I bounced from technologist to producer/project manager for a few years until I found User Experience and fell in love. The last 10 years has been a personal journey of discovering from the outside what “D”esign really means, how it is really meant to be practiced, and now how it is to be taught. Then I connect that to my passion for technology and human beings which combine to me into  Interaction Design.

it is important for future (if not current) interaction designers to be educated in design foundation in order to connect more and be taken more seriously

[WE] Who/Where do you look to for inspiration?
[DM ] What a great question. My greatest inspirations come from the Cooper Hewitt Triennial. Companies like Antenna Design where two people do amazing work spanning so many disciplines of design. Other designers who span multiple planes of design particularly architecture. I’ve also been trying to look deeper into game design theory and practice and I’m really excited that my new position at SCAD will put me in closer contact with some of the best educators of game design anywhere.

[WE] I’ve said to many people that a lot of us have not come by our current roles honestly. That is, many–like you and I, weren’t formally trained as interaction designers – coming from a formal design program (like SCAD or CM). Do you have an opinion on where the interaction designer of tomorrow will evolve from?
interaction design is about deciding the flows and conversation, the narrative that these interface points make up–the notes that are played by the musician.

[DM] Despite my own lack of pedigree, I really feel strongly that for the sustainability of the discipline of interaction design, that most people will need to go through a formal design school education to become contributing parts of the interaction design practice community (community of practice?). But it is also important for future (if not current) interaction designers to be educated in design foundation in order to connect more and be taken more seriously by the rest of the design community including industrial, architectural, communications, and interactive media.

[WE] I have heard you talk quite a bit about drawing from fields like Industrial Design – do you think people equate interaction design with web design? Do you think that limits how we as a profession are seen and how do you think we can grow out of that perception?
[DM] I don’t think that people equate interaction design with “web design”. I think they falsely equate it with “software design” at least inside the United States. And even then that doesn’t speak to what is the more exciting practice of IxD in the US which is most directly connected to the Industrial Design world, which–ironically enough, doesn’t really get interaction design as a community.

But I draw upon Industrial Design as I think it is the older, more established design discipline that most speaks to interaction design. Having worked in an industrial design studio for a bit, I really learned how far ahead they are in understanding and executing the basics of design foundation practices and having an established communication protocol amongst their peers. This lesson more than any other drives me towards education and towards my work around communicating a foundation of interaction design. Something I feel is sorely missing and needing.

[WE] Following up on your your previous answer – People are sometimes confuse or conflate interaction design with interface design? How do you see these as different?
[DM] Part of my gut tells me that they are the same thing. I’ve heard people define both terms in such a way that they are so similar that they might as well be the same thing. But where I usually take interaction design out of interface design is that interface design requires visual interfaces and not all interaction design has visual points of interaction. But even then, there are VUI designers (voice interface designers), so that blows my initial assertion out of the water that UI is only graphical. 

If I dig deeper, though, and if I hold to my own guns, I believe that UI is about presentation of interfacing points, but interaction design is about deciding the flows and conversation, the narrative that these interface points make up — the notes that are played by the musician.

[WE] I know you were very politically active this past year during the election and I think a lot of digital ink was spent discussing the role of social media/internet in this recent election of Obama as president – do you think the effectiveness of the Obama website including the My.BarackObama website brought more focus to the interaction design community and to the importance of good IxD in general? Tell me what you think about how Obama’s call for greater government transparency will impact the IxD community.
[DM] I’m not sure it called attention to the IxD community because it is unclear what role the IxD community played in the creation of all these tools. But it is clear that the tools themselves did make a big difference, at least for me. I think that my.barackobama.com gave me an outlet to express myself and to turn thoughts into actions both online and offline.

On the issue of transparency, I have been using the work I’ve been a part of in this campaign as a source of inspiration in thinking about IxDA. So it isn’t so much about effecting interaction design as it is effecting the interaction design community and possibly even more so the Open Source community.

[WE] One issue that at least I haven’t seen addressed in the IxD community is ethics – could you reflect a bit on the issue of ethics and the role of the interaction designer in an enterprise? Will you be incorporating anything into the curriculum SCAD?
[DM] I am lucky in my career in that many ethical issues haven’t really come up. I’m actually sure — there is something about “forcing users” down paths that I felt were unnecessary, or schlocking wears that only contribute to the downfall of the world on so many levels. 

The more serious answer to your question is that there are so many levels of ethics and concerns, but a point I want to make clear is that interaction design has as much application to pornography and gambling as it does to changing behavior towards sustainability and raising money to end poverty in Africa. 

But personally, I do lean to the left more than the right (understatement) and the design community as a whole is so intent on applying its methods and processes towards “transforming” those elements of society that seem to be in imminent collapse.

Interaction Design… can be applied equally to gambling and pornography as it can in creating a service used to advocate for or change the behavior around positive change for the world.

A point I’d like to make about ethics is that as a discipline Interaction Design is not bound by ethics. This is true because the discipline of IxD is about the methods and rules of designing behavior. It is like a hammer. What you do with that hammer can be used for good or bad. It can be applied equally to gambling and pornography or to creating a service used to advocate for or change the behavior around positive change for the world.

[WE] Along those same lines – your new role as professor of interaction design at SCAD (Savannah College of Art & Design), how hard has it been developing a curriculum? What are some of the key disciplines you will be focusing on this year?
[DM] SCAD is a design school. Everything in the industrial design program is project and studio oriented from as far as I can tell and my courses are no exception. I’m inheriting so far the curriculum of Jon Kolko. It is a minor program to the Industrial Design major for undergraduates. The crux of it is very sound: HCI, Interactive Product Design, Information Architecture, Contextual Research and a senior studio. But as I’m teaching the courses, I’m hungry for more theoretical depth. I’m lucky that it is a minor in industrial deign because  I know these students all went through foundation and get to really hone the crafts of ID (3D, graphics, etc.) 

On the flip side, I’ll be putting together a Masters degree curriculum soon for Interaction. I can’t go into too many details here but I’m very excited with looking at what US programs like CMU and SVA are doing and comparing that to what Ivrea, RCA, Domus, Delft, Umea and Malmo are up to. I think bridging the European-North  American divide is key for future education programs.

[WE] Many top tier universities like Standford and MIT are opening up all their classes including lectures, notes, syllabus to the public – do you think you and SCAD will be following suit?
[DM] Not sure about that, yet. I  think it is a false hope, thinking that interaction design can be learned from watching video’s on the web, even accompanied by course materials and syllabi. The key for most design practitioners is studio work. You can’t fake it. You either have to find an environment where you live it, or you have to go back to school to gain access to it. Almost no software environments run as studios.

 I’ve been thinking about this problem a lot though and I think we need to be inventive about continuing education. Events like AP‘s and UIE‘s week long multi-workshop experiences are interesting, but in their attempt for breadth they miss depth. Cooper‘s practicum is also too wide. What we need are week long courses that are deep and intense and that bring together different levels of practitioners into the same studio space. I’m working on some programs with SCAD but until I can get them off the ground, I can’t really talk about them yet.

[WE] Finally, What should the audience take away from your workshop at Interaction ’09?
[DM] The main purpose of the course  is not to teach students everything they need to know to be an interaction designer, but rather teach them everything they need to know to build a framework for plotting their career path and their own self-education. My biggest lessons have always been ones that inspired me to hunt for more knowledge as opposed to false attempts to impart knowledge itself. 

The workshop is going to present a framework of what interaction design is, how it is practiced and what leads to success. It is also going to be lessons on critique and non-linear thinking tools. Finally, it is going to be a chance for participants to think about their career, their current practice and what type of practice they want to be doing in 5 years. Visualizing that goal will allow them to choose a path. 

The most important thing I tell my students is that the path’s are like design itself. The flow of ideas head towards a horizon point, but there are many opportunities for disruption along the way. At any given point on the path, the direction of the horizon can and should change, influenced by the past, but put in motion by the present.

[WE] Thank you very much for taking the time for this interview.
[DM] You’re welcome.

About Dave’s Workshop
This half-day seminar will provide a solid background in Interaction Design (IxD) for those who are coming to the practice of IxD from other areas, such as information architecture, software engineering, business analysis, project or product management, technical writing, architecture, industrial design, visual design, and interactive design.

For more information about Dave’s workshop at Interaction 09, go here.

About Dave Malouf
David Malouf is currently a Professor of Interaction Design in the Industrial Design Department of the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). Before taking this position, David was a Sr. Interaction Design for Motorola Enterprise Mobility where he designed software, webware, and hardware interactions and interfaces. Motorola was the last in a 15 year journey of practicing interaction design, information architecture, ui design, project management and other roles and positions working almost exclusively with think client technologies.

David is also one of the primary founders and first Vice President of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). David’s passion for evangelizing and teaching interaction design, came to a climax in 2008 when he co-chaired the first Interactions conference, Interaction 08 | Savannah.