Mar

16

Man I would love to meet Jonathan Ive

Apple / Experience Design

Q: Why has Apple’s competition struggled to do that?

A: That’s quite unusual, most of our competitors are interesting in doing something different, or want to appear new – I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us – a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better. Committees just don’t work, and it’s not about price, schedule or a bizarre marketing goal to appear different – they are corporate goals with scant regard for people who use the product.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/sir-jonathan-ive-the-iman-cometh-7562170.html

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Mar

01

Designing for function alone vs designing the entire experience

Experience Design

Doug Dietz, a designer at General Electric. Dietz creates complex medical imaging equipment, including an MRI machine that is incredibly important to the medical process. But one day, Dietz saw a little girl crying, scared of the treatment she was about to receive. And whereas he’d once been proud of the lives he’d helped save, now he was disappointed to realize the fear the machine caused. And so he turned the machine into an adventure. The results were dramatic: From 80% of kids who had previously needed to be sedated, now only 10% required anesthetic. Repeating a story that has by now entered GE lore, Kelley recounts Dietz waiting with a mother for her child to come out of a scan. The little girl ran up: “mommy? Can we go again tomorrow?”

David Kelley @ TED

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Feb

29

UX goes so far beyond the UI

Uncategorized

Out of the box from Vitamins on Vimeo.

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Feb

19

Visual design or development? Neither, User Support.

Experience Design

How did you get in to User Experience?

So often the answer is either visual design or development. In some cases both; design and development each allow for a unique perspective into UX. A developer may be frustrated with current software and the lack of focus on those who actually use it. This situation provides a great opportunity to introduce the importance of UX. A visual designer may realize that an interface can be beautiful and still not make sense to a user. This also provides a great opportunity for the visual designer to discover UX. Backgrounds in either of these fields are a great gateway into learning more about User Experience.

 

These two industries are not, however, the only ways into user experience. My background is not completely unique to me; yet I find surprisingly few people who come from the same industry I do: User Support.

 

User experience is all about the use of technology –  individuals trying to accomplish tasks using a tool that was designed. It is, of course, the goal to design a product so that the user can flawlessly navigate the situation accomplishing their goal without hesitation but we all know at times people get confused and frustrated when a tool is expected to work one way, but it does not. When we hit a snag who do we call? User Support. It is also user support that is responsible for user training if the tool being used is complex in nature and requires an explanation or demonstration of use before the user takes control.

 

As a User Support professional I spent years working as a user support professional. I spoke with users on a daily basis and, in a way, conducted ethnographic research with actual users in context dealing with the frustrations of using technology. I encountered all levels of user proficiency dealing with all levels of issues with web applications, hardware, networking, mobile phones, and all other forms of technology. The emotional connection between a user and a piece of technology can become so aggravating and frustrating it can drive a user mad. A support person has to not only fix the issue, they also have to work with the user to understand how the user became frustrated in the first place and then explain to them in a language they understand how to properly use the tool.

 

However, this background puts a UX designer in a tough spot when dealing with people who expect a UX professional to come from either a developer or a visual designer background. For those who view UX from a visual design perspective,  User Support is “very technical.” However, those who come from a development background don’t expect a user support person to understand the technical concepts and jargon of development. Visual designers can say they are a “photoshop wiz” and developers can list of all the coding languages in which they are proficient;  it is not as simple to list a specific technology that sums up a user support background. However, for an industry that is concerned with Human Computer Interaction and User Experience, User Support professionals have a first-hand understanding of users interacting with computers and all the encompassing emotions.

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Jan

26

Who Cares? – Seth Godin

design theory / Observation

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/01/who-cares.html

Caring, it turns out, is a competitive advantage, and one that takes effort, not money.

 

Like most things that are worth doing, it’s not easy at first and the one who cares isn’t going to get a standing ovation from those that are merely phoning it in. I think it’s this lack of early positive feedback that makes caring in service businesses so rare.

 

Which is precisely what makes it valuable.

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Jan

08

More than…

design theory / Experience Design

“User Experience is more than…

  • visual design
  • front end development
  • websites
  • software
  • technology
  • a piece of the puzzle
  • a diagram
  • a process
  • a set of tasks

It is all of those things and so much more. It is every single detail we take in from the world around us; if our lives were a movie it would be mise en scene. People are constantly experiencing, taking in the world around them through their senses. “An Experience” is those sensations (things seen, smelled, felt, etc.) from a moment in time that were in some way relevant enough to a person that they are recalled when this moment is remembered.

This philosophy is crucial to the success of any business, non-profit, or group of people providing a good or service to others. When the consumers interaction with a product or service is recalled, if the memory is happy and positive then the person will be willing to continue spending money to use the offered product/service, and if they really love it they will even evangelize for the product/service or brand. If they recall a negative experience however, then they will either not return or begrudgingly use the product/service until a competitor comes along and provides a more pleasant experience.

User experience for an organization is any experiential quality that involves the product or service provided. Focusing on delivering a positive experience is critical to the long term success of any organization. 

 

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Jan

02

Christmas in Indy

Uncategorized

Went home to Indy for Christmas. Loved seeing the dogs, got some great stuff, saw a bunch of great people, and got to hang with family for a whole week.

 

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Dec

22

Photoshop lies

design theory / Experience Design / IU HCI/d

The Importance of Dog-Fooding

Felton says the main lesson he learned from the experience of designing and iterating Timeline is that “Photoshop lies.” “You can come into a meeting with a very beautiful comp and it’s like, ‘Oh yes, we should do it that way,’” he says. “But you’re never going to know if you can do it that way until you pump in the real data and live with it for days or weeks.”

To make sure they got it right, Facebook released Timeline to its own employees during the development process, to make sure that the paradigms they were developing worked for all users, those with a ton of status updates, for example, as well as those with just a few.

“As a designer, you have your baby that you want to try and sell. To make it saleable, you might pick someone who has really nice photos in their profile and use that to make your mockups,” Felton says. “But you’re ultimately just lying to yourself and the rest of the group if you think everyone’s page is going to look like that.”

I remember working on my first graduate school design project, a RSS feed reader for Mozilla firefox. My team worked hard to come up with a really solid design, that fit the aesthetic of firefox and managed RSS feeds in a very clean way. It was not until our presentation however that we realized that though still a good solution, there were many kinks in the design we had not accounted for because we used data that “fit neatly” into our mockups. We had not accounted for links and blog titles that went above our expected average character count nor had we really pushed the boundaries of how our tool would scale.

 

This is on top of the fact that even if you feel like you consider all of the options, and it still looks great in photoshop, it might end up not working as well as it looks like it should. This just exposes the value of building prototypes, not necessarily fully coded prototypes, but just something to get your hands on to start to evaluate the design as it is used, not just as it looks on the surface.

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Dec

13

Happy Dogs

Observation
Happy Dog

Dogs in Cars from keith on Vimeo.

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Dec

04

I’m tired of “Well it works…”

design theory / Experience Design

Because no, it doesn’t! To hear ‘well it works’ is one of the most frustrating responses one can hear coming from those who make decisions about a products development. ‘It works’ to an engineer and ‘it works’ to a normal person, who is trying to accomplish a task, mean two entirely different things. To an engineer it means it is possible. While it may be technically possible, it does not ‘work right’ or ‘work smart’ for someone who does not think the way ‘it works’ for an engineer is a way it makes sense for the task to be accomplished. If it takes me 12 clicks and with any or all being completely hidden or unintuitive to do something as simple as setting an alarm on a cellphone (a very common task) then it does NOT work, even if it is possible. Hearing ‘well it works’ is usually a sign that the current design is viewed as adequate or ‘good enough’.

 

But that leads to another one of the most frustrating responses that can be heard ‘it’s good enough’. I understand that constraints are ever present in every design situation. There is never enough time, never enough understanding of who the user is, always just a few more tweaks that can be made to make a design just that much better. I also understand that embracing constraints and reacting to the situation can inspire even more innovative work. But to hear ‘it’s good enough’ is a cop out. It can always be better. You can’t let that stop you from delivering, but to just write off a piece of a design as adequate and ‘good enough’ will never lead to a pleasurable experience for anyone who interacts with the design. The devil is in the details and as a designer it is always disheartening to hear someone involved with a product who does not care enough about the product to always be thinking of ways to iterate on it to make it the best it can be.

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