21 Jun 2007 1043H

The freedom to play, the need to constrain

Play v Constraint

One thing that’s been wracking my brain lately is how to create a process wherein designers inexperienced in designing for interactive media are allowed to have a sandbox for experimentation and yet have their excesses constrained within the sandbox through vetting from user experience professionals.

See, each year there seems to be an endless stream of eager, hardworking ambitious young people who are fabulous print designers, and occasionally interesting Flash designers, but being young and eager and inexperienced, because design is hard, because the web is hard, are even more inexperienced about business and how to meet its needs. It is almost as if the excess days of the web are now coming back with a vengeance.

The thing that’s in the back of my mind is that there was, at some point, a time where there was no GUI, no car, no mobile phone, no radio, no TV, no telephone, no typewriter. And yet people somehow learned to operate these things, things which they had had no history of working with before, and which are also quite complex machines without precedent. How did they get along in those days?

I am led to understand that they adopted controls which seemed to be like other things that operated mechanically. So there were dials of many kinds, snappy dials, smooth dials, push-buttons, levers, valves, stops, the like. Eventually conventions emerged. All before the advent of usability.

So I think creatives can take on some of these tasks but given so much of what we consider design to be cosmetic, and what they produce is largely cosmetic, I am fearful of the consequences. Particularly if you have not worked with them before or if you are in a consulting relationship. I’m mindful it is already happening and probably someday some of these young people will indeed become specialized as information architects or say, interaction designers.

The work still needs to be done.

10 years ago I gave an interview to a reporter from the San Jose Mercury News about how everyday is September on the internet, because of the number of hoaxes, unverifiable stories and flamewars that arose when kids came back to school for the Fall semester. Now in my life, everyday is June, where we have to deal with kids graduating and have to be taught how to work with us all over again. Since we are in a consulting relationship, we absolutely need to be able to work with these new designers.

A major complaint seems to be about chafing under design direction but yet people are reticent to admit they don’t know what the media is limited by or capable of. Or perhaps there is no structure in place to incorporate the use of our resources. At the same time we want to give them full use of their capabilities. Finally, we don’t want to have a process where we have to repeat over and over again. No one wants that, least of all designers. There has to be some kind of institutional memory or some kind of permanent process in place. Either they have to do it themselves or we are called in at the appropriate time.

The obvious solution is to do user testing early enough — I believe someone much smarter than me said once, if you can sketch it, you can test it — and this means testing then becomes part of the design process. In fact, I think everyone would be much better off if we didn’t put pixels down until we had the hard functional stuff done first. Yes. Even for brochureware type stuff. Even more so for the brochureware type stuff where a bad user experience early on can seriously hurt the brand, which is often just being introduced.

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