26 May 2008 0839H

Stop kvetching, start doing

The other night was a local IxDA event which they graciously arranged for it to be broadcast via internet, which was frankly genius in intent, although the execution of it was rather poor — speaker positioned in front of a window, no backup microphone to relay the sound to the online audience. If I am not mistaken I believe Dave Malouf shortly gave up trying to listen in and went back to cooking dinner.

Regrettably the event itself turned quickly into a support group for IAs Anonymous. Given that the topic was about who controls the design process, which itself is a loaded question to begin with — does one design in a vacuum? isn’t that the same as being an artist? does one design with the inputs of others? if so then what is a designer, etc? — I suppose it was to be expected. But not in the lengthy painful drawn out manner that it evinced to be.

I hate that.

For over 10 years I have listened to whiny designers kvetch about their situation. I myself have been part of the whinge. The buck stops here. Whiny designers, start figuring out a way to get to where you need to go, either by leaving and joining somewhere else, or doing like my boss said that Don Norman said back in ‘98: stop whining, start doing something about it. Just do something about what your situation is.

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26 May 2008 0724H

Faces of the Dead

A remarkable memorial to the fallen.

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21 May 2008 2221H

Dropclock

One last thing before I pass out tonight: one of the developers on a team working adjacent to ours has this screensaver on his laptop and it’s been catching my eye for a few months now, but, have silently admired it from, uh, five feet away. I need no longer do so because of my mad Google skillz. The loverly creative efforts of the creative label SCR have produced two screensavers, “Kaze to Desktop” (”Wind and Desktop”) and the aforementioned “Dropclock.” Both are totemo kirei na, honto ni. Viddy well the zammechat veschch, o my brothers.

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21 May 2008 2137H

Online satisfaction

So I’m reading the numbers for the May 15th Spring 2008 report from ForeSee Results on the top 100 e-tailers out there. Netflix, QVC and Amazon lead the e-tailing pack and have done so for nearly four years now, rather remarkable in that manner. But then come the next few and these do surprise me: DrsFosterSmith.com, Shutterfly.com, Newegg.com, then Apple, which only squeaks by BassPro, Shopping.HP.com, Avon, and mysteriously the Oriental Trading Company. Hmmm. I need to study the report more. I want to know what the criteria and methodology were. 

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21 May 2008 2126H

Shop four sites at once?

Yep. That’s exactly what the Gap brands would have you do. You can indeed if you so choose buy that bikini to go with your work outfit and don’t forget the flip flops. But, then, where does that leave the Gap? Is it just a slightly more pricey Old Navy? That just seems to expose how that brand’s value prop has been, like the Giving Tree, taken away from all angles. I like how the cart comes down as a visual indicator that an item has been added to the cart and doesn’t take you away from the page you’re on, but disappointed at how the interactivity doesn’t seem to be consistent across all the properties. Oh well. Next release perhaps. 

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21 May 2008 0644H

10 e-commerce lessons

from Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos (second time I’ve mentioned them in the last week or two!) by way of eCommerce Optimization. Particularly so for startups, I think, more difficult to apply for established companies with brick and mortar presences. But hey, Sears sold more than $2 billion in goods last year through the ecommerce channel, so, who says this doesn’t apply.

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19 May 2008 1229H

UI Design in an Agile Environment

By way of my friend Joel in Hong Kong, who went to the HCI Conference in Florence:

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04 May 2008 2014H

Calendaring apps

It occurs to me that we spend far too little time actually tackling industry-standard problems in school and that is, of course, what we look for when we interview people: has the candidate actually done work that looks like a professional problem, with the inputs and limitations placed upon us by resources available?

If I were to assign such a problem to students, I think calendaring would be among the more difficult but satisfying assignments to work on. When you think about it there are really some fairly complex algorithms to get into code: how to calculate a calendar, for instance, how to display information in a calendar. Then there are the human things, such as how to schedule for events, once, repeating, what if there are multiple events in a day, so on. Then, of course, how to accommodate all the different ways that people have of describing repeating events. I suppose the calendaring could be broken down into small problems since it is such a large project. It is an ideal project of course: there hardly comes a day that we do not encounter some form of calendaring and of course, once designed, you can continuously improve upon it, making it an investment that keeps on giving.

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04 May 2008 1952H

What is a user experience professional?

I’m often asked what does it take to be a good user experience professional. Well, of course that depends on where you intend to use your user experience work. I happen to work on the web, so the UX I do is naturally a bit different from someone who works with embedded systems or industrial design artifacts. But if I were to design a whole curriculum around producing the next generation user experience professional, I would require:

1) Social science methodologies. Much much of our work revolves around the observation and analysis of human behavior. I’d say a background in psychology or social psych would be best, particularly around environmental or industrial psych, possibly human factors, although I think it is a little too quant heavy for our work, some sociology, anthro, so on. I’d want students to be good quantitative and qualitative people and to have tools at their disposal. You must be able to understand how to observe people and collect data, either narratives or numbers, accurately describe where the data came from, who they represent, how that data was collected, cognizant of threats to validity, sampling methodologies, how to phrase questions without injecting bias, so on.

2) Library and info science. A good deal of our work involves the categorization of information and information seeking needs and how users are served thereby. It is interesting to note that LIS tries to claim information architecture but I feel they focus too much on the categorization and labelling than they do on fundamental interaction design, which is really taught nowhere, unfortunately, and not at the undergraduate level where it really should be fundamental to. . .

3) Computer science. A lot of our work involves dealing with technology. So I would have to say that you should have at least built one website and maybe no less than three to five. You should have learned how to gather requirements, which is of course what no one teaches. You should have learned how to program and interface with databases and know your way around SQL. It would not hurt to understand Java or another object oriented language. You should have learned how to work with different types of scripting, like HTML, Flash, Javascript, so on. In other words you should know how to work with developers and speak the language of development. Wouldn’t hurt if you had deep chops with HTML, CSS, XML, and Javascript. Here is where comp sci could be useful but isn’t. Requirements and methodologies would be great to know here, but that would require students to actually work in teams on projects that simulate real world problems. In addition, a lot of what passes for information architecture really is in fact interaction design, which is only emerging as a discipline of its own now, but has deep deep roots in comp sci.

4) Visual communications. Now we get to the softer side of things. A lot of things we do involve designers. So a few courses on type, color, composition, grids, branding, being subject to the sometimes brutal and subjective cycle of ideation and critique, and actually doing the work of design on real world projects wouldn’t hurt you in the least. Primarily I would avoid the whole stylistic track — you will inevitably gravitate towards your own unique style — but I think I would focus a student towards information design, such as newspaper infographic designers do: how to make complex information understandable at a glance. Layout for reading comprehension and how to grab people’s attention really also helps.

5) Interaction design. Most importantly and least often presented in the curriculum, I would say, this is the most important skill. You should be able to talk in the language of decision making of choices made in the design of interfaces. Unfortunately, not very well or broadly taught and not deeply enough. Maybe it is time to actually start doing so. There is quite a deep reading list to go through actually.

6) Business courses, particularly around marketing and operations.

It will be noted drily that few people have done all of the above and that most of us working in UX now do not come from such backgrounds. Zannen da kedo! Fortunately, the tools that give a good liberal arts graduate a good head start in the world can also be applied towards catching up with the other disciplines in this list.

What about you all? What would you think would be useful for a user experience professional to know?

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02 May 2008 0719H

Make my logo bigger

Hilarious.

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