Design Sapling.com

I recently took a course on design communication at Cooper. Cooper is an interaction design firm. The founder, Alan Cooper, is one of the godfathers of interaction design.
Adobe TV has a video showcasing Cooper’s use of Fireworks. It’s a good introduction to the type of work an interaction designer might do after performing user research and developing a solid framework for the product.

I would consider interaction design to be a large sub-field of human factors. Lately, there has been a debate among some prominent interaction designers on the Interaction Design Association discussion board concerning the usefulness of UCD. In particular, the usefulness of observing users, developing personas, and using those personas to guide a design has been challenged by Robert Hoekman Jr., author of Designing the Obvious and Designing the Moment which advocate an alternative approach to Interaction Design called activity centered design.

Personas are a central part of Goal-Directed Design, a UCD process developed by Alan Cooper. Hoekman claims that, while personas may be good for understanding a niche market, it’s hard to apply that to something made for everyone. This is a valid point. The
creation of personas takes into account work environment, social factors, and personal preferences. There’s no common ground on those topics for the mass market. The solution is a process developed by Don Norman called Activity-Centered Design (ACD). Norman and Hoekman both claim that people adapt to technology, citing evidence found in our daily lives: using clocks, remote controls, musical instruments, etc… None of that is natural, and yet we learn how to use it without trouble.

Activity-Centered Design focuses on “activities”, which are comprised of tasks. Tasks are comprised of actions, and actions are comprised of operations. Norman’s uses a cellphone as an example in his article Human-Centered Design Harmful?. A cellphone can do many functions, such as email, voice, SMS, calendar, camera, etc… The “activity” for a cellphone would be communication. The tasks would be checking email or dialing a number. He then contends that the difference between Human-Centered Design (HCD) and ACD is that HCD only sees the opportunity for
technology to adapt to people while ACD sees the potential for people to adapt to technology. With ACD, products are designed to allow people to easily adapt to the technology.

Reading through many discussion on the Interaction Design Association discussion forum, I conclude that each method has its purpose depending on the situation. It’s better to gather many techniques from different methodologies than it is to choose one and stick to it dogmatically.

People are motivated by both avoidance and approach of tasks. Avoidance is when you don’t want to do something, so you’re motivated to NOT do it. Approach is when you want to do something.

Well, use your avoidance mentality to your advantage! Once you decide you really don’t want to do something, you’ve got all the motivation you need to do your less important task. Your reluctance to start the most dreaded task reminds you of everything else you have to do.

“Hmm, I need to do that, but I’ve got all these other things I need to do. I’ll do them first.”

-Johnny Procrastinator

That’s why lists are important:

1. They give you something productive to do when you procrastinate
2. You get a sense of accomplishment when you check them off the list, adding fuel to your motivation

Another key to motivation is to make your goals public. It’s harder to procrastinate when you’re being held accountable.

I sometimes find I have a lot of things going on in my head. When I don’t want to do something, I suddenly become interested in everything. It’s hard to get started. Surfing the web and doodling take over. Taking a minute to meditate calms me down and then I break my goals down into shorter tasks and write them down. Once I’m calm and start that first simple task, getting focused is a lot easier.

As Leonardo da Vinci said, “It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”

Months ago at work, I proposed a design methodology based on Alan Cooper’s Goal-Directed Design as featured in About Face 3.0. This was the first step of my current goal. Things are going well!

We’ve started to implement usability testing into our application development process. Unfortunately, the project that we’re doing usability tests with was started before we had created our design process.

However, the results from the tests have been very positive; I think this is because I tried to design it with the user in mind.
However, I didn’t have a style guide, which would have made delegation of tasks much easier.

I believe planning is essential for a successful project. I did plan the functionality of the project. However, without proper usability testing BEFORE production began, things changed late in the game due to clients requests after seeing things in action. This caused further delays.

In the end, I’m very happy with the final result and the usability tests we did DURING the end of production show that the end users would be happy with it and indeed this has been the case.

For our next projects, we will fully implement our design process. We’ve already implemented an organization of resources for the development of the products. Currently, I’m creating a company-level style guide, which include things such as best practices for coding, file naming conventions, variable naming conventions; as well as a project-level style guide template. Additionally, I’m developing documents that will make it easy to follow our design process. This goal has definitely moved in the right direction!

Just a few projects to prove its 100%! With the design process not only documented, but easy to use and remember thanks to the templates, guides, and checklists, I think things are going to go very well for this goal.

Here’s a progress report for Goal #2: Convert my workgroup into a slick web application developing machine.

Completing Goal #1 was easy. Just a few presentations.

My second and current goal has been to make sure those ideas are actually implemented.
To do this, I’ve had to do a couple of things.

1. Make sure the boss had my back.
2. Institute a product development workflow for my group.
3. Successfully develop a product using that workflow.

Getting the boss on my side was easy. I only had to mention that I was reading a book on design methods and I really wanted to present what I’d learned. After a short primer on the subject (the 3 Layers presentation), my boss said, “I realize I haven’t been a good manager.” Point being, he realized we didn’t actually HAVE a design method for him to direct us with.

Next, I presented a design methodology constructed mainly from Cooper’s called Goal-Directed Design, which can be found in Alan Cooper’s About Face 3.0. Another inspirational book on the matter was Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman Jr.
With this design methodology, we set the groundwork for efficiently developing standards compliant designs.

The coworker who I thought would be adverse to changing his ways has actually started using CSS in his websites. A definite step in the right direction.

So the last step is to prove that the design method works by designing a new project with it from the beginning.
I don’t see how it can go wrong (fingers crossed).

In order to get other people to care about what you’re talking about, you have to pitch your ideas to them on an emotional level. When creating a presentation, you can’t just throw out all of your statistics and data. Over the last 4 or 5 months, I’ve followed Garr Reynolds blog, Presentation Zen, where I’ve learned a lot of tips and tricks in creating effective presentations.

For my second presentation to my work group, one of the handful that will help me complete my second goal, many of the principles of good presentation design have been incorporated. I MAY videotape this presentation tomorrow. If I do, I’ll post the video here.

UPDATE!
I added sound to the presentation and uploaded it to Slideshare. It’s embedded right below!

My current goal is to help incorporate what I presented to my colleagues into our daily routine. I can tell it isn’t going to be easy. Everyone once in a while, you’ll have a client who wants to tell you how to do your job. This can be great because the client makes all the decisions and you just implement it. It’s easy, it’s quick, it’s painless…unless that client makes bad decisions. At some point, you have to let the client know that although you value their input, you are the expert and you highly recommend another route. If you do it with some tact, you can even make the client think it was their idea. When a coworker recently insisted that I design something a certain way because the client said so, I had to tell my coworker that I understood what the client wanted and I had a better solution (and, it wouldn’t hurt to present several ideas to the client and see which one wins out).

He insisted I do things a different way.
“Why do you think that way is better?”, I asked.

“He says he wants is like this,” was the reply.

“Yes, but he wants it that way because he realizes that way works. But you can see that this other way also works and it actually works better. Wouldn’t you agree it works better?”, I said.

“Yes, I can see that, but the client it wanted it this way.”

The point is one of my coworkers is stubborn and a lazy designer. Nothing is planned out. Whatever the client says is good enough. But when someone comes to me for my expertise, I don’t go into Code Monkey mode and throw something together as quickly as possible. I want to plan out how things will work best. I use what the client asks for as a guide to ask them more questions. “What about that technique you’ve shown me do you like?”, “How do you see users interacting with that functionality?”, etc…

This particular coworker does not care about the speed, effeciency, and user-friendliness of his programs. They are usually riddled with bugs and the user will often do things the “wrong” way because it’s not clear how something should work. When we get a call about the problem, instead of fixing his design, he says, “You’re doing it wrong. You’ve got to do it this way.”

The problem that I am going to have in completing my goal is that he is too stubborn to actually implement any changes. He doesn’t believe they are necessary because he’s work is good enough. And honestly, his work IS good enough because our clients generally don’t know they could have it so much better. We don’t do creative work. My talents are lost. I’ve got to make him WANT to change. That’s my biggest challenge. I want to do this in 4 month because…I plan on quitting in 5 months. I put up my resume on Monster.com a few days ago with a request for $75,000. I received my first phone call today from a company in Indianapolis looking to interview me. Right now, I’m just testing the waters to see what the market is like.

Have you ever heard anybody say, “Sorry, that’s not my job”? Maybe you’ve said that once or twice. I know I have. Why? Because I wasn’t motivated by my job. When I worked at a discount movie theater, I only did what I got paid for and nothing else. It’s a bad attitude.

Instead of just doing “your job”, how about just “making a difference.” Does your job make a difference? Do you ever refuse to help because its not in your job description? Do you have your job just to pay the bills? When you step back and think about the person you want to be, your ideal self, are you still doing that job?

If not, get out ASAP and get started doing what your ideal self would be doing. The only thing that has stopped you in the past has been yourself.

Next Wednesday through Saturday, I’ll be in Seattle attending An Event Apart, hosted by web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman and CSS guru Eric Meyer. I’ll post some of the things I learn after each session. That will bring me a big step closer to my current goal of presenting all of this stuff to my coworkers.

Also, I’ve already started the next goal: make sure my workgroup starts actually using the things I’ll present. This was originally a year-long goal, but after reading some of The 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss, I’m going to make that a 3-month goal. In the book, Ferriss points out that long-term goals turn into excuses for not taking action. It hit me as being pretty true so I’m going to take 3-months to push this effort through and then…my third goal I can’t talk about yet. Thanks to my buddy Mike for lending the book.

How is this new goal coming along? Instead of just jumping in and coding on this new project, we’ve actually taken then the time to plan something out. It will save us weeks of frustration and dozens of bug complaints.

My coworker is catching on quickly about using semantic HTML and making it easy for me to implement my visual design of the site using CSS. It’s standards compliant, accessible by cellphones and screenreaders, and not ugly. That’s above and beyond for this particular client.

Wordpress alone hosts over 57 million blogs. And the founder of Wordpress realizes there are other blogging systems out there with many more bloggers.

Subtraction.com author Khoi Vinh points out that the number of design blogs is ever rising. So what’s the point of starting yet another blog about design?

1. It’s not really about design…it’s about learning. There will be a slant towards design, but that’s incidental. If my path towards success diverges from design, that’s where I’ll focus my learning.
2. Even more than learning, it’s about becoming successful. The goals will change depending on what I have to do to become successful and that’s what I’ll write about. I think it will be fun to have a log of what I did to reach the top.

I hope that makes the point of this site clear. It’s a blog about what I have to do to become successful, which for me is understanding how I learn and applying that to learning about business and design.