Design Sapling.com

A few months ago, I wrote about how to use Gmail as your To-Do list.

I just came upon some email innovation ideas from Lifehacker.com.

Good suggestions for better email usability.

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.

New and Interesting Online Interactions
280 Slides. It’s beautiful, free, and very useful. An amazing online slideshow maker.

Swype. Take a look at an interesting new way to type on touch screens.

Five Second Test. For UI designers, understanding a users first impression is important. A 5 second test is a usability exercise where you show your interface design for just five seconds and then ask the viewer to describe what they saw. This website makes getting first impression very easy. Make it a part of your design toolbox if you make software or webpages.

Adobe CS4 Product Info. An interesting feature from Adobe’s CS4 product page. Roll over a product name in any of the 4 software bundles, and the same product is highlighted in the other 3 bundles. Makes it easier to compare bundles and decide which is right for you.

Did you know?
Pressing the Alt key in MS Office 2007 software will superimpose the hotkeys used with Alt onto the interface. Now it’s easy even for novices to speed up their workflow and stop using the mouse.

Other Interesting Things
DaPino Colada. Beautiful, free vector images from some talented designers in the Neatherlands.

Konica Minolta: Museum of Beauty. I found this presentation compelling. A virtual tour of the Venus de Milo, one of the world’s most famous sculptures, with insights about how it was made and what it may have looked like if the missing pieces were put in place.

Edit — Link was down last time I checked.

Short post today! Firefox 3 is now official. Go download it! There are some nice new features that I’m sure you’ll learn on your own.

Read on for my favorite change.

In Firefox 2, after you typed your username and password into a site, a Firefox pop-up dialogue box appears asking if you’d like to save the password for next time. You can choose “Yes”, “Never for this site”, or “Not Now”. The web page won’t load unless you respond to the pop-up. Since I am hardly ever sure if I used the right password, I usually choose “Not Now”, so that I won’t accidentally save the wrong password.

Firefox 3 asks you the same question, except instead of an obtrusive pop-up, it uses an attractive drop-down dialogue bar right under the menu bar. The page continues to load even if you don’t respond Why is this so great? Now I can wait to see if the site accepted my password. Once I see that I used the right password, I click “Yes”. Firefox will no longer save an accidentally mistyped password!

A small change, but much more usable!

P.S. I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been helping shoot a movie (!), have been trying to reorganize my office at work, just got a tablet PC (it’s used, but it’s awesome!), been moving a lot of furniture into my apartment, and I’ve adopted a new exercise regimen.)

Interaction Design vs Marketing

Interaction Design (IxD) is the intersection of business and user needs to create a product that fills everyone’s needs. When I was explaining IxD to my dad, he asked if it was like marketing. There are similarities, but IxD is concerned with understanding people at a different phase in their relationship with the product than marketing is.

Marketing is focused on moving the person-product relationship to the purchase point. Convince the person the product is right for them. IxD is concerned with the person-product relationship AFTER the purchase point. Marketing is about designing a message to persuade a person to want a product. Interaction Design is about designing a product that fulfills a persons needs. IxD feeds back into marketing when enthusiastic users spread word of the product through reviews, word-of-mouth, and using it in public.

The key to success in either field is in understanding the customer, but the focus is very different and the way you segment your research participants is different. With marketing, your segments are based on buy habits, with IxD, your segments are based on user goals. People from several different marketing segments might share the same goals in a product, while certain other people from those same marketing segments might have completely different goals.

In order to develop products for goals instead of marketing segments, we do something similar to ethnographic research

Ethographic Research vs Observational Research

Ethnographic research is when you immerse yourself into a society and find out what it’s like to be a part of that society. The idea is that the best way to understand a different culture is to immerse yourself in it.

Observational research does the same thing. For interaction designers, the goal is to understand a corporate environment, a users daily routine, how they use existing tools, etc… With that data, they can figure out how to design a tool that best fits into that environment.

You can’t just ask people what the environment is like. It’s difficult to explain and dynamic. You’ll get different answer from different people.

You can’t just ask people what they want. You need to know WHY they want it. Then, you can develop something they didn’t even think about that could exceed their expectations.

Design = Collaboration

After getting your research, you’ve got to design the product to fit the goals you’ve observed. You don’t get to design whatever you want. The credit for the design lies with the users. They decided how it should work. You are merely implementing their design.

Additionally the business needs are considered. A design ideas that fills both the user needs and the business needs makes for a great design principle.

Conclusion

To be a great designer, you’ve got to be a great researcher and collaborator of ideas.

Imagine you’re an engineer. A client’s marketing team has discovered many of their customers are looking for a new mode of transportation. It could be a car, a bus, an airplane, a teleportation device, a giant robot, etc…

You must do the research and design; they don’t know what the customers need. But they do know that no matter how it works, it should have red stripes because they really like red stripes.

The Problem

That sounds completely backwards and ridiculous…and yet it is how the majority of software are designed. The client has no idea how the site will work, no idea what the visitors will prefer, and yet they nitpick about the colors and logo.

And why do the clients do this? Because the software designer showed them concept art for the damn thing without first showing them how it will be structured. If you show a client a mock-up of anything before you have the functionality down, the client will start nitpicking the visuals and the critique of functionality gets pushed to the side.

The Solution

Don’t show the client what it will look like until they’ve checked off on the functionality! Do your best to make your concept art rough and sketchy. You don’t WANT them to see it. Don’t distract them with irrelevant details because they will focus on the irrelevant details. Pencil drawings are much better than Photoshop drawing when your starting out on a project.

Once they check off on the structure and functionality, THEN you can start showing them examples of the visual user interface design. Now that they user’s goals will be met, the client can nitpick the colors.

You see it more and more. Products are getting better and people are getting used to it. There is a demand for well designed products. And new business owners are going to be designers.

Interaction Design

Interaction Design (IxD) is here to show us a new way of doing business.

1. IxD practitioners do research on people and businesses.
2. Then, they design things in an efficient and effective way based on the results of the research.

So of course they will have some insights into how a business should be organized to meet user expectations. Interaction Designers are concerned with technology, psychology, and design. They are experts in understanding a user’s motivations in order to design a technology to meet the users goals. It’s tied to marketing and business operations.

TED

IxD is similar to the idea behind TED, which is an conference of the most successful and brilliant minds around the world present their works and methods to each other. It stands for Technology Entertainment Design.

• Technology are the tools used to do research and create products.
• Entertainment (loosely) parallels psychology in that to meet a users needs and goals, you’ve got to create engaging applications.
• Design is at the root of a company. The organization must be designed (from a business plan, perhaps?) and the services and products should all be designed.

The successful presenters at TED “get” Interaction Design. They may not call it by name, but they all practice it.
If you want to become a business owner or a better businessman, then start researching Interaction Design.