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The good folks at Boxes and Arrows have made the audio available from my IA Summit presentation, How to be UX Team of One, and I’ve synced it to the slides on Slideshare. This presentation features lots of tips and tricks for anyone who works as a solo UX practitioner from time to time. It also includes some dirty secrets and ends with a Howard Dean style whoop and holler. Enjoy!
Even though it was in Miami this year, a California kind of vision came to me at the Information Architecture Summit last weekend. Everywhere I looked, I saw pioneers and homesteaders.
Pioneers
It used to be that I went to the Summit because of the pioneers. It was the one place where you could find all of IA’s early champions all together. There’s Jesse James (Garrett) and Kid Peterme! The Argus Gang! Polarbear hunters! They all came together year after year at the Summit. And even if you were a new kid in town, you could walk around in your stiff new boots and your ten gallon hat, and sort of bask in the reflected glory.
Homesteaders
But this year I found myself inspired by a different group — the crop of people who are working as teams of one in organizations that haven’t previously known user experience professionals. And these are the homesteaders. It’s like they’re building little ranches and growing crops in soil that can be hard to work with and — heaven help them — they’re spreading our civilization to places where it’s never been before.
I used to be a homesteader myself. My presentation at the Summit on how to be a user experience team of one was my attempt to share my thoughts on the experience. But even I was surprised by how many people I found last weekend who identified with the situation, and how much they seemed to crave a larger discussion about how to be successful when you’re a team of one.
Hardscrabble living
The challenge is, when you’re just bringing UX to an organization, the role can feel very embattled and small, and it can rattle your faith in your own contributions. I met a lot of people who told impressive stories about what they were accomplishing, but who nevertheless seemed almost sheepish about their work and how they were going about it.
From time to time I also hear more established folks in the field talking about how IA is yesterday’s news and the future is interaction design, design strategy, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. That’s stuff and nonsense. Don’t get me wrong, those things are all great and important and it’s wonderful that we’re advancing collectively as a field, but there are still a lot of places where basic problems of structure, findability, and language have yet to be resolved, and it’s the homesteaders who are making that happen.
Homesteaders, the work you’re doing helps us all. You’re spreading our field to new outposts, and you deserve as much support as we can give you.
So, I’ll open up the question, what can we do to help?
One of the perks of working at Adaptive Path is the opportunity to meet and share ideas with others from all over the world who are working on the same problems.
Last night Henning and I had the pleasure of meeting with the German chapter of the IXDA , where we learned that practitioners in Europe are facing the same challenges that we face in the states.
Chief among them is a business community that is increasingly curious about experience design, but who still don’t quite get it. While the success of products like the iPod and the Wii have certainly made decision makers more receptive to the idea of design strategy, it turns out we’re all still working our way towards a common language that helps us get the message across to people outside of our field.
Service design is evidently also a hot topic just like back home, and in Germany as at Adaptive Path, practitioners are still figuring out what that means. Henning cleared his throat to permit himself a small rant on the topic, which was actually quite insightful and got some heads nodding. He pointed out that service design is nothing new. It’s been happening in places like restaurants, travel, and retail for years. Designers, he says, can learn a lot by training their gazes on those established fields and seeing how they create a cohesive experience for their customers.
Many thanks in particular to German Leon and Neil Clavin for organizing the event, and to Oliver Kapelle from NeoMotion for giving us a warm soapbox from which to preach our thoughts on design strategy.
A friend just clued me in to the Feltron Annual Report (the 2007 edition recently came out).
How have I not stumbled across this marvelous example of information visualization before? The Feltron Annual Report is designer Nicholas Felton’s report of his last year, a detailed catalog of personal minutia like amount of coffee consumed, music listened to, books read, locations visited, public transport taken, and lots more. Best of all, it’s full of fascinating charts, graphs, and numbers — all well considered and beautifully rendered.
I think this would be fascinating to anyone (check it out!), but it’s particularly interesting to me because I’ve recently given myself a personal project to improve my visual skills and sensibilities.
Unlike others at Adaptive Path, I don’t have a formal background in fine art, industrial design, etc. I come from the very left brained world of library and information science. While I love that Adaptive Path is a home for people with lots of different types of backgrounds, I’ve seen the benefits that come with being able to visualize a concept quickly and communicate precisely what you mean with a modicum of aesthetic integrity. Even better if you can do it with a sharpie and a sticky note.
My self improvement project has been slow going. I started with Betty Edward’s classic Drawing From the Right Side of the Brain. I realized that I am actually capable of doing a passable drawing of something when it’s sitting in front of me. The challenge is to be able to visualize something in my head and then render it on paper. I think this has something to do with why I like the Feltron Annual Report so much. It’s not just clever and gorgeous and a sterling example of good infographics, it also gives you a little insight into Nicholas Felton’s life in ways that I wouldn’t have thought to to ask, but which he clearly had a vision for how to communicate.
So now I’m working my way through a rapid viz workbook, which promises to teach me to transform the ideas that are in my head into something visual and tangible, but it too has been a challenge. I’ve hit a wall at elementary perspective drawing. Anyone out there know how to draw in two point perspective? Tips and tricks are most welcome.
Now don’t be jealous, dear readers, but I finally got to fly on Virgin America. And, yes, the reports are all true. It is very cool. From the clever safety video to the intelligent lighting system, it’s evident that Virgin America has an expansive understanding of what constitutes experience, and that they’ve thought very broadly about how to make that experience as delightful as possible for passengers.
Meet Red
Of course the cherry on top is the inflight entertainment system mounted in the headrest in front of you. It offers a range of services that read like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — food, talk, read, play, shop. This entertainment system is called Red, and when the flight crew talk about it, they call it that, “Red,” like that’s its name. They say things like “Red can do it all.” “Check Red for the prices.” “Open the pod bay doors, Red.” Oh, sorry. That’s HAL.
A Touch Screen World
You find yourself surrounded by people using these little touch screens — watching tv, chatting with other passengers, playing games, listening to music — and this is what makes it really interesting. It’s like being plunked down in the middle of an immersive market test. Different user behaviors are on display all around you. To your left, to your right, through the cracks in the seat in front of you, you see:
I was actually really intrigued by this idea of behavior models for a touch screen world, and I made a grand plan to do further undercover research on my return flight and share my new model with all of you. Alas, my plan was thwarted.
What Happens When Red Goes Offline
On the flight back, we all received a typewritten letter informing us that Red was regrettably out of commission. We would all receive a free drink and a snack for our troubles. As it turned out, they never gave out the free snack. And not having Red to play with somehow drew my attention to all the little things that detracted from the experience. The flight was an hour late. Grumble grumble. The arm rests don’t fully fold up into the seats. How are you supposed to lean into your companion and take a nap? The adjustable headrests don’t adjust. Maybe mine was just broken. And no airline magazine! What the hell? Where is my crossword puzzle? Whither my beloved, beloved sudoku?
Still Air Travel, After All
So, is Virgin America really the nightclub in the sky that some have described it to be? Um, probably not. Turns out it’s still just air travel, with all of the uncertainties and annoyances that it has always had. And my disappointing trip back home was a strong reminder of the need to provide compelling alternatives to even the most complete computer-based solutions. But overall, it’s clearly a very thoughtfully designed experience. And the world can certainly use more of those.
Last weekend at the Dwell on Design conference I had a minor revelation when I passed by a collection of sample boards and wondered to myself, why don’t we make deliverables like that?
For those of you who aren’t frustrated DIY decorator types like me, sample boards are used in interior design to convey the general feeling of a space while showing proposed materials, colors, finishes, furniture, etc. They’re a bit like mood boards, except that instead of a general visual design direction, sample boards focus on the real thing - real materials, real layout. Imagine a big poster board covered with floor plans and fabric samples and little tile cutaways and sketches and product images - basically a gestalt of structure, texture, feeling, and visual richness.
There are a lot of deliverables that interior design and experience design do have in common, but as far as I know, there is no equivalent for this type of holistic view in the work that we do. This is a real shortcoming.
At Adaptive Path we talk a lot about how to communicate the feeling and, well, experience in experience design. And yet our deliverables are often focused on very specific aspects of a project - a site architecture, a set of wireframes, a content inventory. These are surely all important things, but rather narrow in purpose. This often puts a burden on our clients to do some mental synthesis to imagine the resulting experience. Sometimes they get it, sometimes they don’t.
Perhaps we could alleviate some of this burden with a sample-board-like deliverable (experience boards, anyone?) that blends structure, design principles, core behaviors, characteristic interactions, and even, maybe, a little bit of feeling. Preferably involving poster board.
I actually think Adaptive Path’s recent movie for Charmr is a good example of a deliverable that brings together feeling, specifications, and experience, but movies like this take some effort to put together. Are there simpler ways to accomplish the same thing with less overhead? Is anybody out there producing deliverables that communicate the gestalt? If so, please share.
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