home > services
Brandon, Sarah and I had the pleasure of speaking with Jeff Parks and the I.A. Consultants podcast after our mini-workshop at the VizThink conference. In our discussion, we discuss five elements which “illustrate” why pictures are a powerful way to communicate with multi-disciplinary teams, including:
1. Disambiguation
2. Efficiency
3. Emotion
4. Telling a Story
5. Leadership
Check it out on the web here. It’s also available via iTunes.
The big news for our 2008 events is that we’re coming home. We’ll have three major events in San Francisco, starting with our UX Intensive, a 4-day hands-on workshop addressing the essential disciplines of user experience: Design Strategy, Design Research. Interaction Design, and Information Architecture. The event takes place February 19-22 at the Hotel Kabuki, in the heart of Japantown (great parking for locals!).
We’ve got an end-of-the-year sale going on with our events, with heavily discounted pricing through December 31. (For example, all four days of UX Intensive SF are currently priced at $1,695, compared to the full registration rate of $2,495. Use promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off.) Don’t let your 2007 training budget go to waste!
Last month, I traveled to Vancouver for our most recent UX Intensive (and even taught the Information Architecture day, as Chiara couldn’t make it). I took photos of the event, which featured a remarkable number of activities that ensure you just don’t learn about these UX methods — you practice them.
Some of my favorite pics:
Brandon sketches, and a video camera shows what he’s talking about…
There was lots of writing on walls…
Though some groups preferred the floor…
And lots, and lots of stickies…
Conference organizers and associated graphic designers: when you are making conference badges, here is what attendees need to see (in order of importance):
Possibly Title should be added to this list, but I’m of two minds. One is: who cares about titles? but the other is, well, I do. I want to know what someone does in order to see what kind of conversations I’m likely to have with them.
Not so important: the name of the conference. Duh, I get it; I’m already here. Also unimportant: the sponsors. Not for the conference itself, of course, but on the front of name badges their logos are just visual clutter.
Back of the badge should have the schedule, with preferably both the title and speaker for each talk. If space prevents that, title is more important than the speaker’s name IMHO. Unless the speaker is famous, titles are easier than names to remember.
One more thing: the strap holding the badge should be adjustable. Too often it is way too long. It should hang at chest level, not at belly/waist level. Low-hanging badges can’t be seen sitting down at a table, and if staring at chests is rude, staring at bellies (or below) is probably worse.
This all seems so common sensical as I put it down, but it is amazing how often it is gotten wrong. Even by people who should know better.
Chiara Fox & I spent Monday and Tuesday getting our geek on at the She’s Geeky unconference in Mountain View. In addition to hanging out with smart, geeky gals and learning about a wide variety of tech+ topics, there were other things that made the experience notable, memorable and impactful.
What made it different:
Highlights of the experience
The unconference format allowed for participation from anyone and everyone. If you wanted to connect with others about an idea, you were encouraged to add it to the lineup. There was a big sheet of paper where participants could post their sessions (aka: the grid.)
The grid changed and grew throughout the day. The principles of Open Space made it okay to have a big group, or just one person (yes, you can convene a group of 1!) Key to the process was the following:
Topics were wide and varied…Art + Craft + Geek; GIMP for open source image editing; Shameless Promotion; Guerrilla Tactics of a Diversity Evangelist; Cyber Bullying; What challenging questions should we be asking ourselves? and more.
The Computer History Museum is a fantastic location. One big room for lunch and discussion tables, and smaller rooms for breakout sessions. The espresso bar kept us jazzed for the 2 days.
What made it work? Every activity was grounded in participation:
What I learned?
Many of the session notes are available on the She’s Geeky site, and lots of photos are on Flickr.
I’ll definitely go next year!
Last week I attended Connecting 07, the ICSID/IDSA Congress. I’d never before engaged with IDSA, and I quite enjoyed it. What struck me was how the issues that industrial and product designers are facing are pretty much identical to what we’re seeing in the world of experience strategy and design.
My favorite talks/speakers:
Hans Rosling, Gapminder. Hans is a dynamic speaker who is able to make statistics and data visualization fun and provocative. If you haven’t seen his TED talk, you should.
Sabine Junginger, Lancaster University. Sabine spoke on “Design Change: A Paradox” about the role that design can play in change management. This may have been my favorite talk of the event, because it both supported and challenged conventional wisdom about the emerging role of design in business. As I wrote to my colleagues:
Sabine studied under Dick Buchanan at CMU, and has a Ph.D in…. DESIGN! But, she has her head screwed on tight. She pointed out that while design is often brought in to make change, it often serves to accommodate the status quo with band-aids.
Three things I liked:she kind of dissed design thinking, saying you can’t separate thinking from making. she pointed out how the current design+business craziness means that the different organizational silos (marketing, product dev, IT, etc.) each bring in design to make change, but end up using design only to bolster their silos that successful change management with design *begins* with the product… i.e., it’s essential that you use the act of designing a product to produce change… you don’t change an organization in the abstract so that it can then produce better products
- visions and strategies (and organizations for that matter) must continue to evolve. (Okay, that was a fourth thing)
Sam Lucente, HP. Sam (written about in the latest Fast Company) is in charge of design across all of HP, and has an amazing story to tell about how design is evolving and succeeding at HP. He gave good slides, some of which I photographed. I think the most important lesson from Sam was that in order for the design practice to be seen as a valuable contributor at HP, work had to begin at the most basic level — consistency and simplicity throughout the entire product line — before design could be successfully used to differentiate and innovate.
James J. Pirkl, The Generation Connection. This guy advocated a “transgenerational” approach to design. He objects to how older generations are conventionally perceived, and made the case that many suppositions about the elderly are just plain wrong. He doesn’t advocate design for elderly though… He advocates design that works for all. He showed his Transgenerational House, an embodiment of his design principles, which, honestly, looks pretty cool.
There were lots of poster sessions at Ubicomp – but I have to give props to my friend, Mirjana Spasojevic of the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto for presenting my favorite demo/poster.
Nokia has developed an image recognition technology called Point and Find. Using the camera functionality on a mobile phone, Point and Find identifies objects through image recognition and provides users with associated information.
Similar in functionality to QR codes, Point and Find is a technology I believe has a lot of promise in unlocking the potential of the mobile web. It epitomizes the “Uniquely Mobile” design principle – it’s quick, easy, and can provide internet information without the hassle of text entry through the keypad and maneuvering internet content based on the PC search interaction model.
As with any emerging technology, Point and Find is a little buggy and identifying and enabling the actions people want to take after they identify and image will be essential in refining this technology. Nonetheless – it’s exciting stuff!
Scott Davidoff of CMU gave an interesting presentation today at Ubicomp on a design method for rapidly exploring application design – Speed Dating.
He and his colleagues had conducted ethnographic studies on families and their children. Like many ethnographic studies – theirs uncovered many needs. Their main finding was that managing kids activities is stressful for dual-income families.
Scott and his team were interested in how ubiquitous technologies in the home could help activity management for these families. He explained that they came up with countless concepts. How do you know which concept to make?
He continued that the common approach might be: Why not build it and see? There were several key reasons why this was not the best approach, namely:
- Timing. His team was uncomfortable deploying technologies at such an early stage in the development process.
- Immature design patterns. Unlike more established technology applications, ubiquitous computing does not have established design patterns to leverage.
- High cost of failure
- Unpredictable consequence: Scott and his team were conscious that they were introducing technologies in social contexts and didn’t know what the consequences of that might be.
So he explained that he looked in the design toolbox for some tools of the trade to help. There are a lot of tools designers use – such as sketching and prototyping – for getting the idea right. But not a lot of tools for getting the right idea.
What are the design tools to help designers find focus and strategy?
Speed Dating Design Method
Speed dating was a dating strategy born out of a need for busy professionals to optimize the time they spent… well, dating. The theory goes that if you’re going to invest an hour of your life to romance, why meet just one person… why not meet 2, 3, 4…
While arguably speed dating may not be a sound strategy for finding love, the one can’t deny the logic: experience with more people will at the very least give you a better understanding of what you want.
Scott’s speed dating concept simply replaces potential romantic partners with concepts. His theory is that multiple low-cost engagements with a wide variety of concepts allows a broader perspective to emerge.
Scott’s Speed Dating design process employs two methods
- need validation
- user enactment
Principles the method embodies are:
Ubundance brings perspective
Easier to compare something relative to other things.
Cross boundaries to find them
How do you ask users how they feel about a technology?
Easier for users to tell you about a boundary is once it’s been crossed than predict.
Need validation:
Scott then described how the next step in their process was to show the families in their study concepts like the ones shown here:
Lots of concepts…22 concepts in 2 hours!
He praised paper is a wonderful media to show concepts because it is cheap and stressed that scenarios should be engaging.
He then talked us his teams process for getting the right idea:
Observations = Kids’ activities cause stress -> Strategy: this is a problem, so fix it.
But what should they fix? What should be the focus?
Scott’s team realized that while they identified there was stress around kids activities, the team didn’t have a clear understanding of what was causing the stress.
He then explained user enactments:
Scenarios that people liked were made more tangible through low-fidelity prototypes in order to test and identify boundaries in acceptable behavior.
He showed a common scenario that had raised questions with the families from the study.
A father is suppose to pick up his kids from an activity. His car breaks down. Features of the ubiquitous home coordinate this task and finds a new person to pick up the kids.
Several families didn’t like this example – something about the home just pro-actively coordinating the activity didn’t sit well with people.
The question then became: are there levels of home’s pro-activity that are acceptable? The suggestion of the home coordinating an activity was a boundary that had been crossed – people were able to talk about what levels of pro-activity in the system were acceptable “because the crossed boundary gave them a point of reference from which they could talk about.”
He then talked about interactions with risk factors and how his handy matrix helped.
He explained how a matrix can show lessons about individual themes but can also reveal large themes.
Scott then used his study as an example to illustrate the larger themes that emerged, such as:
- Kid’s activities not “problems”
- Kid’s are in activities to learn lessons about life
- Actions have consequences
- Parents want to protect their kids
- Also want kids to learn responsibilities
Implications for design of their system were:
- can’t approach activities to “fix” problems
- systems need to help kids learn to help themselves
- kids have to learn about consequences and responsibility
- in some places, assistance in inappropriate
- parent must be part of the loop
Understanding of the right idea from his project was that they needed to change their design strategy.
Changed strategy:
Managing activity and parenting are inseparable – teach kids responsibility, function as a safety net
Tradeoffs for adding his process to your design pricess?
- It adds an extra step.
Scott then stressed that he doesn’t expect speed dating to replace prototyping. Once you’ve found your idea, it’s important to get it right.
In summary:
- Finding the right concept + strategy is important but largely unsupported
- His Speed Dating concept is a possible process that can be added to the design toolbox between sketching and prototyping
- Speed Dating is Low-cost + engaging
- It allows you to learn about unpredictable consequences
- Can help you evolve your application
- Can help you focus on what matters most.
The star of this morning’s Ubicomp’s domestic paper presentation session was given by Ja-Young Sung of the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Ja-Young’s paper was titled “My Roomba is Rambo”: Intimate Home Appliances. The paper was based on a research study about how people built affection and love for their Roomba, and what we can learn from the example.
I’ve seen the Roomba in action – my friend and AP colleague Kate Rutter owns one and gave me an in-home demonstration recently. They are pretty fun, and I love how this paper broke down some of the reasons why.
Ja-Young and her team conducted a study of phone and email interviews with people who own Roombas in the US, Finland, UK and Austria. They mined the data for evidence of emotional attachment.
They defined emotional attachment as something that causes changes in mood, feelings, intentions, and behaviors. Here are some of the interesting points I jotted down:
Emotional attachment to an object/technology can change people’s attitudes:
“… Roomba changed how I felt about vacuuming… it went from a chore of drudgery to one of fun.”
Emotional attachment can causes people to create life-like associations with an object/technology:
21 or 30 participants in the study gave names to their Roomba
“I can’t imagine not having him any longer. He’s my baby… I just like him, I call him roomba baby. He’s a sweetie.”
Emotional attachment can cause promotion:
People in the study wanted to demonstrate their Roomba to guests and promote the technology.
“My parents ended up buying 2… their next door neighbor bought one, and my aunt bought one…”
Emotional attachment can cause protection of an object/technology:
“When I visited my parents so they could see if they wanted one, I ended up being very protective of it since there were a lot of thing in their house that it could get choked on or stuck on.”
People change aspects of their environment to optimize the object/technology:
Many participants “Roomba-ized” their homes in order to optimize it – moving furniture, hiding cords, etc..
One participant in the study bought a new refrigerator so that the Roomba could move more easily in the kitchen.
One participant bought a new rug so that the Roomba would work.
One participant with long hair ended up cutting her hair because the Roomba was getting clogged up with her long hair.
What characteristics of the Roomba’s design caused people to have these emotional attachments and responses?
High Visibility: Users can feel the presence of the object. You can see it.
Ambiguity: Where will it go? What will it do? The uncertainty of what will a happen triggers curiosity.
Accountability: The Roomba has similar features to the Dyson vacuum cleaner in that you can see where the dirt and dust goes – which helps users see how well it works. People can appreciate and feel grateful for the technology.
Practicality: Everybody needs to clean – so the Roomba fills a very practical need. There is immediate benefit - it improves my life!
Ja-Young then posed the important question: Why do we need to care about emotional attachment when we design objects and technology?
Roomba was released in 2002 as a relatively flawed product — but as of 2006, 2 million units have been sold. People adopted it into their lives and clearly, from this study, have loyalty to the product. What the user experience and ubiquitous computing community can learn from the Roomba is this:
Emotional attachment helps people establish a long-term relationship with technology.
“I will always have one until I die. When this one breaks, I will buy a new one.”
Emotional attachment helps manage the unreliability of the design or technology. As evidenced by the Roomba — technology doesn’t have to function seamlessly or “be perfect.”
Emotional attachment can increase device adoption. Emotional attachments can cause people to change their routine to accommodate technology and it won’t be perceived as a burden. If people forge these emotional attachments, they are willing to adapt their lives to make the technology work.
What I loved most about this presentation was that it underscored the benefits of understanding the mysteries of emotion. Capturing the hearts of your users can go a long way in forgiving the imperfections of your product.
I’m in Innsbruck, Austria this week attending Ubicomp. Ubiquitous Computing refers to the trend that we as humans interact no longer with one computer at a time, but rather with a dynamic set of small networked computers, often invisible and embodied in everyday objects in the environment.
As more and more of our projects at Adaptive Path touch multiple systems, it’s clear that ubiquitous computing is relevant to user experience work. Admittedly, the lion’s share of the work is very technical in nature — but user experience and design are clearly topics of interest.
The keynote was given by Antonio Calvosa from Ferrari and his presentation stressed the importance of understanding users. He encouraged the audience to “…get your mind out of the lab — put your mind into figuring out how to communicate your technology to everyday people like your mom, or to your friend.”
He also talked about how in the end, you should always be thinking about the end user and putting people at the center of what you do. He gave an example of the Moen Revolution shower head created by Design Continuum Inc.
“Moen Revolution was an example of engineering the product based on the design. We worked in reverse to design the inner working that would improve the shower experience.” He stressed that user need drove the design and development of this product — not technology and engineering.
Wednesday’s session line up on the The Design Process seems especially interesting. I’ll be blogging about highlights this week….
Sunday I lead a workshop with my friend and former Yahoo! colleague, Mirjana Spasojevic – currently at Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto - at the Ubicomp conference in Innsbruck, Austria. We had a good turnout of people (14 total) with a mix of folk from both academic and industry backgrounds
The goal of the workshop was to harness the collective mobile wisdom of the group and create 4-6 mobile user experience design principles. We started out the day with short introductions and launched into discussing possible themes from which we could base the principles.
The themes that emerged were:
- Mobile phones and changing social rules
- Where does the data live?
- Relevance: Personalization and location-based services
- Divided attention
- New mobile interaction models
Next, we divided into groups of 3-4 people and spent the afternoon discussing the theme and shaping it into a design principle. Here are the themes and accompanying design principles. Admittedly, these discussions are reflective of some wandering conversations and may read a little “wonky” – but there is some really good stuff in there.
Theme 1: Mobile Phones and Changing Social Rules
Examples of changing social rules with regard to mobile phones:
- acceptable to talk to yourself on the street (when using a Bluetooth headset or speaker feature on the mobile phone.
- addictive “Crackberry behavior”
- always perceived to be available now that you have a mobile phone
- busy button doesn’t help – negative connotations
The lion’s share of the conversation for this group focused on the theme of expectations. Social rules are based on our understanding of expectations - expectations about ourselves and how we want people to engage with us, and expectations of others and how we want them to engage with us.
We talked about how there are different expectations for the various communication channels. When you call someone, you expect them to answer. If they don’t, you leave a voicemail and expect them to get back to you. The rules for email and text messaging are slightly different – often the social rules are personal and reflective of the relationship the sender and receiver have – or the social contract they share.
There is an interesting tension between inference and plausible deniability. When someone doesn’t answer their phone, there are a set of likely explanations: the receiver is busy, not within reach of their phone, etc…
Conflict seems to occur when expectations are not in alignment. Technology such as gps location or IM status message of “busy” adds a layer of complexity – the sender can know more about the receiver’s state and adjust their expectations accordingly.
Design Principle 1:
Design an appropriate level of ambiguity – tell users something about state, but not everything. Allow for “states” that are not fully revealed so that people can manage expectations.
- Allow people to do what they need to do to retain social contracts
- Knowing is not everything. Sometimes white lies are necessary and desired.
- Systems should support different levels of profiles and different levels of engagement to reflect the variety of expectations people have for various relationships.
Theme: Personalization and location-based services
This group’s discussion started off with a comparison of camera phones and the mobile web. Why did camera phones become a mainstream feature on phones while the mobile web continues to struggle to find a widespread audience. Sure, there are technology constraints that could be the cause. However, the group also added that we’re not that good at predicting and understanding people’s relationship to information.
How do we better predict what people will want? How do we do it without being pushy and invasive. The building blocks of these location-based services are context/location, state of mind, and user motivation. We can use the technology to predict location – but we need to find ways of understanding motivation and state of mind.
The group then discussed how these new mobile location-based services are like a new friendship – tenuous. You can’t be too pushy too soon. Then Dean interjected: Being annoying is sometimes okay… if it works. Pushy people are good at getting what hey want. If the goal is compliance in the short term, pushy can good. Point taken - i see where he is coming from, but disagree. Annoyance is yucky and should be avoided.
Next, the team discussed the idea of enhancement. We discussed the Starbuck’s – iPhone – iTunes service. interesting:
- Being in a Starbuck’s infers state of mind
- The value to the user is in the distillation of large amounts of information into a simple interaction and fulfillment of a need/desire.
Ultimately, the group felt the real value is in enhancing existing experience, not hijacking the experience.
Design Principle 2:
“I’m not in the mood”: Services should enhance the experience and provide added value. The phone can determine location, but mood and motivation are key
Mood and motivation are hard to predict. Location can give some insights into mood (Starbuck’s example). Status (location+emotion+motivation) is everything.
Theme 3: Mobile applications as interventions
This team took on the theme of attention resources. They discussed that a user’s attention is often divided when using mobile applications and services. Therefore, they framed the discussion around mobile applications as interventions.
Next, the team discussed that there are three basic phases to consider in when designing a mobile “intervention applications”:
- Sensing, (data collection and context)
- Delivery notification
- User response
When thinking about the sensing phase, consider the value of the application to a user – is there personal and/or global benefit? This may give insight into how much attention and energy the use is willing to give during this phase.
Users ultimately need to have control over the notifications. Users will ultimately want to be able to override the notifications. Deliver notification data that is contextually appropriate as possible. Consider the environmental and social contexts. Interventions should not be like your annoying friends.
Design Principle 3:
Mobility implies changing contexts and changing interruptability. Consider the three phases of mobile “intervention” applications:
- Sensing, data collection and context
- Delivery notification
- User response
Theme 4: New mobile interaction models
This team discussed the importance of effort and time when considering interaction models. Context is king; it determines cost (to use) and user value. The challenge and opportunity of mobile is that context is highly variable and hard to predict.
There was then some debate as to who ultimately bears responsibility in managing attention and intention? Producer (sender) or receiver. Notification is also a question. For example: is it socially appropriate for me to expect that you know my blog posts?
The conversation then turned to a discussion around broadcasting services such as Twitter, Radar, Flickr, microbloogging and lifecasting and the power of mobile as a capture device.
It was also discussed that it is easy in such cases to get too much information on a mobile device and the Twitter + SXSW example was cited. People signed up, chose to follow lots of friends, but then eventually turned off the service because they were inundated with “tweets” from too many friends. Was the problem a flaw in the design of Twitter or that people didn’t fundamentally understand the “rules” of social networks on mobile.
Francis felt that users should have no barrier and that ultimately the burden for providing controls should be embedded in the system. Dean disagreed (slightly) and explained that it is often difficult to predict what will happen and design appropriately.
Design Principle 4:
It’s not just about designing for a user: it’s about designing for a user embedded in a context. It’s about recognizing the different roles that people have.
Think multiple channels. The mobile platform is sms, mobile web, voice, applications. Depending on the context of your application, expectations are different.
Thanks to all the participants for a day of engaging conversation and contributions to the mobile UX principles.
Daniel Harris
Tony Lee
Fu Yu
Jaejoon Hwang
Taejin Jeong
Alexander Meschtscherjakov
Tim Sohn
Paul Aoki
Francis Li
Mattias Rost
Dean Eckles
You are currently browsing the archives for the Conference commentary category.
Entries(RSS)