Adaptive Path Blog

Dan Saffer spoke to the crowd at UX Week 2007 in his Keynote on Day 4. His talk, entitled “New Sources of Inspiration” invited us to look to sources of inspiration that we normally do not when we design.

Here are the notes from the talk. You can also download the slides here.

Where do our sources of inspiration come from?

When we think inspiration, we think WWAD? (What Would Apple Do?)

Or perhaps we look to Jennifer Tidwell, Designing Interfaces for Patterns or the Yahoo pattern library for sources of inspiration. But sometimes you need more than what’s out there in the digital space.

The world is our pattern library. We can look around us at the world with fresh eyes for inspiration.

Look to architecture and film and mechanical objects. These things can teach us about sources of inspiration that we can gleen things from them. For this presentations, we’ll look to the products and not the processes.

To design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light or turning on a tap.
Alain de Botton

Look at the world with beginner eyes.

ARCHITECTURE

Winchester Mystery House
Example of what you don’t want to be inspired by. It’s a mess, not thought out.

Houses
* Houses are the operating software for life.
* What is it about these that we can look at and learn from

A building must do two things: it must shelter us and it must speak to us of the things we find important and need to be reminded of.
John Ruskin

* Must be useful and usable and have a voice that speaks to us.
* Compared modern houses to old houses…space allocation tells us something about the importance placed on design

In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them…They speak of visions of happiness.
Alain de Botton

* Design of a building shows us the architect’s voice (different levels of happiness)

Best practices are a place to start, not a place to end.

Showed an image of Jakob Nielsen as an example of an architect that would put a bathroom in one place always. That architect would have to be insane or a control freak.

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
William Morris

The Gamble House
* The lighting for the stairs also has the house number. Seamlessly integrated and becomes multifunctional. Yahoo task bar is an example of using space well.
* The lines of the ceiling held to define zones or rooms
* The dishes are placed in built in cabinets. Not far away, easily accessble. InDesign CS3 has this dilberate panel with drawers of tools you need.
* The kitchen has a triangle of work space. So do some of our modern day desktop apps - Apple Mail
* Even the corners of your design can be made beautiful. The straps in the attic are not seen often. These are functional, yet beautiful.

FILM

* Lots of pieces of film (visual effects and transitions) that can inspire us.
* Showed an example of Indiana Jones airplane travel tracking. Jeff Veen had a dream about the movie and became inspired by this movement to design in Google Analytics
* We viewed an Apple commercial as an example of showing transitions of character of the iPhone.
* The movie Birds is an example of using sound to indicate something - it’s an effective tool.
* Props and sets - Blade Runner’s colors and and feel.
Minority Report inspired many touch screens and interaction in product design.
* Title Sequences - convey two pieces of information - mood and credits. Look for timing and movement
* Stamen Design did Digg Swarm in a very visual and different way - information design
* Movement can set the tone.

MECHANICAL OBJECTS

* Look to mechanical objects for inspiration as well.
* We’ve already stolen our buttons and sliders from mechanical objects.

As a caveat:

Don’t replicated Mechanical-Age artifacts in user interfaces without Information-Age enhancements.
Alan Cooper

Dashboards and Control Panels
* We’re always being asked to design them.
* Displays show the necessary information for users to make informed decisions, while controls allow you to manipulate the system. Labels expaine what the controls do.
* In order to control a system, you need to understand the state of the system, the display helps with this. You see this in “Executive Dashboards”
* Crane controls show an example of direct manipulation and feedback.
* Browsers also show controls and direct respose. No invisible state that needs to be exposed further.

Learning from Elements

* Vespa Scooter dashboard is an example of form and layout (so are toys)
* These are examples of possible digital device inspiration
* Typography shows how you can affect feel and labels should connect to controls.
* Icons are hard to do, but when done are very powerful.
* Anticipate how users are going to use your products and then design for it.

What not to do
Don’t label the labels - if you have to, to you’ve designed it wrong

When you’re stuck on your next design, get up, walk around, see what’s available for inspiration in the world.

Bryan Mason, Sarah Nelson, Ryan Freitas, Jesse James Garrett

Failure is a by-product of pushing yourself. You can’t escape it.

When We Take The Wrong Project

JJG: What makes a good project for us for me is a handful of criteria. Most important thing is interesting problems to solve. Problems we haven’t had a chance to sink our teeth into. Second thing is good people to collaborate with. Work in close collaboration with our clients. Best clients are the ones we can learn from. Looking for projects that can have an impact in the world. Clients have to have the ability and commitment to execute what we do. And willing to spend the money to bring us in. If all the other things are in place, the dollars are less important.

BM: When do we get that wrong?

JJG: When we misplace our priorities. When we let one factor to override the others. Most often it happens when we take on follow-up work with a client. It’s easy for us to say yes, without thinking about if it is a good project for us.

BM: How do we not do that anymore?

JJG: Constantly remind yourself what matters. Easy to lose sight of that. Really look at every opportunity that comes through the door, regardless of where it comes from.

Q: What do you do with internal clients? It just comes to you.

RF: The amount of attention you apply to projects is how you can control it.

BM: You can always quit.

JJG: Go back and tell your bosses we told you to quit.

(Laughter)

Q: How does AP find good clients?

Laura Kirkwood: They have to understand what they’re talking about. They have to have a team. They have to have us participate in the important conversations. It’s about mutual respect and engaging a problem together. It’s about figuring out a problem together.

RF: We do go through a very intensive process, but we still get it wrong. We get too excited about a problem or a client.

BM: Or everything changes once you are on the ground for a project.

Andrew Crow: We had a recent project that had a problem we were really engaged with and when we got there, they basically swapped the project on us. But having the rug pulled out from under us spooked us a bit.

RF: This happens on internal teams all the time.

SN: One of the things that is really challenging is that so much of the work is about people and people dynamics. Often early in a project, you need to establish how you act early in the project. But this doesn’t happen because you don’t know them and you want to understand the dynamics. If you sit back, it can set up a strange dynamic.

AC: We didn’t have the respect from the client, so when we needed to guide them or change things, there was no mutual respect.

When There is “No Time for Research”

Todd Wilkens: One of the things we often run into is companies telling you, “We have reams and reams of research and report, so you don’t have to do research, just design.” And you get there and it’s a marketing report. But you can’t tell people, “Hey, you really don’t know your customers.”

RF: There is always “Get on with the designing.” A hope you can just jump into the middle of a problem. Clients’ enthusiasm can be infectious. I’ve given too high-fidelity concepts to clients and then they get stuck on that and look at every level of detail. Need to have an appropriate level of fidelity. I continue to get it wrong, even after ten years of doing this. Delivering comps can be very dangerous.

Off-The-Rails in the MIddle of a Project

BM: Often the in-flight corrections make the problems worse.

AC: “If we just did this, it would be even better…” Those types of things–and you want to please the client–cause scope creep and budget and timeline and then they compound and build up and might keep you from launching at all. We should have been able to take a firmer stance. Didn’t have the ability to even say stop.

SN: We teach people how to treat us. What messages are we sending out? Are we a doormat, a vendor, a partner? It’s a fundamental problem.

BM: No one hires a consulting company unless they have a real problem to solve. People we like are in a bad spot. So how do we play bad cop with people that we like?

SN: I’m a horrible bad cop, so I usually make someone else do it, like a project manager or someone else in the organization.

JJG: If what you are doing is bad cop/bad cop, you need the good cop. Without a good cop, it puts you at odds with the client.

TW: Sometimes it is not just about being firm, but the root cause of the problem is that you aren’t talking about the right thing. Fighting over silly stuff like the number of wireframes.

RF: Recognizing the human element in things.

BM: What happens when you lose an executive sponsor?

RF: You make your life a nightmare. Need a bottom up approach to foster change. When it doesn’t work is when the people in charge are scared. CEO waited me out and once I was gone, all my work went away as well.

LK: Remember who your actual client is. It’s often not the person you are working with every day. It’s often people up above and you need to keep the ear of those people.

BM: Getting senior buy-in can open doors as well as cover your ass.

Q: How you talk internally that fosters these stories these way? We want to blame clients naturally.

BM: Every tuesday we talk about every project we’re working on and all the problems.

SN: You can start to see patterns between projects so it’s not a one-off event and we can all learn from. We have a tolerance for failure culture. It becomes a learning event, not something for disciplinary action.

BM: Although it can be that too!

Jan Chipchase, Insight and Innovation Studio, Nokia

“A Path, Adapted”

A lot of what we do at Nokia is about mobile phones but we’re really interested in everything.

His team’s challenge: capturing the sum of all human experiences. But we recognize this is totally unobtainable.

Begins with simple questions: who are you and how can you prove it? what do you carry where and why? how do illiterate people manage their contact information?

Typical projects: scoping studies (carrying behaviors, identity, way finding, etc.) and targeted at a particular technology or service (e.g. mobile tv early adopters in South Korea).

Illiteracy Project
One month to understand what it would take to design a phone for illiterate people. Turned into four years of research that is ongoing. New products are now based on this research.

It’s relatively easy to get people engaged in this kind of research.

What do billionaires and illiterate people have in common? Delegating the tricky part of tasks to someone else. Which leads you to ask: what can technology take on? What can you delegate to technology?

Everything is about exploring what is feasible.

The Future of Urban Spaces Project
Travel to a place, spend a couple weeks there, see what can be discovered about a culture in a few weeks. Totally reliant on talented local people.

How do you motivate strangers? You have to trust them to help you and that the data they give you is solid.

Contextual exploration. Go to where people do what they do. The richest context.

Wallet Mapping: take everything out of your bag and describe it. Question why people carry what they do.

Bring experiences back to the people at Nokia. Day in the life. Look at all the different things you in a day. What is normal for you is exotic for others.

Participatory design. Use design as a way to get people to express themselves in ways they wouldn’t otherwise do.

Always looking for things to give us cultural bearings. Signage is great for this. What do you need to articulate in a service? Searching for subtle cultural differences that may or may not make a difference in products or services.

Does it matter if a service or product is trusted?

Look at the essences. Why is something the way it is?

Underlying motivations for why we do things can be very similar even if the surface expression of that can be widely varied.

The value of things may not be in actually using them, but in simply carrying them.

When they leave a destination, they like to have everything wrapped up and cataloged and annotated. ~18,000 photos in a several week study.

Credibility: why would someone believe us and not someone else? The more people hear about the work you do from outside the company, the more credible they seem.

Tour Bus Ethnography
What can you really learn in a few weeks? How long is long enough?

The way around this is to partner with people who do know that culture: smart local people

You learn a lot in just the first few days, but you can’t know when to stop before you begin.

When we’re interacting with people, increasingly people are starting to document us. It really changes the way you work and how you think about how you work.

The speed of which small objects speed around the planet is incredible. All the stuff you think is cutting edge today will be commonplace in a few years all over the globe.

Three Things That Work
Make your colleagues smarter. What can I bring of my work into their world?

Know who you are. What is it that you are interested–and not interested–in? What are the boundaries of your research? What is off-limits? Utilize the resources at your disposal–push the limits of who people are. Don’t do things by the book; do the things that need to get done.

Let go. What are the things we can do to let people give up their data? Put the participants in control of the data gathering process. Let them remove the data they don’t like.

Leisa Reichelt
For a long time, she had a traditional approach to product management. Discovery, documentation, functional specifications, sign off, and then go into production. This was a low-risk way of producing projects. It worked fairly well.

But then larger and larger projects, that methodology started to give way and not really work. Came to a fork in the road: another approach. Little changes over time that completely transform over time. The old process can take longer. Not exactly Agile, but similar. More iterative. Agile does have a lot of problems, definitely.

Waterfall = Bad
Scope > Design > Build >Test

Why is it bad? It does bad things to us as designers and to the human brain.

Assumes that you know what you are doing at the very beginning! You know in detail things like schedule, budget, timing, etc. But this isn’t really true. Half of the battle is often understanding the problem.

It also assumes that there comes a point in the process when the design stops. Designers walk away and the developers develop. Again, not true. Still design decisions happening: because of documentation ambiguity, because of technological constraints, because developer “helps out” and “fixes” the design for you.

Waterfall likes people in silos, in boxes. Creates a diminished working environment.

Waterfall doesn’t support the way we solve problems or how the brain works.

Washing Machine = Good
Iterative design. Obviously not a formal methodology. But has characteristics:

Iteration: start by designing, build, take what you’ve done and test with users, take back the design, refine, do it again.

Early and Rapid Release: don’t have to do the whole design process at one go. Break it up into chunks. Public or not, depending on the project. Incremental approach. Helps overcome design fatigue. Compare your first wireframes to your last!

Multi-Disciplinary: involves everybody who is involved in the project. No real stakeholders–everyone is involved (ideally) throughout the entire project. Maintain engagement with the project.

Collaborative: an ongoing engagement with all the different parties.

Involves End Users: real end users! Not just user advocates or usability people.

Agile vs. UCD
Sprints vs. Iterations
User Stories vs. Personas and Scenarios
Pair Design & Programming vs. Contextual Research
Close Proximity Teams vs. User Testing

Agile: weak on end user involvement
UCD: weak on early release and multi-disciplinary collaboration

We need to make Agile more like UCD or UCD more agile! Agile UCD? Can’t just do UCD in the beginning and Agile in development.

Cycle Zero
Happens at the beginning of the project before Agile happens. More upfront research, analysis, and strategy which is existing in UCD but needs to be added to Agile. Need to deliver something that “works” at the end of 2-6 weeks. Deliver: product goals, shared vision, contextual research, personas and scenarios.

But how much design can you do in one cycle? How much testing can you do in a cycle? (cycle=2-4 weeks!)

Mid-Project Cycle
While developers are working in a cycle, designers are involved but also looking to the next cycle.

Pick N’ Mix! Now is not the time for get purist re: methodology!

Stephen Anderson, Sabre
What he’s not talking about: “Hey what happened to my application!”, smart menus, adaptive content, neural networks, AI, social mobs, etc.

Instead talking about micro-changes in the interface itself. These are scripted adaptations (”Choose your own adventure” style).

It’s not that difficult to create personalized UIs. IF THEN ELSE statements.

What if…there was natural language recognition? (”I’m attaching a document…” brings up a form field to attach a document)

What if…my location was known and the UI changed in response?

What if…shipping costs were automatically calculated for me?

What if…drop down menus were sorted by most clicked on? What if the UI element switched based on the amount of data? Intelligent listing.

What if…we noticed that a user was missing the button, we could increase the button size?

What if…the prominence of help links changed over time?

What data elements are less important after time or activity? How does information relevance change over time?

What if…we moved the placement of text based on the amount of text?

What if…we had time-based layouts (changing the information design based on likely context)?

Make transitions to a radically new release easier for current users?

What if…we collapsed data after the 50th time using it?

Why not…have fixed areas and areas that are flexible?

What if…we changed the help text/labels based on audience?

What if…the navigation label changed based on geography?

Lisa Strausfeld, Pentagram, with the UI design team
Christian Schmidt, Takaaki Okada, Eben Eliason

First ever UI demo of the OLPC.

Mission is no less ambitious than to educate every child in the developing world.

Based on work of Seymour Papert’s constructionalist theories of learning–children encouraged to make things. “Find ways in which the technology enables children to use knowledge.”

Announced a little over two years ago. Final round of beta machines are right here. First large-scale distribution is happening in September.

Durable, low-power computer. New display technology–both full color and black and white. Works in direct sunlight. Long life battery that can be hand-powered. Peer-to-peer mesh network. Dedicated processor that handles mesh networks.

OS based on RedHat Linux “Sugar”

Sugar is: a tool for learning, for children without prior experience with computers, in multiple languages.

UI is based on abstraction. Less is more. It’s an ethic as well as an aesthetic. Worked well crossing cultural boundaries. Computers had a lot to do without rendering graphics.

UI Building Blocks

XO: an avatar of the self. Can be personalized.

Sugar is based on people, activities, and objects. Color indicates ownership. Activities produce objects.

Field is a type of desktop with multiple views.

Community forms the real conceptual paradigm for Sugar.

“Home Sphere” is a place for myself and my things. “Friends Sphere” is a shared space. “Neighborhood Sphere” is a larger community like a school. Zoom based interaction model–4 levels of zooming between spheres. Fourth sphere is “Activity Sphere” where shared activities are done.

All activities are recorded in the journal: record of all the things you do. Time based and non-heirarchical. Automatic, no saving required. Keeps track of all activities over time. Search and filters help find entries.

Lots of UI and usability issues when users start sharing activities that we’re just now discovering now that the devices are in the field.

2000 developers around the world developing activities. Hope is that it will be like Mozilla add-ons.

Started working on the UI last summer–incredibly rapid. UI is constantly iterated. Constant builds of the OS.

Basic UI features were established before Pentagram got started–things like journal. Pentagram established model, framework, visual language. Making it more of a continuous space. Extension of the best features of current desktop space.

Screen is relatively small so needs all the screen space to do activities, but when you “step back and look up” you are surrounded by friends.

It’s a non-profit effort. “No one is doing this for the money.”

When we started, we just had to work and make a lot of assumptions. Testing cycle is to come. When the feedback comes in, the bugs haven’t been the problem. Kids are still doing amazing things in the field.

Debate about the frame and its discoverability. But in a classroom, if one kid can find the frame, the kid conveys it to others. Kids share the UI with others. Helped the usability quite a bit.

Most challenging view is the neighborhood (”mesh”) view. What should the view be? The scalability is a challenge: how do you represent 200+ people in the neighborhood view? It can be overwhelming.

Andrew Crow, Adaptive Path

Experienced this? “That’s not the way we do things here.” Poor communication between teams and executives. Hidden political agendas.

Change the rules. If you aren’t in a position of power, this is hard. But over time, you can make small incremental changes that over time will make a significant difference.

Accomplish your goals by navigating the roadblocks.

Understanding People
People have emotions, motivations, and goals. People should be what companies are organized around.

Need to understand our co-workers. if you engage them appropriately, you’ll connect on a deeper level.

Myers-Briggs Personality Types. Not just personality types, but also communication preferences. Match the level of their need to your approach.

Motivations
What excites people. Some people work for different reasons. Learning those motivations and you can affect their actions.

Navigating Politics
Politics aren’t evil. They are just activities associated with managing people. They are a natural consequence of any group. Everyone has constraints on their ability to make decisions.

Managing expectations. Managing up: Make sure the boss knows what you need to be successful. Managing down: set up your team’s environment and mindset for them to be successful.

Moving the Subconscious Cheese
Changing perceptions and understanding through gradual adjustments in knowledge.

Get to know other departments. How can you help them help you? When you understand their constraints, you understand them better.

Build credibility and share knowledge. Increasing others’ awareness and understanding removes barriers and levels in the field. Small ways of aligning yourself: put your professional organizations in your signature file and attend conferences. Make yourself affiliated with something so your boss is aware of what you do.

Using Influence
Who are your influencers in your organization? You need to find out. But don’t be sneaky about it. Always support those who support you.

Tactics of influence: direct requests, flanking your objective (go around the boss to create a group of influencers that allows the boss to commit), indirect alignment (find another influencer to make your case for you).

“You can accomplish anything you want in life provided you don’t mind who gets the credit.” - Harry S. Truman

We’re ending Day One of UX Week, and the conversations just get more and more interesting. On the day-end panel, Peter, Andrew, Kevin and Liz talked about skills for current and future practitioners. Peter mentioned the “t-shaped person” (folks with shallow skills across multiple areas and deep skills in one area). Then he went on to talk about “i”s and “bar”s as an extended concept.

What struck me was Peter’s comment about how team design is critical…having the right people work with the right team on the project. I can imagine that selecting a great team in a “t”, “i” and “bar” world is like playing Tetris.

Today at UX Week, I attended Kevin Brooks’ presentation on storytelling. Dan has written extensive notes on the session, so I won’t repeat that.

What really struck me was the exercise Kevin had us all do. We paired up with someone we didn’t know. For 2 minutes, one person told a story (about something they made of which they are proud), while the other person simply listened. The listener said nothing, just attended to the storyteller. It’s a remarkable exercise, because, among other things, you realize how exhausting it is to tell a story for two minutes straight to someone who is not vocally responding. As a listener, it’s fascinating to be forced to simply listen, to not look for opportunities to intercede, follow-up, be heard.

Within 5 minutes (after both people told their story), the tenor of the room had changed dramatically. Most obviously, the exercise had forced us to explicitly consider the acts of listening and storytelling. Surprisingly, you learn the power that you can have through listening without responding.

It’s an exercise that can be a great way to break the ice between teams that have never worked together before, and definitely something to add to the toolbox.

Katrina Alcorn, Hot Studio

Focusing on the people part of the job (hiring, inspiring, firing, keeping yourself motivated).

What UX Managers Do: Manage/Coach a team, hire/staff projects, project work, teach/write, admin/operations.

How is managing UX Teams different? Challenge of managing creative professionals (ego, opinionated, motivated by different types of projects). Generalized skill set (no formal schooling, harder to assess skills, no one does everything equally well). Staffing model (looking at full team, find a balanced team). External pressure (what do you guys do again?)

Hiring
Personal networks only go so far. We’ve found great people using resources: Craigslist, industry groups, LinkedIn. Others swear by: recruiting fairs, networking, internships, people transitioning from other fields. Recruiters have mixed results–Katrina doesn’t use them.

Need to think of hiring as an ongoing process. If someone good comes your way, check them out and start a relationship.

What to look for: soft skills! Communication, clear thinker, personality! This work is so collaborative that personality is important.

Don’t hire closed people! This work brings out everyone’s fatal flaw. Eventually, there is something you aren’t good at. If you work with someone open, you can get through it. Open people are empathic, problem solver, try to hear other people’s opinions even if they don’t agree. Good at collaboration.

Diversify your team. Hire people with complementary skills. Hire people with room for growth (or they will get bored). Involve your team in selecting new hires.

Think about experience level: how many Juniors vs Seniors you have. Read “Managing the Professional Services Firm.” more procedural work, more juniors. More thinking/hard problems, more seniors.

If you have a round hole, find a round peg.

Inspiring
How do you inspire your team to do your best work?

Bad boss behavior: failing to keep promises, silent treatment, failing to give credit, negative comments, etc.

People should do what they love. “An avid interest in the project subject/concept is the biggest motivator for me to do great work.” Managers should give people the stuff they like to do as much as possible.

Encourage downtime projects. “It let’s you get off the consulting hamster wheel.”

Encourage group learning. Not up to the manager to have all the answers. Encourage the group to learn from each other. Share work and discuss problems.

Have a process and be prepared to deviate from it.

Create an environment for people to do their best work. This means different things to different people. Sometimes it means championing UX in a company for your team. Sometimes it is securing a budget for the team.

Defining the career path. At Hot: UX > Sr. UX > Director > Principal. Not everyone wants to be a manager!

Firing
What do you do when a problem arises?

How do you know there is a problem? Have 1 on 1s with each team member. Check in with clients and business partners. Establish good relationship with other disciplines. PMs, especially, are your canaries in the coal mine.

Common performance issues: great ideas, poor presentation (brilliant thinking, bad presenting), difficulty collaborating, poor time management; leads to sloppy work, unmotivated, thinking is lazy.

Is this a pattern? If not, address it and move on. If yes, can it be fixed? If so, define clear steps to resolve and check on progress. If not, prepare to say good bye.

Giving feedback: Establish a connection. Express criticism as a question. Listen to his side (really listen). Be clear in your feedback and keep emotion out of it. Use specific examples. Basic communication 101 (”I can’t give this to a client because _____”). Don’t wimp out. You can’t be everyone’s friend but you don’t need to be a jerk either.

Motivating Yourself
Lots of yucky things you need to deal with as a manager. Tons of stuff you have to multi-task and you can’t look away.

Be prepared to make some sacrifices. Managers do less and less project work over time. It’s your job to make other people look like rock stars and you don’t get the credit. Practice leads should do no more than 20% of billable work.

But pick a pet project and hang onto it. It will ground you in the work and shows the team you are in there with them.