interaction design.

UX it’s time we re-brand

Published on

Starbucks did it… the Gap tried to, and created a ton of buzz around their almost new logo, and of course we can’t forget about HTML5 coming in and stealing the show. Maybe it’s time for UX to follow suit. No, I’m not talking about creating a UX logo (although that might be fun) I’m talking about rebranding and repackaging our product both internally and externally so that we can have a greater reach in our market.

Whew… that was a whole lotta marketing lingo (probably used incorrectly) but I think my point holds true. I got the idea earlier this Spring at the Healthcare Experience Design Conference while listening to one of the many phenomenal lectures. The speaker was making a great point about how interaction design/experience design is new to the healthcare industry as a whole, and how we need to earn trust in this industry in order to seem qualified to work there. I’m sure that healthcare is not the only industry where this is true… in fact I know it. But the most important point that the speaker made was that we, as designers, are only seen as relevant at the point of interface. We make the interfaces of the things we design easy to use and that builds a direct correlation between us and the interface. Therefore, all of the work that we do outside of just wireframing and sketching is lost to the other people in our industries.

Direct Correlation
A direct coorelation


Because of this, we are usually not seen as important enough to contribute to “real business value” conversations and ideas (a problem that plagues us all and fuels the majority of our debates). Because we are not important enough or relevant enough to these conversations and meetings, we are not given the opportunity to show the extent of the value that we can bring to our businesses… whether those businesses are run by doctors in the operating room or executives in the boardroom.

Doctor

So, in order to start to solve this problem I think that there are a couple of steps that we need to take. And, I think that the concept behind all of these steps is rebranding what UX and IxD mean both internally to our profession and externally to our partners. Meaning, we first need to start promoting the non-tactical side of our profession. When someone asks us what we do, we need to say more than “I design and make things easier to use” (guilty of this one myself). We need to say “I study how people use things and use that knowledge to solve problems around those things”. We need to fold the non-wireframe/interface centric activities into the mix. We need to not only argue about which software is best for wireframing, but which software is best for note taking during user research and testing, as well as which methodologies work best for observing user behavior. In short, we need to talk about our profession as being more than the interface to each other… not just to everyone else.

Next, we need to start to hold our own as professionals and experts. When selling and actually doing our work we need to pick the right kind of businesses to work for and teams to work with (see UX… it’s time we STRIKE). We need to hold ourselves accountable for being wireframe monkeys, and we then need to change the cycle so that UX is seen as more than just the interface. It is our own fault that people hire us solely to change where things are on the screen if we are taking those jobs without question, and not educating our teams and bosses that there is more to what we do. As a consultant, I’m careful about which jobs to take especially if I know that the client just wants me to push things around on the screen for the visual designer to mock up. We all need to take a step back and think about how we can change this pattern with our actions and decisions, and how we can sell UX more professionally instead of just taking what is thrown at us job-wise.

It's Your Fault

Once we begin the process of rebranding both internally (to each other) and externally (to our teams and businesses) the relevance of our skillsets to other parts of the product, besides just the interface, begins to increase. As we become more relevant our external partners will see we are more than just the interface, and will hire us to do the things that we love to do and not just move boxes around the screen (not that we don’t love that as well). We can really do User Experience Design, feel proud and fulfilled in our work, as well as be present in the conversations where UX matters most… those that affect our users. So let’s do it, let’s rebrand UX from just wireframes and interfaces to what we know it really is, putting the user first and ensuring their experience with a product is service is the best it can be.

relevance equals response

Interactions are cool, but then what?

Published on

As designers we can always be distracted by the newest, coolest designs and interactions. In fact, one of the first lessons we learn when we start becoming designers is that there should always be some sort of function with our form. It’s not just about creating cool interactions, it’s about create appropriate interactions for the problems we are trying to solve. Within the past couple of years, with the release of the tablet, we have seen the influx of interaction for interactions sake, and it is taking all of our power not to fall back into the trap of designing cool things just to be cool. At a recent lecture I attended regarding how the iPad and similar devices are changing magazine publishing, I witnessed this situation in full effect. Magazines design really cool interactions for their tablet applications, but one has to question what is the core experience that they are providing with magazine interaction on these devices?

The Core Experience

Not defining these core experiences is what, I believe, is causing the publishing industry’s demise. Instead of thinking about how users experience the content on a non-device level and bringing that to their applications, they are thinking about how users physically engage with magazines and how to replicate that in their applications. This is all well and good, but eventually the “coolness” becomes boring, and without a core experience at the base, the application becomes uninteresting. Thus the problem with not having defined the core experiences for the user is that the thing you are designing, whether a desktop app, mobile app, website, etc… has no real value to people. You are not providing value.

I think it’s obvious that in order to solve this problem of not providing value to our users through our designs we need to take a step back from the interaction and define the experience first. This is UX 101, right? If we aren’t defining the experience, what we want our users to be feeling, how their behaviors reflect needs, goals and tasks, etc then we aren’t really creating an experience at all. By just defining new and interesting interactions without thinking through the experience you aren’t really designing, you are just copying real life detailed interactions into the virtual world. Now, don’t get me wrong, these interactions are extremely important. They are, however, only interactions until they are coupled with the overarching meaning.

Thus, our UX model still holds true even after all this time. In order to provide value… real value, we need to create an experience before we layer interactions on top of it. This is not something that I see most people doing when assembling their new tablet applications, for example. Instead they are more concerned with all the new interactions that they can provide users through this new medium. However, these interactions will become stale when the next big thing hits. By creating and understanding the experience that the application is trying to provide, we are creating real value for our users. The outcome of doing this are applications, websites and products that are useful and have a much longer lifespan because they provide value to the users they were designed for. So, all you designers out there, look to the experience first, then the medium you are designing in. And all you magazine application designers, take a step back and ask yourself what you are really designing. Trust me, you product will be much more kick ass for it.

Kick a little ass

Imagine my delight when only hours after I drafted this post, Jeffery Zeldman highlighted a great, similar (but better written) post about The Problem with Magazine Apps.

UX… Let’s define this thing already

Published on

I’ve been thinking about this topic for awhile. I believe that UX is in the middle of an era where we are ready to put a stake in the ground and define who we are and what we do. We all talk about this, sometimes in similar ways some times in different. We argue about this… every single conference has a speaker that encourages us to do something about this, but we are still hesitant to draw the proverbial line in the sand and really define ourselves. I couldn’t agree more with Jesse James Garrett when he said… “UX is a mindset for which there is no cure”. And I think by coupling that point with the knowledge of the material of our craft, we can come to a good place in understanding who we are and then move UX forward as a profression.

Who we are

The problems with not defining and owning who we are have been talked about since the dawn of UX. But spinning this issue another way and looking at the problem with trying to define these things (as opposed to not defining them), one can see that a major issue that we face is that once we have a definition for what a UX professional is, someone, somewhere, feels that they will be “left out” of that definition. Said in another away, many of us feel that if UX is defined in a granular way, then we will no longer be able to call ourselves UX professionals, and will once again be roaming soulless around the career desert. This is anxiety provoking and thus we hold onto the churn and arguments in order to keep ourselves “in the game”. This, of course, only sets UX back as a profession because it makes it harder and harder for those outside of UX to understand where and how to invest their money in our talent.

Therefore, in order to quell this fear, and calm our nerves, I believe that we all need to understand that UX really is a mindset that we are all born with or grown accustomed to, and that we not only share that mindset, but couple it with the materials of our craft in order to create this thing called UX. What am I defining as the materials of this craft? Code. Yes that’s right, I said it, code is the building block for digital products, and since that is what we all come together to design, I’m calling code the material of our craft. Thus knowing that UX is a mindset that designs and manipulates digital products, we can begin to see that yes, this field is large, and yes, you are still included. Of course some of us have expanded outside of the digital realm, but this is where our roots still lay, and many of us, myself included, still work heavily within these roots. There was an awesome post a few months ago that inspired me to think more about UX and the problems we face in owning who we are. It Doesn’t Matter Which Pill I Take; I’m Still in the Matrix, does a great job of talking about the roots of design. Of course we can always have the argument on whether or not you need to know how to code and how much of that you need to know and bla bla bla. The point I’m making is that the argument is just a distraction. All of the arguments we have on what UX is or isn’t or what UX people do or don’t do are just distractions. They distract us from owning this mindset that we all have from which there is no cure. They distract us from understanding that yes, code is that the base of what you do, and yes, your designs will manipulate it in someway. So instead of building this profession up, these arguments create internal turmoil that hold us back.

Look! A Distraction!

Thus, we need to stop arguing and define this thing already. We need to say “I’m a UX designer no matter if you think I am or not”. I know this because I have a UX mindset, and I work and manipulate digital products. So there. Now what is the argument?

The Importance of Rationale

Published on

I know that this topic is one that has been written about before, but in being true to my own advice, I’m going to raise it again here, today. That topic is the importance of having and being prepared with solid rationale for the designs that we create. To explain further what I mean, as designers we create some pretty awesome design solutions for the problems that we help define. We are creatives by nature, and whether we are designing solutions to holistic experiences or to detailed interfaces, we are continuously challenging ourselves to come up with something new and appropriate. These problems include things like “how do we increase page views?”, “how we we increase conversions?”, “how do we get more people to successfully complete this form?” and the list goes on and on. However, what I notice is that some of us are not always designing these solutions based on design knowledge, testing, or due to a combination of user behavior, business need and technical constraint. Instead, some of us go solely with opinion, misled gut feel, or just with what solutions are new and cool at the moment. This type of behavior leaves us with a big problem on our hands.

The Big Problem

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A designer walks into a review meeting with their larger project team in which they are showing some new designs that they have worked on all week and that they are sure will be accepted and praised. After looking through the designs, the larger project team begins to throw out questions like “This solution seems to be heavy on the server load, can’t we do instead?” or “These solutions don’t seem focused on increasing our conversion rates, i was thinking that we’d have something more like … why don’t we?”. Not getting the type of praise they expected, the designer becomes frustrated with the team and serves up such answers as “Well is doing it this way… it’s the wave of the future, so I think we should do it this way too” or “Can’t you see how much cleaner the page is? Why would we want to muddy it up?”. In short, the designer loses these arguments and is told to go back to the drawing board. The designer leaves the meeting angry and bitter… basically no one is happy.

However, this outcome could be completely avoided… if only the designer was equipped with solid rationale. Thus, instead of talking solely about the page being cleaner, the design educates the audience on form design, references the materials they’ve read in order to create their solution, and points out the behavior of users and how this solution is best. In response to questions about what the project team thought the design would be, the UXer can break down the problems with or successes of these ideas and how they relate to the rationale they have provided. Whatever the answer, the designer knows from a non-opinion, fact based standpoint why they designed what they have, how this helps the user, maps to business requirements and takes into account technical complexity.

Did You Know?

Having and designing with this information brings the conversation to an entirely different level. It allows everyone on the team to talk about solutions and not just opinions. It allows the designer to lead the conversation and to have the most important voice, while making sure they are listening to all others. It gives you, as the designer, points from which to design, instead of that uneasy feeling you get when you walk into your project meetings afraid that your designs will be turned down. You will have all the ammunition you need in order to defend your solutions, or update them based on the conversation. Designing in this way, by looking at why you are making the solutions that you are, also forces you to be a better designer. You will begin to think differently about the solutions you are creating, why you are creating them, and who they benefit. Without rationale, though, it is simply one opinion versus another, and nobody wants that. Opinion based design only leads to erroneous compromises for the people creating the product, and that does nothing for the people that really matter… those using it.

Interaction 11… Here I Come!

Published on

It’s that time of the year again, time for the 2011 edition of the Interaction conference put on by the IxDA folks. I’m absolutely psyched to be attending for the second year in a row because I know how much thought the planning committee puts into each and every detail, thus making Interaction a truly great event.

In chatting with one of my good friends and talented colleagues about the upcoming awesomeness, I was asked “what are your goals for the conference this year?”. I thought this was an excellent question, and realized that I hadn’t set any for myself up to that point. So, I started to think more and more about what I wanted to get out of the event.

After some thinking, here’s what I came up with. My top most goal is to observe and internalize the interaction community as a whole. Since Interaction is such a great event, and so many of the people there are insanely passionate about this profession, I want to take the time to observe how we all interact with each other, react to all the stimuli around us, and take in the large amount of information that we are being given. I want to get a pulse on what topics are popular with which groups/industry UXers and why. I also just want to see how this planning committee throws down one hell of a great experience, and try to gleam insights into how I can do the same in my work.

So despite the life long goal of learning as much as I can, I’m heading out to Boulder to look at and interact with my tribe. It’s going to be a great time, and I can’t wait to provide a recap of what I learned from my goals above… as well as from the speakers that are busily preparing to fill my brain with more UX goodness. This is going to be great… next stop, Boulder!

In Defense of Whitespace

Published on

We’ve all been there. You’re in a meeting showing one of your designs and a stakeholder says “what about all this space inbetween the sections?” or “what are we going to put in this empty spot down here?”. We, in response, roll our eyes and think about how to explain the need to have empty space on the page so that the user can actually digest the information that is displaying. I couldn’t help but think about these situations on a recent trip across the pond.

While in England, I got the chance to visit the Tate Britain, which shows English art dating back to the 1500s (as well as modern treats to look at). As I walked from gallery to gallery I couldn’t help but notice in this, as well as most other art galleries, the large amount of space inbetween the pieces. Rarely, if ever, would you go to an art gallery and see painting on top of painting, piece upon piece. Instead you are given the chance to stand and absorb and reflect on a single piece. It sits alone so that you can experience it and try to understand it, in your own way.

So, stakeholders and the like, do you want your web pages to be like newspaper classifieds where you see one ad after another all stacked tightly together, confusing potential readers and distracting their attention from their goal OR would you like your site to be like an esteemed art gallery, where users can go and experience the product and walk out wanting to return and enjoy another day? My guess is that the art gallery user is going to be a return customer time and time again, whereas the classifieds user visits once, finds or doesn’t find what they are looking for, and leaves never to return (unless absolutely necessary). You decide which site you want to be, and the whitespace can help you get there.

Confession: I don’t want to be an Interaction Designer forever

Published on

I have a confession to make… it’s not easy to say and it’s even harder to admit. I do not want to be an interaction designer forever. In fact, I don’t even really enjoy the act of detailed designing as much as one “should”. Over the past couple of months I’ve begun to recognize the things that I really love about my profession and those that I could do without… and interaction design is one that I can do without. Of course, I’ll need to explain further.

First, let me define what I mean by interaction designer. I’m talking about the people who look at and absorb a strategic vision (either business, tech, or design vision… or all three) and then think about how that looks on a screen/interface. We think about the screens that are needed, and what information/content displays where and when and then we put that all into some form of documentation such as a wireframe. What I’m saying when I state I don’t want to be an Interaction Designer forever is that this part of my job, the part where I’m just focusing on the details of the interaction, is one that I can do much much less of (notice I decided to switch from ‘do without’ to ‘do much much less of’).

Now, this is not to say that I don’t at times enjoy this work. On the contrary, it is the majority of what I’m working on right now, and I’m having a great time creating an awesome experience. But, there are times and days where I say to myself “this sucks”.

Because I’m saying that to myself, I have to ask… what is it I’d rather be doing? This job is awesome, so why am I saying these things? Thus, what are the parts of my profession that I do want to do much, much more of. For me, I personally love working on a conceptual and strategic vision. The other people can figure out the screens and then I can tell them if that fits with the vision, but leave the screens to them. I love seeing the big (really big) picture and enjoy matching that up with user research that I’ve done and behaviors that I’m seeing. This is what brings me satisfaction… so why am I so hesitant to make this confession?

In short, as a member of this awesome community, I’ve always felt that I need to do and love everything that we are responsible for. I need to love research, scoping, design, drawing, etc. I’m scared that if I don’t love doing interaction design, then I won’t be able to call myself a member of this community. But, that is just silly. Today I’m taking a stand and saying… I’m just not down with the interaction design as much as I use to be. I wanna play with the other kids and only come to this sandbox from time to time. And you know what guys? That is OK. That does not make me a traitor or any less part of this community that we’ve worked to build. It just means that I have a better idea of what slice of the pie I want to work with, and brings me closer to where I want to and can contribute the most to this awesome thing that we call User Experience. I encourage you to also think more about what it is you love and hate about our world. Making these observations about yourself can help you focus your career and in the end, make you a happier UXer.

Same *$%# Different Day

Published on

There are times when I know I’m an idealist. Well actually almost everyday in project meetings and planning sessions I know I’m an idealist. I get frustrated with the “process”. I get frustrated with doing things the same day in and day out and development teams wanting to go faster. Constantly I think about the saying that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. How does no one else see this?!

Doesn’t anyone else out there care about the quality of the user experience? I know to some who read this I may sound silly, but doesn’t anyone else take pride in whether or not people enjoy and can use the by-product of their hardwork??? On days like these I know that I was meant to be in this industry. I’ll admit that as a developer I didn’t always think through the interface, but now that I’ve been exposed to that line of thinking I’m never going back. They can’t make me!

[techtags: USER EXPERIENCE, EXPERIENCE DESIGN]