Who’s Experience is it Anyway?

I have gotten asked a lot in interviews lately. “So what are you? Do you consider yourself IA or IxD?” And I find myself asking, “Does it matter?”

I have to ask all UX professionals everywhere, “Why the divide?” Aren’t we as professionals in User Experience supposed to be about the design of that experience no matter the medium?

You could argue, much like Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message!” After all a content rich site is going to need a good IA to wrangle all that content but then that IA needs to also create the interface for the user to interact with all that content. Isn’t the interaction design?

On the flip side, you may have an interaction designer working on a content rich site such as CBS News is going to need to know how to wrangle all that content in order to increase find-ability. Isn’t that Information Architecture?

How much are we really different from each other? And does it really matter? In the end isn’t it all about the user and their experience anyway?

Tags: Information Architecture, interaction design, interface design, naming conventions, nomenclature, User Experience

Change up the Experience

As a designer, I am responsible for the experiences I create for my users. Whether creating a financial web site or a game, I need to consider how people will interact with that information. What excites me about this video is it takes an everyday object and creates a new and unique experience which changes the behaviour of the user. Interesting.

Another example is Mint.com.

Most people would say that they 1) do not understand finance and/or 2) find it rather boring. I am included in that population. Until the day I found myself working in finance, I can honestly say I didn’t understand it. No one spent time explaining it to me. School never had a class in it. How was I ever to understand it? I was frustrated with money.

Enter Mint.com and all of a sudden you have users who say, “Mint.com has changed the way I view my finances.” Really? Why is that?

Mint adds color and graphics. It talks to you about your money. Shows you where you are spending, where you can cut, helps you budget, watch your investments grow, etc. It provides a simple interface for ease of use and understanding. It has changed behaviour and the user’s understanding of their money.

How much more as designers can we help our users understand things they do not and affect behaviour within applications, web sites, games, and other digital means? What can we look to, to help us explore new forms of interactive understanding? Every project differs. In the case of JunoBaby it simply needed to be a simple module to help users understand the company. In the case of AEG (redesign live soon), it was an interactive flash piece that explained the historical timeline of the company through imagery and video while matching with the historical periods in time to help users better understand the time periods the company was making such decisions.

Tags: design, User Experience

Digital Road Signs

I was watching Top Gear on the BBC and they were discussing the design of the road signs for the highways (Fast forward to 4:45 within the video).

In the 1950’s when the government was developing the motor ways in the UK, they realised that the current signs were not going to work. Thus a professor and his former student got the job to redesign all the road signs around the UK. They utilized colors and upper and lower case lettering for faster reading. They also changed up the design of the “children at play” sign to look like the student and her brother when they were young. Their objective was to make the signs clear and easy to read while moving at traditional speeds in the UK. You can find the final product here.

I remember my design classes at design school taught the importance of clean & clear design. Not to mention with road signs you need to consider not only your local audience but the tourist who may read the imagery of the sign differently than you intend. How then does this translate to the web or other forms of digital media?

Road signs in digital media are usually navigation based. Interaction Designers and User Experience Specialists will recommend things like breadcrumbs, as well as, utilizing colors and font sizes to help users figure out where they are within a site. For example when I worked on the CBS News redesign we explored colors like yellow for the Early Show, red for 60 Minutes, and blue for 48 Hours. These visual clues give users an immediate (unspoken) impact which says I am in X section of the site. It’s the way the users find their way or what UX professionals call wayfinding.

Though with that in mind, I ask my fellow UX pros if perhaps when talking about UX with people whom don’t know or understand what we do perhaps we need to use road signs to explain how people find their way through a site. What road signs will users look for when they come to your site? Will the signs say move forward?  Dangerous curves ahead? Stop? What does your site say about you and will users manage to find their way?  Will they find your site a nice drive in the country?  Or a dangerous rocky road ahead?

Tags: breadcrumbs, navigation, road signs, site design, User Experience, wayfinding

Rethinking my Blog: Girls & Games

I came home today from playing soccer, injured.  If you know me, then you know that is not all that uncommon. I may regret this in the morning. Or perhaps not as it got me inspired to blog.

First I want to state that for 2010 I think I will be talking about User Experience in a more generalized way.  I find I put too much pressure on myself to say something profound in my blog. Like every blogger in the blog-o-sphere must say something profound that has massive universal impact rather than simply saying, “I think this about that.” Thus in order to take the pressure off and to encourage more blogging, I will blog about anything I think impacts experience or technology. I’ll ask more questions. I’ll talk about stuff that inspires my thinking. Speaking of, my biggest inspiration lately has been gaming.

Girls and Games.

Ask most females and they would tell you they are either 1) not a gamer or 2) there aren’t enough “girl games” out there for them. What does that really mean though?

Let’s start with point one: “I’m not a gamer”

Any girl who tells you this is simply lying. Truth is they have probably played several games as a kids. As a member of the female gender, they play games with their friends, lovers, and others they come across. They are just not the “normal” type of game we might think of. Girls are competitive in nature.  If you don’t believe me, watch females play soccer or volleyball. (Or fight over a man.)

That brings me to point two: “The games out there aren’t interesting to me.”

I had an interesting conversation with the people at Playdom during an interview a few weeks back. It turns out the game, “Sorority Life“, has a strong appeal to women in their 30/40/50’s whom have the desire at the end of the day to “kill”. (In other words they love the fight feature where they can challenge other women and win battles for money, power, status, or game items.) It is a release of stress for them.

While I was not a fan of Sorority Life (because it felt too girly),  ”Mafia Wars” (by Zynga) appealed to me for much of the same reason. Fascinating, isn’t it?

Why then aren’t more games built for girls that allow us to play to our competitive natures? The game industry is missing a key component to the type of experience girls would want in games. Perhaps there would be more peace in the world if we could take out our aggression within games?

Then again, probably not.

Tags: female gaming, fun, games, girl games, Mafia Wars, Playdom, Sorority Life, technology, User Experience, Zynga

A Week in Twitter

What I learn from following UX Designers on Twitter:

User’s Brain vs Your Design – A Brief reminder of gestalt principles as applied to 2D design.

The Yahoo Pattern Library – Good to help explore ideas on how to design something. Not an end all be all answer.

The Semantic Web and a semantic search for Information Architecture.

Why Couples Therapy for Designers and Developers? – We often use a conveyor belt method to manage products. Designers do their work up front, then “hand off” their creation expecting it can be built and won’t change. Then the Developers need to create something they’ve previously had little involvement with. It’s critical that these transition phases be a two-way channel, and not the closing of a door. The detail of what works might be specific to your team, but in the end, our research shows that communication is what makes great teams work. Successful projects are built around the involvement and engagement of all parties at every phase of the project. How do you facilitate this? Bring everyone, including designers, developers, and stakeholders into the earliest discussions. Involve team members in solving problems that you encounter. Hold reviews after every phase during the project.

Other News:

The Top 10 Best UX Blogs
Interface Design Patterns (Data Visualization Collection)
Imitation, Sincere Form of Flattery?
Downturn Accelerates Demand for Open Source Software
Track Your Happiness with the iPhone

Why Bill Gates Was Successful

[Link from Fast Company]

Sheer determination and persistence gets us farther than anything else. Take Colonel Sanders for example.  He talked to hundreds before he finally got someone to take him seriously and thus Kentucky Fried Chicken was born.

Intro to Programming

My friend, Chris Stead, has been introducing me into programming. I have tried to pick up programming before but usually struggle with the concepts as I cannot visualize what the code is doing. Chris explained the basics of programming as such:

Imagine they (control structures) are like a police officer directing traffic around an accident, a really big accident. An accident that just about deleted the internets. They say turn, you turn. They say stop, you do it.

For is a control structure. It says ‘repeat this until Simon says stop.”‘

While is the same way.

If says ‘ONLY do this WHEN Simon says.’

That’s programming.

Oh, and else is the weird cling-on that follows If around and cleans up the leftover mess with a pooper-scooper.”

Using visual imagery to help me better understand how programming works, Chris has illustrated programming for me.

Tags: code, education, programming

Social Media is Not a Solution

Lately I have noticed an increase in the amount of requests for “Social Media UX Designers”. This worries me. It worries me much like the Pied Piper whom led all the rats out of the village only for them to drown in the river. This is a drastic illustration of my perspective but it does illustrate a point.

Social media is about connections and sharing experiences. It will not suddenly give your business a boost without your business having a product/service your customers (ie users) fall in love with. If you as a business create a product that the users love they will run to Facebook or Twitter or any other service to let their network know about it. On the flip side, they will also say how much they hate it.

Business needs to understand this important distinction and consider their business strategy before implementing a social media tool to their toolbox. They need to ask why they think they need it and strategize that need along with exploring what users need. Combine the two with a social media strategy that fits your business and you might find you have utilized a tool to create a solution.

Designing Carousels: A Comment on a Short by Smart Experience

Smart Experience posted a small webinar about Carousels on their Facebook group.

Most of us in the industry design with carousels all the time. Smart Experience says they have become very popular because of their ability to provide a bunch of information visually. The mind processes information visually a lot faster than data.

If you plan to design with carousels then the first thing someone should know in designing carousels is that it is about imagery.  In fact, designing the imagery in a straight line allows the user to know just how many images there are within a carousel such as the example in the video.

Carousels create depth of field, much like flipping through several documents stacked on top of each other.

Always keep in mind that carousels are about browsing information, not searching.

Finally, Victor points out that carousels should be fun.  I don’t know that I agree with this last point of his. After all, some information found in carousels is hardly fun such as buying an appliance but then again what can we do as designers to make it interesting and unique? Can we allow the user to move in and out and around the object? Zoom in on certain features they need to learn more about? Add visualizations wherever needed to help explain features that may not be easily understood without a visit to a store?  As designers, we get to create those experiences in those modules.  To that point, it’s not just about creating a clean interface that gets the information the user needs to them but taking it a step further and helping the user to gain understanding when needed.

Tags: carousels, gaining understanding, User Experience

Video Notes From the Field

[Original Link & Videos] Liz Danzico recently sought out the advice of digital designers and designer conspirers far and wide, to ask them to respond to the following:

So you’re thinking about becoming a designer? If I could tell you only one thing about going into the field, my advice would be ___________ .

They can be summarized as such:
- Be empathetic towards all (the team, client, etc). Understand behaviours.
- Think about more than just the design
- Know how to express yourself. “It’s the sign of an organized mind.”
- Differentiate yourself by understanding the big picture
- Learn for yourself and create your own opinions
- Have undying passion for what you do
- Use a camera as your visual sketchbook
- Nothing better than knowing something you have changed someone’s perspective
- Focus
- Seek out, embrace, and solve for different perspectives
- Constantly tackle problems at the edge of your ability
- Find the middle ground between clever and stupid
- Constant and consistent iteration

If I were to add my own it would be:
So you’re thinking about becoming a designer? If I could tell you only one thing about going into the field, my advice would be know your client’s business. Know their competitors and then know their users. Ask for specifics get inside their heads. Then solve for what their heart and soul asks for not for what they think they need. Also, know how to talk to people in other fields and backgrounds.

Tags: being a designer, commentary, field notes, User Experience