This weekend I am buried in a seminar on how to be a more engaging public speaker. Most of us fear public speaking. We fear being embarrassed in front of crowds or not being seen as credible in what we are talking about. I too have those fears, which is why I am in the seminar.

Our homework tonight was to write our defining moment, a story about why we are talking about what we’re talking about, so here’s mine:

Having started my career as a visual designer, I was quite happy just dealing with colors, objects, and fonts. As long as clients were happy, I was happy. Though throughout that time I found I really struggled with clients who didn’t appreciate my viewpoint on design. Like most designers I felt I was the expert in all things related to the “beautification” of a product.

Then the dot com crash hit and my life changed forever. After a year of underemployment and struggling to make ends meet I landed in the mortgage industry. I was working in a call center taking calls from people who needed their mortgage loan yesterday. I came to the quick realization that people didn’t understand finance nor did I to be frank. Calls such as “now I can afford a home with this interest only loan” & “I need to pay my contractor who started a month ago; why hasn’t this loan closed?” left me more then a little concerned. This would be an ongoing theme in my life as I began the journey towards financial literacy.

Then I landed in the insurance industry working on a change program to shift resources around the company, save money, and streamline the overall business. Here I suddenly had a new voice. I was hired to work on the internal web site redesign and any other admin related tasks. Having come out of the dot com bust with experience in web design I was a perfect fit for this small group. I knocked out the redesign, creating what I would (years later) come to understand were called wireframes and user flows not specs and process flows. They began to move me around to other similar projects and before I knew it I was a business analyst bringing design thinking to business objectives and suddenly it hit me. There was something to the designers way of thinking that was a different more encompassing approach to problem solving then the traditional MBA thinking. I began to explore what this meant and eventually found my way to Interaction Design but it was that project starting as an Administrative Assistant that led me where I am today.

Mark Baskinger on Drawing Ideas and Communicating Interaction from Johnny Holland on Vimeo.

Here Mark Baskinger (associate professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design) talks to Johnny about drawing ideas, the differences between industrial designers and interaction designers, and how interaction designers can use sketching to communicate their designs better.

Sketch
Sketching is nothing more than showing what’s in your head. Everyone can communicate through drawing. Industrial Designers are very skilled at communicating their ideas within space and real time. It’s part of their vernacular. Interaction Designers are only expected to do that at certain stages and rarely go beyond the basics (ie stick figures). Since Industrial Designers can draw and illustrate in 3D, Interaction Designers should strive to sketch like Industrial Designers.

Construct a Visual Conversation
Use something accessible to the client to get them sketching (ie – a crayon at a cheap Italian restaurant) and talking about their ideas. Clients need to learn about the process. They will feel like they are directing but really they are learning through sketching. As a designer we are interpreting their direction as boundaries, wishes, and desires.

The physicality of the old (like a sliding phone) is what’s locked away in our brains but the new (like an iPad) is still foreign. There’s a disconnect to communicating the new verses what we know as the old. Form needs to embody the desired behaviour. Touch screen is becoming ubiquitous. Thus we need to put the old and new together in a meaningful way or users will break the old. Over time there has to be a record that shows the expected movement. Then connect it back to the person. Through the sketches, tell the story of the product.

Figure out what the value is that you are giving to business. Until everyday people can choose a product based on the interaction not on the cost, then interaction design will still be trying to persuade business they are a needed asset.

I’m rather far behind on the weekly UX Videos so I’ll “catch up” simply by starting my posts again. I ran across this video and am amazed by the facts. We have a fundamental shift on our hands of how we communicate with each other locally and internationally.

Similar to having a web site is required to even be seen as a legitimate business; it’s now vital to play a part in social media. Seventy eight percent of people will trust peer reviews verses the 14% that trust advertising. Some further facts of the video are as follows:

Social media is no longer a toy. It has grown into a leading tool that demands you partner with it in order to keep pace.

This video is a simple and straight forward video, in which Bill Verplank explains what interaction design is all about (from the series of videos that accompanies Bill Moggridge’s book “Designing Interactions”). Given that we are often asked just what Interaction Design is and why it is so important, it is important to learn how to speak the language of what we do in a way that the client can understand. In order to do that you must learn to understand all you can about your client then you can help them understand why what we do is so valuable to them personally.

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.

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?

Whitney Hess has posted the following:

Jess Bezos’s, the founder of Amazon.com, says, “Obsess over customers“. More importantly:

Obsess over customers: “When given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, we always obsess over customers.”

Invent: “Any time we have a problem, we never accept either/or thinking. We try to figure out a solution that gets both things.”
Think long term: “It requires and allows a willingness to be misunderstood.”

It’s always Day 1: “There’s always more invention in the future. Always more customer innovation. New ways to obsess over customers.”

What I like about this video she has posted is it gets back to a point I have made about never losing touch with the customer. In all my experience with Six Sigma, Change Management, and User Experience, I think the only thing that really touches the customer is a culture of asking and consistently testing and iterating on your product line with your customers (or users). Hence why I have fallen into User Experience as a career.

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On top of this Business Week recently posted an article about the IDEA 09 Design Awards calling the article, “Designing a Better World” where they said, “Business leaders should care about design because it hits the bottom line… more than anything else, design builds a business.”

I’ve been at a negotiation seminar all weekend when during the last day I went up on stage to share my 30 second escalator speech. I delivered it only to be told I was insulting my client! I said, after several edits, “Who I work with is IT Managers who has the problem of unorganized web architecture. I help them attain more clients and build loyalty.” It sounded good to me!

However, the leader of the seminar pointed out to me that it is very likely that my client is someone who created that system and consequently would be quite put out by that statement.

After some work I ended up with, “Who I work with are web based businesses who would like to work with the customers they didn’t know they had.”

Much better right? Right. The experience taught me something though. As professionals we often talk in the language of the people we work with. We need to remember when engaging our audience(s) that they may not always known or understand what it is we do. We need to always keep in mind our audience. Consider it user experience within language…

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Steve Portigal was up first to walk us through his sold out workshop called, “Well, we did all this research … now what?”

My Twitter Feeds on SP:

“Who cares about terminology. Examine, infer and apply to business or design.” I’d say apply to both. Why should they be different.

“Stay out of solution land. Try different methods”

When stuck come up with really bad ideas to encourage creativity.

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Second was Kumi Akiyoshi with “Feeling: What Makes an Engaging Product?“.  The slides from the presentation are below:

Third was Ian Swinson with “Postcard Patterns”.

Postcards = simple straight forward messaging

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Fourth was Nadya Direkova with “What’s in a game? A look at game design best practices as prime influencers of interaction design.”  The slides from the presentation are below:

Twitter:

Is google a single player or multiplayer game? How many of us get to design apps in 3d?

This is review so far. It’s all about the same from my game design class at Parsons.

Simply controls. Friend invites to play with friends. (AdverGames)

Create a reward in health. Physical Therapy… Doing # of exercises = whatever

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Kim Goodwin “each one teach one” – people are now saying I experienced good design. This is easier than that.

Twitter:

“Nothing special about the iPhone. Technology is simple. It’s design they are selling. And we’re paying a lot of money for good design.”

“Corporate Americas new found belief in design is fragile.”

A lot of good ideas end up collecting dust. “It’s someone else’s fault. We need to take responsibility.”

Sales people understand progressive commitment. Get people involved in the research and so on to understand reasoning. Pushes commitment.

Even those who are use to rational decisions can be susceptable to emotion. (Ie the Mini Cooper)

Bargaining a normal part of Change Management. “I’ll have the salad with the cake.”

Ixd = generation creation

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In summary -

Personal gripe: Another thing about less is more on presentation slides… Less information focuses the audience on you and what you are saying. Avoids info overload

At the bar afterwards: “We’re designing behaviour”

Claudia points out the advantages and disadvantages of Flexible Content Models in this presentation.