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.

Being Human is NOT Quantifiable from Jeff Parks on Vimeo.

The Following are the Key Takeaways I got from the Video:

“Behaviour is a function of the person and their environment.”

You cannot sum up behaviour as easy as a bunch of numbers. “The experiences in our life ultimately determine our perspective. It is the culmination of experiences that ultimately shape our unique reality.” Not just one event.

Business/IT tends to care more about their processes and code then the user. Much like in family feud, the user stands in the sound proof booth and they know the answer but can’t tell the people who are up on stage (business & IT). We don’t take the time to talk to our users. Take the time to find out about the people you are designing for.

Seek First to Understand Then be Understood:
Find the reconcile force… Write out all the things you disagree about then move forward on all the things you agree about. This is where personas and wireframes come into play as a tool. They are tools to communicate ideas. Move forward from there with the how. (How do I get buy in for my ideas?)

No One is an Expert:
The industry is only ten years old. How many ten year olds do you know that have the answers to everything? According to Malcolm Gladwell it takes 10K hours to master anything.

Most of our work is about conveying meaning to others for others. By focusing on data points, we miss the emotion and the perception. (ie the Human Side AND the opportunity to connect.)

If you seem stuck then the answer may not be logical. Draw, do something creative, it’ll free up your mind and help you think outside the box.

Children have endless capacity to create. but we kill creativity ruthlessly. (When we design for human beings we take the human out of the equation.)

Trust is predicated on an understanding of what it is that you are trying to communicate. Trust is the biggest issue on the web, in the marketplace, in business, in government… it’s everywhere today. The web is a conversation but do you know WHO you are talking to?

We define the people we meet by WHAT they do not WHO they are. Human experience and what we remember cannot be put into a number.

“Designers have imagination, empathy, and intuition, which is just as legitimate as statistical data and are grounded in knowledge and principles. Design is an argumentative process and as the design must be argued for so too must the data. Neither is the final answer or truth; instead there’s a process of discovery and understanding.” – Uday Gayendar, VOIP for Oracle, Adobe, & Cisco

The only way to truly understand someone is the ability to connect with them in a balanced way.

“…no one will remember you for the car you drove of the things you owned. In life, what matters most at the connections you make with other people and the personal impact you had on their lives…” – William Oliver, Farmer (My Dad said something similar to me when a close personal friend died unexpectedly: “No one will remember you at the office.”)

We have so much potential and yet we squander it on useless data points.

Other Video’s & URL’s Mentioned by Jeff are as follows:
StoryCorps
Jake Barton
Jesse James Garrett
Lego Universe
Boxes and Arrows Podcasts
Podcast with Greg Vassallo

Special thank you to Jeff Parks for taking the time to share with us his thoughts!

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?

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?

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.

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.

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The Top 10 Best UX Blogs
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Downturn Accelerates Demand for Open Source Software
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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.

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.