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:
60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
We will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
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.
Talking to customers is what user experience professionals claim to do day in and day out. Learning the lanugage of our customers in order to talk about what we do is key to translating what we do to the general public. An 8th grader should understand it. If you were to step back, what is the experience your customers have of you? Do you know? What is it you are selling? Why are they choosing you? What is your value? These are all questions we claim to ask of our client’s users (aka customers) but do we ever ask ourselves.
I always struggle with explaining what I do. Often getting blank stares and perplexed looks when I say, “I do user experience design.”
This always leads to conversations between ourselves that go something like this, “So how do you explain what we do?” “I do x.” “Oh yeah that sounds really good. I usually say y.” “Hm, I might need to implement some of that.” However, who we are not talking to is our customers.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon says we should obsess over our customers but how many of us actually do? We talk endlessly about user experience but do we take that internally to consider the experience of our own users (aka clients)? Do we go out and talk to them? Ask them candidly, “do you understand the value of what I sell?” How confident are you that your clients can explain in plan language just what you do and what value you bring to their organization?
Spend time learning the language of your intended audience. Figure out how to translate what you do into their language. Build rapport with them through the language you utilize to explain what you do.
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.
I use my Twitter account mainly for work and gathering information from my friends about the latest and greatest going on in the UX community. With following 88 rather active Twitters, it’s often hard to keep up with all the articles they post so in an effort to not only summarize for myself but also pass on to anyone reading, here’s what I have seen over the last week:
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.”
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