John Zimmerman on Idea Generation and User-Centered Design
design
August 19, 2004, 10:04 PM
John Zimmerman, one of the three resident Design professors in the HCII, came to our capstone project class a few weeks ago (you can tell I'm behind...) to talk about ways to create user-centered design ideas. He espoused several interesting views that in many ways are fundamentally different from the more data-centric ways we've learned in the MHCI program.
John talked about several strategies you can follow to create innovative and appropriate designs:
- Draw from user intents, not from tasks, needs, or problems. What John means by "intents" seems to be the same thing Cooper means by "goals"; they are the underlying purpose of the user's desires and actions that remain constant even in the face of changing environments and technologies (unlike tasks, which vary). Understanding your user's real intents will free you to look at new ways of fulfilling them without straying from the path of user-centered design.
- Visit analogies and metaphors. In the course of designing, a common means of generating new ideas is to come up with metaphors, or solutions that are somehow similar to the ones you're considering. John suggested that you not just invent such metaphors, but actually get out of your office space and visit them. For example, a project team developing a document organization system for an operating system came up with the metaphor of tombstones in a graveyard. They went to a graveyard and examined the metaphor in its real setting to help flesh out the metaphor.
- Design for extreme users. Instead of imagining normal, middle-of-the-road people such as those commonly captured in personas, invent interfaces for the edge cases. If you're designing an MP3 downloader, think of the user who only downloads one song every five years and the one who downloads 50 a day. Alternately, there's the designing for extreme users technique (that I've mentioned before), which calls for looking for unusual types of users in addition to edge behaviors. John says he uses this technique to generate new ideas when he's stuck; obviously the interface that's appropriate only for an extreme edge case user would not be appropriate for the final design.
- Channel your personas. Actually those are my words, not John's, and I use them slightly tongue-in-cheek. John believes Cooper's concept of personas is almost right, but not quite. It's not enough to define a specific user and design an interface for them. John belives it isn't possible for a designer to design for anyone other than himself. However, it is possible to become the user; you can think like they do then design for yourself, rather than thinking like yourself and trying to design for them. If you're in a team, one person could assume the role of a persona while the others ask him or her questions.
- Live with the work. Put your designs up on the walls of your project space, so that they're always visible. Yet another benefit of radical colocation.
- Sketch on the way. Always be engaged in the act of design. Start doing low-fidelity sketches from the first day of the project; don't wait until you have all the user needs "right" before starting to think about the product itself. Most of these sketches may be discarded, but they will keep you focused on how what you're seeing influences the design effort.
- Design for the presentation. John feels strongly about this, although it is controversial. He suggests focusing on the final presentation of your work (whatever that might be) from day one, and avoiding any work that isn't feeding into that final presentation. His rational is that if you don't keep focused on the final results, you'll waste time looking at details that aren't important for the current stage of your project. If they won't be in the presentation, nobody will see them, and by the time they're relevant, they'll be obsolete. Basically you want to do the right work at the right time (very XP-ish in this regard) by keeping focused on what your audience's current problems are and what will excite them.
- Generate scenarios or stories of use. Oftentimes, individual sketches can't capture enough information to express an interaction design. Scenarios of use can fill in the details by describing the entire course of the interaction. Stories are often the best low-fidelity way to prototype an interaction design.
- Get yourself in the right mindset. To create new ideas, you have to learn how not to think. Though you have probably accumulated a sophisticated understanding of your users' goals, tasks, workflows, processes, etc., you need to be able to let this go at times and let your intuition guide your design thinking. Too much understanding of how things are can impede your ability to think about how things can be. It's also important to foster a team environment where it's ok to come up with less-than-brilliant ideas, since only by seriously considering the less good (if not downright silly) ideas can you get to the ones that are gold. To do this, you need to be able to trust your teammates; if you don't, you won't feel comfortable expressing half-baked ideas and this will impede creativity.
- Say "Yes, and..." During brainstorming and ideation, it's important not to start critiquing and shooting down ideas too early. Instead, build on your teammates ideas to take them to the next level. If someone shoots out a half-baked idea, don't think "what a crappy design idea", think "how can I take this further"? Brainstorming should be fun, not competitive.
- Stand up. You're less creative if you're sitting down. This might be a personal preference, but I certainly find I'm at my best when I'm pacing the floor; somehow the physical activity jolts my mental activity into overdrive.
Finally, John had a couple of things to say about user research. He warned us that our interpretations of the underlying goals and needs we uncover during user observations are generally going to be wrong. On the other hand, users' perceptions of their goals and needs are also wrong. Effective interpretation of user research lies on reconciling these two to arrive at something right. To do this, you need to do more than just observe; you have to show users the concepts you've created and get them to react. You can talk forever about abstract goals and get nowhere, but the instant you put a real, working interaction design (or some low-fi version thereof) in front of a user, she'll immediately be able to say "Yes! This is exactly what I need!" or tell you what's missing.
Understanding needs must be complimented by making things. User research and interaction design need to walk hand-in-hand throughout the product life cycle.
Macromedia Bound
announcements
August 14, 2004, 05:27 PM
Well, that was a long silence, wasn't it? But a silent blog often implies a busy blogger, and I've been busy with many things for the past month and a half.
The most exciting news to come out of all that busyness is: I have a job! I just accepted an offer from Macromedia, a software company in San Francisco that makes these web tools doohickeys called "Flash" and "Dreamweaver", among other things. Maybe you've heard of them.
I'll be stepping into the position of Usability Specialist there next month, primarily working with the Flash product team. I'm really excited; there's a lot of smart, talented people there doing cool things that I'm looking forward to being a part of. The position they offered me is a perfect fit with what I want to do right now; I couldn't imagine a better opportunity at this point in my career. Oh, and I'll be in the same office as that Kenneth guy, which I'm cool with, I guess.
As for now, I'm busy finishing up a few things before I leave Pittsburgh, but hopefully I'll get a chance to post some retrospectives on our capstone project and other tidbits shortly.
Stay tuned!
Posted by Jeff on August 14, 2004 at 11:25 PM
Congrats Rob. Best of luck in California.
Posted by veji on August 20, 2004 at 03:47 PM
you the man!!
Posted by Kevin Lee on August 22, 2004 at 10:55 PM
Hey Rob,
Congratulations on your success landing on a great job at MM.
I'll personally look forward to seeing much user-friendly products from both Flash and DW.
Send my best regards to Kenneth guy as well when you see him in person.
PS I'll be in SF next February for business trip. Hope to see you and your office mate then.
Posted by Jed Wood on September 14, 2004 at 06:11 PM
Been a long time since I checked in, so this is a late congrats. Based on the lack of posts, I'm assuming you've been assimilated properly. After a drawn-out decision, I ended up staying here at ID. So far it's working out well.
Keep us posted. You probably remember from all my previous ramblings that I've been a Flash Usability evangelist for some time now, though it looks like you'll be making sure the IDE is usable, no (rather than what people create with Flash)? If so, say hi to Eric Pressman when and if you see him (based in Boston). I bump into him at various conferences-- cool fellow. I also met Deb Galdez at UPA 2003, though I don't recall where she's located.
Email Rob:
Newsapple
design, internet
June 29, 2004, 03:18 PM
I came across a video of the next version of Safari's news aggregator capabilities (via Andy, via Dave). I was struck by one thing; damn, but it looks a lot like Newsable! Right down to the sort and archive (or "recent articles") options. Of course, I can't really tell that much about its full feature repertoire from peering at the short and small video, but that's the impression I got about the core interaction, anyway.
I'll admit, it's improbable that Apple really got the idea from me (though it wouldn't be the first time ;), but it is encouraging to see that what I came up with was very similar to their design. Seems I must have been on the right track, at least.
On the other hand, this does cast Newsable's future into a certain amount of doubt, since I'm not sure I want to compete with the likes of Apple. Chad and I had some ideas for new directions we could take Newsable (not gonna tell you what they are; Apple might steal them), so maybe we'll have a chance to work on that someday. In the meantime, though, maybe it's time to start thinking about that WYSIWYG blogging tool I've been meaning to write...
Email Rob:
Gmail and the Desirability of Scarcity
internet, society & sociology
June 28, 2004, 12:23 PM
I haven't made a big deal out of it, but I've had a Gmail account since around the time Google publicly announced the service (thanks to Kevin). It's a great little webapp, perhaps the best email client I've ever used, but that's not the point of this post.
Since April, Google has given current users of the service the ability to invite a limited number (2 or 3) of their friends into the fold. This has had the effect of introducing an artificial scarcity of Gmail accounts. I'm guessing that it's also had the effect of making them much more desirable than they otherwise would have been.
When Kevin first sent me the invite, my first thought was "ho hum, another webmail service". But then I got curious, largely because I felt rather privileged. I was cool enough to know Kevin and get early access to this new service. So I signed up, and wound up moving all my email to a webmail client (something I'd never expected I'd do).
Granted, Gmail's superior design and storage capacity were critical factors in this decision. Had Gmail failed to differentiate itself from its competition, I would have taken a look but turned away and gone back to Entourage. But the invite system was enough to convince me to take that first look. Often the weakness of good human-centered design is that it isn't always apparent at first glance, so people may never buy the product even if it would turn out to benefit them greatly. The invite served to make that jump, at least for me.
And it seemed to work for other people as well. During the first round of invites Gmail accounts were going for upwards of $50 on Ebay (now that they're much less scarce, their price has dropped dramatically, of course). The website Gmail Swap was created for people looking to trade things in exchange for Gmail accounts.
I don't know whether this was intentional on Google's part; there are certainly other reasons they might have done it. After all, handing out limited invites makes it easier to control how quickly the application scales so that Google's server admins don't get deluged with an unexpectedly high numbers of new users. But the marketing angle is more interesting; one wonders whether it would apply to other products. Perhaps this is a form of computer-based social networking that 1) doesn't rely on colored bubbles and lines and 2) is actually practically useful.
While we're on the subject, it has been brought to my attention that Google is branching out in new directions. Their next project involves producing a tangy, cheese-based cracker spread. When released, it'll be called "G-Whiz".
Ok, that was bad.
Posted by Robert on October 12, 2004 at 01:16 PM
Some good insight and analysis of Gmail. I've enjoyed the move to the new e-mail service, too.
Of course, now it is not scarce and I'm wondering what is in store when they roll it out for everyone to use.
On another note, I'm curious, what blog software are you using? It appears to be Serendipity in functions/layout. The template/style looks like a modded Serendipity template.
Just wondering what your experience has been with it. I've experimented with many blogging packages. I was wondering what your evaluation is i.e., functionality, etc. I moved from Serendipity (but liked it a lot). I couldn't effectively moderate/control the 'comment spamming' thing.
But, i see that you've effectively incorporated a 'number' fill-in function. I'd love to know if it is available as a plugin.
Nice site!
Thanks.
Email Rob:
Goodbye, Comment Spam
announcements
June 26, 2004, 12:16 PM
Following an annoying comment spam flood last night, I've finally been pushed into installing the CAPTCHA anti-spam plugin for Movable Type. What this means for you, dear reader, is that there's now a little image that will appear in every comment entry form with a number on it. You'll need to retype that number into the text box next to the image in order for your comment to get posted.
The reason for this odd-seeming requirement is that most spam comments aren't posted by humans, they're posted by computer programs ("robots" or "bots") that crawl the web looking for comment forms and automatically submit junk comments so the spammer can sit idly by while his computer does all the dirty work whereas I have to manually clean up the mess. Not very nice at all, but spammers aren't very nice people.
The image thing prevents robots from posting comments automatically, since the robot can't read the number in the image like a human can (computers are notoriously bad at tasks that require recognizing words in noisy images, whereas humans are notoriously good at such things). If you're interested in getting more information, see the CAPTCHA project's web site.
I apologize for the inconvenience, but I had to take some measures to stem the tide, and this seemed to be the best option. Sadly, it's only a matter of time before any open system gets abused by the assholes among us.
Email Rob:
Role-Oriented Workspaces
design
June 24, 2004, 10:20 PM
Like many knowledge workers, I find myself playing many different roles throughout the average day. Some of these roles are part of my personal life, many are part of my professional life, and an increasing number of them involve my computer in some form or fashion. For example, I'm a research assistant on the U&SA project, the project manager for our capstone project team, a soon-to-be unemployed user-centered designer looking for a job, and of course the author and maintainer of this here weblog, just to name a few. I've mentioned some thoughts on how to deal with role overload before, but now I'm thinking of ways that my computer could help me out with this problem. What I really need is a role-aware operating system.
Unix windowing systems have supported multiple desktops for a long time. For power users, this is a useful feature since it allows you to organize the windows that hold your documents and applications in some sort of task-oriented fashion. But this is only part of the way towards supporting different roles. Certain programs may need to behave differently depending on what role I've currently assumed; for instance, my instant messaging and email clients may need to log in to different accounts depending on whether I'm in a "work" role or a "home" role (and perhaps should automatically put up appropriate away messages when I'm switched off of a role). Certain preferences settings may need to be different. And so on.
The latest version of Mac OS X, Panther, supports this notion better by providing a fast way to switch between multiple logged-in user accounts. But this may be too much separation; the tricky part of implementing a role-aware operation system is hitting the proper balance between separation of different roles and integration of globally useful options. After all, this is the same person and his activities will often not fall neatly into one role or another. If the system puts up too many barriers between roles by making it hard to get information from one role to another, this paradigm won't be useful.
At any rate, I think this is fertile ground for design exploration.
Email Rob:
More Friends with Jobs
people
June 24, 2004, 07:37 PM
Congratulations (slightly belatedly) to Mathilde for her acceptance of Ebay's offer to join Micah in their UI design team. With people like these on their side, it's hard to imagine how the 'bay could possibly go wrong.
Also, congratulations to Chad, who has already begun work at Google along with Kevin and to Haven, who will be working at Catapult Thinking, a design consultancy in Boston.
Makes you think perhaps I should be getting off my duff and finding work for myself, eh? Well, hold that thought a bit longer... ;)
Email Rob:
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