design

About

Syndication

Categories

Archives

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.

[ Permanent Location ]

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...

[ Permanent Location ]

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.

[ Permanent Location ]

Design, Usability, and Innovation

design, usability

April 18, 2004, 08:54 AM

A few weeks ago, I went to a talk given by Hugh Dubberly on models for design (Dan has a very nice summary, as usual). During the talk, Hugh made a point about design and innovation that's stuck with me; he remarked You don't get innovation from the design process. You get quality from the design process. At the time, that struck me as quite true.

Since then, however, I've had second thoughts. Let's consider an "innovation" (an overloaded word) to refer to "some technology-related change that has a significant impact on the ways people behave, generally for the better". I think that captures it reasonably well for my current purposes. Usually when we think of innovations, we think of some brand new ideas that spark new technological developments, like televisions or automobiles. And its true that the design process won't get you these; great new ideas are elusive things and so far no one has found a process to repeatably elicit them (though there are some brainstorming techniques that can help).

But there are times when innovations are not spawned by brand new ideas. There are times when the innovation involves taking an existing technology and making it accessible to a new (probably wider) audience. Or in taking a technology that used to be complex and cumbersome to use and making it quick and simple. Suddenly, the technology is accessible and it becomes an innovation.

The GUI desktop metaphor is a classic example. Affordable computers were available before PARC's innovation got commercialized, but only hobbyists bought them, because they were just too tough for the average person to use. With a well-designed interface, however, personal computers became a reality and an innovation was born.

iChat AV is a more modern (if also more modest) example. Voice-over-IM has existed for a long time in AIM, but nobody used it. All Apple did was make it dead simple to use. Suddenly it becomes useful to the masses, and we have innovation.

Style sheets and the single-sourcing paradigm might be a design innovation waiting to happen. Style sheets are useful to some but inaccessible to most due to the complexity of dealing with the badly designed interfaces for creating and applying them. If someone were to create a more usable interface, we may have innovation.

This is, I believe, the role that design plays in innovation. Not in consistently generating world-changing ideas (these come from a multitude of disciplines) but in turning these ideas into something simple enough to affect the lives of thousands.

[ Permanent Location ]

Marketing and User Research

design, usability

April 16, 2004, 11:01 PM

I've been thinking recently about the relationship between market research and user research.

Market research is conducted by marketing departments, who are mainly concerned with figuring out what sorts of products people are willing to buy and what sorts of people are willing to buy them. I am very ignorant of marketing research techniques, but my current understanding is that they tend to involve conducting surveys and possibly focus groups with the intent of nailing down a market demographic that the company can sell some new product to. Marketing may also collect information on what features and attributes of this product are important to swaying this demographics' buying decisions.

User research is conducted by user-centered designers, who are mainly concerned with producing the interface and interaction design of the new product. As Beyer and Holtzblatt point out in Contextual Design, the kind of data necessary to drive product design is different from the kind of data collected by marketing; market research alone cannot drive research-informed product designs. UCDs require more detailed information about what the people behind the statistics are like, what their goals are, how they are currently performing their tasks, etc. B&H have already made this argument eloquently so I won't bother rehashing it here.

All this isn't to say that marketing's data is useless to UCDs, however. In fact, a reasonably thorough market analysis is absolutely necessary to have ready before design research begins. If marketing hasn't narrowed down the target user population, design won't know where to start looking to collect their data. They may wind up taking a scattershot approach and (at best) waste time talking to the wrong types of people or (at worst) design a product from data on the wrong users.

Just as marketing's data can't substitute for design data, design shouldn't be expected to collect market data. Because design research involves more detail-oriented studies, these studies cannot uncover a broad picture of the market needs on a large scale. A mistake I've seen among novice design researchers is to spend time sending out surveys to uncover a market for the product when this information was basically provided to them by the marketing team. This is a waste of time, not to mention an inappropriate application of skill sets. Design should be focused on how the real people behind the demographic numbers marketing generated are working, communicating, and feeling, for this is the information they need to create great products.

[ Permanent Location ]

NEC's Future Designs

aesthetics, design

April 04, 2004, 02:26 PM

Jodi sent me a link to some product concepts developed by designers at NEC. A couple of them are kind of similar to two of my IID projects from last semester; the "tag" device reminds me of my scheduling snake (look at the first picture on the page especially), and the flacon is vaguely similar to the "Keep in Touch" application I did with Elizabeth and Chun-Yi. Not that I'm claiming NEC are culling my weblog for ideas or anything, but it's sorta neat to see that the technology that will make designs like these possible is actually in the works, and that professional designers coming up with concepts that are similar to the ones we're coming up with here.

I feel all designy.

[ Permanent Location ]

Life Lessons for Designers

design, processes & methodologies

March 26, 2004, 10:16 AM

Found via Dan, this article titled "The Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School" is interesting reading for those of us who are starting careers in one of the subdisciplines of design (or hoping to, anyway). Some of these ring true for me already, partially due to my (admittedly marginal) professional experience but also because of my experiences here at CMU (so some of them can be taught in design school, albeit indirectly). For example, I'll buy the "95% of any creative profession is shit work", especially after playing project manager for our capstone project. And this is important to come to terms with, because you probably won't be too happy or successful as a designer if you can't learn to take the bad (think convincing management that your design is important, writing up user testing reports, fighting with developers over technical compromises, etc) with the good (sitting down to do some creative design work).

Others I can certainly see as important, but I recognize that I need to get better at, like prioritizing and not over-thinking problems. And a few sound pretty familiar from my experience as a software developer, like "Start with what you know; then remove the unknowns".

It's good to remember, every now and again, that things work differently in the real world than they do in the ivory tower of academia.

[ Permanent Location ]

Moving Outside the Device

design, systems

March 19, 2004, 03:31 PM

I've been the proud owner of an Apple iPod for a while now. Although I'm happy with my purchase, I do have some issues with the little device. These issues can be summed up in a sentence: it doesn't really talk to any of my other devices. Not that its alone. My devices in general are a rather antisocial bunch.

I generally listen to my iPod on my walk to and from work. When I get home, I remove it from my pocket and plug it into the computer to recharge the batteries. Assuming I haven't pushed "pause", why not have the song I was listening to immediately start up in iTunes? I generally want to at least finish listening to the song that was currently playing when I arrived home. But my iPod only talks to my computer to synchronize my music collection. Which is wonderful functionality, but since they're talking to each other already, why not go a little bit further?

Likewise, when I get into my car I often want to listen to my music collection; I have a cd player but choosing and transporting all those little plastic discs is a pain. Since my whole collection is on my iPod, why not provide a car radio that I can slip the device into (Kenneth calls this the "iPod ker-chunk slot") so that bringing my music with me is dead simple?

This is what distinguishes experience design from product design; experience designers consider the interfaces and interactions that appear throughout the whole system the customer is a part of. It's not enough to create products that provide point solutions but don't integrate with the rest of the customer's world; the smart consumer wants his problems solved by his purchases, and these problems span his interaction with any particular device.

The good news is that I think Apple, at least, gets this philosophy. It remains to be seen where they'll go with it, and who will follow.

[ Permanent Location ]

Feline-Centered Design

design, funny

March 15, 2004, 06:37 PM

Tycho from Penny Arcade has a rant up today about the failings of his automatic cat litter box. One of his complaints is that the box doesn't even appear to have been designed to fit a normal-sized house cat. It's interesting to hear a customer's perspective on why it's important to user test your products, even when some of your user population isn't human...

[ Permanent Location ]

Sorting Environments

design, usability

March 14, 2004, 09:28 PM

My friend Jeff Howard was showing me a research project he'd been working on for his miLife project a couple weeks ago, and now he's posted about it. He's basically conducting a card sorting exercise, except the cards contain pictures of various kinds of environments like conferences halls, bus interiors, scenic natural vistas, etc. His team is asking users to arrange the cards along a continuum of which environments they feel more or less mobile in. I believe they're also asking users to arrange the environments along another continuum of how remotely connected to others they feel and how connected they wish to feel. Note that Jeff's online prototype doesn't work as well due to the small size of the cards; the actual physical cards are larger.

It's an interesting spin on the typical card sorting procedure; the pictures may evoke a more emotional response from users which is more appropriate for this particular study than the short words used in navigation hierarchy studies. It also helps give the users more context than a typical interview question such as "name five places you feel mobile in" would, while avoiding the cost of having to find users actually sitting around in all these environments.

[ Permanent Location ]

Nielsen: Qualitative Is Better Than Quantitative

design, psychology

March 11, 2004, 03:44 PM

Jacob Nielsen has posted an alertbox column claiming that qualitative user studies are preferable to quantitative user studies in most circumstances. His reasoning is that quantitative studies, while useful for producing metrics that can guide decision making and resolve design arguments, are too difficult to conduct properly (thus leading to biased results) and tend to produce results that are so narrow as to be useless for guiding design.

My friend "Q" (she posts anonymously, which is why I'm not disclosing her identity) takes issue with Nielsen's proclamation. She tends to favor quantitative research, and points out that it's possible to to botch qualitative results as well, and that a good research program should include both quantitative findings and qualitative observations.

I agree that both kinds of studies need to be done carefully and by people with some training in the area. I also agree that it's good to be flexible and consider many types of studies depending on your research goals. However, I can see Nielsen's point; remember that he is not writing for psychologists or social science researchers, he is writing for practitioners in the design and usability fields. Most of these people do not have significant training in statistics, experiment design, or psychology theory and are unlikely to successfully design a valid quantitative experiment. Moreover, my experience with designing quantitative studies is in line with Nielsen's observations; it took me the better part of last semester to design a study intended to provide evidence that personas helped lend focus to remote design teams in open source software (note I said "provide evidence" not "prove"). And by the end, the study was so narrow in its focus that it wasn't at all clear that it could stand up as bulletproof evidence that remote design teams should always employ personas.

Of course, as Q points out, it's possible to get bad qualitative results as well. But I've found that its fairly easy for relatively untrained individuals to uncover useful design facts about their target user population merely by watching a few members of that population do their work, or by talking to them in an interview, or by giving them some tasks to perform with a prototype interface design. Of course, sometimes you do find users that exhibit outlier behavior, but often, as Nielsen says, it's easy enough to identify such behavior by forming hypotheses beforehand and reasoning about how the behavior you're seeing fits in with your understanding of the world.

Bottom line is, even in enlightened companies a user-centered designer is likely to have only a little time (a few weeks, maybe) to run user studies. To make the most of that time, it's usually best for this practitioner to focus on broad, qualitative, fuzzy data to gain a general picture of the problem, rather than focusing in and losing all that useful information that could be guiding design just to get a few numbers.

[ Permanent Location ]

Newsable Redesign Mockups and a Request for Feedback

design, usability

March 08, 2004, 10:07 PM

I'm working on giving Newsable a facelift soon, both to improve the interaction and visual design. I've posted some mockups of the new key screens; if you're the sort of person who likes to speak words about other people's work, then here's your chance to speak some words about mine. My goals with this release are to make the visual design a little more pleasing and to improve the interaction for people who are subscribed to a large number of feeds. Also, I hope to convince Kenneth that the three-pane format isn't the be all and end all of aggregator design.

I'm also working on the design of a community system that will help facilitate a usable open source software process. The design is based on the research I did last semester in CSCW. If this sounds intriguing to you, stay tuned for more.

[ Permanent Location ]

How to Make an Oldsk00l Text Adventure Game

design

March 06, 2004, 05:12 PM

I came across an interesting article on the history and craft of text adventure games (or "interactive stories" if you want to be high-falutin'). It's fascinating stuff in it's own right, especially if you're interested in game design, but there's also some nifty little nuggets of design wisdom lying about, as there are with any well-written design case studies and instruction pieces. For instance, there's some thoughts on using design research for inspiration, a suggestion to start coding early so as to not get caught up in developing a perfect design and losing all your gumption, and the admonishment to think of the game from the point-of-view of the gamer, rather than that of the designer, if you want your game to really be any fun.

Whoever I got this from, I'm sorry I forgot you. I guess I'm just as bad as the next weblogger at crediting my sources...

[ Permanent Location ]

Making Web Log Analysis Tools Better

design, information, internet

March 05, 2004, 12:22 AM

We're starting our final project in Mapping and Diagramming, which is self-defined. I've decided to focus on designing visualizations of web log data (not to be confused with weblogs, although webloggers are my primary user group), since I've always been of the opinion that the visualizations generated by most current tools tend to suck. So far I've come up with a few sketches and a description of the project.

Some things I want to explore include:

• Better maps of what paths people took through the website (including most frequented paths).
• Information on how long people spent on each page.
• New ways to diagram other important web issues, like page bandwidth consumption, where people come from (referrers), etc.
• Interaction designs for mechanisms to show how these usage trends change over time.

And possibly others as well. I'd like to check out more existing web analysis tools as well as look over some of the relevant research that's been done on the subject, so if anyone has some good pointers, let me know.

Oh, and Dan is doing something wacky with linking together the music people buy, or something.

[ Permanent Location ]