Millions of us use these annoying robo-responses. Why? Because email is the primary communication channel for business, and because we want to appear attentive to customers and colleagues. We figure that it's better to hackily and immediately "respond" than to leave important people hanging. The makers of PIM tools (Outlook, IBM Notes, Entourage) obviously don't care why we use auto-replies; if they did care, we'd have tools that actually support what we want to do.

Let's end this little charade

Our primary business tools can do better than asynchronous notes telling us that we've failed. Many of us set a variety of statuses during the course of a day, and good tools bring critical contextual information to us.

Let's say that someone wants to send me email. (It happens from time to time).

Once the sender's PIM tool recognizes who I am, it could quickly ping the address.

Let's pretend at this point that I have told my PIM tool that I will be out of the office. This is immediately reflected in the sender's tool.

That's not good enough, though, because the sender needs to know that there is some kind of recourse. What if the tool could politely indicate where the message was going?

Even better, what if I could create a special VIP list who would immediately be forwarded to me?

Google Wave may make this argument irrelevant over the next few months, but until then, I offer the above, inspired in parts by Facebook, the real-time elements of the Google Wave demo, and a conversation with Jared Goralnick. Jared's service, AwayFind, provides a nice way to get around Outlook's blunt, siloed approach to business communication. Check it out.

I was recently involved in a project that involved the creation of a "status economy" on the web, i.e. a system in which businesses reward loyal users with stuff — a representation of increased status, better service, cash, etc. The parallel in the real world is the loyalty program, but the word "loyalty" seemed to imply a sort of exclusivity that is inconsistent with fluid and flexible world of web commerce and relationships. The web already has a variety of ways of displaying status, and the word "economy" more appropriately spoke to the web's transactional nature.

On Wednesday, we celebrated the release of Designing for the Digital Age, a comprehensive how-to for getting great products built. The release party was hosted by Autodesk in their amazing new Gallery at One Market in San Francisco. The Gallery is filled with cool toys and overlooks the Bay, so it was a pretty ideal setting in which to host a couple hundred of our closest interaction design friends. Big thanks to our friends at Autodesk for a memorable night!

Scenes from Wednesday night's party at the Autodesk Gallery. More on Flickr.

Download the chapter here.
[PDF, 1.4MB, requires Acrobat 7 or higher]

Check it out, and let us know what you think. It's entitled "Designing the Form Factor and Interaction Framework," and it contains a discussion of the tools and techniques for generating and iterating design directions. If you're wondering what you're getting into, here's an excerpt from the Introduction.

Kim Goodwin delivered the closing keynote at interaction 09 on Sunday, and it's now available on Slideshare.

Clarification: We've posted only the slides and notes on Slideshare. We'll post a link to the video of the presentation when it is available on the IxDA website.

The title of the presentation is "Each One, Teach One," and it discusses the future direction of interaction design as a profession. We've seen demand for our services increase dramatically over the past few years, and, in order to continue to respond to this demand, we need to make more of us. Part of the solution involves creating academic programs to provide the foundation for learning the craft of interaction design; another part is to create a culture of mentorship. This means that all of us need to learn to teach what we do.

As Kim says, "[Being a good mentor] takes good listening, observation, and collaboration skills. It takes imagination, because you have to see the potential in someone who isn’t yet able to demonstrate everything they’re capable of. It takes a willingness to explore and wander a bit instead of going down the path of least resistance."

Check it out, and tell us what you think.

Kim, Suzy and I just got back from the annual conference of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), interaction 09 in Vancouver, BC. Four days packed with ideas, insight, meeting new friends, and catching up with old friends; the program offered some intriguing speakers and provocative topics, and I'll highlight a couple here.


The keynote speakers played to packed houses.

Taking on big problems

Talk of sustainability often came up during the keynotes and the smaller sessions, and it seemed to be on the minds of many in attendance. Like other disciplines, interaction design is wrestling with the ways in which we, as a profession and as individuals, can do more than simply design more disposable crap. How can we design stuff that lasts, stuff that helps, stuff that addresses real problems? [Cooper took a shot at approaching these questions recently].

When I saw Christoph Niemann's recent piece in the New York Times, I LEGO N.Y., I was struck by the way that simple physical objects, accompanied by text, can beautifully illustrate ideas.

Both images are from Christoph Niemann's I LEGO N.Y.. He has a blog called Abstract City on nytimes.com.

At Cooper, I find that I'm often looking for new ways to activate design thinking, or to clearly and directly represent ideas. It can be easy to think too literally, to work over the same terrain again and again, and this is why I'm inspired by work like Niemann's — it gets back to basics. It speaks clearly, but also invites interpretation. It reminds me of Bill Buxton's discussion of "storytelling with found objects" in Sketching User Experiences:

As a child, when your parents got a new refrigerator, did you not take the box and transform it into a fort or spaceship? We have all seen and done such things — made free associations between objects and their meaning and purpose. The key observation here is that such transformations are as fundamental to design thinking as they are to childhood imagination and discovery.

I'm curious to hear from the design community: Are there techniques that you've used to radically reconsider familiar concepts? Or to vastly simplify the communication of your ideas?

Art house movies always seem to reveal new possibilities. Last week I watched Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle, a deep dive into one of the world's most fascinating athletes &mdash French football god and legendary hothead Zinedine Zidane.

The film spans a single game, and dozens of cameras are trained on Zidane for the game's 90 minutes. Throughout, you're connected to Zidane &mdash pressed up against his face, attached to his hip as he glides through the defense, drifting around him as he scans the field. You're also immersed in the sound of the event &mdash chatter between players, the sound of cleats cutting into the ground, the distant crowd roar, and strange periods of silence.

Zinedine Zidane, from the film Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle, (translation: Zidane, a 21st century portrait)

It's the sound that really did it for me. The gasps for breath, the immediate shifts in the pace of footsteps, the ka-chunk of the foot hitting the ball, the zzzzzip of the ball on top of the grass. If you applied this super hi-fi sound to sports I watch all the time &mdash NBA basketball, for instance &mdash the end result would be incredibly compelling.

Remember Clippy, the Microsoft Office Assistant? If you're like me, you remember Clippy because you hated his guts. Figuring out how to do basic stuff in Microsoft products is (often) frustrating and difficult, but being patronized by a grinning cartoon paperclip while doing so was infuriating. The fact that Clippy seemed to offer help at all the wrong times — well, that just added fuel to the fury. When Clippy joined his anthropomorphic predecessor Microsoft Bob in the UI dustbin, every user became a little happier and more productive.

Clippy came to mind when I was in Japan, a nation and culture richly populated with animated characters. On every surface, there are characters — talking penguins, inflatable dogs, instructive manga characters — and their cumulative presence seems to make the environment more engaging and friendly.

I saw this little guy in the UI of a Nintendo DS when I toured ATR, the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Kyoto.

I don't know what he's saying, but he sure is cute.

So, after my trip to Japan, I'm worried that we've taken the wrong lesson from the shortcomings of Clippy. There must be an appropriate a place for characters in interactive systems that are not simply games — not all interactive systems, but some, maybe?

My question: Can anyone point me to some good implementations of characters in non-game software? Or recommend some best practices?

I'm a big fan of democracy. I believe that every citizen should have equal access to power, that a community should express its values and priorities through elected officials, and that the outcome of an election is a critical expression of the state of that community.

Still, there are limits to the utility of democracy. You don't ask your friends to vote on the probable cause of your stomachache. Newspapers don't poll their readers when they're deciding what leads to pursue. Our elected officials don't ask us to decide whether a complicated bailout plan is the right course of action for stabilizing our financial system ... (Umm, actually, I take that back).

Makers of the excellent publishing platform Wordpress recently asked their users to vote on certain UI decisions in its next release. They didn't ask users to design the UI from scratch, but they did ask some strategic, fundamental UI questions:

Q.2: The La-Z-Boy goes: (a) to the left of the TV; (b) to the right of the table with the pizza on it; (c) under the reading light; (d) other: [please explain]

Here's a screenshot of the whole survey. The survey authors tried to be helpful by providing rationale for each option, but it sounded a little like the engineers at BMW asking me where I want my steering wheel and what intervals I want on the wiper switch. On one hand, it's a nice gesture; on the other, these questions are fundamental to the user experience of their product. Shouldn't it be the business of BMW to determine the appropriate implementation?

The point is: There ARE right answers to these questions. They are not matters of taste. The key to determining the answers, however, is deeply connected with a long-term strategy for the user experience. Does Wordpress have a long-term strategy for its UI? To use a counter-example: Facebook could have asked its users whether the News Feed was a good feature. (As you may recall, users initially hated it). Facebook kept it, with a slight modification, and it is now the foundation of the tool. That's strategy at work.

On a more philosophical note: When there is expertise in a field, why pretend that there isn't? When Wes Anderson makes a movie, he doesn't revisit the first principles of filmmaking and decide anew whether film editing is really something that an "expert" should be hired to do. He hires an editor because he knows that the editor will bring out the best in the film. I would argue that UI designers have a similar effect on the technology underlying a product. They're able to craft a cohesive whole from the disparate elements. Search is a disparate element that needs a place in the cohesive whole; why ask the community to decide where it fits in the experience?

Tolstoy said it about families, but it's true of teams as well: Every happy team is alike, but each unhappy team is unhappy in its own way. Where Tolstoy and I differ is that I think that there is much to be said for happiness.

In the design world, the idea of working in a "team" often provokes dread. Teams introduce overhead; they require communication; members often battle to see their ideas implemented. The end result of teamwork is often seen as compromise, i.e. as a "taco pizza," i.e. a situation in which everyone (including the customer) loses.

On the other hand, there are many examples of highly functioning creative teams, and my own experience tells me that a team approach can be vastly more efficient and effective than working solo. Who doesn't want a well-matched partner to ensure that the ideas flow, the problem is considered from all angles, and dead-ends are avoided? And lets face it — some of the most interesting and important problems are too big to solve alone.

At Cooper, we've spent a lot of time noodling on this problem, and we've got some ideas.