Alternate dimensions

If you’re a typical designer working in the software world, the majority of products you’ll create will have strictly two dimensional interfaces — length & width only, pixels on the screen. As interfaces have evolved over the years many have gained a very simple kind of "depth": lighting effects, drop shadowing, and modeled surfaces. But they are (ironically) strictly surface effects: aids to perceiving flat objects on a flat screen in discreet layers. The illusion of depth is useful for managing a limited amount of space, and contributes to a more detailed and "real"-feeling experience. Yet like piled sheets of paper, they have depth but are not in any meaningful way three dimensional objects.

An alternate dimension that can be added to our otherwise flat interfaces is time.

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congratulations to litl

We're excited to announce the release of the litl, a simple, and quite frankly, very cool, computer for the home.

We're proud to say that we helped design the litl. We worked for a year alongside the amazing folks at litl, as well as a number of other partners including fuseproject, Fort Franklin and Pentagram to make the vision a reality.

The litl can be used in both laptop and easel modes (to support lean-forward and lean-back interactions), and does away with a lot of the unseemly artifacts of more traditional desktop idioms like folders and menus. It's closely integrated with the social Web and designed around family life.

We'll get a case study about our efforts up on our site as soon as we can. In the interim, check out the litl site for more about the computer and the company.

 

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NYC as an interface

Photo by Delcio G.P.Filho.

The big apple.

Many say it’s the greatest city in the world. Whether or not you agree, there’s no denying it’s an incredibly dense place with an overwhelming amount of people and things to do. Not only are there over 40 million tourists annually, jostling to see the sights and get a taste of the cultural capital but there are also over 8 million people living here − struggling to manage the tasks of daily living amongst all the tourists. That’s a lot of people with very different goals. How do they all figure it out?

(For those of you not in New York, you might want to consider pressing play for some mood music.)

The usability of cities

I’ve been on the road for the past few weeks and am struck by how some cities are easier to use than others. Since I’m in the business of interfaces I’ve been thinking about it in those terms. Just like software, smaller cities with few features are generally (but not always) fairly easy to use. Once you have a large, complex city with many features − like NYC − it gets much more challenging to maintain that ease of use.

New York City is an incredibly powerful interface with multiple entry points and endless features. One might say it has feature bloat. It overloads the senses and it’s not always easy to navigate and understand, yet people learn to use it effectively and often grow to love it.

In that way it’s like Adobe Photoshop - optimized for expert users, perfect for their needs once they have taken the time to learn how it works, but very intimidating to novice users. Over 40 million of tourists enter the city each year and have to navigate the New York City ‘interface.’ How do they figure it out?

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We cannot accept that behavior

I bought some concert tickets online a few days ago. For once I was online and ready as the tickets were going on sale at 10am.

09:58am ─ I clicked through a maze of links to finally arrive at a page where it seemed like I’d be able to buy tickets.

09:59am ─ I continually refreshed the page until a “buy tickets” button appeared.

10:00am ─ Once it finally showed up I clicked the big friendly button and was taken to a page that required even more clicking around before eventually presenting me with an “add to cart” button. Pressing it presented me with this dialog:

10:01 ─ I filled in the form as quickly as possible and clicked “join now.” Then I got this error message:

Paaaaaardon me?!?

I stared at my computer screen for a minute sorta wishing it had a face so I could punch it.

10:02am ─ As I sat there feeling frustrated, and a little insulted, all the good tickets were being snapped up by people with one word last names like Smith and Baker. Then I had to decide whether to hyphenate my last name or remove the space, trying to anticipate the consequences of the decision for will-call or credit card payments.

10:05am ─ I finally purchased my 2 tickets, using an improvised last name. (I can no longer recall what solution I had to use to make it work.)

Though I managed to get tickets I was very indignant after being told that my last name was unacceptable. Can you imagine going down to the box office to buy tickets and having the guy behind the counter tell you that he cannot accept your name? That seems absurd! (unless of course you’re shopping from the soup nazi) Yet we encounter rude and insulting behavior from interfaces all the time.

Software has replaced people in so many of our daily transactions, from buying concert tickets to shoes and groceries. Computers bring obvious improvements to the table: they can provide instant comparisons, full feature lists and recommend similar items more easily than a person could. In fact computers could make this a fantastic experience by providing a very quick, very flexible way of choosing the right seat at the right price if they didn’t just focus on just automating the analog transaction, but that’s a whole other blog post. Even in this context of database transactions it's time software started learning some manners and stopped hurling insults whenever we ask it to do something difficult.

If the request is truly impossible, at the very least inform me politely, and tell me what I need to do to make it work. For example, "We're terribly sorry but our system is unable to deal with spaces in names. If you could please remove it we'll sign you right up." That’s probably a bit wordy, but better than "we cannot accept your name" without telling me why, or what I can do to make it acceptable. The best case is for the software to deal with whatever my last name happens to be, fixing the problem for me so that I don’t have to know or care that it’s database can’t accept spaces.

If we want our products to be liked, we need to design them to behave in the same manner as a likeable person.¹ Our software should be polite, but more than that it needs to be considerate and take into account our needs and goals.

¹ Cooper, Reimann & Cronin. About Face 3. Indianapolis: Wiley, 2007 249-285

 

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A conversation with Ed Niehaus, new CEO of Cooper

A few weeks ago, Cooper appointed Ed Niehaus as President & CEO. Ed is a Valley veteran, with a rich background is in public relations, branding and business-building. He met Alan when Visual Basic was merely a twinkle in Alan's eye, and since then, Ed has worked with a long list of the Valley's top companies, and has been on the board of half a dozen, both public and private. Yahoo!'s founders hired Ed when they wanted to grow their business beyond a server in a trailer on the Stanford campus. Steve Jobs hired Ed's PR firm - already the agency for Pixar and NeXT - when Jobs returned to revive Apple and launch the iMac.

In the brief time that he's been with Cooper, he's told us some great some stories that we've wanted to share, so we sat down with Ed to pick his brain about his background, the Steve experience, and where digital technology is going.

Tell us how you got involved with interactive products.

I got on The Well in the late 80s, and it was a real community, one in which over 1000 people shared every aspect of their lives. It was a microcosm of what the blogsphere is today: communities of shared interest, each one with what amounted to a bartender, serving up domain expertise, keeping the conversation going and stopping fights before they got out of hand.

The quality of the content was actually very high despite having no formalized process for reputation-building; the Well's secret was its profound lack of ease-of-use. We called it the ‘bozo filter’ because you had to be smart and determined to even begin to use the dreadful text-based software. The intellectual equivalent of fraternity hazing. Today I guess you could say that a lot of products have a bozo filter, only in reverse: you feel like a bozo if you bought one.

After a while I noticed that a 'company' was doing business through a community over which they had no control, right there on The Well: that company was the Grateful Dead! They got huge promotional value, a lively market for show tickets, T-shirts etc. Of course there also was an outlaw market for bootleg show tapes. Even so, think of the possibilities! Companies could turn their information outward to face their customers and, if they were willing to - gasp! - forgo controlling and spinning what the customer said, they could build trust, and build business through online communities. If only the bozo filter of dial-up online services would get out of the way!

Companies already were building user groups around their products. Programmers banded together because software was so hard to make, and found that being a community gave them the clout they needed to squeeze the information out of the hardware vendors. For instance, developer groups famously got Steve Wozniak to share the ‘secret’ schematics for the early Apple computers. But, the relationships between vendors and user groups were often dicey. One CEO I knew called his company’s users' group ‘The Bedwetters Club,’ because they had the gall to complain when things didn't work. It was that thinking, not 'content' like brochure websites, that interested me when I first saw the NCSA Mosaic web browser.

You got involved in The Well to help them with PR and branding; what does ‘brand’ mean in the interactive space?

You could think of a brand as a piece of real estate in someone's head, a little patch of ground that is the sum total of the experiences that they've had with a particular product or service. Things changed in the 90s: a million new brands put most of that real estate underwater. Wired magazine got to be an inch thick, and half the companies advertising in it had logos that looked like the rings of Saturn.

And, suddenly, consumers had clout! As a PR agency, we started evangelizing, ‘Branding is Dead!’ A bit ironic because Yahoo was just three people when we started, and grew on our watch to be - among people under 21 - the most widely recognized brand in the world.

Now, in some ways, branding really is dead. Today it's about the experience.

Today branding often is about love. So, on one hand you have Dell and Microsoft, ‘needed’ brands. On the other hand you have Apple, a ‘loved’ brand. Dell has a P/E of 12; Microsoft's is 13. Apple has a P/E of 120. Companies do the math, and come to Cooper saying , ‘We want to be the iPhone of (our product category)!’

Speaking of Apple, is there any part of your ‘Steve experience’ that seems particularly relevant to the work we do?

Working with Steve can be brutal, but you get a chance to see firsthand his tremendous eye for detail and the clarity of his vision. Nobody can judge work like Steve can -- design, advertising, engineering -- you name it, Steve knows, and look out because he'll tell you. He has got a hierarchy of judgment that's really pretty simple: at the top is ‘Insanely great,’ which is the best in category that you'll see in your lifetime. Then there's ‘really, really, really great,’ - and he says it packed with emotion - that's the best that you'll see this year or maybe this decade.. And, there's ‘shit,’ and that's the entire hierarchy.

I wish you could have seen Steve in action with Lee Clow of Chiat/Day, working on Apple's ‘Think Different’ campaign. Lee, the living legend whose creations ranged from the ‘1984’ Apple commercial to ‘Yo Quiero Taco Bell,’ showed an early version of ‘Here's to the crazy ones’ from the ‘Think Different’ campaign. A full minute of black-and-white pictures of Picasso, Einstein, Muhammad Ali, Rosa Parks, Bucky Fuller, amazing music and Richard Dreyfus reading this poem, seeing it for the first time brought the hair up on the back of my neck. So here I am, practically with tears rolling down my face, and Steve just looks at Lee, shakes his head, and says, ‘You've lost it.’

I thought, ‘What?! That's one of the greatest ads I've ever seen!’ And here's Steve going, ‘No. The music isn't right. It was right before. And you've changed the pace of the pictures, and you've got them in the wrong order.’ He sends them packing, back to LA. They came back after probably 30 hours with no bodily functions, and I was stunned. It was a lot better. Steve has a vision of what great is, and he's never going to settle for anybody else's standard of great.

That's great for Steve. What does that mean for the rest of us?

For the rest of us, it's about the experience. We might not have Steve's vision of what's going to be great, but each of us knows what ‘insanely great’ is when we see it and use it.

It's easy for product companies to fool themselves that what they're doing will get them there. They convince themselves that they know their technology, that they know their domain, and that compromises and half-measures will get them there. But what I’ve learned is that true impact in the market only comes from maintaining an undying commitment to creating something that is truly “insanely great.”

Are there any lessons to learn from tough economic times?

In hard times, executives focus on cost and time-to-market. The impact of controlling these two factors to the exclusion of everything else is two things go out the window: adherence to the company's vision and attention to the customer's experience. Engineering is motivated to find shortcuts to meet timelines, figuring they can always come back later and ‘Fix the UI.’ Product marketing is motivated to get something out quickly and let the users sort it out. Suddenly, user research is too time consuming and, ‘Besides, aren't the users’ needs always changing?’

The fact is, if you really study your users, their needs actually are knowable and don't change very quickly. If you want to thrive in tough times, you have to craft a vision that meets those needs in a way that exceeds expectations, and nail the delivery.

 

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Thinking outside the boxee

Yup that’s right. First they had the idea to get the Internet on your TV (remember WebTV?) then it was all about TV on the Internet (Hulu, CBS, CNN, etc. ) and now we’ve got TV on the Internet put back on your TV (boxee).

For those of you not already in the know, boxee is a multi-platform media center with a 10-foot interface for aggregating video, music and photos that exist both offline and online. Others have failed in this space, but the boxee offering pushes the paradigm of content distribution and consumption in some interesting ways.

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The movement is the massage

Cooper hosted an IxDA-SF event last summer in which Punchcut's Christian Robertson discussed motion design, and the ways in which it can provide meaning in user interfaces. His presentation was specific to his experience designing for mobile devices, but many of his insights apply to a much broader perspective and, since then, they've remained in the back of my head.

Prior to joining Cooper as a visual designer, I was a motion graphics designer. For a long time, these two experiences were disconnected. I took interaction design classes and motion design classes in school, but they were separate lines of thought. One was rational; the other, evocative.

Recently, I worked on a consumer product in which the interface movements and animations were the foundations of the experience. The real lesson for me in this process was that thinking about, and designing, what happens between screen states. Even when there isn't a mandate for you to consider motion in your product, incorporating it can yield a design that is more complete, more understandable, and more meaningful.

This was a huge duh-moment for me. Looking at a typical design framework, we see discrete places (or states), snapshots in time and space. We architect this way because it is efficient and breaks the flow down into digestible parts. But when we ignore the path between A and B, we risk disorienting and confusing the user.

Scrolling a menu with no transition.

Scrolling a menu, transition included.

The example Christian used in his presentation was the subway: You get on at one place, and you are essentially teleported to another place. You arrive without really knowing how you got there.

Humans look for, and respond to, movement. We evolved to spot predators in our periphery and track the movement of prey. This instinctual attention is what motion design can leverage in order to make a behavior feel more "intuitive." When users can see how the screen gets from state A to B, we (as designers) can worry less about them getting lost. When designers think about how the screen gets from state A to B, we can understand the system of behavior at a more detailed level. The movement becomes the meaning.

 

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One free interaction

"One free interaction" is a prospective design pattern that gives software and hardware a more humane feel. It exists outside of task flows and the concept of users as task-doers. Instead it sits in the "in between" spaces, suiting users as fidgeters, communicators, and people who play with things.

Snapback pages

When I got my iPhone, I spent time opening up all the applications and playing around. I was keeping an eye open for what new facets of the touchscreen interaction design were fun and useful. When using the Safari web browser, I noticed the funny stretchy-edge pages. Meaning, when you use your finger to scroll above the top of a page or below the bottom of a page, it pulls away from the edge of the browser, revealing a small blank area that sits “behind” the page. When you lift your finger up, the page snaps back into place. It’s kind of hard to describe, so this little video should help.

It was pretty cool, since it provided some visual confirmation of the edges of the page. But honestly I thought it was just a coding oversight. Then I saw it again in the text message page. And again in email menus, and the emails themselves. Nope, I realized, it’s baked into the OS.

I put the feature out of my mind until I found myself fiddling with it. Mulling over an email, or waiting for a text response from someone, I’d sit and idly flick the pages away from the edge just to watch them snap back. Flick-snap. Flick-snap. It was so satisfying, even if it was sort of useless.

Then I started seeing this same pattern in other things.

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Checkout checkup: Sites that get it right

Recent reports on the holiday shopping season show that despite the tough economy resulting in a sharp decline in spending overall, the shift from brick and mortar to online shopping continues. Because “going to another store” in the online world is as easy as a mouse click, retaining customers throughout the shopping and buying process is critical. Does your site have what it takes to give customers a satisfying shopping experience and earn their loyalty?

Between some friends’ regrettably-timed birthdays and the holidays themselves, the past month has provided me ample opportunity to interact with and admire recent advances in online shopping and checkout design. From that admittedly unscientific sample, here are some thoughts on key aspects of the checkout experience to consider, as well as my take on the winners at each step.

Searching and inspecting

They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. As your customers’ first encounter with your site, the searching and inspecting experience is critical. Think of your site’s browse and detail pages as a top-notch personal shopper, and design them to mirror the qualities and behaviors of superstars in that role:

• Flexible: Make sure your site supports multiple modes of shopping (such as browsing within broad categories as well as focused searching based on specific criteria), and enables users to easily recover if they click into the wrong item or just want to continue shopping.
• Good listener: Many customers have a pretty good idea of what they’re looking for - is your site designed to listen? Filters that expose a wide selection of available criteria, work together, and support multiple values are great ‘listeners’. If you’re not sure what options to provide, monitor the use of your search box to identify filter candidates.
• Efficient: Performance matters, so be sure you’ve tuned your page updates to deliver lightning-fast results.
• Forthcoming: Ensure that your browse pages provide users enough information to quickly disqualify undesired items and develop strong interest in appropriate items, and that detail pages include all information needed to close the sale. While a picture is worth 1,000 words, it can’t say anything if it’s too small - an image size that’s ample for displaying a collection of small items like shoes or belts could induce squinting and frustration when presenting full-length dresses. On browse pages, provide a control for adjusting image size, and include interactive swatches of color options to reduce the need to drill in. On detail pages, provide multiple views and close-ups with minimal navigation.

Winner: Endless

This site rocks my world with a half-dozen filter categories that work in tandem, allow multiple values, can be reset with a single click, and update results in the blink of an eye. Replacing the ‘more colors’ bar with a row of interactive color swatches would earn them an A+.

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Designing time to think

I was busy with production work last week, and in the background I listened to the Google TechTalk by David Levy, "No time to think." In spite of the title (and my partial attention), it really got me thinking. Levy suggests that we are in an information environmental crisis, that we need silence and sanctuary for creative reflection and engagement. He explains that Nobel Laureate Barbara McKlintock was able to see further and deeper into genetics than anyone had before because she took the time to look and to hear what the material had to say to her. At Harvard, students asked her "where does one get the time to look and think?" They argued that the pace of current research seems to preclude such a contemplative stance.

This is a pressure we can all relate to. I struggle to find the time to think deep thoughts. Every time I try, I interrupt myself to check my email or text messages, or track the latest news headlines. Randall Munroe over at xkcd.com seems to have the same problem. It seems that my attention span is inversely proportional to the number of "productivity" tools and toys I have. As much as I love it, my iPhone has been the worst thing I could have done for my ability to focus.

These days we rarely focus clearly on one thing at a time, multi-tasking from the moment we read the paper on the bus with headphones and coffee en route to work, until we get home and check email in front of the TV while eating dinner. We are constantly interacting with technology devices and information.

Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, As We May Think, expressed the hope that more powerful tools will automate the routine aspects of information processing, and would thereby leave researchers and other professionals more time for creative thought. But as Levy points out, more than sixty years later, it seems clear that the opposite has happened, that the use of the new technologies has contributed to an accelerated mode of working and living that leaves us less time to think, not more. Levy asks where in our culture we are making time to think, since thinking takes time.

At the end of the talk an interesting comment came from fellow who observed that, in contrast to Sweden, San Francisco has very few public benches where one can just sit down and observe what is. One has to keep moving, and according to the laws if you stay in one place too long, you may be considered to be "loitering." In our culture, there are few opportunities to be calm and sit down in a public space, unless one is consuming something at a coffee shop or a café. This is something that has been built into the culture and the architecture. We need to rediscover the places that will encourage this kind of thinking and reflection - not only in our physical but also in our digital spaces. Creative thought can't be rushed, but it can be nurtured.

So how can we nurture creative thought?

Much of the work we do at Cooper involves designing tools to increase productivity and efficiency; to help people to do more, faster, and keep them moving. But are we in danger of making things too fast and efficient, preventing people from spending enough time with the information they need to consider carefully? There are things that computers are really good at — memory work and calculations, for example. There are also things that they are really bad at — cognitive work, subjective decisions and judgment calls. The latter should be left to people, and as designers we need to ensure they have the right information, as well as the time, to come to a thoughtful decision or judgment.

For example, when designing software for tax professionals, we should ensure that the preparer is enabled to spend most of their time interpreting tax laws, rather than filling in line items one by one. Make the easy stuff easy — let computers do what computers are good at — and allow preparers to focus on what they are good at, and what they actually enjoy about their jobs.

Designing with time

We use scenarios to tell stories of ideal experiences for our users. Any storyteller will tell you that timing is an important part of telling a good story and as designers we need to think carefully about time as a design element — it's just as important as color, type and layout. Dan Boyarski has been thinking about time as a design element for many years. He has been teaching his students to use time for emphasis, clarity or to create new meaning. You can see some examples of the work from his classes here.

Most of these pieces are experimental and entertaining, based on poetry or film dialogs, but the principles at work can be applied to designing enterprise software too. Rather than just making everything faster and more efficient, we need to think about how to get people to focus on the important stuff, without letting minor tasks and busy-work get in the way. We need to design environments where people have the time and space to focus on important decisions. One way to do this is through progressive disclosure; only revealing information when it's relevant to the decision at hand. Other ways to achieve this would involve presenting information in the right sequence, or placing related information in close proximity to help people to see the big picture. All of this is in service of nurturing the balance between ratio (searching and re-searching, abstracting refining and concluding) and intellectus (thinking; reflection; assimilation and contemplation) — which is Levy's concluding slide of the talk.

Photo from Flickr by timparkinson.

It's really important to take the time to look and to think. Let's think about how we can design metaphorical benches in our products to encourage people to stop and reflect where necessary.

 

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Feeling passionate about Amazon’s Frustration-Free packaging

As my fellow Cooperistas will attest, I’m passionate about a lot of things: interaction design, birthday cake, shoes… But product packaging? No, I wouldn’t have included that last one in the list - at least, not until I caught myself swooning over Amazon’s new Frustration-Free packaging.

Suddenly, it all came back to me in a rush of emotion: the anger, frustration, and threat of serious injury when struggling to extract a tiny memory card from its giant plastic “clamshell” package. The tedium and anxiety of twisting countless plastic-coated wire ties in a seemingly never-ending effort to release toy components from incarceration before the child loses interest and starts playing with an empty box instead. The disbelief and disgust over the trail of excessive plastic waste left behind after opening a single product. And I am not alone. To tap into the packaging-frustration zeitgeist, Amazon has encouraged customers to post pictures and videos of their worst experiences to the Gallery of Wrap Rage, and the responses are pouring in.

These consumer-hostile packaging practices are a perfect example of business needs trumping user needs. For far too long, companies have designed packaging that serves only two masters: product marketing and theft reduction. Mark Hurst's This Is Broken features a particularly rich example of product packaging that fails to address the need to get the item out of the package.

Because Amazon doesn’t have to deal with retail display or shoplifting, they were in a unique position to sidestep the usual drivers for package design and think (pardon the pun) “outside the box”, focusing on customers’ goal of liberating products from the package so they can actually use them! And as Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos notes in his letter to customers introducing the program, “in addition to making packages easier to open, a major goal of the Frustration-Free Packaging initiative is to be more environmentally friendly by using less packaging material.” According to their FAQs, products with Frustration-Free Packaging can often be shipped in their own boxes, without an additional shipping box.

Just in time for the holiday consume-a-thon, Amazon delivers human-friendly, eco-friendly package design. Now really, who wouldn’t be passionate about that?

 

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Demand a better ballot

Election Day is finally here, and as ballots are cast and counted, I’m hopeful that voters will declare victory for the candidates and measures that I care most about. But as I review my sample ballot in preparation for my visit to the voting booth, I am discouraged to find that it includes many of the design flaws that the AIGA’s Design for Democracy project has been working to expose and eliminate over the past 8 years. As AIGA reports on their website:

“In July 2007 the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) accepted AIGA Design for Democracy’s research and best practice recommendations for ballot and polling place information design. Guidelines and editable samples were distributed to 6,000 election officials across the country this January. As a result, local jurisdictions now have the tools to apply communication design principles and make voting easier and more comprehensible for all citizens.”

Why, then, am I holding a ballot that violates at least three of the Top 10 election design guidelines, including the use of all caps, center-alignment, and tiny fonts?

As Marcia Lausen notes in Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design, typographic specifications are often dictated in well-intentioned but misguided election law. So while the valuable work of Design for Democracy is to be commended, it alone is not enough to bring about the change we need in the design of ballots and other voter information and materials.

So as you head to the polls, review your ballot carefully — not only for its content, but for its design. Make note of the ballot’s flaws, and contact your state and county registrar and representatives to press them to implement the AIGA guidelines. In addition, consider participating in the Polling Place Photo Project, which seeks to document what is politely described as the “richness and complexity" of the voting experience in America.

Most of all, don’t forget to vote!

 

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Finding inspiration from photos via Flickr groups

I often find design inspiration from photographs. One of my favorite sources for this is Flickr groups. Lately, I’ve been really distracted by the list of my groups on the newly designed homepage. Here are some of the best that I find directly relevant to the work we do.

Visual language and interface inspiration

Possibly my favorite group of the entire collection is Inspiration Boards. This set is a compilation of people’s stuff. It might be postcards, magazine cutouts, interior design samples, shells, or a mish-mash of other objects. I find this group particularly interesting because it approaches design the same way we approach early explorations in visual interface design. When designing a product we’ll do research, define the visual strategy, and then design visual language studies that are an emotional, immediate representation of the visual strategy. The studies are arranged similar to inspiration boards in a way that separates them from any specific behavior so that our design team and our project stakeholders can have a more focused conversation about the visual design without being distracted by the interaction design.

Designing affordances using reference material

The dials, knobs, buttons etc… and Push Buttons groups are great for exploring user interface control languages. These groups cover examples from everyday life that are sometimes new, sometimes old and worn. Designing realistic controls can be difficult so it’s helpful to reference photographic material when designing your own creations. Texture is a similar group of photos with… you guessed it… texture! Of course, this shouldn’t be a sole substitute for getting out there with your own camera.

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Why I hate the substitute spinning instructor, and what the heck that has to do with design

As interaction designers, it’s natural for us to pick apart the failings or successes of every website and electronic device we see and apply that knowledge to our work. But every day, we’re faced with countless products, services, and even people that provide us with positive or negative experiences. Gaining an understanding of what makes each of those non-digital experiences good or bad also exposes patterns and commonalities that we can draw upon when it’s time to design.

Not long ago I found myself growing increasingly annoyed and frustrated with a substitute instructor for my regular spinning class at the gym. To keep myself from leaping off my bicycle and strangling her, I spent the class analyzing what worked so well with my regular instructor’s approach, and what made me so crazy with the substitute’s.

Setting aside the fact that the regular instructor is a Brazilian Adonis and the sub was a perky size 0 cheerleader type, I identified that the substantive distinctions in their styles were tone and frequency of communication. My Adonis is the strong silent type; he speaks only as much as is necessary to guide our action on the bikes, using a tone that conveys respect: You have shown up for class, and are therefore self-motivated, driven, and capable of pushing yourselves to your appropriate limits. He lays out the plan for the training, cranks up the music, and lets us get in the zone. The sub, on the other hand, yammered over the music non-stop throughout the class, reminding us to breathe (gee, thanks!), stressing that we came here for a workout, and regularly demanding that we give her 10% more. Excuse me? I don’t even like you - I’m not giving YOU 10% more of anything!

As luck would have it, back here at the studio, I’m working on a business application that will be used primarily by workers who are relatively new to the job. (Advancement at my client’s company happens quickly, so just as users get good at what they’re doing, they get promoted and no longer have to perform the work that the software supports.) Knowing that the application we’re designing will need to guide users through their work, and keeping in mind my recent experiences at the gym, I made sure to ask users about the qualities they appreciated most in their human mentors. My design partners and I then took care to embody those personality traits in the visual and interaction design of the application. (For a nice list of factors that affect the perceived personality of an application, see Martijn van Welie's blog post Brand behavior in interaction.)

So the next time you find yourself particularly delighted or disgruntled as you move about your daily life, challenge yourself to figure out why — it just might help you hone your design skills.

 

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The Birds Nest & the television experience

Amazement operated on many levels during the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. During each performance, my mind struggled to process what I was seeing. What is this? How in the world did they pull this off? Where does an idea like this even come from?

TV: These small boxes will now take the form of a keyboard, and the keyboard will sprout a peach blossom.
Doug: ... Huh.
TV: Now the small boxes, which have made precise, machine-like movements for the last ten minutes, will reveal that humans have been operating them the whole time.
Doug: ... Wait, what? ... How ...
TV: Now a globe will rise, and dozens of people will fly around it in precise circles.
Doug's brain: [explodes]

In a Wahington Post editorial, Roger K. Lewis recently wrote that NBC didn't once mention the architects of the venue, Beijing National Stadium. Hmm. That's funny. I didn't mention them during the telecast either, but that's because my brain had been reduced to a pre-verbal state.

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