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THE IMPROVED WINDOWS USER EXPERIENCE
I don’t see it. I really don’t. I know I’m a Mac guy, and I’m biased, I get that. But I’m gonna take a moment and explain to the Windows using world what you don’t get. Your OS and the applications that run on it lack a cohesive metaphor.

By that I mean, it seems like this shit was designed by a committee of retarded monkeys. It doesn’t even have the consistency of design that a single retarded monkey could achieve.

Read the full review at Cult of Mac

I am fond of analogies.  I use them to cut through the ADHD induced swirl that often cause my brain to be fogged in.  Analogies simply pop into my head and then I blurt them out.  I gues it’s my way of crystalizing the cognitive chaos.

The analogy that came to me this week was the result of a project that has some very deep complexities and very little time to actually analyze them properly.  I know – been there, done that.  But this is a particularly tight timeline and the problem is deceptively simple, by which I mean it is nowhere near as simple as it looks.

Then it hit me – UX design is like baseball.  If you have the time you can set up the solution on a tee and let everyone have their turn at bat.  If you have less time you can lob a few soft pitches and let folks take their best swing.  But when the pressure is on and their are tight deadlines to meet you need to throw the high heat.  The batter is either going to keep up and hit a home run or they are going to strike out. Either way that solution needs to get delivered fast.

I love collaborative design.  I love the process of idealized design.  I love contextual inquiry, mental modelling, and card sorting.  However, when I need to deliver a solid conceptual model for facetted browse/search in a week then the tee gets yanked from the batter’s box and I start throwing using my best Noaln Ryan inpersonation.

Last night I said to Jennie that I absolutely love twitter. So naturally she wanted to know why. Good question. It’s a 3 bears kind of thing. Email is too slow. It’s great for depth and building dialogues but crappy at casual conversation. IM is too fast. I am always online and when my IM is on I get bombarded at the wrong times, and then I feel the need to respond. Twitter is just right. It forces brevity. There is no expectation that a reply is required. It’s all about casual conversation It takes the best of IM and email and blends them together into a communication tool that fits me just right.

The other day I started reading On Purposeful Systems by Ackoff & Emery. I will be blogging about it more later but this quote jumped out at me …

… before the revolution in thought that made possible the use of teleological concepts as a methodological key to open doors previously closed to science, scientists tended to derive their understanding of the functioning of the whole from the structure of the parts and the structural relationships between them. Today we increasingly tend to derive our understanding of the structure of the parts of a system from an understanding of the functioning of the whole.

It has been a couple years since I dug into academic texts but this really has me thinking about the discipline of user experience design, the whole define-the-darn-thing dialogue, and the very act of system and sub-system design.

More on this as my reading continues.

Well, not really a WANT. Well maybe. Is it wrong to WANT a Barbie being attacked by crows? Maybe. This is so very twisted. Yes. Yes it is. So in that case – WANT!

Many projects over the years have started the same way – I need a mock up of a screen. That request is often made by a product team or executive stakeholder with an idea for a product or service. Quite often they confuse the user interface with the user experience. They believe that the only experience design required to make their idea a reality is some slick graphics and hip branding.

User experience design is far more than screen or interface design. Our users and customers form complex and multi-facetted relationships with our companies and our offerings.  User experience is influenced by the technology we employ, the market in which we operate, the cultural context of our users, and the specific context of the user.

As user experience designers we should be aware of all of these factors as we do our work. We should look at the technology. We should understand what it can and cannot do. Most importantly we should understand the user’s expectations regarding the platforms we deploy. What kind of applications would a user expect on a household phone, on a mobile phone, on a game console, or a laptop? When does a user expect to use a web form? When the user has a task, which piece of technology do they look to to meet their need.

We also need to understand the market. What does the competitive landscape look like? Can the user meet the same need from another source? Is our company or brand name associated with the product or service we are trying to launch? If not, why not? Can we address the consumer’s perceptions of our place in the market?

The market speaks to our business model. The social model of our users come from their culture. Understanding cultural norms, practices, and structures is critical to understanding user experience. A user’s perceptions and expectations will be shaped by culture. What tone should the editorial content of the site take? Well, we need to understand the cultural expectations of our audience. Is the business model one in which great formality is expected or is it one in which a rebellious attitude and tongue in cheek humor is the norm. Understanding the cultural context will help us to understand what lines can and cannot be crossed as we interact with our user.

A corollary to understanding the cultural context is understanding how our products will impact culture … but that is a big topic for a later post.

Finally we get to the users themselves. We need to understand how the individual user will react to our product or service. We need to know how they think our product should work. We should have a deep understanding of their expectations. It would be fantastic if we could see them use our product in the context of their day to day lives.

Only when we dig deep into all four areas – technology, the market, cultural context, and the user – can we even begin to build deeply meaningful user experiences.

This leads me to my final point – UX designers ARE stake holders. The folks we often refer to as “the business” are not our clients. The companies that hire us are not our clients. The developers are not our clients. They are all stake holders just like us. Too often I see UX design dictated to the UX designers. We should be an equal partner at the product design table. We represent the user. In order to create truly excellent products and services we cannot be just wireframe producers, or functional specification monkeys.

User experience designers are just as critical to the success of a product as the technologists, developers, business strategists, and product managers. Companies that truly get that are the ones that lead the markets in which they operate.

For some reason a dumb reason all of the links on my blog (other than external links) are were all kinds of broken.  Sorry about this.  I have a crack team on the case … in other words I opened a ticket with my hosting provider.  Keep yer fingers crossed.  AND THEY FIXED IT!  Turns out one file had a .bak attached to it and the whole thing went kaplooey.

Inspired by my friend Livia I have decided to post a bit of a personal retrospective on the year past. I know my blog is often a mixed bag of personal and professional posts and I promise to tackle that in the coming year. Until then the mix continues …

I am a very fortunate man.

My wife is an amazing woman. She is wise, strong, and takes amazingly good care of me. Without her my life would not be nearly as good as it is. It is a true blessing to have her in my life.

My career as an information architect is incredibly satisfying. I have great friends in the field. I feel fortunate to have given back to my profession since it has given me so much. My work on navigation saw print last year. James Kalbach included my research in his book Designing Web Navigation from O’Reilly.

I am living one of my childhood dreams – I make toys! I have been given the opportunity to work with some amazing artists like John Kovalic, Carl Jones, Delme, olive47, NoseG, and others (I can’t name them publicly … yet). I have been interviewed in magazines and news papers. My toys even slipped into a Pizza Hut commercial.

I have much to be thankful for – a strong faith, fun hobbies, a video game I am actually good at, a wonderful and supportive family, and an wonderful dog named Grif yes we named him after that Grif.

Don’t get me wrong. My life is not all happiness and joy. My wife has been stricken with one of the most insidious illnesses I have ever known – CFIDS. She has been sick since 1994 and I had only known her for three months before this debilitating disease entered our lives. It has altered the course of our lives in ways we never would have imagined. We cannot raise the family we had hoped to raise. We cannot do the things we love to do because Jennie can only be active for a few hours a day. She often spends days in bed, unable to do much but sleep and lie in a state of bodily imprisonment.

I struggle daily with the effects of ADHD. My short term memory tests nearly two standards deviations below the norm. I struggle with hyper focus, distractibility, and mild hyperactivity. The impairment that ADHD has wrought in my life is incalculable. If I had not struggled with it as I have I wonder how much more I could have done, and could be doing. The limitations imposed by this illness are maddening – an never ending source of frustration.

But the theme for this year for both my wife and for me has been counter strike! My wife is the Chairman of the National CFIDS Association. She battles everyday to help shape an organized response to CFIDS and the harm it inflicts on the millions that suffer from it. My fight is more personal. I work with some fine folks at Penn’s Behavioral Health: Adult ADHD program. With their help I am taking back my life from an illness that could just as easily relegated me to the sidelines.

So I count my blessings and fight to overcome those things that hold me and my loved ones back from living the life we want to live. This year has been a year of challenges and victories. I am sure each and every year will be much like this. My guide through all of this is a passage from Writings of the Baha’i Faith that was read at a devotional gathering back on September 15, 1990 (a spiritual birthday – of sorts):

Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity. Be worthy of the trust of thy neighbor, and look upon him with a bright and friendly face. Be a treasure to the poor, an admonisher to the rich, an answerer of the cry of the needy, a preserver of the sanctity of thy pledge. Be fair in thy judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be unjust to no man, and show all meekness to all men. Be as a lamp unto them that walk in darkness, a joy to the sorrowful, a sea for the thirsty, a haven for the distressed, an upholder and defender of the victim of oppression. Let integrity and uprightness distinguish all thine acts. Be a home for the stranger, a balm to the suffering, a tower of strength for the fugitive. Be eyes to the blind, and a guiding light unto the feet of the erring. Be an ornament to the countenance of truth, a crown to the brow of fidelity, a pillar of the temple of righteousness, a breath of life to the body of mankind, an ensign of the hosts of justice, a luminary above the horizon of virtue, a dew to the soil of the human heart, an ark on the ocean of knowledge, a sun in the heaven of bounty, a gem on the diadem of wisdom, a shining light in the firmament of thy generation, a fruit upon the tree of humility.

- Baha’u'llah

Hope you don’t mind the preachy bit, but faith is a big part of what gets me through life. That and bacon.

In my previous post I talked about user experience resistance and how we (as UX designers) can modulate the level of resistance based on the motivation of the user to reach the goal and the competitive landscape. So a real world example is a person buying a car must work through a lengthy and difficult process because the goal is tremendously important and the dealer is often the sole source to meet that need.

A corollary to resistance is the concept of annoyances and helpers.

Annoyances are those elements of the user experience that break user expectations and call undue attention to the systems limitations and draw attention away from the user’s goal. Annoyances run the gamut from a minor speed bump like an labeling issue to a major interaction flaw like an error message that hinders the user from recovery and leaves a dead end in its wake.

Helpers are those user experience elements that suddenly accelerate the process and help the user reach the goal. Quite often these helpers stand out like annoyances but instead of pausing because the system is getting in the way, the user may pause because the system accomplished a task with such ease that the user marvels at experience and wonders why every other system makes that particular step so hard. It’s like the first time I went to create a screen name for a site and as I typed it let me know, character by character, if that screen name was available. Helpers are those “why didn’t anyone do this before” moments.

The difficulty with helpers is that they rapidly move from a boon to a matter of course expectation. A real world example is anti-lock breaks. There was a time when anti-lock breaks were a key selling point and a premium feature. Now anti-lock breaks are a part of the baseline expectations a car buyer assumes as the norm no matter which make and model they happen to be looking for.

Annoyances, on the other hand, are timeless. Sure, some annoyances may be accepted necessary evils, like the ever-present need to use some form of security credential to access the secured sections of a web site. Annoyance like that are more like UX resistance than a real annoyance.

The worst annoyances crop up when the user experience breaks the user’s mental model of how a system should work. Take the Google Earth iPhone app. The mental model for map software is (like physical maps) that the user will be looking straight down from orbit. No matter what the user does with the map it will maintain that perspective. Google Earth on the iPhone adds a new twist. It uses the accelerometer to allow the user to tilt and view the horizon. You can then pick a point on the horizon and look at it in the regular map view by zooming to it and tilting. This sounds really cool until you realize that you need to hold the iPhone just right to make the interaction work as planned.

Google Earth is an amazing iPhone app but this one annoyance takes all of its awesomeness and reduces it to basically useless. What good are all of the cool features if this one annoyance breaks the experience.

Helpers will give a user a moment of joy and then they will move on. An annoyance has the power to kill the entire experience in a moment of angst and possibly panic.