Thoughts
Thought: Design rhetoric
Here is a conversation that I have all too frequently. It usually starts with a request that goes something like this.
“The user is asking for this field.”
Me: “Why?”
“They had it in their old system.”
Me: “What do they do with that information?”
“Well, they report on it.”
Me: “Okay, but how does that help them do their job?”
Puzzled look.
I seem to go through this same basic conversation over and over again. Partly this is a tale of saving the users from themselves, but there’s something else to consider. That field in some form may seem innocuous, but it’s going to cause a user distress. The user requesting the field will love you for it, but think about your other users. They are going to see that field and possibly say to themselves:
- I don’t know what that field is for.
- Why don’t I know what that field is for?
- Should we be tracking that information?
- What am I supposed to put in there?
You may be sitting there reading this thinking I am being hyperbolic, but I have seen the anxiety in users’ eyes. I am only trying to caution you. Whether you want to believe it or not, your users trust that you know what’s right for them. As Designers we need to be mindful of every element we introduce else our designs suffer the death by a thousand cuts.
Thought: iPhone apps
I’m sure this will sound familiar to several of you who know me. It seems that since the release of the iPhone everyone and their dog has an original idea for a new great iPhone app. That is all good and well, but here’s the reality.
Your app has already been done.
It’s okay though, don’t fret. In fact it’s nice that someone went through the initial steps of desiging and marketing your idea. All you need to do is make it better now. I think a great way to be successful as an iPhone app producer would be to take the core of others’ good concepts and redesign them. Whenever I’ve talked to others about this approach, there seems to be an uneasiness about it. I think most Designers would agree that ideas are cheap, it’s the execution that is difficult. Besides if this seems like cheating I’ll let you in on a little secret. We cheat all the time. Trust me, if I need ideas for a design, I start seeing what else is out there.
In the spirit of my post, I will give you my idea for an iPhone app (since the idea alone gets me nothing). By the way, I have no idea whether or not this has actually been developed. I want to map out buildings so that you can find where your colleagues sit or where that conference room off in some corner is. The map could show you a route to get to your desired destination. Of course, this is only relevant for sizable organizations, but I know this would help me where I work.
Thought: motivation paralysis
Let’s face it, I got lazy.
I started this thing blog posting regularly. Then I had a few things come up, a trip back, moving across town, the holidays, etc. In some ways I feel that I would have kept up with this better had I never established any goals for how this site should go. First, I limited the scope of the posts to design-related material. What the hell does that even mean? Second, I told myself that I would make x number of posts regarding subjects a, b, and c, every month. That leads me to this question: Do goals really inherently drive people? The goals I made for this site had no real payoff. It’s the difference between saying ‘I want to do x’ and ‘I want to do x because it will bring me long-term success (or what have you).’ Basically what I’m getting at is that I am not going to worry about it going forward. If I don’t publish anything for a couple months, then I don’t. This will serve as an outlet for whatever I want to rant about. Chances are it will be about Design (I still don’t know what that means but as a Designer I will take the approach of ‘you’ll know it when you see it’), but I am not going to hold myself to it either.
For those of you that have read and responded to my posts, thanks. I hope you continue to read.
Sidenote: I always look at my posts and wonder if I have written enough, as if there was a length necessary to make a post worthwhile.
Thought: Bathroom design
As I admitted earlier, I am a bit fixated on the generally poor design of bathrooms. The way I see it, there are some basic expectations people have that when met will lead to a positive user experience. Today I am going to touch upon the first basic expectation.
Sanitary
The bathroom needs to not only be clean, but it needs to promote sanitary practice through some smart design decisions. For example, I often see that public bathroom doors have pull handles on the inside of the door. This makes the user pull on the door handle to leave the restroom. I can only speak for men’s rooms, but it is common to see a guy use the bathroom and then proceed to leave without washing his hands. Now I have to touch that handle. This in turn leads to another problem.
Users with the foresight to realize that the handle is not necessarily clean, will take a paper towel to grab it. Often, the wastebasket is not close enough to the door to throw away the paper towel. When this happens, you will inevitably see a small pile of discarded paper towels on the floor near the door.
Here’s another suggestion and thankfully this is not as common a problem, ditch the bar soap. I do not want to touch the same bar of soap that has someone else’s nastiness on it. This goes for peoples’ homes as well. I’m sorry. I may be your friend, but I do not want to share your bar soap with you. Also, please provide a hand towel. I rather not have to wipe my hands on my jeans.
I’m going to leave it at that for now. Otherwise, you gusy will think I’m a bit OCD about things.
Thought: Scented hand soap
First, I have to apologize for the delay between postings. There has been some travel madness as well as moving madness.
I spent a good portion of the last week traveling back and forth between Indiana and South Carolina. As a result of all this time on the road, I ended up eating out several times a time. Typically when I get to a restaurant, one of the first things I do is go and wash my hands. This is especially true if I have been traveling. I don’t know what it is about traveling that makes you feel extra grimey. Has anyone else noticed this? Anyway, I end up going through my normal hand washing routine at some stop along the way. While washing my hands I noticed that the soap had a somewhat disagreeable smell, but there was no other option for cleaning up. I suppose I could have asked the wait staff for a lemon and washed up with a lemon and some salt (which makes for a nice bath scrub by the way). I go back to my table and shortly thereafter my food arrives. I had ordered a sandwich. Here is where the problem arises. Now every time I go to take a bite of my sandwich, I get the smell and taste of that horrible chemical scrub. What were they thinking? Eating out is all about the user experience, but somehow restaurants rarely seem to get it right. I love eating out but I am hardly ever pleased. Maybe what I really love is punishing myself.
Meta observation: The bathroom seems to be the location of many of my observations, some of which I have yet to write about. Maybe I need to be a bathroom designer. Anyone need some advice on such a matter?
Thought: Too many acronyms
I notice that in the software world we are rather fond of the acronym. Here’s the rub (and I know all you have done this before). You end up in some meeting where acronyms are being thrown around left and right. Half of them you are trying to piece together as the meeting is going along. I mean, c’mon I’m a smart person I’m sure I can figure out what XYZ means. By the time you figure it out, you have missed the conversation. Next thing you know, you need everything to be rewound so that you can catch up.
Rectify this please.
- Stop the conversation and ask when you don’t know what something means.
- Write down the acronyms and figure them out later if that will help maintain the flow of conversation.
- Create a list of all the acronyms you have encountered.
- You are going to forget what some of them mean.
- New employees will love you for it.
- A shared lexicon is important for being on the same page when discussing with stakeholders.
- As a speaker be cognizant of this problem.
- When you write a paper, for example, it is expected that the first use of an acronym be spelled out. Perhaps you need to speak it out.
- Provide a list of relevant acronyms for formal meetings.
- Don’t use them. You might not sound as cool, but people might understand you.
Now for next week, a conversation about ‘dropping the cliches’, ‘losing the bad analogies’, and ‘banning the tiresome catch phrases’. Booya. JK. TTFN.
Thought: UX week 2008
I attended UX week and all in all had a postive impression of the event. Practically every speaker was engaging. I really appreciated how the Adaptive Path people created a cohesive experience for the conference goers. To not have done so would have been a major gaff. It seemed that whoever was in charge of planning the conference, had paid attention to the little details.
One of my favorite aspects of the conference was how being part of the conference wasn’t just about being at UX week. It was also about being in San Francisco, which in my opinion is a great city. The recognition that people are at the conference to participate in the proceedings but also to enjoy their surroundings was crucial to its success. From the micro level of where you sat, to the hotel that it was hosted in, to the location of receptions, to the city itself; everything seemed to be done with intent. It wasn’t perfect, though.
My biggest complaint was the large number of case study style presentations. Truthfully, these can be interesting and inspiring. My biggest problem with these is that the focus is often on the design experience and not the user experience. These stories are often told as accounts of the trials and tribulations of a Design team that ultimately end on a high note. We are left with a ‘lessons learned’ slide at the end. These types of presentations are fine, but at a user experience conference let’s talk about user experience.
A second complaint (and I can’t fault Adaptive Path for this one) is that conference goers in general want to be spoon fed information. I don’t know how many times someone has told me that presentation ‘x’ was interesting but it didn’t apply to their work. It’s the same complaint I hear from people about Design theory. Guess what? We’re Designers. Isn’t it our job to take in information, abstract from it, and then figure out how to utilize it in our designs? People are always searching for certainty when a large part of being a good Designer is dealing with uncertainty. Some things aren’t quantifiable or directly observable. I do believe that the things we experience in our lives change us. That change in turn affects the way we think about Design.
At the next UX week, I would like to see a bit more focus on the total user experience. I think Designers tend to focus on a user’s direct interaction with a system, when in fact experience encompasses the past, present, and future. We don’t come to interact with information technogolies without some predispositions and we don’t look back without some baggage. I consider this all part of the user experience.