Designing Interactive Products

Form a vision, tell a story

If you are involved in the user experience design of an interactive product (site, webapp, mobile app, whatever) you might do a number of different tasks. Some of you write code, some of you don't. Some do only visual design while others do only interaction design. Some of you do all of it all of the time.

Whatever your role, if you care about user experience, there's something that you need to do immediately before you create another concept model, flow chart, wireframe or comp. You need to form a vision for the user experience and then you need to tell it as a story. The combination of these two steps can help you in your everyday work and it can also help a team get moving together toward a well-defined goal.

The who, what, why, where, when and how

There are three things that a designer should always be striving for:

1. To understand the product direction and the motivation behind it (what problem are we solving and why should we solve it)
2. To understand the user as defined by the product direction and be able to internalize the point-of-view of that user (who are we solving it for and when and where are they using it to solve the problem)
3. To understand the possibilities and limitations of the technologies that will be used to implement it. (how are we going to solve it)

These can never be considered "done" but they should always be in progress.

The answers to the questions often only exist in the heads of a few people and rarely get communicated completely to the entire team or organization. This often leads to each person having a slightly different version the who, what, why, where, when and how (which I'll abbrievate from here as W5H).

Once you, as the designer, have begun to understand the W5H, your first goal should be to form a vision of how this comes together to create a great experience and then create a story that illustrates that vision. Your goal is to build toward a common understanding of how it will feel to use the thing you're creating.

You can do this on your own, but a better idea would be to involve other smart people with different perspectives. Find an engineer with a good product sense and product person with an interest in design and take an hour to talk. Don't be tempted to sketch UIs. Just get in a room and describe the actions that a person takes to accomplish the task as it stands today. If you have a whiteboard, list the the actions or draw them as a storyboard.

If you're working on a new product, describe a person using your top competitor's product. If you have an existing product, describe how someone uses the current version: "They sit down at their computer. They launch their browser. They click the bookmark for our site..." etc.

Be detailed but not exhaustive. Don't list every permutation of how they might do it. Just pick the most common and leave it at that. This is the boring part, so you want to move on to the fun stuff as soon as possible.

Once you're satisfied that you've described the current state of the world, take a look at it in whole. You're likely to find at least a few places where you say, "that's a stupid way of doing this."

Now start describing it as it should work. Don't be afraid to let "in a perfect world" ideas creep in. If it involves flying cars or the transportation of matter ala Star Trek, you might want to reign it in, but technology moves fast. It's likely that some of those "in a perfect world" ideas are actually possible.

Once you've described this vision of a new, better world and the smart product person and engineer have agreed that it makes sense you need to take the next step: tell the story of this vision in an easy to understand narrative that anyone in the company can understand.

Open Powerpoint or Keynote. Create a slide to describe the W5H. Then, make a few slides to describe the old, stupid way. Make the pain points obvious. Then make the transition into your vision. Create an example user and give him or her a name. Create one slide for every step of the new process. Illustrate the slides with stock photography or concept UIs (just don't get caught up in details, make if feel like a UI you'd see in a movie -- one big button right in the middle).

Show it to your product and engineering allies and make sure it accurate reflects the vision you'd discussed previously. Then tell the story again and again to anyone who'll listen. When you get intelligent feedback integrate it into the vision.

Get as many people as possible visualizing the same thing so that everyone's on the same page. That might not necessarily be your job as a designer, but I'll bet you've increased the likelihood for success on the project by accomplishing this.

More than any other piece of documentation, this clear and compelling story can solidify in everyone's mind the vision for the user experience and get everyone on the team pulling in the same direction. It'll make your work better because you can see how each interaction fits into the big picture and give the entire team a clear goal to shoot for.

Note: If you're a product manager and you don't involve your designer in creating this vision, then you probably aren't getting the best of them. If you're an engineering manager and the designer or the product manager haven't thought about this vision you should get involved and encourage them to do so.

Just press enter!

Love this video. We design products assuming a certain minimum amount of knowledge and skill in using a computer (or any piece of technology). The truth is that there are lots of people out there that don't have that. How should that change how we design?

(via Boing Boing)

A blogging resolution

I've always found it difficult to blog consistently. I go through stretches where I have lots of energy and ideas but then I slowly lose focus and go long periods without posting at all.

The first post on this blog was more than three years ago, but I've only written a total of 57 posts. That comes out to less than two per month.

I realize now that part of the reason for this is that I'm always disappointed with the lack of response or traffic when I am posting often. Getting feedback on your ideas is exciting, but expecting feedback and then not receiving it can be really discouraging.

So I've decided to make a New Year's resolution regarding blogging. I'm going to post consistently and I'm not going to care if anyone ever sees it.

I'm going to have only one goal: learn to express my views on design intelligently and succinctly.

I'll measure success by looking back at my posts every few months to see if they still seem to have value. If they do, I'll be on the way to accomplishing the goal. If not, I'll try to examine what I don't like about them and work toward fixing it.

I'm not going to discourage or avoid feedback -- if you're reading this, feel free to comment, retweet, etc -- but I'm not going to measure the success or failure of the endeavor based on the number of pageviews I get.

Is this a law of the universe or a problem waiting for a solution?

"Yet social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It's the people that matter, not the venue. So when the trend leaders of one social niche or another decide the place everyone is socializing has lost its luster or, more important, its exclusivity, they move on to the next one, taking their followers with them."
- Douglas Rushkoff, CNN Opinion

Rushkoff's point, that all social network sites seem to be doomed to eventually fail, is an interesting one and a difficult point to argue. These sites tend to follow the same path as any pop culture fad: the cool kids discover it, the masses follow, the media creates a ton of hype, the cool kids leave for the next thing and then the hype fades in favor of the next trend.

So here's my question: will this happen forever or will some smart social networking company eventually figure out how to avoid the fad cycle?

One answer would be that the internet itself is the only social network that will remain in some form forever. The gathering may move from site to site, but people will always want to gather online somewhere.

And it seems like there's nothing wrong with that.

Thanks to @sippey for the initial link.

Einstein, simplicity and the design of products

“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”
— Albert Einstein in “On the Method of Theoretical Physics" The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford (June 10, 1933). »

This quote is often paraphrased as "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

This should be the guiding principle of product design. When you are designing something that helps others solve a complicated problem a certain amount of complexity becomes a requirement. However, the designer should be vigilant that unnecessary complexity not be introduced into the system.

Being able to distinguish necessary complexity from unnecessary complexity might be the greatest test of a designer.

Learning from the failure of others

The New York Times had an interesting article yesterday about six companies that went out of business in 2010. Two of those companies were web products: Wesabe and iParents.com.

The interesting thing is what the founders of those companies pointed to as the major factors in their demise.

Wesabe:

Ten months after Wesabe’s introduction, a competitor, Mint.com, appeared. As Mr. Hedlund acknowledges, Mint had a better name and better design and was easier to use...

LOOKING BACK Mr. Hedlund wishes he had simplified the consumer’s experience. “We wanted to help people,” he said, “but it was too much work to get that help.”

They didn't put enough focus on user experience.

iParents.com:

Too much time and money were spent on enhanced functionality, like text-alert reminders about appointments and the ability to turn family photos into refrigerator magnets. “All the bells and whistles diluted our premise — to be a community for parents and families,” Mr. Milley said.

In other words, feature creep. They weren't able to see which features were important and which were not.

Both of these cases are failures of product design. It's possible these companies would have failed anyway -- they were both facing stiff competition -- but what the founders saw in retrospect was that the design of their product was one of the key causes of the company going out of business.

Google, Groupon and local newspapers

When I read about Google offering $6 billion for Groupon a few weeks ago, I was a little confused. Where's the value? Not in the software. Google could knock out an app like that in no time. Not in the brand. The company's only been around for 18 months and hardly has any recognition with the general public.

After talking with some coworkers and reading a bit online, it seems like the value is in Groupon's knowledge of local markets and their team of salespeople with relationships with small businesses.

Here what the New York Times' DealBook column had to say:

Google had set its sights on the hyperlocal market for neighborhood mom-and-pop shops, where it sees a largely untapped group of business customers and advertisers. Groupon, which offers discount coupons, could provide Google with specific insight into consumer spending habits as well as provide access to a large fleet of salespeople with intimate knowledge of local markets.

Are you telling me that "a large fleet of salespeople with intimate knowledge of local markets" is a major factor in company being valued at $6 billion? In the early part of my career I worked for several small newspapers and I can tell you that most of them have exactly this asset. Every local newspaper publisher in the country has to be slapping their forehead at this point.

I'm not suggesting that Google go out and start buying up the Clovis Independent and the Foster City Islander. However, if they want sales people with knowledge of local markets they might want to think about recruiting them from local papers like this.

Let's enhance

(via the awesome Clients From Hell)

Will the iPad usher in a golden age of UI design?

When people talk about the future they were promised as kids they often say, "where are the flying cars?" The iPad is the flying car of consumer electronics. It's the exact device that the futuristic movies and tv shows have always promised us and now it's here.

Personal computers (both Mac and Windows-based) have gotten a lot easier to use and many people are now comfortable with them, but let's not kid ourselves: computers are hard. Even Macs. Want proof, Apple nerds? Try using search in the Finder. It's painful. Macs "just work" when the user already has a certain familiarity with the basics of personal computing.

The operating systems we use today are still based around the office-oriented concepts of files and folders. I suspect that's because when Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was creating the first GUI they were imagining the office of the future, not the home of the future. We've lived with that for twenty years because home computers still did mostly the same things that office computers did.

Fortunately we've been freeing ourselves of the office idiom over the last few years. Thanks to the MP3, the iPod and the Internet, we've seen the gradual shift from the computer as spreadsheet-and-word-processing machine to a true information appliance. The iPad could potentially fulfill the promise of the original Macintosh.

This is where it gets fun for designers and developers. We are now free to ask a really interesting question: "what do regular people actually want to do with this magic tablet that can basically do anything?" Yeah, we know that they'll want to watch movies, play games and surf the Internet. But what else? And when we figure out what they want to do we, the designers, will get to figure out the easiest and most intuitive way to do it. My mind boggles at the potential for rethinking everything we've become accustomed to when designing user interfaces for the web.

Some of you might be saying, "but isn't it just a big iPhone? What's the big deal?" To which I say, "YES! Exactly! It's an iPhone that's big enough to show lots of information. What more could you want?"

And please don't say "Flash."

P.S. I think Apple missed a great opportunity when they called it the iPad rather than the PowerBook or the iBook.

My last day at Six Apart

I'm very sad to announce that today is my last day at Six Apart. I've been here for almost three-and-a-half years, starting as a front-end developer on LiveJournal, then lead designer for Movable Type and finally design director for TypePad. 

I will really miss coming to work every day with such an amazing group of funny, smart and talented people who really care about making great products and helping people express themselves. I'd like to sincerely thank everyone I've worked with for being so generous with their time and knowledge. 

I'll continue to blog on TypePad and look forward more amazing things from Six Apart.