Designing the User Experience at Autodesk

Building Trust: AutoCAD Customer Councils

Designing the User Experience at Autodesk team — Wed, 15 May 2013 02:58:00 -0700

On the AutoCAD UX team, we've been thinking a lot about building trust with our customers.

We've recently transitioned our software development process from waterfall to Agile. As a result, we are getting closer to having smaller, working chunks of code that we can show to customers sooner.

We have designed a Customer Council program as a way to partner with customers throughout the development of our key features. AutoCAD has a very broad user base from nearly every industry. So for each Customer Council, we carefully select people who have a vested interest in a particular feature area, and invite them to participate in our development process with us. Through the council, participants get to preview very early builds of AutoCAD that have partially complete functionality, revealing the direction we're going. They can try the functionality out on their own drawings and projects, give feedback, and watch the features evolve. This gives customers much earlier exposure to the actual implemented solution. The big win for us is that we can get feedback in time to make really meaningful changes.

Often, with AutoCAD, you have to wait until everything comes together to get a good understanding of the experience that a user will have. Unlike a website, in which interactions are often linear and decoupled, the AutoCAD experience is an immersive design canvas with complex, highly-precise interactions, relying on a sophisticated graphics system. If performance is slow or the code isn't stable, it will drastically interfere with our users’ experience and we will lose the sense of how they would really behave. For example, with slow performance, you see cognitive step-down effects that cause users to lose their concentration and shift focus. In cognitively demanding tasks like design, this breaks our users' flow and dramatically changes how they work.

We've noticed that sharing these early bits of code with customers is like exposing your soft underbelly. You know the code isn't rock-solid, and there will be bugs and quirks and probably crashes. You can't hide the buggy areas with a well-practiced demo, or a controlled usability session. You are releasing the code over to customers to try out on their own, in the wild, to do whatever they might with it.

To do this, you have to be willing to be more vulnerable. This is where trust comes in. We don't want to let our customers down or to disappoint them. We're also aware that the first impression is crucial because it can anchor our users' perceptions and expectations in the future. These concerns are in direct conflict with the goal of letting users into the inner chambers of our design process, allowing them to co-design with us, and observe the work in progress as it comes together.

In spite of the discomfort of being exposed, we are learning to be more vulnerable. So far, we have found that many people are willing to work with us from this early stage. They are prepared to put up with the bugs and crashes in return for being able to help guide and influence the functionality so that it gives them what they need. And through this process we are building trust.

By partnering with our customers in a deeper way, we are building more human relationships. For example, we introduce the council participants to the relevant development team at Autodesk. We share names and pictures of people, have webinars and one-on-one phone calls. This helps us move beyond the perception of being the big company Autodesk, to just being people who are trying hard and doing our best, who will acknowledge if we make the wrong assumption about a feature or leave out something that is important.

We want to build something that users are thrilled to get their hands on and that will amplify their abilities to do even more amazing work. We are still in the early stages of learning with Customer Councils, but we are getting glimpses that we can get closer to our goal by letting users into the development process earlier.

Designing with the Color blind in Mind - Part 2

Designing the User Experience at Autodesk team — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Tips for making color more accessible

by Mark Jamieson

Part 1 of this series provides information about the physiology of color blindness, and lists examples of situations that are challenging for color-blind people.

Part 2 provides tips to prevent color design oversights and help reduce accessibility barriers for color blind people.

Choose colors that all color vision types can identify easily. In the design process, determine which hues and shade combinations are problematic in terms of their perception or differentiation, and avoid them. Refer to the available Web resources to help determine a color palette that is suitable for different types of color blindness, and to proof your color palette. Usually, if you increase the contrast between the brightness of colors, even when their hue and saturation are different, they can be discerned more easily. Note: See the resource list at the end of this article.
Ensure that color is not the only differentiating cue. When designing for a Web site or the interface of a software application, use explicit text labels, shapes, line borders, or textures. Ensure that there is sufficient contrast between the text label and colors. Black text on a white background is prevalent because it provides good contrast for differentiation.

Shapes and text labels help with the differentiation of items.

Explicitly identify a color whenever its identification is useful and could be misinterpreted. For example, to ensure that a color can be accurately identified, regardless of the context:
- Add the color name to a bar code tag for an item of clothing.
- Ensure that a crayon contains the color on its label, and imprint the color name in the crayon wax in case the label is torn off.
- Print the color of the plastic insulating covering of a wire every few inches along its length.
- Use a tooltip to identify the color by name (or its RGB value).
Add a color blind test to your regular set of accessibility checks for your product. Test the colors that play a critical role in any aspect of the design of your product. Consider involving one or more color blind testers, each with a different type of color blindness. In the early design process and during usability evaluations, ensure that your colors are distinguishable for their intended purpose in various planned contexts. The solution is often not as simple as substituting a color when a confusing color is critical to the color palette of a design. Sometimes it is necessary to evaluate various color palette options. For software application and Web site designs, a number of utilities are available to help proofing how colors in the design appear to a person with color blindness. These utilities help to ensure that important colors are readily differentiated, and you can tweak any colors at issue. Minor color adjustments can make a huge difference in color perception for a color blind person. Note: See the resource list at the end of this article.
Allow customization of the colors of user interface elements. Many software applications provide preferences for customizing the colors of various UI components, such as text, background color, and highlight color. This option provides the most flexibility for a color blind person. A few Web sites also provide the capability to change between a limited set of predefined color palettes to display their UI elements.

A poorly designed user interaction can unintentionally impede an otherwise efficient workflow. Likewise, the wrong color choice for elements of a design that you want users to distinguish greatly impedes accessibility for a color blind person. Make a difference for color blind people by considering these tips for your projects.

References

Adobe Creative Suite – Proofing Colors – Soft-proof for color blindness (Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator)
Designing for Color Blindness and Color Universal Design (CUD) – The Distinct Studios Journal.
Color Universal Design – Web site for the Color Universal Design Organization (mostly Japanese, but this link provides an overview in English).
Can Color-Blind Users See Your Site? An article by Robert Hess for the Microsoft Development Network (MSDN), October 2000.
Color Oracle – A free color blindness simulator for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Vischeck – A Web site that provides resources for simulating color-blind vision.
Visolve – A utility that transforms colors into discernible colors for the color vision deficient.
Designing for People with Partial Sight and Color Deficiencies Aries Arditi, PhD. Guidelines for making effective color choices that work for nearly everyone.

Designing with the color blind in mind - Part 1

Designing the User Experience at Autodesk team — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The limitations of color-blind vision

by Mark Jamieson

I’m color blind. When I divulge that information to people with normal color vision, they usually respond, “Really? Can you see any color? What color is this?”, as they point to something within close range.

This seemingly innocuous reaction indicates a general lack of understanding and empathy for people who live with this genetic-based vision disability. Color blind people experience many barriers and frustrations when using items that are designed for people with normal color vision.

In this two-part series:
Part 1 provides information about color blindness and its limitations.
Part 2 provides tips to reduce design oversights that affect people with color blindness.

Most of the people with color blindness (about 8% of males and 0.5% of females) can see color in a reduced color spectrum compared to people with normal color vision. Color vision deficient is a more accurate term than color blindness. Only in rare cases does color blindness mean seeing the world in black and white, or through a range of gray tones.

From a physiological perspective, our eyes contain photoreceptor cells that are named rods and cones, based on their shape. Rods number about 120 million per eye, and sense light and dark. Cones number six to seven million per eye, are less sensitive to light, and sense more color. Each of three cone types senses one of three primary colors: blue, green, or red. The information that these three cone types receive, when combined, is what our eyes perceive as color.

In people with a color vision deficiency, one or more cone types is malfunctioning or missing. As a result, they cannot distinguish as many color hues as someone with normal color vision.

The relative lighting (bright, dim, daylight, incandescent, fluorescent), background (light, dark, front lit, and backlit) and size of the color sample all play a role. A color blind person can generally see all primary color hues (red, green, and blue) at full strength (saturation). But the mixture of the deficient hues with other colors makes some colors challenging to identify, or indistinguishable from another.

Contrast is a huge factor in accurately differentiating between color shades. Color gradients (color ramps) are tricky too. One end of the ramp can begin in a hue that is perceptible, and end in a hue that is not. If text appears on top of the color ramp, it is sometimes not readable if the contrast between the elements is not high enough.

The two rows of colors in the following image provide examples of solid colors that can challenge some people with red-green color blindness.

It is relatively easy to differentiate (not identify) the five colors in either horizontal row, as there is good contrast and variation between the color hues.

To the red-green color blind, the colors in the vertical columns are almost identical, depending on the context in which they appear.

As the palette for a pie chart, these ten colors are problematic for most people with red-green color blindness, which is the most common color-vision deficiency.

Anything that involves identification of an item purely by its color can challenge a person with color-blindness. (Examples: matching clothing, plant foliage, signage, LED indicator lights on electrical devices, matching paint colors, colored pencils/crayons, Web sites, user-interface icons, color-coded information charts, board games, sunburn and rashes, insulation colors on electrical wires, maps, GPS color displays).

Color is often used as an element to simplify and differentiate items in the design of a product. Unconsidered color choices make the accessibility of a product more difficult and frustrating for a color blind person. We use color increasingly in the communication of information in many aspects of our society. We can easily reverse accessibility issues by designing products with colors that are perceptible by as many people as possible.

References

Colblindor – A Web site dedicated to color blindness, with many articles, and a free eBook.
We are colorblind – A Web site dedicated to making the Web a better place for the color blind.
Ishihara Color Blindness Test – The original Ishihara Color Blind test first published in 1917 as an online version.
Testing Color Vision – Advice for parents and teachers in dealing with color blind children.

Alerts and Warnings: Is your UI crying wolf?

Designing the User Experience at Autodesk team — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 03:00:00 -0700

by Cecilia Farell

We all remember the story of the boy who repeatedly tricked the villagers into thinking a wolf was attacking his sheep. When the wolf’s attack became real, no one believed him. The moral of the story is don’t squander your credibility, and it’s a lesson that applies to user interface design as well as human behavior.

If an application raises the alarm about every little thing that might happen or go wrong – if it “cries wolf” – its alerts and warnings gradually become meaningless and lose their intended effect. Worse, they can become annoyances or even hindrances to the user, who then ignores them or, if he can’t, ends up hating them.

Alerts and warnings: error messages by any other name?

My last post was about error messages and how to make them effective. I mention this to emphasize that alerts and warnings are not the same as error messages.

Error messages occur “after the fact” and show the user how to navigate away from the problem and get back in the flow. Alerts and warnings are about problems that might occur in the future. Their intent is to prevent these from happening in the first place or, if that’s not possible, to mitigate their impact (think “preemptive damage control”).

Alerts “alert” and warnings “warn”

There is a difference between alerts and warnings, although it’s a subtle one. Alerts are a kinder, gentler version of warnings (think yellow traffic light instead of red). They inform more than they warn and are not fatal or even critical. An alert is the right way to let users know of upcoming downtime for maintenance or that the site login process has changed.

A warning is an absolute must when the user has to act (or refrain from acting) to avoid the loss of:

mission-critical data
access to the system
privacy or control over confidential information
the user's time (a significant amount) ¹

Going with “the flow”

The Holy Grail of UI designers is to create experiences where the user becomes “fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment.” This is known as flow, a psychology concept with recent application in the field of Human Computer Interaction, particularly in Gaming.

Flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate experience in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning.²

If flow is the Holy Grail, breaking it is anathema. Unfortunately, alerts and warnings do just that. In fact, breaking the flow is what they live for: their job is taking the user’s focus away from what she’s doing and towards something that needs her immediate and undivided attention.

This is the very reason for using alerts and warnings sparingly and judiciously. In a nutshell, avoid them unless absolutely necessary. Apple’s guidelines³ declare alerts unnecessary if they merely:

increase the visibility of information already available
update users on tasks that are progressing normally
ask for confirmation of actions initiated by the user
inform users of errors or problems they can do nothing about

Red light/Yellow light

Earlier I suggested you think of yellow vs. red traffic lights as a way to differentiate alerts from warnings. Red and yellow (and of course green) are common colors in UIs because their significance is universal.

Using these colors in alerts and warnings is an effective way to grab your user’s attention and quickly convey the severity of what’s involved. When you combine these colors with equally significant symbols or icons, you can replace redundant Alert and Warning labels with more specific and meaningful content (e.g., Scheduled Downtime or Malware Detected).

Green light

These are simple guidelines to follow when crafting alerts and warnings. I’ve also stressed the importance of using caution and good judgment when giving an alert or warning the green light, so to speak. Before making that decision, ask yourself: Is this alert or warning worth interrupting the user’s ever so elusive state of flow?

Until next time and happy trails.

¹ Adapted from a list in the “Messages” section in Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd535525.aspx.

² Both quotes are from the Flow (psychology) page in Wikipedia. The second is the words of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who, together with J. Nakamura, proposed the concept. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology).

³ Pared-down version of the list in the “UI Element Usage Guidelines” section of the iOS Human Interface Guidelines. https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action.

Changing Cultures: Towards a Lean User Experience

Designing the User Experience at Autodesk team — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 03:00:00 -0700

By Joshua Ledwell

Autodesk development teams that once requested design specifications up front now are collaborating with user experience designers to design, build, and test software in rapid cycles. This incremental approach offers more opportunities to gather user feedback and optimize the product. Success depends on practicing “Lean” UX, in which designers stop attempting comprehensive documentation, and embrace “just-enough” design combined with constant iteration.

The idea of working lean comes from “Lean Manufacturing” at Toyota and more recently The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Lean companies minimize wasteful business processes that don’t add value for end user. They also get products to customers faster, even with fewer features, so they can learn from their target audience and build the most value into the next version.

I am a passionate believer in Lean UX, so I was pleased to attend the Lean Day UX conference in New York on March 1. In the morning, seven speakers from different industries described how they navigated the switch to Lean practices.

Key insights from these speakers:

Ries’ The Lean Startup treats product development as a series of quick, experimental launches. However, transitioning an organization to this lean workflow requires a cultural shift from “experimenting to validate” to “experimenting to learn.” As a UX professional, you may be accustomed to usability testing a complete product. Now, though, you may need new methods to help the product team quickly adapt to user feedback.
Changing mindsets is critical for Lean UX success, but it’s not easy. Simple rules can help change your organization’s behavior. One speaker’s group outlawed surveys and mandated that all teams meet face-to-face with real users.
At another speaker’s business, the priority is building lean entrepreneurial teams that take risks and learn from them. To help achieve this goal, managers at this company must present failures and suboptimal outcomes to the entire organization.
Designing for delight requires building user empathy on your team. One recipe for success is generating many ideas and iterating solutions, moving from broad to narrow focus as you learn more about user needs. “Delighter” features create promoters for your product and brand.
To paraphrase Bill Scott of PayPal, Agile is a good “engine” for delivering products, but it has no brain. Lean UX leadership can be the brain that ensures the team builds the right product. (see image below.)

After lunch we participated in a rapid prototyping exercise. My team designed an app for public transportation users to refill their passcards anywhere. We focused our design time deciding exactly what user problem to solve and how little we could build to solve it – also known as Minimum Viable Product (MVP). I was impressed by the POP app for iOS for rapid mobile prototyping. With this app you can photograph your paper prototypes, select hotspots for navigation, and link them into a flow.

Here are links to the presenters’ topics. Some of the presentations are online, and links are provided:

Lionel Mohri, Intuit: Getting Dirty With Design Thinking - How Intuit Is Enabling a Culture of Entrepreneurship and Experimentation

Farrah Bostic, The Difference Engine: Research Rebooted - Why Most Market Research Is Broken, And How Lean Can Help Fix It

David Panarelli, LivingSocial: Iterating Forward: Maintaining Alignment and Focus Across Multiple Lean Teams

Tom Illmensee, Snagajob: Build A Recipe For Better UX Process With Fresh Lean Ingredients

Andrew Crow, GE Healthcare: One To Many: Designing For Scale

Emily Holmes, Hobsons: Iterative Innovation – Small Guerilla Projects Can Lead To Big Successes

Bill Scott, PayPal: Lean Engineering: Key Principles For Transforming Engineering Into A Full Lean UX Partner

On the train back to Boston, I reflected on the speakers’ ability to promote user-centered change in their organizations. When UX professionals are willing to abandon potentially wasteful up-front design practices and embrace lean workflows, they are leading by example and increasing their influence on the whole organization. I like that being a change agent and a user-centered designer are mutually reinforcing aims.

What’s a Service Anyway? New Packaging for an Old Concept, or a Game Changer?

Designing the User Experience at Autodesk team — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 03:00:00 -0700

By Kursat Ozenc

Software designers and development teams have lost the luxury of working on a single platform or device. In today’s fast-paced environment, traditional waterfall processes and long product launch cycles are gone. Within recent years, major software companies—including Autodesk, Microsoft[1], and Adobe—have moved toward service-based offerings. These take the form of monthly subscriptions and product suites covering comprehensive workflows. Many factors account for this shift, including demand from the users, competition, and protection of profit margin. The overall zeitgeist in the software industry also plays a role, with game changers such as ‘the Cloud’, mobile, and social app ecologies.

Designers and product development teams are now in a tough position. They need to respond quicker to small product level challenges while also applying far-reaching, insightful thinking across platforms, devices, and workflows. Designers and product owners need a fresh perspective that can address both particular and systemic design challenges at the same time. That fresh perspective can be service design, which combines design, business, and development lenses. This two-part post will uncover service design, and make a humble suggestion for product teams to reconsider what a software ‘product’ might mean in this new era. We will also examine how designers might address mobile, social, and cloud-related design challenges more effectively.

Service design (SD) is an interdisciplinary field that aims to deliver service interfaces that are usable, useful, and desirable to the users, while also being efficient, effective, and distinctive to the suppliers (Mager, 2009.) In the past decade, interest in SD among designers has been noteworthy, including organizations such as www.service-design-network.org, as well as personal blogs such as www.servicedesigntools.org, designforservice.wordpress.com, and design4services.com. SD can be seen as a T-shape discipline that addresses both systems- and product-level challenges. Service designers approach a service problem as a drama with beginning, middle, and end phases. They also frame front and back stages of the business as design challenges. Finally, service designers bring a holistic perspective that considers both single touch-points, and the overall journey of a user engaged with the service.

Sample coffee shop service with journey map and touch points

SD methods are real mash-ups, taking best practices from different design disciplines including interaction, graphic, and industrial design. The most distinctive methods, however, are mapping and enactment. Mapping of journeys, relationships, and stakeholders allows exploration of system level interactions, whereas enactment methods such as experience prototyping and role enactment reveal the product level interactions and service moments.

In characterizing service design thinking, Stickdorn suggests user-centeredness, co-creation, sequencing, evidencing, and being holistic as the five principles of the discipline. Among these principles, sequencing means designing all the steps that a user might take while using the service, which can be developed through using journey maps, role-enactments, and scripts. Evidencing means defining the intangible delivery of the service through offerings, such as a coffee-latte for a coffee shop. Engine, a service design consultancy, similarly put value, systems, journeys, people, and propositions as the five fundamentals of service design. Journeys are similar to sequencing: the path that the user takes to form her experience. Proposition is the distinctiveness and desirability that a service can offer to the user, such as a preference for coffee shop A over B.

In software design, it’s easy to relate current design practices to user-centeredness. What user-centeredness means in our hyper-connected world is another story. In parallel with advancements in computation, the way people access, create, and use information has changed dramatically. These changes affect not only people’s tools and resources, but also their habits around technology use. People become real jugglers, wearing many hats at once, curating their product wardrobes based on emerging needs and desires. One workflow per product is not the case anymore. To unlock this dynamic challenge, other principles become handy, mapping peoples’ prospective journeys and creating offerings, value, and propositions accordingly.

The strength of SD lies in its ability to capture both the system-level and product-level challenges. Aforementioned principles blend both abstract, intangible wholes and concrete, tangible parts of a service. The next post will take these principles and apply them as lenses to inform the design of software. Situating service design in a cloud-computing and cross-platform SaaS context will demonstrate how the manifestations of these principles can inform the design endeavor.

[1]
http://www.kuow.org/post/microsoft-launches-new-office-subscription-service

6th Annual IxDA 2013 Social Innovation with Impact - Part 2

Designing the User Experience at Autodesk team — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 03:00:00 -0700

By Kem-laurin Kramer, Stephen O'Connell, and Ian Hooper

Interaction 13: Photo: Richard Cerezo

Wednesday started with a number of presentations, including How to Design Social Experiences. A timely presentation, given our current age of social media, it highlighted how designing interactions between people is different from designing user experiences. When designing the former, there is often no clear task to design for, no set user goal, and no clear outcome. Paul Adams discussed the challenges and processes that have enabled people to design for this growing form of interaction.

Later that morning, Trip Odell of Audible, took us on a presentation journey If UX Can Kill it Probably Will: Designing for the 70 MPH Interface. What happens when our “on-the-go” lifestyle literally collides with the ways we do all of that “on-the going”? Distracted driving is a very real danger, but at Audible, user experience designers are trying to design for safety.

Another funny presentation title followed: Social Networks Suck. Social Computing Frees You. In this presentation, Julia Barrett outlined how applications are designed to suck you in and away from the people that are right near you. We’re often too busy updating our statuses instead of talking to the people we’re ‘statusing’ about. Sad but true. This presentation underscored the growing issue of how social networks have lessened physical human contact and how design can help mitigate this.

Other noteworthy presentations that day included the provocative Hack You: The Human Body is the Next Interface, presented by Andy Goodman and Marco Righetto. This presentation deliberated on how a host of incredible innovations will transform our bodies, communication, and society – even the human psyche. A whole new range of body-embedded products could be in our near future, but how much is too much?

By the end of Wednesday the chills and rain outside had the 1100 bodies cooped up inside yearning for the imminent wrap up to the week, however exciting the event was. But even then, Interaction was set to end with a bang.

***

Thursday, the official last day of the IxDA 2013 opened with yet another agenda sure to please, starting with the OCAD University Showcase: Inclusive Education, with Pina D'Intino, Sandra Earl and Michael Furdyk. The trio examined the question of what happens when education becomes liberalized. Students in OCADU’s Inclusive Design program believe this is just the type of question today’s innovators should be addressing. The thread on education continued with a Panel Interaction Design Education Workshop Report Back. A follow up to a workshop held previously, this panel addressed such topics as curriculum, research, portfolios, apprenticing, continuing education, and the industry-academia relationship. The outcome of this workshop was captured in design artifacts and was a great panel discussion for those with interest in education and design.

Other noteworthy presentations included one of prototyping, Bury the Wireframe: A Primer in Interaction Prototypes by Derek Vaz and Designing a Compassionate Healthcare Experience by James Senior.

In Bury the Wireframe: A Primer in Interaction, Vaz postulated that it is time we stopped using static representations to design interactive products. This talk outlined why interaction designers should abandon printouts for interaction prototypes, how to introduce those prototypes into your process, and then showcased real world examples and success stories. The presentation by Senior was a call to designers to be compassionate at the heart of our UX practice especially designing in the context of healthcare.

With a few more presentations taking us to closing, the conference proved to be a success with attendees.

John Bielenberg was a fun choice for the closing keynote. In his presentation, Rubber Ducks and Hockey Gloves (Or, how to jump the ingenuity gap), he talked passionately about his Project M initiative that is “designed to inspire and educate young designers, writers, photographers and filmmakers by proving that their work, “especially their wrongest thinking”, can have a positive and significant impact on the world”. He talked about how most people suffer from heuristic bias that leads people to always seek the most direct solution from A to B. As a result, he advocates for what he calls the “Rapid Ingenuity Cycle”, which is stated as the following steps: Be Bold, Get Out (of your workplace, community, comfort zone…), Think Wrong, Make Stuff, Bet Small (i.e. solve small problems – it takes out some of the risk of failure), and Fast Forward (i.e. iterate quickly).

6th Annual IxDA 2013 Social Innovation with Impact - Part 1

Designing the User Experience at Autodesk team — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 03:00:00 -0800

By Kem-laurin Kramer, Stephen O'Connell, and Ian Hooper

Interaction 13: Photo: Richard Cerezo

1100 designers entered the belly of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, where we collided to help “define our role as guides through social interactions, digital, and beyond.” The Interaction conference, held in our home city of Toronto (January 28-31), was also a celebration of 10 years of IxDA with OCAD University as the event sponsor.

Monday began with a keynote by Ravi Sawhney, Our power to empower: The satisfaction of designing for social impact, which reached into a cornucopia of historical figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and John Lennon. The talk focused on drawing parallels between different eras of design. Sawhney posited that if we could look outside our own bubbles to the world at large, we’d recognize that there are many others who have had great influences on society, even if they weren’t designers explicitly. We too can be just as influential as those great minds by utilizing our power to change the world through design. Creating this social impact is one piece of a far greater whole that “flows through our fingertips as we conceive and create not only new user experiences, but in fact new, highly empowered users… everywhere”.

Mr. Sawhey’s keynote highlighted a day that segued into many other inspiring presentations including Dan Saffer’s MicroInteractions: Designing with Details. Saffer’s presentation asserts that the difference between a “good” product and a “great” one is in its details. He termed these “microinteractions”; the small moments inside and around features, which are typically not on any feature list and often ignored. All these little moments can change a product from one that is tolerated to one that’s beloved. This talk provided a new perspective on designing digital products as a series of microinteractions that are essential to bringing personality and delight to our experiences with applications and devices. After leaving this talk, I could not help but think it was fundamental user experience knowledge that we had collectively forgotten, polished up with a new name. All in all a great presentation!

Later that day a number of mini presentations (10 minutes) were inserted before lunch. Of note was Health on the Go: Designing Electronic Health Records for Mobile. This is a growing hot topic today, and one with an undoubtedly long way to go as issues of privacy and security make it very complicated.

***

Tuesday arrived with cold rain and slushy snow – not exactly how we want our city remembered. However, all this was forgotten when Jer Thorp took the stage to present Data and the Human Experience. In his talk he focused specifically on the juncture where these two aspects meet. He also detailed a number of projects involving diverse data sets, including the 770,000 words in the Shakespeare Folio, astronomical measurements from NASA, text from nightly news broadcasts, and real-time air traffic reports. Jer discussed how, by framing data in a human context, we can use it more effectively, and ultimately foster better practices for data-focused design. For the mathematically inclined designers in the room, it was a crowning moment. Never had data looked so sexy; the presentation was meticulous both in process and aesthetics. Ben Shneiderman would have wept tears of joy.

Later that day CNN UX Designer, Judith Siegel, took the stage to present CNN and the UX Challenge of Presenting Long-Form Stories. This was another of my favourite presentations and a great juxtaposition to Jer Thorpe’s data presentation. “Textual information” was the focus here, and Siegel addressed some of the design challenges with “long form journalism” in an age where textual consumption is faced with short spans of attention.

Just when we thought the day could not get any better, Sara Cantor Aye graced the stage in a rather engaging presentation, Designing Everything but the Food, which first had me wondering how it made the program. However, although this presentation was more architectural in nature, it underscored some of the key principles in user-centric design. By using design methods, the team at Greater Good Studio helped improve a middle school cafeteria through ethnographic research to inform industrial design. Through a series of changes to how the food was presented and distributed, they managed to dramatically improve how the kids ate their food. That in turn led to less food waste. It was an inspiring and interesting talk. Social Change? We think so!

1100 designers entered the belly of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, where we collided to help “define our role as guides through social interactions, digital, and beyond.” The 6^th annual Interaction conference, held in our home city of Toronto (January 28-31), was also a celebration of 10 years of IxDA with OCAD University as the event sponsor.

***

1100 designers entered the belly of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, where we collided to help “define our role as guides through social interactions, digital, and beyond.” The 6^th annual Interaction conference, held in our home city of Toronto (January 28-31), was also a celebration of 10 years of IxDA with OCAD University as the event sponsor.

***

Just when we thought the day could not get any better, Sara Cantor Aye graced the stage in a rather engaging presentation, Designing Everything but the Food, which[MC1] first had me wondering how it made the program. However, although this presentation was more architectural in nature, it underscored some of the key principles in user-centric design. By using design methods, the team at Greater Good Studio helped improve a middle school cafeteria through ethnographic research to inform industrial design. Through a series of changes to how the food was presented and distributed, they managed to dramatically improve how [MC2] the kids ate their food. That in turn led to less food waste. It was an inspiring and interesting talk. Social Change? We think so!

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[MC1]I’m actually not sure where the presentation title ends. I think it’s here?

[MC2]Might need a little elaboration here. How does one eat food “well?” Quantity? Enjoyment?

The Dream of the '90s

Designing the User Experience at Autodesk team — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 03:00:00 -0800

by Ian Hooper

I knew I would like Jason Brush’s IxDA talk “The Dream of the ‘90s is Alive” when he played a funny clip from Portlandia where the characters wax nostalgic for a time of riding unicycles and skateboards, wearing flannel shirts, and buying and selling CDs at a record store.

Portlandia

This presentation felt tailor-made for me. The 1990s was the period of time when I really dove into technology. It was an exciting new discovery, full of promise. A lot of the buzz at that time was hyperbolic and utopian. In retrospect, I had often attributed this optimism to the selective filter of my age and grad-student status. But this presentation showed me that this attitude was not just an illusion of my own rose-colored glasses. Jason Brush clearly showed that society as a whole was wearing those hopeful spectacles. His presentation started with some context-setting images and quotes to give someone who had not experienced the ‘90s some idea of what the time was like. Germany was re-united after the fall of the Berlin wall, Nelson Mandela was free from prison, and the World Wide Web was born. It seemed that digital communication tools like email and the Web were going to fuel a new age of better understanding and unity among people. He described this feeling as ‘Technological Vertigo’.

Most remarkable to me about this presentation was that rather than dwell on technological change (death of the floppy disk, Windows 95, video on the web, etc.), he focused on the work of artists in digital media. He included early explorations into hypertext by Mark Amerika and David Foster Wallace and showed how this mode of thinking even made it into mainstream culture, citing Pulp Fiction as a non-linear movie example. He describes how early web art practices focused on individual, independent experiences. They created their own bespoke way of telling their stories. But rather than concentrating on the technical development of blogging platforms, Brush showed the work of Nina Pope and Kern Guthrie in A Hypertext Journal (1996) as an example of an early weblog that predates the popularization of the form by a number of years.

Map of Infinite Jest

Of course no description of the 1990s technological landscape would be complete without a mention of virtual reality and CD-ROMs.

NeuroVR!

Again Brush chose to focus on the use of these technologies by artistic innovators such as Jeffrey Shaw and Char Davies. Although the presentation did not take the time to go into the meaning or message of these early electronic art pieces, Char Davies’ description of her art seems appropriate today as the computer-human barrier erodes through ever more sophisticated sensors and gestural interaction methods. Describing her late ‘90s work, she says, “having the immersive experience dependent on the intuitive visceral processes of breath and balance, was intended to counter conventional ways of navigating and interacting in virtual space. (Such techniques, by relying on hand-based devices such as joysticks, pointers or data gloves, tend to reinforce an instrumental, dominating stance towards the world.) Our approach was intended to counter the medium's bias with a vision of the medium as a channel for ‘communion’ rather than control.”

So what of the “dream of the ‘90s” is still alive today? Brush offers that the future is currently as open as it was, and we are going through our own period of technological vertigo. We can find our footing by learning to question the past and to realize how much of the present came from the past.

Navigation is information in context

Designing the User Experience at Autodesk team — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 03:00:00 -0800

By Kursat Ozenc

Having laid out the main influencers in navigation design, how then can designers create smooth navigation controls in spatially-based software? Depending on the complexity of the design brief, designers can embrace these influencers without marrying one in particular, instead synthesizing navigation features and behaviors based on their priorities.

How do you as a designer form priorities and act accordingly?

Do your homework: know your audience and their contextual needs, and discover which navigation mode is priority: egocentric, exocentric, or both. What are the contextual needs? Are your users office-bound, or are they usually mobile and in the field? Do they navigate for the sake of navigation, or is navigation just one step in another task? Are they shortcut-savvy power users, or do they come from all walks of life? Do they need a first person egocentric view, a global exocentric view, or both? Which modes of navigation do they want: look at, walk, drive, or fly over? Do they want to navigate through an object, an area or global world? These questions can be taken as guide posts to help you strategize and determine your priorities.

Hybrid is the new norm in design. Designers should consider a design that will work across platforms and devices, which means a curated navigation framework rather than a one-type-fits-all approach. Curating is different than blind consistency; it means being sensitive to the specified platform or device context. Delivering the same interaction on both tablet and desktop may not make sense, since they have different affordances. Disruptive technologies such as gesture or other novel input devices are a critical influencer for forming these hybrid designs.

Navigation means information in context. People navigate in order to get informed, or to inform others with different goals. The value proposition of way-finding is to get location information. For leisure, it’s to get information to progress in the game setting. For engineering, it’s to inform the designer so that she can better design an object, and for creative production it is to present and convey an idea in an editorial setting. From a broader perspective, navigation design is about creating affordances for intuitive, flexible, yet structured paths for the end user to reach and consume information. This idea should bring an information architect’s mindset to the navigation problem, which is to create a framework or skeleton for the navigation flow before thinking about specific features or controls.

Designers need to create or use already-formed navigation patterns to simulate a smooth flowing experience. What do patterns provide? Patterns address felt-life experience by leveraging the user’s memory and cumulative experience. Patterns are also an embodiment of best practices where the designer can cherry pick snippets of best flow, behavior, and controls. However, current state-of-the-art products lack good explicit navigation pattern libraries, leaving designers to try to deduce patterns by observing the products in action. One drawback of patterns might be the inflexibility that they bring to the table when non-traditional influencers are at play, like disruptive technologies, gamification, or reverse webification. At this point, it is the designer’s call to break the pattern, especially when these new influencers are necessary to provide the best user experience.

Finally, designers need to think of the quality of the navigation experience. What gamification or reverse webification shows us is that creating playful, light-weight, straightforward products is a way to reach quality. To achieve this quality goal, designers can leverage game-like or web-like experiences and deploy them in the navigation design.

In designing navigation challenges, designers should be aware of the main influencers that are at stake, namely gamification, reverse webification, disruptive technologies, and felt-life experience. To effectively manage or make sense of these influencers, designers need to act strategically and prioritize what’s important for their users. To do that, they need to dive deeply into understanding their target audience and that audience’s contextual needs. Designers need to think hybrid, drawing on a constellation of experiences, instead of trying to provide a one-size-fits-all solution. They need to rethink what navigation is in terms of information in context. The designer should leverage design patterns to use felt-life experience and best practices in the field. However, designers should also be cautious, but perhaps brave enough to challenge established patterns to address disruptive technology influencers. Finally, designers need to think of creating a quality experience that will provide a working flow while the user is in action.