I’ve always said that anything is possible with software. That statement has a lot of caveats, because it’s still hard to make software do exactly we want it to do. And while there are a ton of developers out there coding in virtually every language, it’s still rare to find good ones who truly understand how to write them well.

The point I’m making is this – software is a moving target. Despite all our efforts to strategize, plan, research and design for the user experience, it doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t take the practicalities of implementation into account.

Good designers know this. They understand that it’s not that easy to come up with crazy AJAX interactions, maintain cross-browser compatibility, and design for accessibility within a short period of time. This is why good designers and developers earn their stripes by credibility, not by qualification.

Thus, user experience designers and software programmers are basically two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. Even if you aren’t calling yourself a UX designer, when you’re making decisions about how users should or would interact with the software, the tone of voice the content should have, the color palettes for the styleguide – that’s basically the kind of thing UX designers get paid to do.

At least for now, UX is being used unceremoniously as an umbrella term for all that design, strategy, and thinking towards the overall experience that’s intended. This means that almost everyone has a hand into doing the work of UX, because almost everyone has a stake in that experience.

The sad part to all this is – it all seems too much like common sense. And everyone will have an opinion about design. Worse still, anyone who really likes the idea of doing UX can suddenly start acting like experts on the subject, and come up with seemingly insightful quips which may actually be more damaging than the status quo. Actual UX designers have their work cut out for them, to separate the wheat from the chaff, to bring clarity from confusion, and most of all, to address the real problems at hand.

There’s a fine line to walk between solving real problems and offering what seems like to the average Joe a poignant solution. And I feel that the only way we’re going to get it right is if we spend more time doing the work of solving rather than fussing too much about how it should be done.

Just like how books/events/ideas/etc. can’t guarantee you’ll turn out a good developer, it won’t guarantee you’ll be a good UX designer as well. I don’t care if you’re highly qualified – show me instead how you’ve helped solve real problems for real people, and that will reveal the true marks of a tradesman.

Everyone’s hyped up about getting a Google Wave invite. I have one and I don’t see what the fuss is about. Yes, I’ve seen the YouTube video, and yes I’ve watched the Developer Preview video too. It looks great and all, but seriously folks – it’s one complicated thing… next to email.

And this is why Google Wave isn’t about email. The same way computers aren’t (just) about calculators.

What it is is real-time collaborative messaging with historical playback. Which, granted, is very good for real-time anything. Except that real-time in human terms is highly contextual.

Because people have better things to do besides sit in front of their computers all day long, they are much better off carrying Blackberries and having push email rather than collaborative messaging. In my opinion, push email works just as well – because you don’t need to be in front of a computer to communicate with your colleagues.

Wave is also a tool. Meaning that the interface itself is not the message. In order for users to synthesize information, they have to make sense of it in a collaborative sort of way, which means paying attention to whatever is happening in that messaging window, which takes up at most 1/2 of the screen. It looks and feels like, a video player – but for messages. Think of IM on steroids, not email.

Email works because it’s mind-dumbingly easy. And because of that, nobody needs to take 3 week lessons on how to use email – and that includes your grandpa. And because it’s so atomic, it can easily be transported as a message to any other atomic messaging forms – SMS, blog post, forum post, IM chat, whatever.

Waves, on the other hand, are almost asynchronous streams – anyone can start writing content at anytime into a wave, and hope that it doesn’t make a mess of the conversation. Last I checked, people still pay attention to body language and subliminal messages, both of which are devoid in Wave but affects the way people communicate collaboratively and socially together – i.e. turn-taking and all that jazz.

Which part of a wave is atomic? You have to spend effort to calculate and decide. Then you have to find a way of “clipping” that message – and how do you make it portable? Can you cut and paste portions of your wave onto your blog? SMS? can you print it out?

Like email, most of what is published gets fixed in time. But a Wave, is a collection of content played out over time. Just like how photographs put together over time become videos. But with the added complexity of multiple sources of photographs, it becomes more and more difficult to separate and organize content in a Wave.

And that’s why Google Wave is not about email.

Sites and Articles Relevant to this Post:

• It’s Just Fancy Talk
• EasierToUnderstandThanWave

Instead, I find myself spending more and more time blogging about careers, which in a way doesn’t have anything to do with interaction. Except for one thing – the human condition.

The real kick behind designing any interaction is the effect you get when a human being interfaces with it. Whether it’s good or bad – it’s one of those things that turns me on like nothing else – seeing someone actually interact with a dumb thing you actually built and expressing an emotional response from it.

But when I go out and read all the blogs that talk about user experience, interaction design, usability, bla bla bla… so much of it is so arcane that my eyes start focusing beyond the screen into emptiness and my mind begins to chant mindless syllables.

UX is losing its Touchy Feely

What ever happened to all that user magic that Norman used to talk about? The stuff where he’d complain about the affordances of door handles being one way and not the other and talking about how people would get confused and how we ought to design to love and make people feel nice and fuzzy inside. What ever happened to that?

Now, the only thing people end up talking about are new things that were invented two hours ago – Experience Themes? Who writes a blog post titled so arcanely these days? I thought we were much better at copy than a lot of other people.

And look at how much time went into creating this user journey diagram. It’s pretty, but I don’t know what in the world it’s saying. I showed this to some colleagues of mine (folks who actually do “get” UX common sense) and they too couldn’t make head or tail of it. And this came up tops on Google. :-/

No One Understands Us Outside of Us

Why can’t we just stick to simple terms and communicate things clearly and simply? Do our customers, bosses, users, readers, colleagues and friends really know what we mean by all these words we use? It’s funny how we spend most of our time building for these people, but talk in a language that doesn’t make sense to them.

Are we as designers supposed to build things that way – where we act as folks who fix things and have our own codes of conduct, and can never have normal conversations with the people we solve problems for?

UX Designers aren’t really Designers if they’re more Geek than Human

We compare ourselves with engineers and say we’re more user friendly, but there’s no doubt that every UX person I know is a geek in their own way. They just don’t do code, that’s all.

I prefer a person who does code, because it’s one level below the abstraction layer (towards the technology, not away from it). You can’t have a web UX designer without a programmer. The programmer gets to call the shots, because he actually builds the stuff that makes it work. UX designers ought to pay some respect to the engineering community who built the thing in the first place.

A UX person only has my approval only if they really do care for other human beings, and tell me about their stories. Don’t talk to me about methods or crazy terms and phrases, because I can toss that out and use something else that works. Just because engineers have fancy names doesn’t mean UX designers need them too.

Speak English?

Engineers need fancy names because computers can’t speak for themselves. UX designers already have a language they can use that’s already widely available, is extremely portable, and is fairly universal – it’s called English. They don’t need to invent new words to describe the things they do, which by the way, was copied and stolen from other disciplines like psychology, sociology, marketing, management, etc.

To be fair, I’ve had my share of that design-speak. But I’ve gain nothing except credit from other fellow designers who’ve done the same.

If designers can focus on explaining and speaking out what really represents people who use technologies, it would be a lot better for everyone… rather than inventing new languages to use between themselves.

User-Centred Design – Using What Works For Me

I felt that a lot of “formal” usability methods didn’t help me much, here. I felt somewhat trapped by procedure and process, thinking about best practices for wireframes, personas, user journeys, etc. Having been exposed to too much user experience jargon, I realized that user-centered design isn’t necessarily synonymous with visual design. In fact, each stakeholder seems to have a different understanding of who the user is, even if the differences are slight.

What ended up working for me was to put down the questions I felt the users would ask (while using the interface/application) onto little bits of post-its, and looked for patterns like organizing those questions into related categories. I organized this in several ways:

“User Journey”-type Things and “Site Map”-type Things

One way of visualizing the questions was to list them out in the style of a “user journey”, which were lists of questions laid out in a temporal fashion (e.g. question A leading to question B as a user traversed deeper into the application). This helped me understand which questions to address first, and which to address later. It helped me prioritize my workflow, and make decisions on which interfaces to work on first. It was already obvious that we needed to focus on designing the homepage, but there were other pages that weren’t immediately obvious, such as a page to help users to “learn more” about the product – that page only came about after looking at the questions from the user journeys.

Another way was to group the questions that were related to one another, and label them as categories. That helped me to visualize the overall site layout, because I absolutely hate building software in the dark – and that includes building on software requirements without understanding the whys to the point I’m convinced of its business and user needs.

At this point, I hadn’t used any formal methods I had learnt from a class, website, or book. It was good that I understood who I was designing for, and I wouldn’t have been able to do this without classes, websites and books – but the formal methods were pretty useless. I just used what worked for me.

We Used Fireworks, but I can’t Recommend it to You

It’s important to note that two of us jumped onto paper and pencil and did wireframe sketches, and then designed a hi-def visual of the homepage on Fireworks (which I now really love) – only because we were three people and we couldn’t quite picture the outcome in our minds. At the same time, we needed our boss to make a decision and he has a lot of emotional attachment to the look and feel of the site, being the founder and all. So it was important to get those designs out.

I don’t think I can recommend the same process to other designers – it really depends what you’re designing for. Those fireworks designs took up several days and a lot of it was thrown out of the window as we iterated from one design to another. But I think that’s necessary in design, sometimes – because the interface is what users will end up seeing and using, again and again.

Sometimes I read articles from other designers and it all sounds really cool and makes you feel that there’s some kind of order or process in the design of an interface. But I find these things hard to use because it’s the designer that makes a difference, not the method. It’s about knowing what you know that works – a process or method can’t save you. They’re just tools.

This might be because wireframes aren’t obvious enough to people.

You heard that right – if people are misunderstanding your wireframes for a finished product, or your sketches for a placeholder for a WYSIWYG dev tool like Visual Basic – there’s clearly something inappropriate about the tool’s use.

I believe some of us take wireframes for granted, such that we see no other way of implementing a product. While wireframes work well for some designers, I sometimes think they take up time and that there might be better, faster, more efficient ways to build software.

Also, wireframes aren’t great for super-dynamic AJAX-heavy interactions. And they aren’t great if you want to break out of the 2D mode, and work with more dimensions (how do wireframe a keypress, or an animation, or audio?).

I remember the first time I used tons of wireframes on a project, and ended up realizing that we wasted all that time building hi-fidelity prototypes just because I felt it was the right way to design an application. Time was wasted testing the prototype because we didn’t get THAT much insight out of it, simply because it was so blatantly obvious – we should have just tried it on ourselves before testing it on other users.

I’m probably stepping on some UX no-go zones – aren’t we supposed to test apps on real users, and not ourselves? Well, I think there are some things which are so blatantly obvious you needn’t waste the users’ time to fix or test. Testing via paper prototypes a la Carolyn Snyder isn’t always going to save you time. There are much faster ways to get it done, if you think through it a little.

I’m not advocating against wireframes. I’m just advocating against getting locked down on a specific method – against “methoditis” – you know, when you start believing that one method is better than another just because.

Basically, you might want to re-think wireframes if they:

• confuse the people you’re communicating to
• take up time when something else can be so much faster
• cut down too many trees

Here are some examples or ideas of doing without wireframes:

• http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch11_Dont_Do_Dead_Documents.php
• http://code.new-bamboo.co.uk/polypage/ (a tool developed by Clearleft and New Bamboo)
• method-acting (see Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences for an example a designer “being” the device)
• plasticine? feel free to add your own examples.

This isn’t technically a food review, since it was part of a London IA “Field Trip” excursion organized by @AliceNWondrlnd. The main attraction of the restaurant was the interactive tables from which you could order your meal from. There are no waiters coming to take your order. They sit you down at a table, and each table has a “session”, during which you can order drinks, desserts, food, play games, change the table “wallpapers”, spy at the kitchen, track your order amount, and some other interesting stuff.

Interactive Tables

The tables are given an immersive environment via overhead projectors and a trackpad on the bottom right corner of the table. Despite the excitement, the table was not a touch sensitive surface – we had to use the trackpad just as you would a mouse to navigate the “hand cursor” to interact with the system. I actually think it would be hard to design a system like Microsoft Surface, as we were resting our palms and arms on the surface of the table and not wanting the computer to pick those gestures up as interactions.

A small menu slides out, showing icons that indicate “drinks”, “food”, “table”, “entertainment” and “service” (I’m assuming all this, because the icons were not annotated with text or mouseover help). Each item leads to other sub-menu items, and they’re fairly easy to navigate.

Making an Order (Remotely)

When you make an order, you select an item from the menu and it appears on your order list. When you’re done with the order list, you hit confirm and wait for the food to be served by a waiter – it sort of just comes “automatically”. There is no interaction between you or waiters between any of the orders unless you specifically call for them.

This is quite a novel experience, but some people were afraid that they might have submitted the wrong order. A waiter assured us that it is possible to revert an order even after it has been confirmed, which is a good thing – but I think the interface could’ve been improved to cater for this – a waiter actually confirmed that this problem happens very frequently.

Placing an order was way too easy, which meant that the bill just kept going up. It was a bit like Amazon’s 1-click system – and it wasn’t obvious at first how to remove items from your order list (you needed to hit the minus sign next to your item in the order list).

Interactive Tables

In between waiting for the food to arrive, the table “entertains” you by giving you the option of playing one of two games (battleship and those picture puzzles where you have to move blocks around). You can also change the “tablecloth”, which was quite a nice touch as that made the whole experience so immersive. You could also view the live “kitchen cam”, and see what the chefs are up to. I didn’t find the “entertainment” options too distracting that I ended up not talking to the others. And to be honest, our discussions weren’t always focused on the experience of the interactions, despite being user experience geeks and all.

Overall experience

Interestingly, the waiters didn’t take long when we used the interface to “call” them. Service was fairly prompt and cheerful, so no complaints there. My only rant was that my set meal was a bit small – I ordered the cod set meal, and it was not enough for my large appetite. Despite this, the food tasted really good but you really end up paying for the overall experience, really.

The table “session” stops once you hit the “call for bill” button. Once that’s pressed, you can no longer order anymore items (unless you call the waiter), nor can you check the total of your order – which was a shame because we had wanted to pay separately. Thankfully, they were able to provide us with a seat-by-seat breakdown of the damages.

The trackpad was okay except when I accidentally placed a small bowl of miso soup on it, and the undersides of the bowl had some sauce so it make my trackpad sticky. One person mentioned her left-handed accessibility issue.

It’s not the only restaurant in the world to integrate interactive order systems. I’ve frequented Sakae Sushi when I used to live in Kuala Lumpur, and they use a more conventional mouse and screen setup. But obviously Inamo wins hands down for sheer experience, food and otherwise.

Visual Thinking for Design (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies)

I was one of the lucky winners of this book from Morgan Kaufmann after I donated some money to the IxDA fundraising initiative. After turning in my MSc Project dissertation, I finally had some time to catch a breath. You’d think that reading a book on Visual Thinking would be the last thing on my mind after losing weeks of sleep to writing… I’m surprised myself.

Anyway, at a glance, this book is about understanding how we as humans interpret and interact with objects and environments visually. It’s written mostly from a psychologist’s perspective, and provides useful references to the theory and science of visual perception, cognition, attention, etc.

Colin starts off talking about how the eye and brain processes and perceives visual stimuli, and each chapter concludes with a set of design recommendations. He gradually works upwards the abstraction layer, dealing with topics like color and shapes, the relationship between visual and verbal processing, the process of “seeing” or “thinking” by sketching, leading up towards how we perceive meaning in a visual world.

I felt that I understood the subject matter a little better because I learned about cognitive science during the HCI course, so readers who are new to psychology may initially find it slightly alienating. I also feel that designers who are looking for design ideas may not find this book as an inspirational resource. I see this as reference material – something you pull out to make sure you’re doing things right, like getting more substantial evidence to support design ideas in problem solving.

It’s also a fairly easy book to read. Despite references to psychology terms like V1, V2 and top-down/bottom-up, the author succeeds in explaining things in simple language, and provides good examples of how the science of visual perception is linked to visual design.

The best parts of the book lie towards the end, and I think that the early chapters act as building blocks that support the overall perspective summarized in the last few chapters. The gist of it is that our mind, eye and body works together to look for patterns in the world, and that understanding how this takes place can aid designers in helping users to make sense of things more clearly and easily.

The implications on p. 172 are a key takeaway:

1. to support the pattern-finding capability of the brain; that is, to turn information structures into patterns
2. to optimize the cognitive process as a nested set of activities
3. to take the economics of cognition into account, considering the cost of learning new tools and ways of seeing
4. to think about attention at many levels and design for the cognitive thread.

(The word ‘cognition’ refers to the “process of thought”, i.e. thinking.)

In summary, this book is worth an investment. It’s one of those resources I will occasionally refer to for clear, evidence-based recommendations for visual design.

Just leave me alone

At this moment, I realize that all the effort I’m putting into this MSc project is going into polishing my ideas – i.e. writing a literary piece that’s able to stand on its own. And while I absolutely agree that bad writing sucks and that we should all strive to communicate things clearly, half of me wants to just give up and do something else – like, personas or wireframes or jQuery.

For one, I actually prefer to build stuff and see things work. And instead on being assessed on how well I’m able to design solutions, I’m being graded on how well I communicate my research ideas based on the work that I’ve invested in the project. It could be worse, I suppose – but it’s a little frustrating.

Sucking as a Designer

You don’t need an MSc in order to build things. But that’s not why I decided to take up this course. I did it because I was tired of convincing people that they need to build things better for people, rather than just building things so that it functions well. So, in a way, my goal was to learn how to convince people about building things better.

But halfway through the course, I realized that I wasn’t getting any better at convincing people about how to build things better. Instead, I was learning to convince myself about how to build things better.

So, really the MSc basically opened a can of worms for me – it showed me just how bad a designer/developer I really was, because I was focusing so much on solving the problem, rather than implementing the solution.

The Sobering Irony of Academia

The question is – did I really need to go down this path to know that? Did the course make a difference in my life? Would it have been better for me just to focus on building stuff and pick things up as I go along?

I think the answer is yes/yes/no, and maybe it’s because I took the road less travelled and I know of no other route. Firstly, all that effort I put into the course forced me to reflect on my abilities and goals, and I think I wouldn’t have realized there were much better ways to implement solutions without truly assessing myself critically.

It’s ironic that this still doesn’t guarantee that I’ll be able to build better things. But at least I should be a lot more sensitive about building worse things. So, maybe that’s what I’m really being assessed about – my ability to judge and reason about good design, which is more than just writing up a good project.

But mark my words, though – I’m going to park Word aside for some *proper* hands-on stuff when I’m finally done with this.