Letters from the Equator

Piolo - the small and simple iPhone 4 stand.

£4.

Makes me want one (the phone).

I just finished reading Giles Colborne’s “Simple and Usable” – a delightfully compact, practical and highly readable book about interaction design. I’m glad the book isn’t one of those books that tries to solve everything about interaction design. Instead, it’s a book from a designer telling stories about his experiences solving design problems to someone who is interested in, but may not be an expert in the subject.

I did find the initial part of the book about design approaches a bit straightforward, mainly because it contained a lot of good design principles I had been hearing a lot elsewhere as well. However, I think it was a necessary in order to provide appropriate context for the four strategies for simplicity, which was the main focus of the book.

However, the main strengths of this book is the way it unfolds. Each page is provides a little story or lesson with a nice big photo next to it, and you’re not forced to dig too deep into theory or complex abstractions. The stories, when added up, provide a sort of perspective about design that’s actually quite holistic. And because each story was neatly fit into one page, it felt as though I was having a conversation of sorts, with the author narrating his experiences around this subject.

This is a really great way to explain design, because it’s not a hard science, but neither is it completely subjective. When I was fairly new to design, one of the hardest things to understand was how designers think and work. There are a ton of design books out there, many of them are either too technical, too sublime, too visionary, or a combination of the three. I still find that as a practicing designer now, we don’t talk enough about our experiences in doing design and fetishize outputs and ideas all too much.

It’s hard not to recommend this book to anyone. I really think it’s a very usable book, and it’ll be a staple on my bookshelf to remind myself of the little things that I need to consider when I think about my work.

When I first got wind of Global Service Jam back in January, I got really excited that a service design unconference was coming to town. I was desperate to get on board so I tuned into GSJ via twitter and kept a watchful eye on organisers, news, and making sure I got a ticket when the time came.

And now the weekend’s over and I’m not quite sure how to put it – Global Service Jam has certainly been a very memorable design jam event for me, but I think I’m left with more questions than I had before about service design and I’m now really wondering if it isn’t really all that different from UX.

Firstly, I have to be honest that my team wasn’t made up of service designers. It would’ve been interesting to gain some insight into how a service designer would’ve approached the problem. In fact, it would’ve been helpful to be given some tips on how to approach service design if you were, say, from an information architecture background or even an interior design background (as one of our team members did).

So over the weekend, “service design” felt to us like it was UX except with a larger scope… it felt like many groups went down the route of not being able to scope an idea, and it felt like we could’ve spent more time focusing on the design process than trying to brainstorm ideas.

I certainly cannot fault the organizers, sponsors, and mentors for being such an amazing, energized, and cooperative team. Two mentors that stood out for me were Belina Raffy, through her energetic improv activities, and Robin Pharoah, who really helped us get to grips with our service idea of helping teens speak out to the wider community.

It has certainly been one of the most energized design events I have ever been to. Design Jam 1 was pretty energetic and UXCampLondon was as well – but it the combination of the 2-hour review sessions, the full weekend span, the frenzied “times up” bell, improv ice breakers, Shoreditch + Brick Lane, the uber-ambiguous “superhero” theme, and the personalies combined that truly set itself up as the craziest design jam in the world (so far).

So, if I’m right, I’ve successfully the 1st design jam ever organized and now, the craziest design jam ever organized.

In the end – I took a way the fact that designing for services takes up way more effort than designing for an app or a website, and it forces you to really dig deep, go far out, and really engage with people (or find good research that has). All the teams who put up commendable effort did all this and it was encouraging and inspiring to see their work, even if the service outcomes weren’t as comprehensive or pragmatic.

OK so in the end I guess we did end up with a service after all.

When I was studying the HCI course at UCL, we had a module known as “Design Tools and Techniques” (it’s now been changed/modified to “Design Practice”), which provided an overview of design that looked like this:

1. The Design Problem
2. Requirements, Scenarios & Task Analysis
3. Prototyping
4. Sketching
5. Design Judgements
6. Visual Design
7. Visual Communication
8. Interfaces
9. Personas

If you’re from a design background, you’re probably looking at this and going… WTF? Task Analysis? Interfaces? Personas? What does that have anything to do with design?

The graphic design course outline from Central St. Martins makes a bit more sense. I wish we had learnt more about sketching as a thinking tool (not as a drawing tool), about exploration in creative problem solving, about the various modes of working (individual vs. collaborative), about the different ways other designers produced their work as well as the various graphic design areas (photography, typography/letterpress, print, animation, etc.).

However, I actually think that the module hasn’t done much damage. I still see a lot of UX designers use patterns, tools, and processes as a starting point – when we should only be considering those when we’ve fully understood the fundamentals. I sometimes wish we could have sessions where we deconstruct the patterns, tools and processes we’re so used to – just to get at the essence of creative problem solving.

While I don’t discount the value I’ve gained from learning about cognition, affect, organizational psychology, ergonomics… it’s good design that really makes all those skills truly worth something.

And while I’m giving my alma mater a hard time here, I’ve also heard criticisms about CSM being too open and exploratory. Maybe we should get UCLIC and Central St. Martins to trade students for half a year.

That would really mess things up nicely.

Me

A friend

Bicycles

London

Midnight

6 Hours

Photos

A Good Cause

And You

Please Join Me!

I have a problem in that I find it hard to do any kind of work in which I see no point in doing, and this happens a lot with UX documents. Even when I get rewarded for doing it, it’s hard for me to work on something without understanding the purpose and goal of that task in greater context.

Love/Hate Relationship with Documents

While it’s a good thing in design to think holistically and contextually about a solution, it takes up a lot of time and effort – this gets even harder without the appropriate resources to do all the work (researching, ideating, designing, testing, communicating). Spending time “figuring out” a document isn’t really a UX thing, but happens because sometimes I get to the point where I’ve worked my ideas around a design and I need to produce something for it.

So now a large part of my work now involves producing documents. In my previous life as a developer, I did very little of that – mainly because software tends to exemplify the essence of the product/goal, so I didn’t have to explain myself much – the software did all the talking for me. But now, I work in the realm of ideas – and software doesn’t always do a good job of communicating ideas.

UX Documents are Strategy: Influence Decision-Making

I’m quite happy to work with any document, but at some point in time those documents will end up being outdated because they would have served a specific purpose, audience, and time. So, I don’t want to waste a time if I can avoid it. Also, in terms of the kind of business we’re in, the document itself isn’t really the goal – it’s about strategy – a means to make decisions about the final product or service.

But what does that really mean? How do you write a document that helps someone make a decision about a product/service instead of just some mumbo-jumbo wishy-washy fancy-pants thing?

What Can a UX Document Describe?

Well, the more I started thinking about it, I realized I needed to illustrate the obvious and came up with this diagram about what can (not necessary should) go into a UX document. I think the core elements of any UX document can involve:

1. users (or the empathy for)
2. the product
3. engineering or systems (the functioning of a product/service)
4. the business
5. history
6. the future (ideal, goal)
7. building and testing (execution)

The aim of any UX document is to influence the reader to have a mental model of this “overall picture”, so they can make decisions appropriately. Sometimes, they don’t need to see the whole picture, sometimes they do.

The reason we end up producing so many documents because no one document can successfully illustrate the “overall picture”. The problem I face, of course, is which document I should be working on and most importantly, why. So, I mapped Peter Morville’s list of UX deliverables to the diagram above, highlighted each document’s focus based on the seven elements I mentioned above, and ended up with this:

The matrix illustrates a document’s focus, not scope. The reason why I think it’s important to point this out is because of our tendency to start with a template (pre-scoped) and mindlessly “fill in the blanks” and ending up with goo. Understanding a document’s focus allows us to be flexible about what and what not to include in a document, as long as the document effectively communicates what it needs to. In fact, it allows us to be flexible about who the intended reader is – and often times we’re producing the documents for ourselves.

This then frees us to be rigorous about our approach to documentation because:

• we can see how the documentation illustrates the big picture
• focusing, not scoping, helps us avoid writing documents that don’t mean anything

This applies to any kind of fidelity – it doesn’t matter if you’re producing a sketch or a printed poster. The goal of documentation doesn’t change – communicate the big picture appropriately and avoid writing crap.

I find it surreal that I only got back from Hong Kong the morning two days ago, and that it has only been 4 days since UX Hong Kong. Maybe it’s because I feel there’s a lot to digest and I’m still experiencing the conference high, which I think is a good thing. I’ve certainly been in conferences where I’ve felt really deflated, as though the event was a big party and everyone had to go back to their scheduled lives -  it hasn’t been so with UXHK… at least not yet.

Why UX Hong Kong?

UX Hong Kong is the first UX conference (AFAIK) ever held at this scale in Hong Kong. There have been several UX conferences in China (warning: link may be reported as an attack site) and Australia of this sort, but none in Hong Kong until now. I think UXHK, befitting its political and cultural context, sits between the East and the West; and provides a venue for globally-minded, Asia-aware practitioners to meet and exchange views about the state of UX from this Eastern melting pot.

It has managed to attract a diverse list of attendees, such as:

• HK-based practitioners and companies looking to expand and improve themselves
• Foreign companies and freelance consultants interested in Asia as a market
• Foreign and local companies looking to recruit promising candidates
• UX practitioners looking to HK as a potential base (e.g. born in HK but working abroad, dimsum lovers, etc.)
• IxD/design students from HK educational institutions

The conference was organized by Apogee HK (Daniel Szuc, Josephine Wong), a well-respected UX consultancy both locally and abroad.

Talks & Workshops

The format of the conference was a basic presentation-followed-by-workshop format, with four speakers each giving a high-level presentation of a chosen topic to a full audience, followed by a half-day workshop with registered attendees.

I felt the selection of topics were fairly varied, which was good. Steve Portigal focused on the topic of delivering real value from UX research, Rachel Hinman on what I call a-really-good-approach-to-designing-for-mobile,  Steve “doc” Baty and Janna DeVylder on practical means of materializing UX strateg(ies) even/especially without a centralized UX approach, and Gerry Gaffney on the essence of UX and getting to grips with the fundamentals.

I liked the no-nonsense, anti-bullshit approach – I think UX has gotten discredit for being some fluffy stuff because of misrepresentation (uxmovement.com?) and misunderstanding, so I’m happy to say that even experienced practitioners got some real meat from the sessions.

Since I only attended the Experience Strategy workshop, I can only summarize from that experience:

• a strategy is intended for decision making (my take: if you can’t make a decision from a known strategy, it probably isn’t a good strategy)
• deep and broad understanding is required – ask the right questions and then brainstorm the answers exhaustively to build rich models of the context, environment, business needs, etc.
• illustrate the synthesis of those models through visualization tools such as experience maps, storyboards, pain points, and so on – by all means, map those against each other to find correlations and cohesion
• Always, always, always consider the broader context of what users go through – illustrate it, discuss it, map it out – don’t treat it lightly, because it’s easy and common to sidetrack (I made that mistake too, even in the workshop)

Grokking the Event

In all fairness, UX Hong Kong wasn’t a major UX conference. It was intended to be a fairly intimate, practical event for UX professionals, and I think they succeeded very well. I was happy to get to chat with all the speakers during the conference day and the dimsum + informal excursion the following day, plus meeting fellow practitioners from Singapore, Japan, China and other places was exceptionally invaluable. While I love being in London’s amazing UX scene, it was really nice to meet some fresh faces and build rapport with them. At the same time, the event gave me a chance to experience Hong Kong a little bit more than if I was at a typical stay-in conference. Some of us even got a short guided tour of HK culture by Calvin Chan, who was one of the attendees!

I must say, however, that serving fried rice, kai lan with oyster sauce, and roast pork first BEFORE siu mai, har gau, cheung fun, and char siu bao is not very representative of proper HK dim sum… otherwise, I had absolutely no regrets attending UX Hong Kong and would highly recommend attendance and/or re-attendance of next year’s UX Hong Kong 2012.

photo credits: yeungfeifei, szuc

underpaidgenius:

Bob Herbert has uncovered a disturbing trend:

Bob Herbert, At Grave Risk

According to the National Employment Law Project, a trend is growing among employers to not even consider the applications of the unemployed for jobs that become available. Among examples offered by the project were a…

I had a free day to myself today, so I thought I’d laze around the internet looking for interesting stuff and ended up spending the whole day immersing myself with the insane amount of stuff that’s been posted on the interwebs about Interaction 11 in Boulder, Colorado.

After 5 pages of sketchnotes, I’m still not done yet. The sketchnotes have certainly helped me digest and really synthesize the talks – it’s almost like being there, plus I can do background research about the speakers and certain topics at my leisure. I’m so glad that people are putting all this stuff out. If I don’t manage to get to Dublin for Interaction 12, I won’t know what to do with myself.