Interaction

I just got my ticket at the very last moment yesterday, and I was psyched. And then I realized the event is taking place much sooner than I realized – this weekend. Anyway, I’m prepared to go. I sort of have an idea about what I’d like to talk about, although I’m not quite sure I will be talking. If I do, it’ll probably be about getting feedback from people who have used the Kohana PHP framework and what they think about it.

I’m not entirely sure there’ll be UX people there. Probably more developers. But I’m thinking there might be interesting things that will surface related to UX, like gestural interfaces and stuff. Who knows. This is my first Barcamp. I know nothing!

I remember that there was a Barcamp that took place about a year ago in Kuala Lumpur that I chose not to attend. I didn’t think it was going to be as exciting as the Barcamps that were taking place elsewhere. I guess I have this poor impression of the scene back home, but that’s not very healthy.

Need to make a list of stuff to bring.

boon :: Mar.26.2009 :: development, events, technology :: No Comments »

I’m currently through my second and final week of the Design Experience module – where we get into groups and use all the HCI skills we’ve learnt to good use. Our job this year is to come up with a navigational device for tourists. Our group has decided to focus on museums, and we’ve gone through user observation, interviews, personas, paper prototyping, etc. – and even though we’ve  we still have debates over whether we’re doing the right thing, sometimes.

Is this the experience of design?

I sometimes think about what’s essential past the logical reasoning for the way we design interfaces. One thing we don’t get very much in a HCI course like UCLIC’s is studio work. Unlike many design schools that function like apprenticeship workshops, we only get hands-on work during project days – hardly a chance to overcome our shyness of doing fieldwork and working with real users.

Last weekend, when I was interviewing some tourists at the British Museum, I found it really hard to come up with the right questions and help people feel at ease. I got better with each try, but it wasn’t easy. I learnt a bit of how fieldwork is done from books like “Tricks of the Trade” by Howard S. Becker, and from papers on design ethnography – hardly a core part of conventional HCI courses.

I also observed that our groups tended to talk more than sketch, prototype, wireframe, or interview. We have lengthy discussions about definitions, the usefulness and appropriateness of methods, whether certain methods were applied properly, or whether they should be used at all. Our modules constantly focus on the value of ‘reflection’, and I’m now wondering if there’s such a thing as ‘over-reflection’ vs. just-get-the-damn-thing-done… just my way of saying talk after doing rather than before.

It’s hard to learn everything in a year, but I’m getting the feeling that all this learning is preparation for even more learning – of the hands-on kind.

Already, I’m applying this as a programmer with a small startup company I’m doing some part-time work for. We hold one-day sessions where we sit around a kitchen table and get stuff done. If we need to draw references from books or methods, we do it. Otherwise, whatever works gets applied. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it needs to function first. We’re applying design as we produce our work, not before.

Side-rant:

Recently, there’s been some debate over what interaction design is (or isn’t). Does it really matter? Is this a concern because we’re trying to establish an industry, and that we need to formalize our reputation with our clients? Maybe we still call ourselves programmers, or graphic artists, or project managers – but we do a good job of it,  because we understand more about the way things work the way others can’t. The terms, ‘usability’, ‘user experience’, ‘information architect’ and the like seem to be transitional. Who knows what businesses might call UX practitioners in 5 years time?

I do hope that in due time, more people are aware of practitioners who apply user-centered solutions for interactive systems. But it involves us going out, interacting with industry and users, and solving their problems – rather than poring over books and figures.

boon :: Mar.24.2009 :: books, design, interaction design, mobile, user experience :: No Comments »

I have a feeling that my group is suffering from a type of paralysis that makes it hard to produce sketches. But sketching is exactly what we need to do. We’re almost halfway through our two-week intensive Design Experience module, where we have to come up with a navigational device for tourists and present our work in the form of a poster. And the only way we’re going to arrive at a design is by sketching it out.

But I have a feeling that some of us feel that sketching should be a “finalized” output. That one or two should be fine. And we spend time instead discussing what the sketch should look like rather than actually doing it.

Then, I stumbled across this post on metacool, and it gave me a sense of comfort that design isn’t about being as good as someone else or something else. In fact, there are probably a ton of stuff that expert designers have produced before stumbling upon “the right one”. Sometimes, we just need to get over ourselves and get stuff done.

That being said, sketching is an art, not a science. I’ve used it in at least these following ways:

• to understand high level requirements
• to visualize types of designs
• to visualize ways of presenting information
• to illustrate flow and sequence
• to illustrate interaction
• to provide contextual  background
• to highlight portions of a design
• to consolidate designs together
• to tell a story

There are probably a million other things you could do with sketching, and that’s the point. It’s a visual language. Think about the million and one ways you could say “hello”, and try to put that as a sketch on paper.

I guess I consider myself lucky that I got into comics at a very young age, not just reading them, but drawing my own comics. Sketching was just part of the whole process. It does takes practice, and after the millionth time you’ve drawn a wireframe with pencil and paper, you’re not going to ask the person next to you – “so, how do I do this?”.

So, I guess I should get on with it.

boon :: Mar.20.2009 :: design :: No Comments »

I started my first web log on Blogger years ago, probably in my little corner of the office as a software developer. At the time, it was just a way to post up random stuff about life, but over the years I slowly realized the potential it had to touch other people’s lives (as well as mine). But by the time I had realized that, I had put up so much junk on my blog that no one would ever read apart from myself, I feared no one would ever take me seriously.

So, I launched a separate blog to discuss about more serious things I cared about, like jobs and careers. And then, when I got into the masters program, I launched this blog, to talk about UX. Now, I manage three blogs, plus a food aggregator that caters for two countries I currently don’t reside in, and that can be a lot of work, sometimes. That’s when I start to relate to some people about what blogs are about, and what they should be, and what they’re not.

So sometimes I think it’s a way to post random junk. Then I think no, it’s a way to inspire others. Then, I think… no, I should make it sell – sell my ideas and make me rich (right).

And the plain fact is – it’s just a tool, dammit. Use it however you want.

*bonk*

Recently, a classmate of mine who is a total news junkie (his own words) introduced me to Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News. Any self-respecting internet pundit would know about Winer’s claim to fame (the invention of RSS). He is someone who the NY Times calls, “The protoblogger”. Thus, skimming through his articles, I caught glipses of his “proto-posts”.

Dave’s posts are brief, but packed with insight. They are personal, but not revealing. They are vocal, but not contentious. And I think there is a lot of variation as you move out into the blogosphere, but Dave’s blog is like smack in the middle.

And if I ever really needed to give a good definition of a blog, Dave’s would be it.

So, there.

boon :: Mar.15.2009 :: social web, web :: No Comments »

I’ve just spent the last 10 or so hours mucking over Kohana, Doctrine ORM and jQuery – all of which I really enjoy and think are great, but I’m starting to doubt my own ability to code. Do Javascript programmers spend more time building functionality and interaction, or mangling the libraries and fussing over browser compatibility? While I think jQuery is a brilliant API, I’m always wary of the quality of plugins that people write. Same goes for Wordpress plugins. I guess free does come with a price (like the price of not using Java).

Which leads me to think – can there be a lone UX expert who also does web development? I’m sure there are folks out there who make a living doing this, but the literature treats the fields so separately it’s hard to see how these experts manage the line between the two.

Even with a team of two people – a UX designer and a web developer. How do they interact? Does the UX designer have a head start to come up with all the wireframes and storyboards, who then hands it over the programmer to make it functional? Do they work together in an agile fashion?

I think that as most technical work goes – there’s less and less breathing space for UX designers and web developers to work in very small, efficient teams, unless they are very, very good. I’m not saying that everyone else just sucks, but building websites can take a lot more time than you think it does, and unless you’re designing mom and pop websites all the time, it’s going to be hard to guarantee how much time is required to build good sites.

While plugins and APIs can be useful in increasing speed, they also can lock down the interaction and degrade the user experience if not planned well. Maybe established sites understand this all too well, and take a phased approach. Maybe this is why Flickr only launches a new (but exciting) feature only once every few months.

I used to think that as technology improved, so would our ability to build products. But I find that this isn’t always that simple. In fact, despite all the effort being put in to build so many plugins, APIs, platforms, patterns, components, etc – it still takes a lot of effort to put things together properly.

Thus, all software is bespoke, and are not exactly a lego-like mashup of neatly interfacing components that we tend to think it does.

My only question is, if we are to get better, how? Apart from being willing to devote ourselves to our tools and simply, get our hands dirty.

update: I found this presentation from Leah Buley from Adaptive Path, which she gave at SXSW’09. It comes quite close to what I was talking about. I’m not quite sure it always works out so simply, but I like the idea.

boon :: Mar.14.2009 :: development, interaction design, user experience, web :: No Comments »

A List Apart recently published several articles about Web Education, spelling out the inherent difficulties for students to come out prepared for jobs in the web industry. While I can surely sympathize with that, myself being a practitioner for several years, I can also see how academic institutions struggle to reconcile pressure from the perspectives of research, teaching, and learning.

Contrast this to simply “learning on the job”, there’s a huge amount of tacit knowledge that you can acquire in a relatively short period of time, but only if the conditions are right. Surely, in industry, you do it every single day. But in class, it’s quite hard to teach that to students who haven’t quite grasped what it’s like to work on websites or other interactive systems on a daily basis.

The Interaction between Academia and Industry

The HCI program at UCL tries very hard to give students a good flavor of not just the academic and theoretical side of things, but the practical side as well. And because of its strong background in psychology and computer science, there may be a tendency to think they lack the kind of practicalities designers live by on a daily  basis – but the people who run the program understand this and design does have its place in the program.

Certainly, in the academic community for HCI, design is seen as a black box – as though some kind of magic takes place whenever you design a website. But there’s a whole lot that goes on in the design process. And I’m glad to be given the opportunity to not just learn the skills that are required, but to see the history of both industry and academic trends evolving over the years, which tells you a lot about the different perspectives of the industry, which is probably why we have so many terms for practitioners (e.g. information architect, usability engineer, interface designer, etc.).

However, there has been significant contributions and conversations from both sides. Norman and Nielsen have a long history in the HCI community, whose works are often cited. On the other hand, you have folks like Alan Cooper and Steve Krug who are more known in industry.

Straight from the Horse’s Mouth

One of the things that UCLIC has done from the very beginning (back when it was more strongly associated with Human Factors and Ergonomics), was to have people from industry come in and give their perspectives of what the ‘real world’ is like. It’s an optional session and we don’t get slapped for not coming in, but it’s such a good way to hear so many different perspectives from people in industry.

We’ve had ergonomists who’ve done work on air traffic control centers, information architects who have done work on massive knowledge systems and even simple sites for financial institutions, interaction designers and user experience researchers from Microsoft and Google, all-rounders from small design companies like Clearleft, usability practitioners who do work on game testing…

It’s just amazing to see the spectrum and application of HCI in industry.

They come in different shapes and sizes

Although this sounds like a plug for the program that I’m attending, I really don’t know what other programs are like. I certainly considered a more design-focussed program like the ones offered at the University of the Arts, London or Savannah College of Art and Design. Even my alma matter, the University of Kansas, has begun offering modules in interaction design. But since my background is deeply technical, I went for something more HCI-based, and hoped that it would give me some exposure regarding design (it has).

I appreciated that the different terms (IA, UxD, UX researcher, etc.) meant something specific, even if one person seemed to be doing all of them. An information architect may be doing usability work, but not the other way around sometimes. Also, if you’re a designer, you’re not always equipped to do good qualitative research about user behavior, even though it may be extremely helpful to your work – while anthropologists do this every day. Engineers have insight to how technolgy works, but psychologists are needed to show how the mind works.

It’s during the practice seminars that I got the sense that I don’t have to box myself in a particular category, but that it’s just learning to use my skills and presenting them appropriately to whoever is consuming my services – and to embrace the constantly changing nature of the field.

boon :: Mar.05.2009 :: design, education, uclic, user experience :: 2 Comments »

The duration of the flickers (not flickrs) that are used to demonstrate Change Blindness in the video posted in the link below only last a few miliseconds, but it’s a powerful visual tool to demonstrate just how easily it is to lose a reader or viewer’s attention.

This means that visual clutter can have a major effect on interface design, if not used in a purposeful way. More so  because of the interactivity of sites – how is the site designed for the user’s goals? And issues like whether distraction is appropriate, and even branding and immersion can affect the overall experience for users.

link

Okay, so maybe pages aren’t designed with milisecond lapses of flashing gray blobs, but what if a sidebar that presents new information keeps getting missed? What about ad placements? A good place to start might be theory, so some Gestalt psychology might help:

Closure

Proximity

Continuity

Similarity

Pragnanz

Basically, these funny shapes just mean that people tend to group things together to form some kind of meaningful unit (the closure pattern looks like a circle, the proximity pattern makes the four blocks look like one unit, the continuity pattern makes the user want to fill in the blanks, and there’s some kind of vertical order in similarity vs. a vertical one). There are more laws, but the basic gist is – things need to make sense, and here we have visual representations that are more likely to be in one order than another.

In summary of these laws, the law of Pragnanz is sort of an overriding principle – one to rule them all.

Couple this with Change Blindness, and you might wonder how these patterns may help to either diffuse or illuminate particular elements. Visual clutter can be easily achieved by dumping a random collection of these patterns into one thick slush.

Add to that the tendency for users to leave your site within seconds of not finding what they want.

Caveat emptor. Design isn’t just a pretty thing.

boon :: Mar.02.2009 :: cognition, design, user experience :: No Comments »