Design

Common canvas of distinguishing features

Chris Chase, a neuropsychology professor back in college, enjoyed introducing concepts with the notion that humans are more alike than they are different. It is a useful foundation for deciding what is important to study, fundamentals that apply to everyone or the anomalies, certainly not unimportant, just narrow. And yet, humans are fascinated with differences and in particular our faces and our bodies.

Slavko Milekic, the chair of my undergraduate thesis on child friendly interfaces, evolved the face flipbook into kid-friendly touch-screen interfaces. Earlier on, in a self-study project I implemented the more traditional version of a face flipbook, allowing someone to switch parts of faces but in a more literal representation to the kid books I grew up with.

Reminder: There are too many examples of literal expression in virtual spaces that fail. It amazes me that we tend to not take on the larger challenges of inventing something new instead of replicating what we know.

Slavko introduced gesture and touch based interactions to the traditional computing environment enabling object switching, size shape and position. Certainly one of his successful creations was that of assembly of faces out of a variety of common objects like vegetables. Even at a young age, even when working with vegetables – something often seen as a challenge for children – we are fascinated with the construction of human form.

Move to the more taboo example of human nudity in art or even pornography. There are books dedicated to human genitals – again, the differences. Even when considering the world of fantasy and identity, nudity and pornography depict other people doing things that you yourself could do, by yourself, with others you know and increasingly others you do not know. So why that fascination, if not for the differences. What is it like to see an attractive someone with a certain set of features? It is all about the distinguishing marks, regardless of it being labeled art or smut.

My recent move back to New York City, more specifically Brooklyn, reminded me of the diversity I missed. A great Walt Whitman quote on a Barnes & Noble ad in my subway car read,

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?

That must be what outgoing is, talking to the diversity around you instead of just observing. But, in fact, almost no one speaks to strangers – we even teach our children not to. However, everyone has the pleasure of enjoying diversity visually at fire hose volume in New York City and for me on my morning commute on the F train.

Professor Chase is still right, we are more alike than we are different and while we are consumed by those curious differences, I posit that our fascination exists because our distinguishing marks appear on a relatively common canvas.

Design — 1 Comment
6
May 07

Getting radical with UCD

Mark Detweiler from SAP has an exciting article – Managing UCD within Agile Projects – in the May / June issue of interactions. Last year I used SCRUM to manage a small development team on a high-profile project and one of the lessons we learned was that agile development does not work well with disciplines that are not also agile. The development is managed and completed in a series of sprints (we worked three, 30 day sprints) and the application was twitching before any formal UCD work had completed. This challenge applies to more than just User Centered Design (UCD); accelerating development is only so valuable. Detweiler’s UCD centric view offers a series of tips on making a better go at it, but the truth is this problem needs a more radical conception.

Detweiler offers three iterative UCD phases, Understanding Users, Defining Interaction and Designing the user interface. One observation is that UCD teams need to focus their energy on work that influences the current development sprint. Every profession has more they want to do. Delivering it apart form the product development positions their brilliance it to be ignored.

Understanding users is important, but it is not going to hold up development, so what is the minimal amount of work that needs to occur in order to have the development team be more considerate of the user context. Since we are iterating, maybe each sprint has a refinement of the user definition. One thing for sure, the developers will create a user persona if one is not provided.

Defining user interaction has to happen in a more collaborative manner with the development team. It is often just as easy to code the application, as it is to write the use case documentation. This does not mean use cases are a waste of time, but we need to ask what about the document is going to influence development. The time may be better spent with the UCD professional in the initial task breakdown meetings to help define interactions in detail. Having access to a UCD professional as the development occurs helps accelerate decision-making, but the goal is not to have the solution be perfect – it is to have a thoughtful solution, where lessons learned inform the next sprint’s interaction design. The UCD professional needs to own their role representing their stakeholders, but not constantly checking in to see if they are meeting expectations – there is simply no time for checking in and reporting back at every turn.

Designing the user interface as part of an agile development project is difficult. Short of starting this work prior to development, we need to find the opportunity in having the user interface be quick and dirty. An existing design system can address the developer’s need to assemble the application without having to worry about the overall application style. Assuming that a custom user interface is required, the designers need to be in the boat of iterative design. Save the Mona Lisa for a few iterations from now. If you want to influence this sprint’s user interface, worry less about the pixels and more about the styles. Design elements that telegraph where the design will be going. Development is iterative – it is assumed things will change so influence at each point, but save the masterful work for a time when it is not needed yesterday. Great work often takes time; why pretend it can be done in less?

All of this feels a little sloppy and this is why I think what we need is to revisit UCD and maybe the larger thought of user experience and how it is most affective in an agile development environment. This issue is exacerbated in innovation teams where often prototypes catch like wildfire and suddenly a solution with little to no formal UCD thought is at Version 1.0, causing pause to the value and role of UCD. We need to do more than apply more resource or slow down development to accommodate external dependencies. We need to do more than just the same thing in a slightly modified way. To be successful, we need to reinvent UCD or stop being agile.

Design — 1 Comment
10
Sep 06

Interacting with color

Josef Albers’ book, The Interaction of Color, was my first real look at color. Ever since I have been eyeing original silk-screens and playing with color. In a first exploration, I dusted off my Macromedia Director hat and threw together a simple visualization to explore color blending, mottling and motion.

The algorithm is pretty simple: given the surrounding boxes, average their colors to determine the current box’s color. On a 10 x 10 matrix, I introduce two pebbles to drop in the pond, one is under the user’s control and the other is related, moving opposite to first and controlled by the computer. Each square has determined a random color and clicking on a given box will reassign it another color. The order in which you calculate the average impacts the visualization – consider that each square is an object, completely self-sufficient. To provide a little more interest, I have forced the rendering to occur around the vertical mid-point.

Clicking on the image will launch the Shockwave version.

Design — 1 Comment
4
Sep 06

Tag clouds of today are so yesturday

Anyone living a Web 2.0 lifestyle – using applications like Flickr or Technorati – is sure to have seen a tag cloud. Typically tag clouds depict the frequency a tag has been used within a system. The larger the word, the more times that tag has been used. The idea is that tag clouds are a good indicator of community behavior, which is very misleading.

Tag clouds do provide a navigation interface which requires almost zero learning. Relative size seems like a universal concept for importance. Clicking on a tag usually shows a collection of items tagged with that word. The cloud is often contextual to a given page so digging into a collection is as simple as clicking tags in the cloud.

Tag clouds as we know them are actually not very useful. They are, in fact, a tease – so easy to use and communicating just enough to be interesting. The problem is that just because a tag is used in high frequency is not an indicator for what a community finds interesting. It is literally a display of how often a tag is used within a given context. In many cases the word flower is distinguished from flowers, even though they are obviously very similar in spelling and meaning.

A friend and colleague pointed me to a blog posting discussing how clusters were introduced to Flickr – groupings of related tags without the use of a high-level label or facet. If clustering can be done well, it offers a more interesting possibility for tag clouds. Instead of simply reflecting the use of a given tag, tag clouds could display the activity for a given cluster. It might very well be that the community is interested in food, but more people are using the tags “family”, “friends”, and “porn” so, as a user, you would never know. The use of clusters is an opportunity to reveal the higher level topics a community is actively working with. Flickr has chosen not to label their clusters. You can actually explore Tags / clusters / clusters. However, all you are really doing is browsing clusters of tagged images that are also tagged clusters. A less confusing example is exploring Tags / summer / clusters which limits the clustering to all images tagged with summer, which can be seen as a facet – a folk-facet. Certainly the URL convention makes it feel like a facet, but, is it really?

[digression starts]

Taxonomists seem to be fascinated with the emergence of folksonomies, but are quick to remind you that they are very different things. So, a facet that is applied by a user is different that one used by someone versed in the science of classification. Again, at first glance, Flickr appears to be automatically identifying facets, but is really just generating clusters from leftover tags. For example, look for clusters on Bergdorf Goodman and you get items tagged nyc, newyorkcity, newyork, etc. A typical faceted browse might show a breakdown within that category of clothing lines (i.e. mens, womens, childrens etc). Instead you are left with the breakdown of whatever the collection has been tagged. So, while it is possible to select a tag that might be a facet, for Flickr, it is not a facet, it is a tag. However, I would maintain that a user could intend to apply a facet through tagging, but the usefulness of that tag as a facet is lost because the system itself is unaware of the higher level categorization. Additionally, it would require that the tags, if clustered browsing was going to return a faceted collection would need to be limited to those expected from a faceted collection. (i.e. In the case of Bergdorf, mens, womens or childrens) Otherwise, the faceted browsing would be a mess, worse than not having the ability at all, because there would be no science to the tagging.

Taxonomies and formal faceted browsing are different activities from tagging and need separate user experiences. In that last example, it is clear that a user could intend a tag to have a higher level grouping property, but unless the system understands this then it is in fact, just a tag. If categorization was important in Flickr, I would expect a different interface from tagging to facilitate the classification.

I often ask what the difference is between content that is tagged or categorized “dog”. If I were surfing facets I might have different breeds under “dog” and maybe items tagged “dog” without a breed. If I were surfing tags, I would expect all dogs and if interested in a breed, I would enter it as a tag. Combine the two and I might browse a collection by facet, “dog” and then filter by tag, “flatfaced.” Is this any different than compound tagging, where one tag is ANDed to another tag? (i.e. dog AND flatfaced) Is the difference limited to the intention of the user who assigned “dog” as a facet and not as a tag? What happens when a user applies the same word to both the category and tag? Are they plugged into formal classification enough to distinguish the differences in meaning? Should they be? Should they care?

[digression ends]

Someone needs to birth version 2.0 of the tag cloud where the visualization is driven by the clustering of tags and not just the use frequency of a tag. Maybe someone has. I can even imagine layering user activity of browsing tagged items on top of the activity of users tagging. A fabulous side project!

Design / Innovation — 1 Comment
21
May 06

Green Osmanthus – my cup of ingenuity

A few weekends ago I made a stop off to a Wild Oats Market down the road to explore their options for tea. If I remember right, it was a particularly stressful time at work and tea always seems more soothing than another cup of joe.

On a high shelf, a satin silver tin box caught my attention amongst all the organic colored tea boxes promising added clarity, reduced headaches, cures for the sick and peace of mind. It was a tea box from Ineeka (which means little earth). I am a fan for package design and the box was nice to hold – it had weight and it opens slowly because of the extra think lid. The front label was simple, reading Green Osmanthus Ingenuity. It promised whole leaf tea in a pre-measured BrewTache, something that seemed innovative – the picture alluded to how their system worked a winged tea bag that does away with all the traditional tea steeping fuss. Opening the tin, smelling the subtle aroma and removing a silken bag communicates that you are in for an exceptional experience. You carefully tear off the top of the bag revealing the loose tea leaves. A gentle pull on either side of the bag offers two little wings that hug the sides of your chosen mug steeping the leaf blend in water. The color after three minutes was a wonderfully spring green and the first sip was gentle and honey toned. Cleanup is simple and controlled with a lift up and soft squeeze the left over water is removed from the bag and discarded. The experience is so nice that when it ends you wishing it was just a Tetley tea bag – cheap and wasteful – so brewing another could go unconscious.

Spirited ThoughtGetting my head around my mind