Design / Redesign

Porsche 914-6 Monterey

2007-04-02T13:00:00.000-04:00

Not the Monterey! That's what the mechanics at Specialty Motorwerkes will say when they hear its going away. Anyway, that's what they always say when it shows up as well ...

Yes, the 1973 914-6, worked on since 1988 and sporting Ferrari's Fly Yellow since 1993. Multi-year autocross champion, great HP/weight ratio of nearly 1/10 (~190/2000 lbs. empty). I keep trophies, but plenty of parts to go with car (struts, 911 calipers, torsion bars, etc.)

Handling, lateral g, and SOUND of this car has to be experienced. The picture shows the max lean in a fast corner.

914-6 conversion, clean 1993 - Autocross & track champ, street legal. Beach Boys Monterey body w/ 930 airdam, slant nose, 916 valance, box rockers, Euro lights. 2.7 CIS w/ upgrades (fuel, injection, tensioners, headers, oil tank. Full welded cage, Momo seats, wheel, Rennline pedals, shifter & linkage, rebuilt 901, 930 axles, S alloy brakes, 911 struts, bars, stiffeners, CamberTruss. Bartosh leather dash & 911 gauges, 911 door inserts. Fuchs 15" Kumhos.

Featured in 1993 European Car. See the article images: Page 1 Page 2

The original conversion was done by Mark Bartosh of SoCal, who had done a nice job of making a 914 touring car for his wife. Mark made 914 kits, and his shop also made the custom leather 911 gauge set dash, and the 911 style door inserts. Its a cool interior, with Rennsport pedal set, good shifter kit, Momo seats and D wheel, 5 point harnesses.

What else can I add quickly - the custom cage is a work of art, welded and gusseted, with a Chromoly hoop. The chassis has some stiffening from the stiff kits, but not all. One of the early adds was the Camber Truss to stiffen across the rear shocks. The shifter has been worked with short-throw and bushings, its as good as a 73 gets, except for the usual first gear stiffness.

The body is a one-off Monterey slant-nose cabrio style from Beach Boys Racing, like the feature show car built for the 1992 Monterey Porsche Parade. Its a stock 930-type nose, rear flares are cut from an SC and welded in, and the 916 valance. Euro lights were originally with the car.

They sold one set of pieces outside the shop, and I got it and ran the car since 1993.

Its a dry-sump 2.7 CIS engine, no mods - just updated chain tensioners and fan, blueprinted injectors, Euro fuel distributors, custom distributor curving. The car always starts right up after a winter sit, its very drivable and torquey. I've never drag-started it to get a true 0-60, and have never calculated true HP. It could use an LSD - but the 930 driveshafts hold up pretty well.

The conversion includes strong 5-lug hubs and real Fuchs 15" alloys, with 225/50 Kumho's all around right now, which was a mistake (in search of even more oversteer, as if needed!) Suspension is not radical - a stock rear bar, 23 mm front torsion bars, 21 anti-roll bar. 1990 911 struts, early 911 S alloy calipers. 930 steering rack, bump-steer adjusters.

Oh yeah, the wipers don't work - motor gave out, and i rarely drive in the rain with being an open car. I just outdrive the rain, or trailer it if needed. The fuel sender has never worked perfectly either, or the VDO clock, but they sit in the dash with working wiring which I sorted out years ago. All the critical gauges are OK, brake and headlights operate just fine.

$13,250 Email me: (peter@poetics.org), look up my phone #, or contact via blog post.

Why I haven't been here for some time.

2007-02-18T17:34:00.000-05:00

I have a new blog called Design Dialogues on Wordpress.

The Blogger service "lost" my blogs during their December re-launch of Blogger. My wife Patricia's blog (http://slowlearning.org ) was affected as well, but I literally lost my access to editing the blog. Perusing other blogs to see what I could try to reinstate my service only revealed I was not alone, it was a major bug that gave the appearance of having no existing blogs.

And as you'd expect with Google, there is no customer service for their free service. (Maybe only for advertisers ...)

Patricia and I did some research and found Wordpress to be a great fit for her blog - Slow Learning. so I followed suit. The real driving factor was the opportunity to shape the new blog around the new venture of Dialogic Design, both the practice and the business. Since the scope of dialogic design embraces my design values and it conceptially integrates design tools and outcomes, its the overarching theme that finally lets me rail on social, political, media, and large system design without compromising the original focus on my "day job" professional practice of user experience research.

Thanks for visiting, and please change your feeds accordingly!

Tao of Dialogue

2006-12-12T12:30:00.000-05:00

Lao Tze imagined a way of serving others and giving up your own ideas:

In caring for others and serving heaven,
There is nothing like using restraint.
Restraint begins with giving up one's own ideas.
This depends on Virtue gathered in the past.
If there is a good store of Virtue, then nothing is impossible.
If nothing is impossible, then there are no limits.
If a man knows no limits, then he is fit to be a ruler.
The mother principle of ruling holds good for a long time.
This is called having deep roots and a firm foundation,
The Tao of long life and eternal vision.

Working in Dialogue means giving up your role as expert and engaging with all others as if they were the only voices that matter. Dialogic design is our process of designing social systems and complex services in participatory design dialogue.

Dialogue enables people to listen to each other on issues of common concern, going beyond what they personally think is important, to find common roots the deep issues that dynamically influence their situation. Informed with the knowledge of what is really driving their situation, people move forward with enthusiasm and commitment, working together in a designed future co-constructed by dialogue.

We bring the Structured Dialogue Process (SDP) to the table to facilitate deep and disciplined dialogue. SDP honors individual autonomy in the group dialogue, respecting everyone’s words, and allowing their careful clarification. It does this in such a way that every stakeholder participant is on an equal level. Hierarchies of power, expertise, and personality are marginalized. When everyone has submitted their answers to a triggering question and clarified them, the tension goes out of the room as everyone feels that they have been heard. The group has formed in mutual respect and with an agreed upon vocabulary.

The intellectual underpinnings of our approach to Dialogue can be found in the work of the following thinkers:

Socrates Socratic Dialogues

H-G Gadamer Horizons of Understanding

H. Ozbekhan Toward a general theory of Planning

J. Habermas A Dialogue on 9/11

David Bohm Dialogue - A Proposal

J. Warfield Galleries of Interactive Management

Aleco Christakis A People Science

Opportunity Overload

2006-11-18T11:20:00.000-05:00

As cognitive / usability researchers we have been interested in information overload for a long time. For me, at least since experiencing the info-whelm of an undergraduate, and realizing that it would only get worse. (And that was long before email!) As the online experience consumes more of our attention and with it our time, all of us notice the acceleration of overload. And with very little guidance from research, we are left with a range of practical time-management options from the Pickle Jar to scheduling your email. But none of these address the fact of information overload, which threatens to significantly diminish the value of the web and email. As demonstrated by the situation of too many choices.

Jared Spool recently posted (and podcasted) an interview with Barry Schwartz where they discuss his book and the recent line of research into "choice overload," which starts off with the Iyengar and Leeper Jam Study:

"... that showed when you present 30 flavors of jam at a gourmet food store, you get more interest but less purchasing than when you only show six flavors of jam. All of a sudden, it became an issue, or at least a possibility, that adding options could actually decrease the likelihood that people would actually choose any of them. More and more, because of that study, people have actually tried to study it in the wild, in the field, by getting companies to vary the variety that they offer and tracking both purchasing and also satisfaction. So that’s starting to happen, but there are not very many papers that are actually published on that. This whole line of work is only about five years old."

There may be a common phenomenon underlying choice and information overload. Neither of these surfeits of stuff are problematic unless we're interested, unless there's an opportunity. Since information is neutral until deemed interesting, information overload is not problematic until we admit ever-larger boundaries of interest and attention. When we overwhelm short term memory and task attention, we're forced to stop and change the focus of attention. The same with choice - I don't care whether there are 5 jams or 30 unless I really want jam. Otherwise, like the overload of celebrity stories in the public media, the overload is easy to ignore.

Once we evaluate email and user experience with the concept of opportunity overload, the angle of insight shifts from technology itself to the idea of value. While 90% or more of all my email I could ignore, I also have extraordinary opportunities presented by way of this communication channel. Not only most of my consulting projects, but collaborations, new tools, great ideas to work with, answers to questions I did not think to pose. Its opportunity "push," with the Web as opportunity "pull," a nightmare of opportunity overwhelm if you let it.

As a research issue this interests me as it entails hermeneutics (individually and not externally interpreted) and economics (as in the cost/value of opportunity). We attend to the extent we are emotionally engaged with the perceived value of the opportunity represented by a choice (a product or a message in an email). But attention is only the intial draw. There are significant cognitive requirements demanded in processing the value (what is this worth to me? How cool is that?) and choice (Which one do I want, or is it worth my time to evaluate further?).

To finally make a decision may require additional learning (which one really is better? do I know enough to choose this opportunity? What are the costs in time and lost business/opportunity?). It may require communication (who should I ask about this? Wouldn't Nick want to know about this?) Next thing we know, the day is gone!

So nobody except Miles the Marketer seems to be onto opportunity overload. (And Miles means to make you money, and I don't, so go there if you want marketing opportunities!)

Researching Activity, Designing for Activity

2006-10-30T13:16:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about Don Norman's articles (Activity Centered Design) a lot recently, because of his influence on a lot of non-designers who read his pieces and start thinking along these lines. That is a lot of leverage, and we can all learn and benefit from that. He picks up on the right emerging trends and gives them a good push into broader awareness. Now it's up to all of us to make the memes sing! Which gets me into some follow-up on activity.

If we are to design to activity, then what IS activity? Is it a type of task, such as setting up and completing a stock purchase? Is it an ongoing series of inter-related work activities, such as the "activity" of software development? (Coding a single program?) Who should define what the activity is that we are designing to? The designer? Or the person engaged in action?

In activity theory research the identification of activity is not straightforward - the specification of an "activity" is not activity-centered itself, as the coinage of activity-centered design suggest. The components of activity - action and operation - seem better defined, and they are observable. Activity and its context, not so much.

Activity is based on purpose and motive, what the Soviet school calls "object." Read "object" as "end result" plus "motive" and that's what activity design should be centered on.

This requires pre-design research into the activities and context of action. It is not user-centered, because there is no "thing" yet to be a "user" of. This pre-design research into activity conflicts with Don's other recent and influential essay, "Why doing user observations first is wrong." If you are doing activity-based design, based on activity theory, you have to conduct "user research" before designing to activity. I put that in quotes, because, more specifically, this is research into the unit of analysis called activity from the a person's perspective, a person that we hope to recruit as a user once done with our design.

These "levels of activity" are confusing, especially to the instrumental thinking of American industrial tradition, from which user experience is derived more than we might imagine. But they are valuable in identifying the most critical components of a user's practice and their information use cycles related to that practice.

The activity of "centered" should be based on the person engaged in work, not on a task or function we believe we are designing to. In product design, we always already have a set of resources in mind - a product concept, a labor-saving tool, a body of valuable content. These resources are typically the starting point for what WE consider "activity" to be, and our prior work with these artifacts may bias our ability to formulate the big picture, the activity and its purpose and outcomes.

Failed KM: Less technology is more

2006-10-29T14:57:00.002-05:00

Something I've been working on:

Failed knowledge management initiatives are common, if not legendary. Obviously failures are not as widely publicized by firms as successes, which are often merely those projects succeeding by fact of their completion. From the very start, KM technology suffered difficulties with organizational adoption and business purpose. Chae & Bloodgood (2006) report a meta-analysis of KM-related initiatives (including IT and organizational change initiatives), finding more reports of KM failures than success. Also citing Malhotra (2004) and Mertins et al (2001), they report a study across more than 1200 European firms that fewer than ten percent were satisfied with their KM initiatives.

Some critics in information science consider the appropriated concept of knowledge in KM as a meaningless glorification of information. Wilson (2002) exhausts the literature in a critical meta-analysis deconstructing the value and meaning of knowledge as found in peer-reviewed KM articles. He finds no relationship between the Polanyi (1967) concept of tacit knowing and the framing of knowledge across the business and information systems literatures. If Wilson is at least partially correct in his analysis, the emphasis on knowledge as a stock/resource may be misleading and widely misinterpreted. He places blame on its highly-visible adoption by management consultancies and the original Nonaka research itself (for misconstruing Polanyi). However, Wilson and other critics also miss the context within which the Nonaka work is represented. The Nonaka knowledge-creation cycle has been lifted from its "knowledge-creating company" and widely used as a general purpose model of organizational knowledge management. Knowledge creation is not a general process applicable to all organizational functions.

Simple explanations readily appear for the failure of KM to take hold. Our management theories of knowledge may be wrong, from Nonaka (1991) to Chae & Bloodgood, (2006), untenable and untested. The focus on KM technology may misdirect valuable organizational attention, preventing organizations from implementing valuable knowledge management theory. Or organizations generally lack the thoughtful leadership necessary to deploy organizationally-centered knowledge management, a critique that emerges between the lines in Nonaka's own explanations of the cross-cultural differences between KM as found in Japan and the U.S.

Knowledge Management as technology cannot resolve or address the paradox of knowledge strategy. In the concept of knowledge strategy, managers recognize the competitive advantage of organizational knowing and learning, guided by strategic goals and constituted in effective internal processes. The paradox emerges when executives envision the strategic value of developing knowledge as a resource of the firm, but have no control, accounting, or valuation of knowledge as an actual asset. The top-down vantage point of (traditional) strategy is unable to generate knowledge exchange within an organization, unlike the control of other assets. Simply put, knowledge does not function as a strategic asset (Venkatraman and Tanriverdi, 2005), it cannot be sold or exchanged like a building or plant. Strategically, firms following this model may operate from an unworkable theory.

Nov. 27: Dave Snowden in Cognitive Edge recently answered the musical question from the 2006 KM World: Is KM Dead?

One of the questions at KM World was the now familiar one question: Is KM dead? My view for about two years now is that it is on its last leg as a strategic movement (otherwise known as a fad) in management. We also have that infallible predictor that a fad cycle is coming to an end: government adopts it as industrial best practice.

Now don’t get me wrong, the objectives of KM theory and practice persist and will continue to be of great importance. They are clear, simple and important and can be summarised as follows:
To support effective decision making
To create the conditions for innovation

I still find the "strategic movement" Dave refers to was all about IT, and was rarely if ever about informing strategy with orgnanizational knowledge

(More later)

Transformation Design

2006-07-27T18:03:00.000-04:00

It may not be quite a movement, but things are moving in that direction. Thanks to the RED team of the UK Design Council, we may be hearing ever more about the interdisciplinary field of "Transformation Design."

RED is a 'do tank' that develops innovative thinking and practice on social and economic problems through design innovation. RED challenges accepted thinking. We design new public services, systems, and products that address social and economic problems. These problems are increasingly complex and traditional public services are ill-equipped to address them. Innovation is required to re-connect public services to people and the everyday problems that they face.

RED harnesses the creativity of users and front line workers to co-create new public services that better address these complex problems. We place the user at the centre of the design process and reduce the risk of failure by rapidly proto-typing our ideas to generate user feedback. This also enables us to transfer ideas into action quickly.

There are few firms that have approached this work in the US. In fact, there have always been very few design firms in the US able to pull off Euro-style Participatory Design, from which much of the social import of Transformation Design has grown.

IDEO comes to mind, with a number of service design projects, including their well-known redesign of healthcare environments. However, the US does not fund a public sector think tank in design such as the Design Council, that I know of. The UK's RED group has the liberty of making excellent use of public funding to explore and experiment in public service provision. Its clear that, regardless of whether these projects evolve into new public services or not, the use of participatory design as social experiement will wake people up.

Microsoft - Innovators or Mystery Players?

2006-06-30T10:37:00.000-04:00

I like The Big Picture for a good econ/market read. I trust Barry Ritholtz - blogs are all about perspective, and if you are not a fan yet, you should be. Anymore, I have the time to read about 2 blogs a day, and The Big Picture is one I see 3x weekly.

So, back from a long traveling period and I have a few blurbs to write. But first, read Barry on Microsoft in Crisis?

Cut into action here: >>

However, I am still an objective observer, and I believe that Mister Softee is not what most investors think it is: They are hardly innovators; rather, they copy other people's work relentlessly, until by default they own the standard. Their products are kludgy, bloated and anti-instinctive; They are hardly the elegant, easy to use software first dreampt up by science fiction writers decades ago.

From an investing standpoint, their fastest growth days are behind them, yet they are hardly a value stock -- yet. (Cody and I have disagreed about this for some time). The leaders of the last bull Market are rarely the leaders of the next. ...

Many people think of them as this well run money machine; In reality, they are very poorly managed by a group of techno-nerds with very little in the way of management skills. Even their vaunted money making abilities are profoundly misunderstood: Its primarily their monopolies in Operating Systems (Windows) and Productivity Software (Office) that generates the vast majority of their revenue and profits. Their Server software and SQL Database make money, but hardly the big bucks of Windows or Office. MSN is a loser, MSNBC is a dud, their Windows CE is hardly a barn burner -- even X-Box has cost them billions more than it is likely to generate in profits over the next 5 years.

Its not news that MS aren't innovators - as a firm, they are an old economy-style monopoly, working platforms and channels that ride on "other people's knowledge." They sink a LOT into R&D these days, so it should be interesting to see what innovations that buys them. Its not here yet ... Please correct me, quickly, if I'm wrong about this. Because to most people this is counter-intuitive, I find they are a great whipping boy in innovation articles. Like this 2002 article in the Design Management Journal: When Successful Products Prevent Innovation.

Card Sorting as Cognitive Method: Categories, Structure, or Mental Model?

2006-06-22T08:45:00.000-04:00

A recent email list discussion debated the use and merits of card sorting, whether and where it was effective, and where it might be misleading to adopt. As typical, I probably overstated my case as email list discourse tends toward fast responses and exposing rough and initial ideas. But consider how well the email list works as a genre for collaborative discourse. Where the blog is more of a mini-article or opinion piece, the email discussion allows exchange of rough and not-yet-ready ideas, getting some quick feedback and response (or not).

When we choose any method, it should fit an overall research plan consistent with the method and its collected data. But card sorting is often adopted a a kind of panacea - Product managers like the apparent quantification of user information models (like it distances the researcher from the interpretation). Designers like the concrete view of user categories a card sort offers. It is not a miracle method, it should not be used in every information architecture situation. But card sorting has powerful leverage if used correctly and inventively. Also, as Don Norman suggests, it can lead us astray.

Don has recently made the point that it guides design toward a path of the user's information structure, and does not capture their activities. He makes a good point that card sorts (if used to design traditional menu systems in cell phones, for example) may indeed locate functions together logically. But, will this organization of functions support the actual activities people want to do? Menus are a poor way to organize vehicle features, as in the BMW i-Drive example.

We need to select card sorting for its best applications. When using it, we should ask of this or any other method:

What are we actually analyzing? Category preferences, mental models, or an inherent organization within a domain?
Does our sample of users really allow us capture and validate these dimensions?

How well does it compare with other methods? Is it faster (and just as precise) to just compare A-B-C versions of information structures and let participants choose the best-fit? Yes, we pre-construct these paper/visual prototypes, but it is a design process to determine the space of evaluation.

How are we then using the data collected? What does the card-sort tell us - must we further adapt and design from the sort data, or do we take the categories/labels/structures as given?

Sometimes we cannot yet identify whether information structures should be activity or object-oriented. But even if so, card sorting may not be the best way to identify information structures. From a designer's (mine) perspective, it has become over-used (a kind of method panacea) and can be an expensive solution for a simple enough design task. For example: For a corporate website with 5 markets and 5 user segments in each, would you card-sort 5 users from each segment to get a fair reading of the user's information space? That's 5x5x5 = 125 x your 20-230 minutes for each participant.

There are some places where it works very, very well. For example, rank-listing by comparing 20-30 features. And clustering and ranking feature groups can be useful, and done quickly. Ranking is very easy to score, and comparable to other ranking data. Such as interaction logs, survey preference data, and revenue by feature.

Then, even if an "object-oriented" design is called for rather than activity, there are other problems with card sorting that I find in practice, and they relate back to theory.

1) Basically, domain experts and customers have different preferences for information structures - which do you privilege?

2) It takes a very large sample to normalize information structures among multiple observations across different samples of the user population. If segmenting the population is important, it can be a nightmare to resolve differences to achieve a common structure.

3) Card sort participants are demand-guided by the card sort options provided. Sorting and clustering are performed on pre-defined categories usually. This is OK if all the items you are sorting are specific and known features to the constituents. But if its a corporate website, "users" usually do not care about the predefined organization labels or elements. People have rival notions for many of the labels we may be sorting, and there's little time to really resolve ambiguity. You can ask people to create their own labels, but "users" are highly variable, and usually people generate weak ideas for new feature labels. OK, maybe one good one per 20 or 30 users. Existing feature, not so bad - its recognition vs. recall vs. formative ideation.

4) People are also bad at freelisting alternatives (as a recall task) - and then freelists end up with multiple labels that must be resolved within categories.

This is enough for now - my intention with this post was to clarify rapid-fire statements made in the CHI discussion list, where much of this argument was thrown together, and in retrospect, looked like a weak argument. Even worse, it looked like I personally disliked card sorts. And perhaps, as with any method, you get tired of the same stuff and want to try new things, and don't get a lot of leeway (time to experiment and develop) in well-defined client projects. So what do you think? How do we advance card sorts and make them interesting again?

Activity and Object-Oriented Contexts

2006-06-21T18:02:00.000-04:00

Its good to see activity-oriented design showing up in discussions, often as a contrast to user-centered or human-centered design. I'm not sure we should treat this as a school of design. It is a context for design, but not a "school" that displaces the decades-old and hard-won position of user-centered design. There are reasons we should encourage both, and many, approaches.

First of all, as a design researcher you find many different contexts for design that call for variations of method, approach, and analysis. A website redesign does not require cognitive work analysis. But to understand the complexity of multiple contexts of use, as in intellectual work in large organizations, theories of activity and distributed cognitive work help us understand the information relationships and structural constraints that trigger tasks. We can design for those tasks in the context of activity. So activity-centered design makes sense in situations where we can really understand the nature of practice.

This is not always as simple as it seems. One of the key issues in Activity Theory (that you hear from the Scandinavians) is that we cannot always know the correct level of activity and context upon which to focus. It may take some time to learn the domain before we know where to locate "activity" vs. context of activity that enables it. And then do we design for activity, or for actions that comprise that activity?

Secondly, designing for objects makes sense in a lot of applications, and is a completely different context of design. And there are information structures where we should design to the object and not activity. For example, searching - search is part of somebody's contextual (and usually unknowable ) activity, but is an action level function - a targeted locating of an information object.

When browsing publications - the activity is the object. IN design terms, it is a type of search of a problem space where we define features for people to find information objects.

In a similar way, think of corporate websites, which are more of an information architecture problem than an activity oriented design. Some firms honestly do have real user activities - such as looking up your account or paying bills at a telecom site. But for the "corporate presence" type of site, who are the "using" customers and what do they want? Do we privilege certain activities at the expense of others? Or, instead, are the information structures themselves the target of "off-screen" activity interests. It does no disservice to say that many firms are right to provide accurate, usable information about their services. Sometimes the only activity on a site is providing a way to get in touch.

Finally, who’s to say that good-old human-centered design, good human factors work, does not include the analysis of activity and the appropriate selection of the design space? I have always considered human-centered a larger context than user-centered, which may encompass activity or object-centered as well. If we do a good job of understanding the functions of the human in a socio-technical system, we will account for activity, task, information structures, and information objects.

Embedded values in process and usability practice

2006-04-11T15:53:00.000-04:00

A recent post in the CHI Consultants led to some discussion about how an organization's values may impede usability practices. One thought was that:

" ... perhaps usability might in some way be in opposition to certain values found in American history. Some of the values that come to mind include independence, self-reliance and a "can do" attitude. Usability people often talk about the problems of convincing companies to spend money on usability. I wonder if part of companys' resistance might be conflicts of values held at some deeper level, in addition to the desire to keep expenses down."

The issues surrounding organizational values pervade much of our work, nearly invisibly, but powerfully. In my research I call these embedded values, which differ by process and practice type. Within the same organization, you will find multiple points of values conflict. These points converge on many areas of process, where different goals, perspectives, incentives, and desired outcomes collide.

So we may often find ourselves in discussion with product managers or usability analysts who desire expansion of user experience-based design, but cannot gain traction within the larger organization. We may be working with design rationale or argumentation for products, guided by very clear user research feedback, finding stiff resistance from business/marketing.

Perhaps some of the values conflicts are larger, cultural values relating to "independence" or "can do" - but that assumes (to some extent) that business people actually have enough empathy with their users/customer to even ascribe such values of independence to them, the users. I think we tell ourselves these "positive" cultural values are in play, when really, its more about the exercise of organizational power within the context of values sets that just make this power easier to guide, down the well-worn paths of processes and organizational routines.

The embedded values I find common in such conflicts are those buried deep within process structures, where business processes maintain a priority of values to other practices within the organization. UCD and UX practices are continually colliding with project management (scope, cost, schedule), product management (product ideation, requirements, development), and software development (Agile, Incremental, Spiral). If you are familiar with Chris Argyris' work on espoused values vs. values-in-use, these are values-in-use, embedded within well-defined processes.

These processes, in effect, hide the actors (e.g., product or marketing managers) and their values (ranging from fairly benign: product control, project control, control of customer channels to not-so: bonuses, financial incentives, implicit and undisclosed management objectives). It becomes an infrastructure of process that actors learn to negotiate. UCD, being a service and a practice, must surpass even cost-benefit arguments to achieve wide adoption in some organizations. It must not only fit process, but must enable some other, often tacit, values to be met for other actors to benefit. I believe such values must be made explicit. For example, if usability feedback became an objective for a product manager's annual review, then we'd see rapid adoption and institutionalization.

I've made other arguments against top-down usability institutionalization because of these dynamics. With an emerging practice, and its values system, you cannot win directly against the embedded values in well-established processes. It takes time, and some bottom-up winning over until the top-down values message will be integrated into the process ecology.

Business innovation: Knowledge strategy and organizational values

2006-03-19T17:41:00.000-05:00

A big topic, one that won't be blogged. After more than 5 years since letting this subject go, its starting to seem relevant again. We have to start these discussions within the organizations we work with. Who else will?

To admit just a bit of context, I've had a proposal accepted to contribute a chapter to a new academic book (collection of articles) on knowledge issues in business strategy. Before realizing there were few, perhaps no, serious academic conferences dealing with this area, I over-wrote and presented a paper at KM World 2000 on Knowledge Strategy: Aligning Knowledge Programs to Business Strategy. Soon afterward, the KM field imploded, not so much due to dearth of ideas, but to the inflection-points of dot coms and consulting firms all going under at once in early 2001 (I was a KM consulting lead for Atos Origin at the time). Oh, and the fact that none of the so-called KM technologies worked back then, and the notion of KM as managing information assets as-if knowledge remains elusive.

What's changed since then? Offshore outsourcing, for one, which has turned KM on its head. I still believe businesses that outsource their core competencies are going to lose their core business over time. My chapter, and my take in 2000 on knowledge and strategy, builds upon the resource-based view of strategy, which has claims to being the best strategic foundation for understanding human knowledge in real organizations. For two big reasons (but there are others):

1. You can only control what you own. We cannot know what the external environment will do, and it misleading to study competitors too closely. Scenario research has shown few teams able to generate strategic scenarios that really help prepare for the strategic anomaly. In lieu of external control, we control what we have: Internal resources, especially the fragile, intangible competitive value of internal, organizational knowledge.

2. Knowledge resources are the basis of "non-appropriable capabilities" that lead to sustained competitive advantages. LexisNexis was thought at one time to be extremely vulnerable to the rise of Internet information services, which would start from scratch, cheaply, make content deals, and undercut the Big Daddy of research data services. It did not happen, for the most part, because of (world-class) infrastructures and dynamic capabilities. They were able to leverage deep, internal knowledge about product development, online services, their paying customers, and to some extent, brand. Which is yet another knowledge-based resource.

But, the rise of Internet-enabled cost-reduction strategies has positioned US companies toward a race to the bottom. Managers have forgotten that the company outlives their bonus packages. Outsourcing may be a good way to make your numbers, but in doing so, firms are only raising profit by reducing costs, never a strong competitive strategy. Unless you have the infrastructure and serial-killer values of Wal-Mart.

I am simplifying here to make a point, of course, but I believe the destruction of internal capabilities will cost many firms the ability to innovate. A capability they may be handing over to India and China, in order to cut costs (in a supposedly growing economy which should do OK without such radical reengineering). These firms are also creating organizations with poor morale, low motivation, cynicism and lack of vision, and labor-arbitraged burnout. These values will persist, and when its time to gear up and build something unique again, the people who remembered that originality and innovation were fragile, important values will have left, for good. And the reputation left behind will not well-serve the rats who failed to jump the slowly-sinking ship.

Mashable! Reveals Ajax mouseclick tracking tool

2006-03-11T13:41:00.000-05:00

Wow indeed. Toronto's UX Irregular's (see their Ambassador Matt Milan's blog here) revealed their anticipation of the Crazy Egg tool they call a Heatmap, which shows the density of user mouseclicks on a given web page. In alpha-beta right now, Crazy Egg should have something for us to see in a month or two. I have not seen a tool like this myself, and it seems helpful for everything from site visual design, nav tracking, remote evaluations, ...

Mashable is quoted in the Irregulars posts:

Wow! Just wow. Crazy Egg will absolutely blow you away. Remember when ajax started getting popular, and some advertisers were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to track pageview stats anymore? Not so! Ajax gives you the ability to track visitors right down to their mouse moves. And guess what? Someone has finally implemented this idea - woot! Crazy Egg is a website tracking system that records every click by your users. It then produces a heat map that is overlaid on your site, allowing you to understand exactly what your users are doing. What’s more, it’s wonderfully designed and astoundingly responsive. Here’s a shot of me playing with the overlay. This one shows where users have clicked, and the popularity of those zones:

The point being, we can track behavior on Ajax sites, using an Ajax tool. Cool, indeed.

Information Architecture and Design's Core Competencies

2006-03-03T11:09:00.000-05:00

Discussions continue in the evolving discipline known as Information Architecture. You know things are happening when we talk about what it is we actually DO, and is it or is it not a real discipline?

This relates to the decades old conversation of "Design-as-Knowledge" and now, the IA-as-Design discussion. See Peter Merholz's recent interview in NextD Journal.

It's interesting to see these discussions continue among the community. It shows me just how emerging and interdisciplinary IA is, and how in its interdisciplinarity its reaching across the several contributing disciplines to appropriate what makes sense to adopt for the practice skills and client needs that drive much of our actual work.

A 2004 article noted in the DMI (Design Management Institute) newsletter received today notes 7 core competencies of design, identified by Chris Conley.

DMI Review Download of the Month: Leveraging Design's Core Competencies

By Chris Conley, Professor and Director, Institute of Design, Chicago

From the Design Management Review, Vol. 15, No. 3, Summer 2004

Chris writes:

Over the past decade, through working with business leaders across industries and developing the current graduate product-design program at the Institute of Design, I have developed a firm understanding of the kinds of expertise that are at the core of design. These competencies, if you will, are meant to be much more specific than the creative dimensions mentioned earlier. Currently, there are seven of them and I am wondering, in line with psychologist George MillerÂs recognition of oneÂs memory capacity, whether the ultimate number should be plus or minus two.

1. The ability to understand the context or circumstances of a design problem and frame them in an insightful way

2. The ability to work at a level of abstraction appropriate to the situation at hand

3. The ability to model and visualize solutions even with imperfect information

4. An approach to problem solving that involves the simultaneous creation and evaluation of multiple alternatives

5. The ability to add or maintain value as pieces are integrated into a whole

6. The ability to establish purposeful relationships among elements of a solution between the solution and its context

7. The ability to use form to embody ideas and to communicate their value

We should be careful, in IA, not to consider our interdisciplinary work as somehow failing to hold a body of knowledge, merely because we seem to have little consensus (I think we actually have a LOT of consensus). Or because we cannot document a BOK (in my experience with other emerging disciplines, such as project management, design strategy, and product management, its best to take our time and not be premature in suggesting we know the BOK yet).

I seem to remember that knowledge (as in personal knowledge) can essentially be defined as "the ability to do." What we know we can demonstrate. The rest is content, more or less. The seven aspects Chris Conley outlines may not be complete, but they are a good start. These are abilities which can be taught, apprenticed, learned, researched, and documented with supporting content as well. Perhaps we should consider IA in the context of abilities, and deconstruct our own tacit knowledge that underlies our discussions.

Its in there, last time we checked

2006-02-16T20:53:00.000-05:00

Richard Danca discusses on CHI Consultants this piece that appeared on ZDNet last year:

"For years Jared Spool has been telling this story: When some software developers asked users what features they wanted in the next release, it turns out that all of the wanted features were already in the current version -- but no one knew. I always thought this was a clever but apocryphal story.

Now it turns out the story is frighteningly accurate!

Here's something from Ziff Davis about Microsoft's latest version of Office that shows the value of user testing (among other things!):

"For years, Microsoft has been trying to add features to Office without them getting in the way of people who already know their way around the software.

(The rest of the article, "Office 12 Makeover takes on Feature Creep" is at ZDNet.)

Unfortunately, the company was a little too successful at making its innovations unobtrusive. In user testing, Microsoft found that nine out of every 10 features that customers wanted to see added to Office were already in the program.

"They simply don't know it's there," Chris Capossela, a Microsoft vice president, told a developer crowd last week. "It's just too hard to find it."

Indeed, Office has become a case study for feature creep--the phenomenon in which a simple technology becomes complicated and unmanageable through the addition of new features. Office, which once had 100 commands neatly organized into menus, ballooned to contain some 1,500 commands located in scores of menus, toolbars and dialog boxes.

Thanks Richard. In product innovation, feature creep (and bloat) are relentless issues. Product managers are held accountable to new product sales, and adding or revising features becomes the easiest way to demonstrate tangible change, if not actual value. But features make an easy value proposition, even if they do not show up that way to the users. What would you propose to do if, as a successful product company, you needed to enhance a well-designed interactive product with a validated balance among its feature set, usability, and performance?

Microsoft "took over market share from all competitors back in the Word 6.0 phase of Office, not due to features (which WordPerfect had more of) but usability and performance. The feature set was leaner, but complete for 90% or more of all word processing tasks. But user interface improvements and "less crashing" led to it, and then Office, defeating every other productivity tool on the marketplace. Not the feature set per se, since every competitor (WordPerfect, Corel, FoxPro, Lotus 123) had more, or even stronger features. Not integration, although a consistent UI was nice. But within-product usability, accessible, findable features with easily-specified actions and parameters.

But from that point on, its been a fight against bloat, and all their innovations have been incremental and predictable. But when you have no competitors, why bother? (Well, Christensen has something to say about Innovation, and in my 2002 DMI paper, they allowed me to also say why I thought successful companies had trouble innovating. My takeaway: As organizations mature, their values change toward stabilizing values, and they lose the ability to "value" radical innovation. This also matches Christensen at his point that businesses ignore the small markets that true innovations aim toward, and have no patience to grow the emerging markets into the bigger ones that, eventually, will eat their lunch. (Patience in selling and radical differentiation are both values.)

Of course, there's a lot more to it than this. I'd love to hear some feedback, because the feature vs. usability conversation always imposes itself in our world.

Technology, Efficiency, and its Discontents

2006-02-15T09:02:00.001-05:00

In our work, especially as consultants, we rarely speak to discourage the "march of progress" of technology. After all, new tech breeds cool work, as designers and developers/builders (in any domain) struggle to make sense of an emerging cool thing or toolset, hoping to be first out of the gate with the Next Big Thing. Since NBT's are often unpredictable within the context of innovation diffusion and adoption, almost anything "new" or potentially radical seems better than incremental enhancement or platform building. But while innovations eventually develop into larger markets of adoption, in the early stages few, if any, follow a regular path to diffusion.

(Remember the OSI 7-layer network, before TCP/IP took all? Fiber to the home, promised in the 1996 Telecommunications Act? The folly of gov mandating HDTV standards? Webvan?)

In our rush to design and build, how well do we acknowledge the social impacts of systems in our domain of design influence? What methods have we introduced that afford us or our clients visibility into the human values of information products or large-scale systems? Or for that matter, commercial websites? Some of us do work for the government from time to time - like the taxes we pay for things we do not support, are we able to see the larger picture of our unwitting contributions? Is everything we do (especially as consultants) "reasonable?"

This introduction sets off my intent in promoting mass reading of the 1992 masterpiece Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, which is more relevant than ever, 14 years later. Perhaps there is undue excitement of the late discovery of such a work, but John Ralston Saul's more recent books: The Collapse of Globalism: And the Reinvention of the World and On Equilibrium: Six Qualities of the New Humanism follow along similar philosophical lines. Copying a bit of review summarizes quickly:

Reason, he argues, has run amok; instead of the enlightened utopia envisaged by Voltaire, the modern West is a soulless machine run by technocratic elites that promise efficiency but create disasters. The author targets the insane waste of our "permanent war economy," the perils of nuclear power, the co-optation of democracy by vested interests, the news media's focus on false events and manufactured celebrities, the "personality politics" of presidential campaigns. He critiques the Harvard Business School's management teachings, profiles such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Robert McNamara and Charles de Gaulle, flunks our colleges for failure to reward creativity and imagination.

It makes you almost nostalgic for the innocence of 1992 - how much more so America, at least, has followed Saul's predictions. The reward in this book is the breathtaking scope of this theme throughout history, from the Inquisition to Ignatius Loyola to Napoleon, McNamara's MBA approach to Vietnam, to secret, backroom decision-making in our single-party "representative" democracy. Sauls' theme is that "reason" - itself- is ideology, and to the extent to which we are unaware of its embedded and systematic rule in our institutions and lives, we are not at choice to liberate ourselves from its tyranny. And, to that extent, we have no freedom of choice in the decisions that matter most to society and culture.

There are significant presaging authors that made convincing arguments consistent with these values, although built upon very different cases and examples, that Saul does not cite. Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (1954), and Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality.

Ellul referred to as “technique” these values of efficiency and unexamined progress, which he said (in Truman's day) held the potential to overcome all social conventions, including political and national institutions. Ellul held the problem was beyond morality, that technique (essentially the unquestioned values of modern technological society) deeply pervaded human activity. “Technical activity automatically eliminates every nontechnical activity, or transforms it into technical activity.”

Moral questions are uninviting to behold, and overwhelming, in the context of such a valuation. What to do? How to decide? How to know what personal values are being violated when social behaviors and systems are so deeply interwoven"? How to respond when those values and one's own self-promises are so vividly detached from the larger scope of social solidarity and deeply-embedded technological systems and political structure? For now, I will continue reading ... and writing.

Agile UX - What about our Process?

2006-01-30T20:06:00.000-05:00

2006 will have many of us arguing the merits and issues of adapting User Experience to Agile software development. Having designed UX processes in industrial-strength development organizations, Don Norman’s conclusion to a recent discussion post resonated with me:

“Agile methods are good. It is where the future is. Learn to modify our procedures to fit - become a team player. And rejoice, these methods care about usability. They want us on the team. They simply won't let anyone slow them down. More power to them.”

But most organizations I know of do not bet the farm on Agile. Software product organizations use processes appropriate to the needs of a project. High-criticality, large user base products remain wedded to traditional processes, even when compressing release cycle intervals. For niche products, lower-volume tools, or new product concept requiring an immediate market splash, Agile practices make sense, and are being adopted side-by-side with traditional methodologies.

Our recent online discussion was spurred by a question:

What kinds of process and practice conflicts are there between UX and Agile methods?

I find no inherent (designed-in) conflict at all. In terms of practice values, there's a strong user-centered (albeit, customer) focus in Agile design. Requirements are based on identified customer priorities. Agile allows for the flexibility over time to iterate a design until the best set of features and interactions are achieved. However, significant differences show up in how a given organization performs using Agile teams.

Why use Agile? Reducing time to delivery is, of course, the main driver. Agile also leverages available skills in a synergistic team. In other words, Agile teams make do with the talent they have, and use cooperative practices to manage design decisions and ensure quality.

But the organizational pressure of this driver places intense demands on teams that are newer to Agile. The conflict shows in the team response to the inherent time pressure of the demand to use Agile in the first place, then having to use Scrum or XP in development, having to baseline code every day and deliver versions every month (or so). These teams are in the midst of learning new process and under management pressure - which offers very little psychological space to afford UCD, especially traditional usability, any entry point.

Who is using Agile? Many firms with large user bases are using Agile in lower-risk projects, but not across the board as a development process. There are many reasons for this. Agile does not scale well to large-scale, mission-critical systems. And it makes sense to continue maintaining highly-stable systems (think telecommunications, industrial processes, military information systems) with well-known, pre-existing successful methods. And we’re not suggesting the continuance of Waterfall methods, even in these cases. Rather than risking moves to Agile, stable and large-scale systems have been “ported” to spiral methodologies, which afford rapid delivery of incremental enhancements while maintaining quality control.

What are impacts on UX practice? There have been discussions and several recent articles on “Agile UX,” and there are certainly impacts on process and approach. There’s not necessarily conflict with adapting UX process, since there IS no established "UX process," except as specific firms have determined as their best practices. UX practices within the frameworks called “process” have to adapt to change as much as software development.

In my opinion, our methods and tools are, or have been, flexible to accommodate many situations. In Agile team projects, what has worked for me has been to involve the product manager in all user field research or usability work. They are able to observe authentic user responses to prototypes and learn directly what features are most important to the user-at-work. Since the product manager remains responsible to customers and requirements, they are literally able to decide on features and priorities while in the field. I'm not saying this is an Agile UX process, instead I am just "being agile" with the constraints of my client and modifying methods to fit the demands of schedule and user access.

How does UX look to the Agile team? The product or project managers are not doing paired-coding/testing, since they are focused on the customer's need. I've used rapid field usability interventions in partnership with the product manager, sometimes a day or two in a field location, scheduling hour onsite sessions with current and potential users of the product line. We work as a trio or small group in the user's office or a conference room, doing rapid debriefs with the client team after the sessions. I usually deliver a topline report within a day or two, then work in parallel time to do some in-depth analysis for up to a week, uncovering any major hidden issues and preparing solid design recommendations (which may be recommendations for a next release, and not the current iteration). UI specs are not used, there is no time to do one. In most "true" Agile projects, requirements are open to change during development - and our field testing alters those requirements. So we use prototypes only, and I will deliver design briefs or detailed feature proposals or wireframes, with the prototype.

Rather than suggesting we should define some sort of Agile UX process, instead its up to us to realize and experience Agile is something very different, it is an "anti-process," a kind of agreement among professionals to play well together. The radical time savings is gained by team design and development as a unified, self-managed small group. Team synergy is generated by having each member of the team performs their role as an individual, and the team's expert, and as a full-time team member. But it only works if each team member is in constant communication, (or at least daily) around the developing needs of the project. That means informalizing our methods to quite an extent, perhaps, but it works well, because the goal is to evolve a product line through multiple increments of key feature sets, not to deliver a full and perfect product on Day One.

Some of my favorite links to Agile methods and ideas:

Agile manifesto

Extreme Programming

Martin Fowler

Alistair Cockburn's Crystal Method

Yahoo Agile UX Group

A Great Reading list on Amazon

My Four Favorite Things, categorized

2006-01-30T10:17:00.000-05:00

Continuing with the "Four Things Meme"

Like a contagion, I caught this bug from Peter Boersma, and now find myself at the blog, perhaps a good reminder to get some fluff on the page, perhaps opening up some space for blogging Important Things.

Four Jobs I've Had

1. All night janitor in an off-Vegas type Supper Club
2. Bartender at Dayton's largest downtown hotel
3. Biomedial engineering (human subjects) research assistant
4. Human factors engineer at AT&T Communications

Four Movies I Can Watch Over And Over

1. Waking Life
2. Baraka
3. Fight Club
4. Lord of the Rings

Four Places I've Lived

1. Milwaukee, Wis
2. Springfield, Mass
3. Dayton Ohio
4. Cincinnati, Ohio

Four TV Shows I Love

1. Daily Show
2. Colbert Report
3. Formula One racing
4. Victory by Design (with Alain deCadenet)

Four Places I've Vacationed

1. Amsterdam
2. Rome, Venezia, Assisi, Maranello
3. Slovenia, Prague
4. Costa Rica (Pacific coast)

Four Of My Favorite Dishes (and drinks)

1. Pasta alla fruitti di mare (with Chianti or Amarone)
2. Killer chili text-mex (with Burning River or other high-hopped Pale Ale)
3. Homemade fish chowder (with Franciscan Chardonnay or Chandon Napa sparkling)
4. Grilled pork loin and garlic mashed potoatoes (with a great Cabernet such as Fetzer or

Four Sites I Visit Daily

1. New York Times or Salon.com for news
2. Bull/Not Bull for market information
3. Huffington Post for political news
4. Google or Clusty for search

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now
These are places I haven't been ...

1. Chile
2. New Zealand
3. Nepal
4. Rio de Janeiro

Four Bloggers I'm Tagging

Here goes:

1. Dirk Knemeyer
2. Patricia Kambitsch
3. Christian Long
4. Keith Instone

Paper Prototyping: When, Why, and Who?

2006-01-20T18:56:00.000-05:00

An extended discussion on paper prototyping arose from a question posted on the Information Architecture Institute members list. (Become a member and join the fun!)

A recent discussion on paper prototyping reveals some pros and cons of the tool. I maintain there are some types of users that respond well to paper prototypes and others that do not or may not. Knowing when to use paper prototyping based on your user/participants is important. While paper prototyping is less time-consuming than interactive prototypes, we usually have limited time with customers in design sessions of any kind. Before using paper, screenshots, or HTML mockups (for example), know what you want from the session. Are users actually creating their preferred features and interactions, or critiquing a rough mock-up as part of an iteration?

For example, administrative personas - accountants and many managers - may respond better to concrete, higher-fidelity representations that show realistic data. For people that work with financial data, often the information design is much more important than the interaction (to their work). They may be less able, and even uncomfortable, trying to relate to the "blue sky" space of alternatives that paper protos imply. On the other hand, people that work with more abstractions in their jobs - people in sales, research, marketing - would be better candidates and could conceive of alternative interfaces and info display on the fly in a guided session.

Other issues I proposed for consideration:

- Task context: Most published studies focus on usability, not concept design. Locating general usability issues in the (same) interaction model is not hard for users to do. Its a critiquing task. But having people design and reflect on a contextual task from their own work, something of importance to them, may be more relevant, and more suitable to lo-fi prototyping as well. Give the participants something real to chew on, some context for their contributions.

- User individual differences: Do users have rich enough background to understand the distinctions you are designing or testing? If you are attempting to generate ideas for improving a design, the users should have enough understanding of task, technology, and technical options.

- Type of UI and content: Testing a corporate website is probably appropriate, but information-intensive interfaces can introduce a lot of show-stopper interaction problems that are hard to catch in paper. There are many times (we) need to observe the actual keystrokes intended by the user in a physical interaction. Same with data - if the data is unrealistic, you may lose users who work on concrete tasks.

Discussion points raised by others in the dialogue, my emphasis in bold. (No names shown for privacy, but these were all interesting, thoughtful comments:)

"While convincing management/clients of the need for proper user testing can be daunting and shortcuts welcome, using paper prototyping as a cheaper alternative seems a poor substitute for a real interactive experience. Users who may be intimidated by the computer, who the author seems to imply are a target audience for paper prototyping, brings up the question whether the data may be misleading for the very reason that the intimidation factor has been removed. After all, the end product will be online, not in a more familiar paper format."

Also, as websites become more dynamic and interfaces predicated more on user choices, wouldn't this type of prototype become less and less effective? This could be used as an internal tool, but then wouldn't this be redundant to storyboards and wire frames?

Given that the term low-fidelity seems to be used as a synonym for paper prototypes, what appears to be in demand from the businesses is mid-fidelity deliverables. There are two identifiable Fortune 500 initiatives to integrate mid-fidelity tools into their methodologies this year.

Also:

First, the selection of your method should be based on what you're trying to accomplish.

I'm a big paper prototyping fan for many reasons, but there are times when other methods are better. (I'm doing a workshop on Paper Prototyping at this year's IA Summit, where I'll discuss this in further detail and walk attendees through the method. You'll even be tasked with creating paper prototypes and testing them during class).

Second, two huge advantages over interactive prototypes is that paper is faster and cheaper. You cannot create HTML mockups as fast as you can paper prototypes (if you're experienced doing paper prototypes). HTML prototypes can be done quickly (tools like Visio support this), but not as quickly as paper ones (don't discount the time it takes to hook up the hyperlinks). Not to mention, when doing an interactive prototype, you have to hook up all the functions to test the entire screen. W/paper, you don't have to hook up anything to test the entire screen - huge time saver there.

Also, every tried to make an instantaneous change during testing for something that was left out of the design? Say, a participant wants to perform a particular action from a link, or action button that doesn't exist. Well, w/paper, you can make it quickly while they're there and simulate an AJAX transition in about 30 seconds. Can't do that w/interactive prototypes.

True, paper won't allow you to log keystrokes, so if you're after that, you should use something else. Also, data has to be simulated (typically done w/greek text, but that's also often the case w/an interactive prototype).

We've found them to be an extremely valuable tool for gathering feedback and testing design concepts. You'd be surprised how much simulation you really can do w/paper when you know how. Last year we even simulated an animated audio player. We had a scrubber that actually moved along the timeline (the "computer" pulled the scrubber along the timeline with a piece of string). It was brilliant. No method is the holy grail, but typically combined methods can get you close.

AND this chart is good, from Austin Govella

On my blog, I compared different kinds of deliverables, from specs all the way through high-fidelity, HTML prototypes:

* http://thinkingandmaking.com/entries/94

You might find it useful for this discussion.

The Originator concludes with:

I generally keep everything in "sketch" mode until the requirements are more defined, so no, my HTML prototypes aren't computer wireframes in such that they also apply brand requirements such as imagery, logos, and as much messaging as is available at the time. They are also presented to the user on-screen. Yet in some ways, yes, you are correct, they are "glorified" wireframes, yet with some design elements built in.

The big advantage of HTML prototypes (to me) are that they mimic the interactivity, at least insofar as the screen-keyboard-mouse type interactivity that I have usually needed to test. Most of the users on my previous projects, however, were very un-web savvy, so the effect of having to use an online system rather than faxing or email was significant to many of my previous objectives.

I'll keep exploring the paper prototype option though. ( ) made a good point about the ability to change paper prototypes on the fly, which cannot be done with virtual mock-ups, regardless of budget or developer availability, so I'll explore that further.

First Impressions Count

2006-01-20T11:46:00.000-05:00

A timely study discussed in Nature and the BBC by Gitte Lindgard of Canada's Carleton University reveals that users have a durable first impression of website design and aesthetics within as little as 50 msec. 1/20th second, faster than a blink, pre-cognitive, too fast to process.

Jared Spool and Perfetti picked up on this on their Brain Sparks, as some may recall, they have promoted the idea of 5 second instant evaluations of the first impression of a website. While a lot of the examples cited (Craig's List, Google, eBay) are very well established

This is a "research pattern" I like to use in almost every usability protocol, as a first task, evaluating first impression before you miss the chance. You only have the one chance to acquire an initial response to a design concept. That chance should be embraced, indulged, then analyzed with all the other responses acquired.

One thing I noticed about these studies is that they are not comparing multiple alternatives of the same concept, which is what we often do in design research. When conducting evaluations comparing two or more alternatives of a visual design used in a site or product, its helpful to balance the alternatives between participants, to control for order effects. Remember to randomize! It is probably more important to balance the order of presentation of visual/perceptual effects (such as a first impression) than for consciously-performed tasks. There is only one first impression, even among alternatives.

Experience-centered Re-design of Physical Space

2006-01-11T15:58:00.000-05:00

As one of the participants in last month's IAI-sponsored workshop on UI Design for Physical Spaces (at MAYA Design and the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh, CLP), I've had a little time to think about some other implications of the workshop and how it might apply in other domains. Peter Merholz wrote up a terrific review of the workshop, which he organized with MAYA on behalf of IAI. His outline of the process and his insights are well worth reading.

There were a few things that stayed with me though - first of all, MAYA's approach should not be viewed as a generic, global approach reusable in any integration of UX with architectural design. The project was uniquely structured to fit the needs of the Carnegie Library, which was looking for a holistic design to solve several problems (as pointed out in Peterme's discussion). Their user-centered design approach accounted for persona types, typical patron goals and needs, and the flow of interaction between 3 "organizers": Space, other people (librarians, etc.), and "categorizations." Categorizations included the catalogs, content descriptions, messages that guided flow within content.

The library redesign project provides an excellent case study for:

Process, as achieved by the CLP and their design team triad of architects, visual information designers, and UX designers,
Product, notable in the end result of a greatly improved physical environment and user-centered flow,
and People, or the resulting experience for the library patrons.

See more shots at Flickr:

While this approach works well for the problem as explored, there were a few design paths not explored in this approach that might be considered in other physical information spaces.

Discretionary use of public space: Design for the itinerant mobile office and other emerging patron types.
The "space of the content" : Design for the content experience, for locating and branching from books and topics of interest to the patron. This flow was left to the traditional library systems.
Future Planning: Design for an immersive, sensor-driven, ambient intelligent space.

I could be missing something here, but if one of the main tasks of the patron is to locate a specific book or article, or to browse certain ranges of content types, the design model appears to miss this opportunity. There are several ways that content could be retrieved and engaged at the point of need, in a sort of stepped-flow of ambient information:

Step 1 Ambient Info: Kiosk display or printout based on recognition of patron and recent check-outs
Step 2 AmInfo: Recommendations of new books on topic, recent magazine articles indexed to topic or author, etc.
Step 3 AmInfo: Online, website: Instant renewal, leading to recommended or reserve queue
Step 4 AmInfo: Recognition response at library alerts librarian to provide reserved books, media, etc.

Another opportunity is found in observing actual uses of the library physical space over a longer timeline. What do repeat patrons do when they show up day after day? A lot of library use is discretionary and not task-related. People have time to kill while waiting for an appointment - what do they tend to do? Does the space support them? (See Peterme's and James Melzer's shots of the Squirrel Hill branch to see how people are camping out).

But another emergent use, pointed out by my CMU colleague Yang Cai, is the use of the public library as a mobile office. Yang camps out with his laptop and cell phone, to actually get work done away from CMU. In his opinion, the arrangement of space for his purposes is wanting - he is looking for a bit of privacy, not a sharing of public space like the Coffee Shop or reading room. Perhaps the library does not want to encourage this though? Something else to observe ...

2006: Resolutions from Bruce Mau's Manifesto

2006-01-05T08:31:00.000-05:00

Toronto's Bruce Mau, of Massive Change, wrote up the Incomplete Manifesto for Growth in 1998. Although those were "different times" from now, in many ways, the precepts boost thinking and inspiration, and prod action in the way we tend to think of New Year's resolutions. I post a few (there are 43) to boost 2006:

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

As #9 says, Beginning anywhere.

2005 Winding Down

2005-12-23T10:59:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I have to wonder about starting a blog - there's no easy way to stop! Instead, it seems better to morph from a journal of developing ideas into a more frequent posts of any ideas that catch my interest and have a life of their own. Most of my "personal" ideas are never posted in blog form anyway, since they are either half-formed in journal notes, or I keep working on them till fully formed. So what makes it to the blog?

Note to readers: whoever some of you are, it would be great to know what you think. People have different motivations for blog writing, but any motive involves some kind of readership. I've perhaps pre-conceived the readership of Desigb/Redesign to be from the User Experience community, other product/interaction design or user research people. That's the original framing of the blog, and its fit within what others have done.

But there's a difference between writing for other professionals in my field of work/consulting, and journaling the kinds of ideas that open toward different, interesting futures. In winding down 2005, I notice what I have been writing here, and it reads like I'm editing a professional journal:

KM World Conference, World Usability Day, (and other conferences)

Recaps of Articles that others might not subscribe to:
- Minding your User's Business (interactions)
- Building a User-Centered Organization (UX Magazine)
- Designing from the User's Experience (DMI Bulletin)

And what occurs to me, reviewing the year, is that many UX professionals will have already seen the articles somewhere else. Its a convenient way to share my writing across readerships, but its not sharing much of the new stuff, the wild variety of issues ranging from alternative learning, cognitive engineering approaches to product design, design of information ecologies for professional practice, concept science and IA, ambient intelligence in information work, redesigning education and eLearning for "humane learning," scenario facilitation and organizational decision-making, and embedded values in organizational life as tacit knowledge.

Perhaps its also more useful to throw out more undeveloped ideas and issues and see who connects.

Portal!: The Game

2005-11-22T17:15:00.000-05:00

Nick Kizirnis and I collaborated on a workshop delivered (for the first time) at KM World 2005 in San Jose last week (Nov 14). Although only a half-day workshop, we attempted to create exercises for simulating the experience of group decision-making on critical portal design process decisions. We learned that the workshop materials, method, and approach worked - but Portal! The Game ... will take a full day in the future.

Workshop materials are posted for participants, and colleagues to find, share, read, and respond.

Key workshop discussions:

Know your business' drivers (industry, competitive) and understand organizational needs
Know your Infrastructure and understand Features
Planning: Gather Resources from everywhere, anywhere
Follow an Agile Process - From Planning, Requirements, through Deployment
Adopt user research methods for requirements and usability
Learn from Nielsen's best practices
Adopt Information Architecture practices for portal design

The KM World conference includes Intranets, Content Management, and Streaming Media now. It has become a multi-purpose consultant exchange and trade show, and has morphed nicely to accommodate the evolution of technology and themes. When I last attended in 2000, I delivered a workshop and paper on Knowledge Strategy. The paper has been republished twice in India over the last few years. (But I have dropped the workshop from current inventory.) In 2000 there were over a hundred tech vendors - this year, maybe 2 dozen real tech vendors, but they have working products and can demonstrate real value. Ones to

Why I Specialize

2005-11-10T16:15:00.000-05:00

(In Industries, not disciplines)

This article was published in ACM interactions Nov-Dec 2005, as:

Minding your User's Business

The User Experience (UX) field has evolved numerous distinctive niches and disciplines: user researcher, ethnographer, usability analyst, interface designer, interaction designer, information architect. There are real differences among the skills needed for these different UX approaches, which I refer to as “skill disciplines.” Clearly, the jobs of UX and HCI have become more specialized, in terms of such skill disciplines. However, another issue is the question of specialization within an industry or content domain. In the past, if working in one industry, such as automotive or insurance, we expected our skills to remain portable across work domains. That may be less viable nowadays. We hear of employers requesting “T-shaped” skill sets (with a deep ascender on the T), with the expectation of disciplinary mastery. So how deeply must we understand the business of our users to effectively design for them?

Why Specialize?

User experience is no longer a general practice of applying human factors principles to software and product design. To some extent, we all specialize in skill disciplines. However, it appears fewer of us explicitly constrain our practices to industry or domain. Rather, most in our field attempt to position themselves as cross-domain generalists. Although many UX consultants claim they can learn a user’s work domain equally well across clients and organizations, there are reasons to question this practice.

One, if we are honest, we may realize we do a much better job at research and design when we deeply understand the user’s work and the business drivers behind their practices. When we work across many types of projects we have insufficient time to build this understanding in a line of business. When we specialize in just a few domains, we have both skill and domain expertise to offer.

Two, we do a better job at UX process consulting with our clients when we understand their industry and the special needs of their users. If we are contributing to an organization’s usability practice, their product design process requires more than generic UX guidelines and best-practices. Different industries and organizations have different user relationships, which may require developing unique processes and methods. Our process recommendations have better staying power when we have a credible grounding in the client’s business.

From here I just list the buller points of the article. For details, find a print version!

Knowing an industry’s state-of-the-art and practice leads to better UX
Specialized domain knowledge makes us more efficient
Domain expertise moves UX practice into business consulting
Specialization can make us more effective at communicating with and influencing our clients
The most useful user knowledge is often tacit and embedded in the domain practice
We conduct better user research when seriously committing to a domain
To specialize in skill, domain, or both?

Specializing is a choice, and it does not make sense for everybody. I have found that between the two dimensions of skill and domain, it often works to specialize in one and generalize in the other. However, from my vantage point, it appears that our field has over-emphasized skill specialization, and de-emphasized domain specialization. I think it is time to shift the balance toward industry specialization in UX. We provide extraordinary value by bringing an objective perspective to design problems, but grounded in an authentic understanding of the business and grasp of the user scenarios, content, and drivers in that industry. We can improve the credibility of our reporting and design recommendations when customers and decision makers are more likely to adopt our design proposals knowing they are grounded in a realistic understanding of their industry and competition, not just the superficial knowledge gained in a single project. We can build trust and credibility to advise at the organizational level, not just within defined projects. Working within a business area develops long-term relationships, connecting to industry networks and communities, expanding the range of value offered. Finally, commitment to an industry may also promote genuine caring, a desire to make a difference in the work lives of people we know well and whose problems we understand.

Brain Surgeon or General Practitioner?

I am not saying everyone in UX should specialize, but consultants should consider the value of dedicating practice to a few areas learned well. In all professions the highest-value practitioners specialize, from medicine and law to accounting and management consulting. The narrower concentrations often demand higher compensation. Having knowledge and personal networks in a practice area increases the economic value of advice, whether in pediatrics, tax law, or retail. In professional practice, domain specialization is a significant strength, not a liability of overly narrow application. And business strategists and top designers usually specialize in a field, such as retail, automotive, consumer goods. Why not in UX?