Month: November 2012

Start-ups face myriad challenges in their initial formative years (or months, actually ;-) … Raising money, validating concepts, ensuring the right killer feature(s), making sure the code is robust, and increasingly, having a persuasive, engaging design that speaks to quality and trust as they introduce a new brand to the world. Indeed, design matters for sure.

From a UX perspective, however, “design” is way more than just colors, fonts, and style treatments (which are all important). “Design” necessarily involves a diligent, thoughtful translation of that beginning “felt opportunity” towards a viable “live product”, ensuring proper fit with the target audience and market situation. To break it down further, there are multiple steps along this translation…and things can get lost or confused, due to lack of proper focus and/or understanding.

Felt Opportunity: the initial vague, fuzzy, nascent notion that something in this domain (healthcare, finance, elder care, child education, etc.) can be improved, ascertained via personal experience with a routine activity, like comparing hotel prices or monitoring server performance or dealing with senior adult care.

Concept Solution:  a rough demonstration of how your product/service solves the issue in a compelling manner.

Business Model: thoroughly detailed (and visualized) statement of market value creation and making money! What’s in it for the investors, customers, users, etc. and how is that achieved with sound growth plans, etc. Creating and capturing and delivering value, particularly returns for investors…

UX Model: combining your primary personas and core scenarios into a well-considered articulation of the service and system elements, flows and activities, critical ecosystem of parts, delivery plans, device use, into a nicely visualized statement. A corollary to the Business Model above.

UI Expression: how is the UX model expressed in the UI in an intuitive, meaningful way that’s technically feasible per platform and device targets. Also, the key patterns and elements and components that will enable this to be a lively interface worthy of use, both satisfying and delightful. 

Live Product: the final vision made real, in actual pixels and code and usage metrics, all validated and iterated cyclically as part of a successful, ongoing product lifecycle and business plan, going forward. And still retains the original “spark of passion” of the felt opportunity, or maybe pivoted accordingly into a new direction via validated learnings along the way. (That’s ok too! Part of the game of startup life…)

There are many more steps, but these are the broad brush strokes that I’m focusing on for now, which could be very well happening in levels of simultaneity. How is the vision translated into something real along the way? It takes conversations and collaborations, with clear statements of intent along the way. Understanding that intent, really chewing it up and spitting it out and recombining all over again for each area. And along the way, you may mess up or realize the translation isn’t working out, gotta go back and revisit…and then you really pivot ;-) Not easy, a truly unenviable challenge, but hugely rewarding if all goes well. 

I’ve often written about the value of rapid prototyping your designs, with an edge towards going high-fidelity quickly so you can glean more accurate feedback from target users, which cycles back into the product design process. There’s also ample value for going low-fidelity too, particularly with rough physical prototypes, made with found materials in the studio, a la Stanford d.school :-)  

I’ve recently been assigned to a UI project exploring various forms of “multi-modal” interactions across devices (phones, tablets, laptops, large HDTV, roaming robots, etc.). There’s understandably much debate around what constitutes the best interactions (voice, touch, gesture, etc.) given the variety of contexts and assumed purposes or core tasks to be completed. Much of that debate gets captured on whiteboards and nice Illustrator diagrams. Lots of sketching ensues of the device screens and possible UI affordances and behaviors. 

But that’s just all very… theoretical. You’ve got to get physical fast. Make physical models of the devices and actively “act out” the interactions…in effect, dramatizing the prototype using “Wizard of Oz” staging techniques or simply “Bodystorming” (Ugh, I hate that word actually…it’s just acting. We all did that as kids!). So why is this helpful?

Drawing sketches, while necessary to get warmed up thinking about and probing the problem space, is actually rather inaccurate for helping to inform tangible decisions impacting the shape and behavior. You’re having an internal debate of how things may or may not function in actuality. Things do get foggy up in the ol’ noggin!  Even the most expert visualizers (who are surgeons, by the way…it’s true!) train and practice with real physical models to test their assumptions and verify actualities. There’s a valuable, rewarding, memorable learning and understanding that happens via the hands, feeling out the materials and textures and angles/joints/connections of physical pieces, separate from the ephemerality of animated pixels. 

Other benefits to physicalizing your prototypes:

* Forces you to consider posture, position, proximity, with your whole body and body space, as well as entire environment. As Raz Al Gul said while mentoring Batman (Bruce Wayne), “Always mind your surroundings!” ;-)

* Alerts you to possibilities, discovering pros/cons as you see it acted out, particularly with gestures and mixed modalities of interactions: In the car, in a cubicle, in a loud busy cafe, on a crowded bus, etc.

* It’s fun! there’s something very collaborative and engaging about creating rough models that folks can play with, poke at, shake around, and try things out. We “know” it’s all fake but can lead to novel discoveries and trigger associative ideas in other peers’ heads, per their unique experiences. 

* You can put them in the hands (literally) of other people, like your target users for initial conceptual high-level evaluations to see if you’re on the right track. And, this leads to great conversation fodder, as users love to play with them, hold and manipulate the artifacts, suggesting other ideas!

Finally, dramatizing also helps communicate your ideas robustly to remote development teams: just record short video clips on your smartphone (using your peers as hand models ;-)  and send along with some verbal commentary. Static sketches simply don’t do justice for conveying complex, multimodal behaviors. You gotta build quick prototypes, to illustrate the intent, and gather support for your ideas.