AEA: Seattle 2007 Review

I had the pleasure of attending the Event Apart gathering held June 21-22 in Seattle along the waterfront at the Bell Harbor Conference Center. (big thanks to Involution Studios :-) It’s not my usual kind of conference, with its focus on the pragmatics and tactics of designing websites: css, xhtml, php, grids, accessibility, etc. I typically attend events like DUX, IDSA, IA Summit or even DMI Seminars dealing with broader aspects of design strategy, theory, and process relating to “user-centered design” or “user experience”. So this offered a new view for me into a kind of “web design subculture” if you will…Done by the same folks who do A List Apart, this event is explicitly dedicated to “people who make websites”, with an incredibly level of passion and talent for that space.

Overall, it was a very well-done showcase of thoughts from the field by the practitioners who have become truly the legendary names for the css/xhtml web design crowd: Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, Khoi Vinh, Jason Santa Maria, Shaun Inman, Jeff Veen, and so forth. I can almost guarantee these names are not familiar to those who come from Carnegie Mellon, Chicago’s ID, or Stanford HCI :-) Which is quite telling about the different “sub-cultures” of design that have emerged in the last decade, focused on various aspects of designing user experience–whether it’s experience theory, innovation planning, human factors, or visual craft & web technologies. Nothing wrong with that, of course. There’s a wonderful plurality of design philosophies, styles, and methods that should be acknowledged; cross-pollination is usually a good thing!

So at AEA are hands-on designers who practice the craft of web design to a supreme level of mastery. Plus, they are (mostly) able to communicate effectively about that!! (which I think is actually quite rare) The event was well worth the time and expense, to hear directly from these masters of the craft, network with like-minded professionals, and become inspired about new ways of thinking and designing… Highly recommend attending future AEA’s, which I believe feature a mix of speakers at each venue, including Cameron Moll, Luke Wroblewski, and other notables in the web design arena.

My hope, however, is that future events will talk more about the challenges and opportunities for what can be called “digital product design”–going beyond content-driven websites towards full-blown transactional UI’s that user’s interact with for data discovery, utility, communications, etc. This could be web-based products like Oracle’s e-business suite, Google Docs, Salesforce.com’s CRM apps, iTunes jukebox, mobile phone UI’s, or even car navigation UI’s or ticketing kiosks at the airport. Basically anything digitally manifested that requires user input and sensory engagement, as well as feature definition. It’s a fast emerging space requiring full-on product development with engineering and business strategy to a level beyond websites.

Zeldman on writing: humorous, lively, great examples, excellent points about the text as “interface” to enable usability and overall aesthetic voice, suitable for a particular given audienceJason Santa Maria: great overview of his process, lots of pencil sketches, nifty “gray box comps” for wireframing, and how to propose options to clients. He’s a big fan of showing the client 3 options to help involve the client and get them participating in the critical decision-making moments.

Andy Budd: great overview of “user experience” as the sum of visual, interaction, and usability with prototyping built-into all that, excellent examples from apple to Starbucks to flickr, also mentioned the challenge of balancing or solving business problems with a powerful design strategy beyond some slick visual style

Mike Davidson: riffed on his time with espn.com (making it standards-compliant), how lame the W3C has been getting CSS3 and other markup updates into the mainstream, praised “elegant hacks”, breaking the rules to further progress, etc.

Khoi Vinh: very nice talk on grids, the history of grids, and showed how to create a basic grid and variations for laying out content… hands down the best looking slides!

Shaun Inman: good overall presentation, basically thoughts on application design, evolving UI with quick user feedback, using Mint as his primary example

Zeldman on clients: another home-run, this time on dealing with clients, selling a design, etc. with wit and verve!

Jeff Veen: he’s at Google now, but still seems “wired” :-) easily the most passionate and enthusiastic speaker, a truly engaging preso, spoke about user experience in general, why “design is so hard” (the challenges of problem discovery and resolution), “finding patterns in data” (references to Tufte), sticky notes exercise (very much like the box exercise for organizing functionality), flow diagrams, etc. a great ending to the conference!

Dealing with edge cases

One of the challenges of working with inter-disciplinary software teams involves incessant yet valuable inputs from QA engineers, who earnestly point out situations not necessarily covered by the MRD or UI spec, aka “edge cases”.

These cases typically impact perhaps 5 – 10 % of the target user audience, if not less. But as the leade designer for an ambitious re-design, and as a consultant guiding the client on doing what’s right for the user, how do you handle these requests without dismissing them rudely or acquiescing to every single request (and thus caught stuck in the quicksand of pointless iterations)?

Here are some quick pointers I’ve learned from Andrei/Involution. The basic overall premise is that the designer is there to help ship a product to users, given time/resource constraints.

  1. Gather all the pertinent info about the case: the main context, primary trigger, consequences if not resolved, level of impact/severity on user’s productivity and goal/task-completion
  2. Ask: does this happen once, twice, or more? Be sure to ask BOTH the PM and the Dev Lead or QA–you’ll likely get different answers, which will force a much-needed but often neglected conversation among key stakeholders about the app’s utility in “real situations” and what’s really important in terms of the product strategy/direction.

Upon resolution of the frequency…

  • If it happens just once, shelve it as a bug for now to be addressed “if there’s time”; so just have QA file a formal bug and move on to other high priority design tasks
  • If it’s a few times, explore a few design alternatives but set a firm timeline. If the situation is not resolved by then, have QA file a bug and move on
  • If it’s everywhere, or warrants major impact due to PM/customer request priority or executive fiat (as is often the case), then certainly get this design tasked and prioritized and crank on it!

Another thing to consider all the while is the adage “don’t break 80% of the app, just to fix something used by 20% of the users”. Holding to that ideal can be difficult when facing a QA nagging you in your face (or filling up your inbox with lovely screenshots). Just remember to verify the frequency, priority, and fit within the overall design strategy. The QA’s job is to find those crazy weird edge cases and dutifully report and file them for handling per their bug filing systems (clearquest, etc.)–so you should simply recognize that, and don’t let it get in your way as a designer. You’re not beholden to fix every single problem encountered; you’re paid to help deliver the best possible solution for your users/customers given the constraints of the situation.

UI design, simply explained

From IHT:

There’s a name for this: user interface design, or UI for short. Its goal is to ensure that all of us can use digital devices simply and intuitively, regardless of how techno- savvy we are. As we’re spending more and more time with digital products, UI is becoming one of the most important areas of design, but it’s also one of the trickiest to judge.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/25/features/DESIGN26.php?page=1

Rich UX Crib Sheet

This posting is meant to serve as a practical follow-up to the more reflective, academic article I recently published on boxesandarrows about designing for a rich user experience.

This is a “crib sheet” summarizes the main points of that article, with links to resources to help the dedicated UI designer who strives to craft a richer quality of engagement with digital media (web, mobile, desktop apps). Of course, richness transcends the digital, towards immersive games, environments, and performances; yet this set of tips is focused on pixel-based encounters for brevity. More later on non-digital rich encounters…

High-Level Issues

+ Re-perceive the design as a talk or presentation to an audience, persuading them this product is best for meeting their goals, as demonstrated in the navigation, functionality, content, and style.

+ Consider how to enhance that communication at the level of structure, behavior, and/or style by using a) good visual and interaction design and b) emerging technologies like Flash, CSS, AJAX, etc.

+ Make sure such enhancements improve the user’s efficiency, confidence, desire or other stated goals and not for the sake of technical hype or coolness.

Detail Design Tips

+ Use in-place editing of labels, names, and other data, whether inside a form or table grid

+ Present immediate feedback and error validation with in-place visual cues, rather than a dialog box or separately loaded page

+ Use desktop-inspired interactions like drag-and-drop, floating palettes, keyboarding shortcuts, as the web and desktop become blurred

+ Use collapsible panels and panes of information; through usability ascertain the default states

+ Apply visual embellishments to emphasize key pieces of information and functionality, like tabs or buttons or messages, or to add stylistic flair inmoderation

+ Remember to sustain the underlying grid layout and visual balance of elements

References
+ Designing Visual Interfaces by Mullet/Sano
+ Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell
+ Tufte’s books, particularly Envisioning Information
+ About Face 2.0 by Alan Cooper
+ Designing for Interactionby Dan Saffer
+ Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko

Gotta be specific…

Simply saying “it doesn’t feel right” isn’t sufficient feedback when reviewing a design with a manager or prototyper or engineer (much less so for other peer designers). It’s just a recipe for communication breakdown, with misinterpretation and ambiguity creating problems of what was really meant.

Gotta be specific–is it the spacing, the layout, the color, the type, the behavior, etc. Get it down to the specific design signals/variables that is the source of the problem or difficulty–then a productive conversation and more importantly, action, can follow that helps everyone get on the same page and towards resolution.

Else, team breakdowns can result, all over a simple misunderstanding that causes people to try to fix other things that cause breakages to occur in the design, etc.