Powzot

A blog about anything my little heart desires

The wireframe is not dead, dying or even ill

This morning I came across an article posted on Twitter titled, "Wireframes are dead, long live rapid prototyping"  My response was "This claim is idiotic." Here's why:

"I don't think that word means what you think it means..."

To the author's credit, he's talking about wireframes the artifact. His claim is that creating another set of documents between designer's sketches and a prototype to take to testing is cumbersome and not well suited for the growing demand of Agile UX design process. There are multiple problems with this claim:

  • Wireframes (the artifact) are generally the best way to show managers and other non-technical stake holders what is actually going to be happening quickly and cheaply. They're also a great reference for "how does this work again?" style questions for designers and developers building a piece of software. Do you really want to have to pull up a prototype and navigate through it to see what it is you need to know? This is like saying, "you don't need the book, you can just watch the movie."
  • Functional prototypes take longer to make. Applications like Axure and Balsamiq still generate wireframes, they just let you also string them together in a semi-interactive way. This isn't new, exciting methodology, we've been doing this with powerpoint  and wireframes for years. Going to this kind of functional prototype from polished wireframes documents is a trival task as far as resource allocation goes.
  • Designer's sketches are not often sufficient as an artifact to communicate the designer's intent. That's why we have comps and wireframes, not because they're just really fun to make or to justify our existence. It's the best way to get what's in our head into the heads of other people.
These problems aside, the bigger problem with this claim that "Wireframes are dead!" is that many don't distinguish between wireframes the artifact and wireframing as a sketching/ideating method. In a blog titled "UX for the masses" I would expect the author to be clearer about which thing he's actually talking about. I know there is confusion here because I've seen and participated in the discussion on Twitter about it this morning. "You don't need wireframes anymore, you can just sketch and then build a prototype" That's true you can. But that doesn't mean there isn't any wireframing, it just means there isn't a formal wireframe document.

Wireframes are to UIs as storyboards are the feature films, they're the road map. They tell you roughly how things are going to play out and what's supposed to be happening. Just like storyboards they're quick and cheap to make, that's why they exist. To go to the kind of "functional prototypes" that Axure or Balsamiq or the like are providing isn't saving any time or killing wireframes, the work is still being done, the method is still being used. It doesn't matter if you print them out and put them in a binder or not.

What is the "new social" really?

I've been thinking about this a lot in the last six months or so, and the hubbub over Google+ in the last few days has brought this back to the front of my mind. My question about "the new social" (a term I've heard people use more than I'd thought possible) stem from a situation like this, I'm sure you've been here if you're not a crazy facebooker/twitterer:***

  • Friend A brings up some new, never before mentioned information about herself in conversation like, "So, when I have the baby I think I'm going to continue only eating only raw foods."
  • I/you react in shock, shocked not by the intended news of the statement, "I'm going to continue only eating raw foods," but by the news of something big like a pregnancy. Says something like, "Wait....what? You're pregnant?!?" 
  • Friend A responds rather disgusted with,"Yeah, I posted about it on my Facebook wall/Twitter stream/Online social media do-dad, I can't believe you're not reading my updates!"
First of all, yes the above example is completely made up, so no I'm not talking about you if we're friends and I didn't know you were pregnant. I might be talking about you though if you rely on social media as a primary, one way, 24-hour news-esq stream about you and expect your friends to be following your every move there. This kind of situation is where my question comes from; is this the "new social" everyone is talking about? 

What the heck is social anyway?
According to Twitter and Facebook (or Foursquare, or whatever your favorite "social" app is) the act of sharing some piece of information where everyone can see it is a social act. As a UX designer, that doesn't feel very social to me. Social interactions at there most basic look something like this:
Newsocialblogdiagrams01
or maybe something like this in the case of internet scale social interactions:
Newsocialblogdiagrams02
These diagrams happen everyday online. The first could be something like AIM, GTalk, or ICQ (no I'm just kidding, no one uses ICQ anymore), a DM on Twitter, a private message on Facebook, an email or a text message. It's a conversation. You know, that thing you did on your phone before you texted all the time.But it's just so much easier to text than have a phone call! I know, I'm right there with you. (For real, I'm a big texter.)

The second diagram could be comments on a blog, twitter @replies, a chat room, or the comments on a facebook wall post. It's still a conversation, it's just happening with more than two people. (The diagram should show the flow between the three smaller guys too, but that would have been a lot of arrows to deal with, and you get the idea.)

So by now I'm sure you're saying, "Thanks Tony, your diagrams are swell, but I already know this. What's your point?" The point is this is how these services were intended to work back in the before time — in the long long ago of 2005-07. And it's how they did work for the most part. I used Facebook in college and had actual conversations with people I had met briefly the night before, or in a class or at a football game, all after the fact. When I joined Twitter in 2007 I met lots of great people and had lots of great conversations. These two diagrams were how you would describe the systems back then. That was before it was "the new social" though. Before there were hundreds of millions of people and billions of dollars in advertising revenue at stake. Before your mom was on Facebook (but not before jokes about your mom were on Facebook, those were always there) and before Ashton Kutcher found Twitter. The new social, at least in my experience looks like this most of the time:
Newsocialblogdiagrams03
And it's this diagram that leads to conversations like the fake one (based on similar real conversations) above. This is your Facebook wall or your Twitter stream now, for the vast majority of users. This is "social media" that lets your great aunt Edna share pictures of her 55 cats with you and your whole family, or Kim Kardashian make $10,000 per tweet, or your best friend tweet about how great she felt after that run and that blueberry muffin with the smiley face blueberries from that cafe down the street with that cute barrista. It's also the "social" component of apps that you and I love like Foursquare, Facebook Places, DailyMile, Nike+, or Posterous (the platform this blog is running on.) Sure, there's a mechanism for 2 way communication, but how much do you really use it? How many of your friends use it? How many of their comments do you respond to? Remember, social now is simply the act of putting information out there to be consumed by your friends and followers and anyone who searches for you or your friends and followers on Google/Bing/Yahoo/Lycos (no, I'm kidding again. No one uses Lycos anymore either.)

And the most scandalous part of this whole "new social" thing is that it's not even new! We are already familiar with this model, it looks like this:
Newsocialblogdiagrams04
And it wasn't even new when the TV came out! Hell, TV stole it from radio, which stole it from the newspaper, which stole it from books, which stole it from scrolls...etc, etc. It's called broadcast, and there's nothing social about it. 

So what's the big deal?
No, this isn't a rant about how my friends, or your friends, or society in general is slowly coming to expect social interaction to more closely resemble voyeurism or stalking, although that's probably something someone should write about. The problem is that more and more stuff is coming out claiming to be social when it's not, and that's stifling innovation for real social technology. And it's the designers' fault. 

"Social media" is a great thing, don't get me wrong, it's just not very social anymore. It's enabling broadcast, and it's designed to be used that way. Why? It's easier to sell ads using these platforms if they're actually broadcast platforms, because marketers don't like to be talked back to and marketers are paying for it. Enabling almost a billion people to create their own, personal broadcast channel that's available to the whole world is a huge achievement. But it's not a social interaction. It's not a social experience.It's not a social technology. We all know what a social experience is, and if you ask those early adopters of current "social media," the possibilities felt endless in the early days, and the gratification of connecting with other people in a way where physical location didn't matter was huge. Social media was about collaboration, because social IS about collaboration.

Social interactions are not just about sharing, they're about interacting with other humans in a way that's meaningful for everyone involved. You don't have a social relationship with the cast of Glee, even though they're sharing their delightful story of overcoming high school adversity through singing the pop hits of the 70s, 80s and today. But according to the rules of social media you do. They're sharing content and you're consuming it. See how it's a broken definition? (unless you're actually friends with the cast of Glee, in which case, think of some other example smarty pants.) 

In the last two and a half years we've actually not made nearly as many advances in social technology as have been claimed, we've just made great leaps in personal broadcast technology. I don't have an invite to Google+ yet, but when I get one I hope that the claims that it's "Just like Facebook, but it's not run by Facebook" are wrong. If they actually did it right, Google+ could be the first truly big breakthrough in social technology since Twitter...before it got really popular at SxSWi and started retooling to become a personal broadcast platform to bring in more VC money and ad revenues. 

*** Full disclosure: I am actually quite guilty of saying, "Didn't you see that, I posted it on Twitter?" 

Sneaky things you can do to make your designs "Human Centered"

Saturday I read a fantastic article by Whitney Hess, "You're not a user experience designer if..." (and you should read it too). In it she brings up really excellent points about things that a lot of "UX designers" don't actually do. Things like: talk to users, design in a vacuum, make design decisions based on personal preferences, don't use UX methods, etc.  While I completely agree, and shouted it from the Twitter roof-tops, it was a part at the end that caught my attention and made me decide to write this blog post.

If you have the title of User Experience Designer and you want to do these things but aren’t being allowed to, don’t stand for it. 

I've been in that situation. A lot. In fact, it was not being able to do these things as an "interactive designer" or "interactive art director"(titles that I held for the first 4-5 years of my career) that caused me to almost give up on design completely, consequently find this whole thing called "UX Design" and figure out that I was trying to do "UX design" in addition to the graphic and interaction design I was doing. It's because of this that I passionately argue for real UX design. It's also because of this that I've hacked together some covert UX methods that you can use if you're in a situation where you want to do real UX, but can't. 

First, a disclaimer
These are, more or less, methods I've used over the last few years when I just couldn't get approval to do real user research or testing. I will never, ever ever ever say these are "good" methods, they're just better than not doing anything. These are in no way "science" and are so far off from pure UX design methods that I'll probably get some nasty emails and comments anyway. Still, as I've been told by multiple people I really respect, "Any research/testing is better than none." 

Also, I take no responsibility if you get fired because you get caught using these methods. I'm sorry, but it was probably for the best anyway.

Sneaky things you can do to make your designs "Human Centered"

Informal happy-hour individual interviews
Chances are you probably know some people on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/In Real Life that are like your users. (at least in someway) Can't do a real ethnographic study? Can't do formal, structured/semi-structured interviews even over the phone? It's time to head to the bar! Pick a few people and a few days, and individually take them out for a drink, preferably someplace where the music isn't too loud. Bring a notebook (or use an audio recorder if you can get away with it) and ask them questions. Ask them their opinions. TALK TO THEM. Try not to drink too much (at least until you're done.) The beauty of this is two fold. First, your participant's incentive is built in. Secondly, you can often times get a 2nd informal interview with someone that is in the bar who overhears you. Is there a sampling bias? OH YEAH, but if they pass your screening criteria take what you can get. More data is better than less in these situations.

Surveymonkey after-hours survey
Surveys are great, because they can kinda run themselves now thanks to the internet, all you have to do is write them. They're also great because you can get a 10 question survey with up to 100 responses per month for FREE, which means this one isn't actually going to cost you anything. (No this isn't a paid endorsement) 100 responses is good for 90% confidence (p=0.1) just FYI, so your results will actually have some statistical validity too! (assuming your questions are good)

Diary study with friends or others who will help you
So you can't go and run a full fledged ethnographic study, if you have really awesome friends who are close to your target user group you can get them to take a cheap notebook to work with them and self-report the things they do/frustrations they have/whatever you need to find out. Is it as good as observing? Nope. You're gonna miss a lot, I'm not going to lie. However, you're not going to miss as much as you would not doing it and just guessing. 

Informal happy-hour cognitive walkthrough
This is a lot like the happy hour individual interviews, except you pull some of your coworkers instead. Bring your wires, or comps or whatever you need to test with you, and tell them you want their opinion on them. The key to this one is informal, don't ask for "stories about using X."  This also has the benefit of slowing indoctrinating coworkers into the HCD fold, and slowly changing the culture to be more friendly to all of this stuff. 

Paper prototyping on coworkers/friends/family/innocent bystanders
If they're close to your user base, draw them a quick marker comp and ask them to pretend it's your product and perform a task on it. (I've done this on napkins before, which is why it's always good to have at least one sharpie with you at all times.) This is a legit method (maybe the most legit in the list) when you want to quickly confirm a wacky idea without having to spend time doing nice looking wires or comps. I recommend this testing method for anyone working on an early stage of a project. 

After-hours card sort
The Internet has made so many things better (like autotuning every sound in nature) including card sorts. Just like the survey, you can run an online card sort and kinda just ignore it except when you're setting it up and analyzing the results. Websort.Net is by far my favorite card sorting tool, and it's totally free. 

The bottom line
The real secret is that you can do almost any formal research or testing method informally, under the radar and on the cheap using your social network, assuming you're willing to put in some extra work after-hours. Is it perfect? No. Is it science? Kinda...it's probably got too many confounds to count though. But, it's better than nothing. Unless it's really really small, your network of friends and family online and off probably has at least a semi-representative sample of your user-base. 

The real question is how to you present your results, or use it to argue your points? If you can get extra points for, "I did user research/testing in my off time" use it like you would if you had been allowed to do it. If not, just credit your awesome rockstar design skills. Say something like "You know, I just really get people" ...and then start looking for a real UX job. 

Ohhhhh you said the F worrrrddd!!!

It's very funny (to me anyway) that I came out of college decrying research, it "ruined design," and a few years later my love for research informed design pushed me back into college to learn more about it. It's also funny (probably still just to me) that I continue to run into these two seemingly opposed design camps all the time, the pro and anti research designers. I'm among friends in one, and inevitably find myself defending the dreaded F**cus Gr**p in the other. It's like a bad word in a lot of circles, f**cus gr**p, and as I always end up explaining, "it's because people don't run the dreaded f**cus gr**p right." They don't ask the participants the right questions. They use it to answer the wrong kind of research questions. They blindly follow the majority opinion as if it was handed down on stone tablets. Bottom line, they fuck it up. Worse yet, this is the only research method a lot of designers, including fresh out of design school me, know. At the very least the only one they think of when someone says "research." 

Research isn't a bad word for designers (even f**cus gr**p)
This is the basic argument I find myself making when in the company of the anti-research designers. I'm a designer, not a researcher. I have a heavy-weight, framed piece of paper that says just that, and in December I'll have two. (This is the only "trust me, I'm a doctor" style statement you're going to get from me, I promise.) As a designer, research is just another tool in my toolbox for solving design problems. It's just like photoshop, or illustrator or my sketchbook. Research does NOT dictate design decisions, it informs them. This is something I usually have to repeat, so I will in an obnoxious type treatment to make it stand out

RESEARCH DOES NOT DICTATE DESIGN DECISIONS, IT INFORMS THEM. 
(Sorry, I it wouldn't let me make it blink too.)  If you're a designer and you think back to your design classes, you'll likely remember doing some kind of asking around or looking at what other people had already done in that space for every project you did. That's research. AND it isn't a f**cus gr**p. (It's likely a competitive analysis or an unstructured individual interview, for the researchers in the audience keeping track.) Your research didn't totally take away all your choices as a designer, and you probably didn't completely change your initial gut feelings based on it. It didn't dictate your design. But it did inform you, and you might have modified some of your initial assumptions, and you may have abandoned bad ideas if they proved to be bad, or already done, or whatever you found. It may have even given you an idea because you saw something new and it sparked something awesome in your crazy designer brain. This is why good research, used correctly is magical.  

Let's talk about the damn f**cus gr**p for a minute
(Warning: this is a rant, you have been warned.)
Most people (especially in advertising) ruin focus groups. This is not an "ivory tower" opinion. This is my on the ground, in the trenches throwing grenades, practitioner's opinion. They're not looking for additional information to inform the design, they're looking for truth. Worse yet, they're not just looking for a truth, they're looking for "The Truth," a totally generalizable (ecologically valid for you researches still keeping track) truth. One that describes everyone like their group everywhere. A group that is usually structured to represent everyone on the planet. Sorry, a f**cus gr**p is the wrong test for finding "The Truth." It's a qualitative test that is at best going to give you an idea of your specific group's opinions, if and only if you recruit the right group and ignore the idea of group think and follow the leader mentality in groups like this, and dont' have one guy who does 80% of the talking for the whole group. At best you're going to be able to say "we showed it to 10 people and 2 of them told us all these things." F**cus gr**ps are not generalizable, period! The are not "The Truth," and to use them as such is foolish, and you should feel sorry for those people because they're likely going to lose a lot of money.

If you're going to hate the f**cus gr**p , hate it for these reasons.  Don't hate it because "research kills creativity." it doesn't, it focuses creativity, and gives you new jumping off points if it's done well.

Design is not art, deal with it. 
This is the other argument that is used to try and defend the anti-research designer position, "Design is art." This is a horse that's been beaten to death, and I'm usually one of the people holding a bat. Design is not art. It can be objectively evaluated because the whole goal of design is problem solving. The goal of Art is expressing the ideas, emotion and opinions of the artist. You can't do that wrong. That's what makes it art. You can't look at art and realistically say, "The artist totally failed to capture the way she was feeling in this piece." You can look at design reasonably say, "this piece fails to capture the attributes of our brand," or "this product is hard to use and it's even harder to look at," or even "why would you design a shirt with no neck hole, no one can wear this!" Design can be wrong. The confusing part is that there are usually many solutions to the same design problem, and all of them are right, but the wrong ones are still wrong. 

There is absolutely an art to design, and great design often does the things art does too, but design is not art. It's design. Even when it conveys emotion. Even when it conveys opinion. Design is concerned with solving a problem that most likely has multiple solutions, and this is why research is such a great tool. It can help you sift through those worse solutions, that are still technically right, to find the great ones. Why wouldn't you want something to help you sift through an endless pile of hay to find the five needles you're looking for?

So what...?
Research is your friend, dear fellow designers. It can lead you to new ideas, better ideas, by pointing to the right path in the tangled map of options we have; and if it's done well that's all it will do. Research can't ever substitute the thoughtful work of a good designer, because good research isn't creative. To quote Dr. David Evans of Psycster research (one of my graduate school instructors): 

A research study by it’s very nature is a cheap, fast proxy to reality.

It's a peak out the window. A designer takes all the information she has about a problem, combines it with everything else she knows and turns it into a solution. Well done research is just one more thing the designer gets to know and use. If you want to be an anti-research designer, why not be an anti-bad-research designer? 

Are you training your users for a bad experience?

If you have an email address, you've probably received at least one email this week about how it was leaked by Epsilon (I've received four now.) If you're not familiar with who they are or why they have your email address to lose (I wasn't) Cnet has a pretty good article about it. What I find so troubling about this in particular, is that Chase bank was one of the notification emails I got. This is troubling because of the way Chase's rewards program works, and the behavior they've trained their users to exhibit is now the very same behavior they are warning them against. This is part of experience design that often gets ignored, and now it's going to be huge.

Training your users to do the wrong thing
If you're not a chase account holder, you're likely not familiar with their rewards program and the behavior I'm talking about. Once a quarter, the bank chooses three to four categories that cardholders get 5% cash-back on. They announce this with emails, and if all the emails were doing was announcing these special categories I wouldn't be writing this post. To qualify for this offer, you have to follow a link in the email and sign in at a microsite. Hello fishers, I hope you have your pirated copies of photoshop warmed up. 

This is the behavior the company endorsed, following a link in an email and signing in. I'm sure no one in the marketing department, or at Epsilon ever dreamed they would now be sending out emails telling people to do the opposite (don't give your account info to anyone who asks for it via email), but the damage is already done. The mental model is already set for thousands (or maybe even millions), "To get my 5% cash back on X this quarter, I click the link in my email and log in to sign up." 

Fish, meet barrel. 

How can we do better?
When we're designing systems, any systems, we need to take into account the behaviors we're training users to exhibit. More importantly, we need to be aware of the big red flag, don't ever do that style behaviors for a particular domain. Training users to follow email links to sign in is a dangerous design because it's so easy to spoof an email and a website these days. To add insult to injury, it's completely unnecessary to make people do this. You can track the success of your email by setting a special link to the account site, where there is significant anti-spoofing measures is place, instead. You could just send an email announcing it, telling people to go log into their account to activate it. Or you could just automate it. Asking users to follow a link from an email and sign-in is one step removed from sending them an email and asking them to reply with their credentials, and it's not a big enough step to make it ok. 

I'm sure there was a business goal driving this dangerous design, but how much money are you saving now if even 1% of your effected users get fished? How does that experience effect your brand? How does it effect your current customer base of non-fished users? Word of mouth is a powerful marketing force, and it's directly tied to the experience your customers have with your stuff (branding, advertising, customer service reps, third party vendors, and even people you've opened the door for who impersonate you well.) 

So what...?
As designers, sure we have to be champions of good design, but we also have a responsibility to avoid designing things that will get us shanked later on. In this case, an already serious data breech is made even worse by a bad design. Chase trained their users to walk right into a fishing scheme, for whatever business reasons. I've yet to meet an interaction or experience designer who isn't really Internet savvy, so I'm sure whoever came up with the model Chase went with was aware of all the things you're never supposed to do from an email. But there is always the chance a designer had no hand in this system, or that they were ignored. We'll never know unless Chase decides to tell us. What we need to do, as a community of design professionals, is keep this event in mind and make sure we're not reinforcing bad web behavior with our systems.    

Why kids are almost always better at new tech than you

A few days ago I was walking back from lunch in downtown Seattle when I overheard the women behind me talking about the Microsoft Kinect. One of the women was talking about how her young daughter "jumped right in" using the device, without having to be told much about how it works. She was also talking about how after almost a month she still has problems using it. "I don't know how she can be so good at it and I'm so terrible," the woman asked her friend. 

They grew up with it, duh
This isn't anything new, and as you can probably guess the friend replied, "Kids are just better at this stuff because they've grown up with it." This is a pretty standard response whenever someone younger than you figures out some new-fangled technology that you can't. But is it really true? This little girl didn't "grow up" with the Kinect, it's only been available to the public for about six months. Sure, she did very likely grow up in the age of consumer electronics, but none of them use the natural human interface that the Kinect does, and even non-standard (i.e. buttons, mice, keyboards, control sticks) input methods are fairly new. Apple's multi-touch devices have only been around for three and a half years, and Nintendo's Wii is only a year older. I will admit that three to four years is a long time for a little kid, but even with that much exposure to similar (although still very different) devices I don't buy the whole "They've just grown up with it" rationale. 

Some say tech, it is a river...
Technology is a constantly evolving monster. It doesn't exist in nicely posed snapshots until the next big thing comes out and replaces it. New things are released to augment the existing tech until companies can afford to push the next big thing into production. Upgrades and add-ons and accessories. All of these things make learning technology a constantly moving target. For example, it's very likely that your iPhone today doesn't just do the things it did last week, thanks to new apps, new accessories or new software updates pushed by Apple or app developers. This makes me think that just because the stuff existed doesn't make "they grew up with it" a very valid explanation. You don't just know everything about technology that is produced while you're under a certain age. There's another explanation that fits much better. Kids are more creative than you are.

It's all about Imagination
I don't know about you, but I've spent at least 24 of my 28 years being told what is not possible, what not to do because it's "weird" or "different", and just generally having people in positions of authority closing doors and building walls around my imagination. I'm talking about parents, teachers, and peer pressure, all slowly pushing us toward the norms and mores of our societies It's probably the same way with you, give or take a few years depending on your age. We've constructed these ideas of "normal" because it makes things work better when everyone has more or less the same expectations of common people and things where they live. We can all agree that a red light means stop, and that generally a person on the street that waves at you is just saying hi. 

Little kids don't have that inhibition yet. They don't know all the rules, so they just make stuff up as it makes sense to them. They let their imaginations fill in the gaps in their understanding of the world because it's all they have to fall back on. Their minds aren't programed to see a TV screen and immediately think "passive viewing experience," they talk back to the characters, interact with them. If you don't believe me watch an episode of anything made for kids aged two to five and see how many pauses for audience participation there are. So of course it makes sense that waving at the TV makes things happen, that jumping up and down makes you on the screen jump up and down. Why wouldn't it? The idea of the TV seeing you isn't more familiar to a child, it's just less impossible. Why wouldn't the TV see you, you can see it? It's only fair. This is how it is for most new technology, and why kids learn it faster. They don't have to unlearn the old things.

So what...?
The absence of preconceptions is what makes kids better at new technology than adults, because it's not "weird" to them that it's not like anything else. As experience designers we need to keep this idea in mind when designing new and possibly "weird" things, but we also need to try and reinvigorate the imaginations of our users. It's possible but you have to prime the pump, so to speak, and get the user into the mindset that "this is unlike anything else." Once you can do that, imagine what other ideas these newly freed users, including you, will think up?

Reading Recommendations

In the last few weeks I've had a few people ask me if I could recommend any books on design. The short answer is yes I can, but mostly only because I have a thing for books and I can't go into a bookstore without buying at least four, so I just happen to have a lot of books. (Yes, I have read them all, thank you very much.) The reason this is the short answer is because I'm firmly in the camp that to become a designer you simply have to start designing. A lot. A whole lot. It's a very learn by doing skill, even interaction and experience design. However, there are a lot of great books I've read that have added a lot of little interesting tidbits to the experience of just being a designer for years and years, so I thought I'd make that list and share it with anyone who was interested.

These are by no means the definitive reading list, just what I've read over the the years, or have on my current reading list. I've also thrown in some movies and a couple card decks that I really love. The best advice I can give any designer is the advice given to me during a junior year portfolio review by  John Jay, a creative director from Wieden + Kennedy (I majored in Advertising and Graphic Design for my undergrad, so I had mostly words of wisdom from designers working in advertising) and it is:

The great ideas are out on the streets, in a club or a bar or a park, not in your office or at your desk. Make sure you get up from your desk every once and a while and experience it.  

So read some of these books, but then go out and experience the world and find inspiration and solutions to your design problems in those experiences. If you want to be a designer, or you want to be a better designer, just start designing lots of stuff. Practice makes perfect.

The List

Interaction/Experience Design
  • The Design of Everyday Things - Norman
  • Designing Interactions - Moggridge
  • Sketching User Experiences - Buxton
  • Emotional Design - Norman
Design Basics
  • Design Basics - Pentak
  • Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative - Eisener (this is technically a book about making comics, but I've found it very helpful to know these concepts designing interactions, because I can use them to help tell other people about my ideas via storyboard)
Design History
  • History of Modern Design - Raizman (this is a must read in my opinion)
  • Dictionary of Design since 1900 - Julier 
  • Dictionary of Graphic Design and Designers - Livingston
Design Documentaries
  • Objectified
  • Helvetica
Graphic Design Quickstarts
  • The Non-designer's design book - Williams
  • The Mac is not a Typewriter - Williams
  • Making and Breaking the Grid - Samara (this is a must have reference if you're doing any visual design)
  • Lettering for Production - Gates (out of print)
Ad books that could be helpful
  • Hey Whipple Squeeze This - Sullivan
  • Hoopla - CP+B
  • Pick Me - Vonk & Kestin
Other Fun stuff
  • Art and Copy (movie)
  • Please Exit Through the Giftshop (movie)
  • The Story of Stuff (the 2007 original) (movie)
  • Ideo Method Cards
  • Handbook of Usability Testing - Rubin & Chisnell
  • Mental Notes Cards
  • Control: A History of Behavioral Psychology - Mills
  • Emotions Revealed - Ekman
  • ReInventing Comics - McCloud
  • Comics and Sequential Art - Eisener 
Books I'm Currently Reading (but can't recommend beyond that because I haven't finished them yet) 
  • Living with Complexity - Norman
  • Unmasking the Face - Friesen
  • Behavioral Analysis and Measurement Methods - Meister
  • Ambient Findability - Morville
If you have any suggestions (stuff I could add to my currently reading list), leave them in the comments :)

The UX Implications of Watson

Unless you were either under a rock or not a techno-geek last week you've probably heard about IBM's Watson natural language processor and it's spanking of the two best Jeopardy players on the planet. It was amazing to watch the way the computer looked at all the data it had access to (and it was a lot) and found the answers. It wasn't perfect, when Watson was wrong it was hilariously wrong, but it was right more than it was wrong.

Why this is something UX folk need to keep an eye on?

You may be thinking, "Tony, this is a great achievement in computer science and engineering but why should I, the illustrious user experience professional reading your blog, care?" Well, very skilled and attractive reader, I'm glad you asked. Let's play the imagination game for a minute. 

Imagine a world where systems like Watson aren't giant, expensive, out of reach systems that exist only in R&D labs. Imagine a world where systems like Watson are commonplace in offices or neighborhoods or households. A world where the computer can take input in natural language and it's hooked up to the Internet.

"Computer, I need a list of all know cultures who believe the colour red means anger." 

What does that system look like? What does it sound like? How does it respond or present its answer? Do you have to say "computer," every time? Should these interactions be more like a conversation with another person or still like giving orders to a machine? These are just the experience questions I could think of in a few minutes.

This kind of computing, while it answers many engineering problems, opens a whole new area of HCI that we've only really thought about in Star Trek and other science fiction. Think about the possibilities of a computer that can understand what you're saying to it without using special commands. Think about the frustrations and the usability issues it will bring. Think about the effect a computer that is fluent in your language will have on the psychology of how we interact with computers.

Back to The Future

Like most of the stuff we talk about in the blogosphere, this falls into the category of "The Future of ________" but this future is coming at us faster than a lot of that other “Future Stuff.” IBM is already talking about utilizing Watson to help doctors do differential diagnosis. The possibilities are nearly endless; we just need to start thinking about them. Yay future! (But I still want my hover board.)