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Reading Recommendations

26 Feb 2011
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Design How-to Interaction Design Research UX Usability

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

23 Feb 2011
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Design Future UX

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.)

Your phone is not the computer of the future

Everyone keeps buzzing about how smart phones are little computers, and that's true. They are. So is an iPod touch or your GPS in your car. Those things aren't going to replace your desktop or laptop, now or in the future. And neither is your iPhone / android / windows phone 7 / blackberry / webOS phone. I know, that's contrary to what almost everyone is saying, but it's true.

What phones are good at

A good phone is good at being a phone. Not just in the 135 year old definition of a phone as an electronic voice relay system. At it's core, the telephone is a system that let's us transmit and receive information over long distances almost instantly. That's really all it does. It's a device that enables near instantaneous communication, like the telegraph before it, beyond the sight of the sender. In 1876, the year the first patent was issued for an electric telephone, that information was sending sound over electric lines. Today, in 2011, it's sending bits over radio waves. Even the voice part of your cell phone works this way. The GPS too. At it's core the thing that makes a smart phone really valuable is it's radio(s). It's connected to the world, via the Internet, via radio waves.

What phones are bad at

The main thing smart phones are bad at is being big. (Although many are trying to get bigger.) Big is an important quality they lack if they're going to be the "computers of the future." Small screens, small keyboards don't make for good computers. That's why you can buy a 30" LCD display for your desktop or desk parked laptop. Big screens are good for the things we use computers for, especially if those screens are going to be displaying soft-keyboards too. Phones are also bad at real multi-tasking (this is one of those things we need big screens for.) This is mostly an issue of power consumption and battery limitations, but it also has to do with the small screens. It takes a lot of power to run a high performing CPU, and phone batteries can only be so big, not to mention they also have to power backlights and radios and flash memory and RAM and GPUs and ect, ect. Multi-tasking is near essential part of modern computing, no matter what Steve Jobs and the team working on OS X Lion say. Don't believe me? Spend the next hour only letting your computer run one application at a time and see how futuristic it feels.

So what is the future?

I don't mean to imply that smartphones aren't an important part of the future of computing, quite the contrary, they're a key part. They're just not going to take the place of any real computer. Phones are great at being the gateway to connectivity, and that's their place in the ultra fractured, multi- device future of computing. They're going to keep being phones. Your tablet and your smart watch and your other crazy ubiquitous computing peripherals are all going to need an on ramp to the Internet, and your little smart phone is damn good at that.

It's also pretty good for acting as a quick window into larger, cloud-based applications with multiple points of user interaction. A quick entry into your personal finance application, updating your workout application with your latest gps and hear rate monitor workout info, setting your thermostat or other simple Internet enabled appliance, uploading pictures to your shared albums, etc. The phone is a small window. It's not good for making things, or really for consuming content larger that text messages or tweets or maybe text only emails. It's good at grabbing information from the world around it with it's sensors, (think cameras, microphones, gps) not your keyboard pecking. Its great at displaying small chunks of information, and its great at sending these things along to a more capable platform for any kind of manipulation.

Your tablet will be much better at normal laptop style tasks. It's got a bigger screen, a larger keyboard, stylus input, and a larger battery more capable of running a more powerful CPU. And most importantly, it doesn't have a radio to run. It doesn't need one. None of your future computing accessories do, because that's your phone's job. It's part of being a phone in the future. Sending your bits beyond the horizon via radio waves. And it doesn't care what you used to make those bits. We need to keep this in mind as we're designing and building smartphone apps. Focus on the things the phone does well and stop trying to stuff in features that the phone does poorly.

The future of your phone is not as a laptop killer, it's as your laptops ride.

Why nobody likes research

7 Feb 2011
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Design Rant Research

Ok, not nobody. I love research. You might. Your boss probably doesn't. Her boss almost certainly doesn't. Yes yes, this is only the case most of the time, not all of the time. But why is that?

Research is Expensive

It costs money to do any kind of research. Even if you're just looking things up on the internet, that time costs someone money. If you're actually doing research with research subjects you usually have to pay them. You usually have to buy materials to conduct your research, if you don't have them already. Some times you have to travel. Bottom line, it hurts the bottom line. (ok not really, but we're not there yet)

Research Takes Time

You have to design a study. Find people to participate. Run the study. Analyze all the data you collected. Make sense of all your analysis. Even a "quick little survey" isn't really that quick most of the time. And "time is money." (See above pun about the bottom line.)

Henry Ford Ruined Research

Or at least he did in the minds of people who are too busy to understand an often quoted Henry Ford snippet:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. — Henry Ford

I've heard this "famous quote" more times in the last six months than any other, often to justify to me why we can't do research. First, I can't actually find the source of this quote. I haven't spent hours and hours searching, but an hour on Google, GoogleScholar, wikiQuotes and wikipedia have left me with no source for it. The point is, he may have never said it. He did not invent the automobile, he just was the first to mass produce it cheaply. But it doesn't matter, because he's getting credit for saying it. And because he's a great name in American business, it carries weight. The problem is, it misses the point entirely.

There are no silver bullets, and Henry Ford probably knew this, even if you (or your boss) don't

This has been beaten to death I'm sure, but "asking people what they wanted" is simply asking the wrong question. Yes, if you ask someone directly "what can I make you?" they're going to define it in terms they already know. Like "faster horses." You're not looking for THE answer with research, your looking for clues to AN answer.

Assuming the Ford quote is true, then yes had he asked people what they wanted they likely would have told him something about horses. They were the primary means of travel at the time. Followed by walking if you couldn't afford a horse. He also might have gotten lucky, if he'd asked enough people, and gotten a couple cars and an airplane. Those would have been the "crazy outliers." But, if he had asked them "What is it about travel now that you dislike the most?" he likely would have learned things like: horses have to rest every few hours while pulling a wagon, it's not easy to take care of a horse, it's expensive to take care of a horse, dogs and other animals can spook a horse and that's very dangerous, etc. He would have found problems to make solutions for. Problems that the mass production of the automobile would eventually solve.

This is what the people who swear that research is a waste of time fail to see, because they expect it to be a silver bullet and it's not. It never is. It's more about finding out what the problems really are, if you're making your thing for the right people, or if your solution is correct but not defined in terms the right people understand. These are the qualities that make the great things you love. I guarantee it. You can't make something great on purpose without knowing the answers to these kinds of questions, and it's very expensive to try and stumble into greatness all the time.

In the end...

The Ford quote is often used to defend the stance of the "lone genius" even if sometimes that "lone genius" is a team at a company. That's simply not the way to make great things. Awesome doesn't happen in a vacuum, or a silo or sitting at your desk with the blinders on for 18 hours. It happens when you ask the right people the right questions to figure out what that "awesome" is, before you start searching. Had Ford "asked people" (and I don't know if he or anyone else did for him) he may have found out that things like "with electric lights, people can more safely drive in the dark." And maybe he did. The point is, Model-T aside, the only way you can know if you're solving a problem is to ask the people you think have it. Not to ask them what the answer to your design problem is, because they won't know. But to ask them what their problem is, so you can design a solution to it. It's these well researched, well designed solutions that make the research effort pay for itself many times over. They're the solutions that become the next big thing, which is actually good for the bottom line (see, I got there). Those well researched solutions are the only kind that will consistently lead to a great experience for the user, even if Henry Ford supposedly said otherwise.

Reading Recommendations

The UX Implications of Watson

Your phone is not the computer of the future

Why nobody likes research

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