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

25 Apr 2011
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Interaction Design Research UX Usability

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.

Are you training your users for a bad experience?

6 Apr 2011
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Interaction Design UX

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.

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 :)

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.

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

Are you training your users for a bad experience?

Reading Recommendations

Your phone is not the computer of the future

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