January 2012
21 posts
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Working with Developers Survey: Job Situation
As a point of comparison, I asked survey participants some questions about their work context.
What is your current work situation?
If you are employed by a company, are you:
How would you classify your company?
Are you:
I was actually surprised by the high percentage of designers working in software development firms, and the comparatively low percentage working in UX/design firms....
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The Wrong Questions
I’ve been seeing a lot of questions recently along the lines of “Should Interaction Designers know how to do visual design?” and “Should Interaction Designers know how to code?” My opinion on both questions is that they are the wrong questions.
There are very talented, successful, and influential IxDers that can do neither, so it is already proven that a good IxDer doesn’t have to. The question...
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Simplified to the point of complexity
Since the beginning of DesignAday, I have made a single post per weekday, minus holidays and days I was traveling. Now, I don’t always get my daily post done on the day it’s for. As of this sentence, I am thirteen minutes late for Tuesday’s post. I have always, however, made sure to date the post for the day to which it was intended. Last night, however, I was surprised to find the time and date...
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Working with Developers Survey: Titles
My survey was open from December 13, 2011 to January 14th. I advertised it through many channels, including the IxDA forums, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and DesignAday. I had 308 people view my survey, but only 90 actually responded. 82 completed it, giving me a 91% completion rate. On average, people spent 11 minutes answering the questions.
I created a Wordle rendering of the job titles. It’s...
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In Comparison: Multiple Selection, part 3
Parts 1 and 2 of this series of posts were the result of my exploration to determine the behavior I would specify for a new, browser-based UI. Now that I’ve explained how it works in Windows XP and Mac OS X Lion, it’s only proper that I wrap up by relating my own design rational.
I sat down with the developer who is to implement the feature and went over my findings. She agreed that including an...
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Agile 2012 Submission
I’ve been working on the presentation I originally submitted to Interaction 12, and I’ll be able to share the survey results here fairly soon. After posting the survey, I was encouraged to submit the talk to Agile 2012, which I have done. Please give the description a read, and let me know what you think. I have plenty of time yet to make changes to my submission before the final deadline. I’m...
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In Comparison: Multiple Selection, part 2
Yesterday, I began to describe the detailed behavior of multiple selection in Windows and Mac OS. We took a detailed look at shift-clicking. Let’s add in control-clicking now. On the Mac, that would be a command-click, but there are some differences in behavior, so we’ll start off with Windows.
Control-clicking selects non-contiguous items. Control-click an unselected item to add it to the...
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In Comparison: Multiple Selection, part 1
How often do you think about the details of the basic interactions that make up the OS you use on a daily basis? Last week, I had to specify the behavior for multiple selection of list items in a browser-based application. The customer’s requirement asked for shift-clicking and control-clicking, just as you would find on the desktop. With the intent of making the behavior exactly like desktop OS...
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Pick a Card
Another of last semester’s projects found my students designing tools in support of design methods. Kofi Opoku created a set of cards intended to be used when a team hits a wall during a brainstorming session. Whenever there is a pause in the action, draw a card from the shuffled deck and apply it to the problem that is being solved. You might find yourself thinking about how you would solve the...
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Interaction Design Position Open
One of the projects I started working on early in my career, about eleven years ago, was with the Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technical Division, based near Indian Head, Maryland. We were hired to help their leadership conceive, prototype, and build a suite of applications that would help EOD warfighters plan and carry out their missions. Over the years, it has been one of the most rewarding...
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Information Visualization
This semester, I will be teaching my information visualization course for fourth time. It has been two years since I taught the course, and in that time, three noteworthy books have been published on the subject.
Manuel Lima’s Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information is an absolutely gorgeous collection of network visualizations. I have yet to read the book, but from flipping through...
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Verizoned Out
I received email from Verizon the other day informing me that they are changing the way their email servers work and that I would need to change the settings in my email application. I linked to their website, and it told me that I could use their Automated Email Setup to square things away. Okay, that sounds great. I clicked the button and was presented with this.
I must meet the following...
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Design Ignites Change
The final project of my course last semester challenged the students to identify a social issue in their community and address it through the design of a product or service. One of the two project teams selected bullying as their issue. They interviewed middle school students and counselors as part of their research, learning about how bullying is currently handled in the schools.
Bullying is a...
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disKinect
Picking up where I left off yesterday’s post, there was one other thing about the Kinect that I thought was particularly poor, and again, I don’t know whether it is the fault of the Kinect or poor design of the games. The user interfaces were horrendous. I’m not talking about the actual gameplay, but the menus that allow you to select levels or options. On the Wii, menus all work pretty much the...
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Kinect
I had an opportunity to play around with an Xbox Kinect over the holidays, and while it is an interesting piece of technology with a lot of potential, I wasn’t particularly impressed. I first attempted to play Wipeout, based on the ridiculous ABC game show. The game couldn’t tell when I stopped running in place, so my on-screen avatar would frequently run right into obstacles or off ledges. There...
December 2011
19 posts
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The Quickening
In the Highlander series of films and TV shows, a Quickening occurs when one immortal beheads another, receiving all of the knowledge and power of their defeated opponent. A similar phenomena occurs in the software industry when a company ignores their customers. Those customers end up drifting away to competitors. It’s a slow burn, rather than an explosion, but the metaphor works.
I just...
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Mind Your Ps and Qs
I had Christmas music playing this afternoon, and my elder daughter heard the following line from an old song titled Santa Claus Blues by Jimmy Boyd and Mitch Miller:
…be sure to mind your Ps and Qs, or wake up Christmas morning with the Santa Claus blues.
She asked me what your Ps and Qs are, and I was more than happy to enlighten her. It gave me the opportunity to explain how books,...
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Mapping the Design Landscape
Lindsey Estep started out with a simple venn diagram as the basis of her map and built out from there. The initial three circles forming the diagram are:
Creative Research: primarily focused on conceptual and visual consideration
Engineering Research: significant testing and study, frequently requires prototypes, pragmatic
Social Research: centered around research about the audience/user,...
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Defenders of the Valley
Back in the Spring, I taught a course on game design. By the end of the semester, my students had conceived a Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MORPG) in which middle school students become park rangers, defending Canaan Valley from invasive species. Actually, the concept for the game was larger in scope, dealing with many environmental issues facing Appalachian wetlands, but for a proof of...
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Waste
I live on top of a hill—a rather large one—overlooking the Ohio River. We often have high winds, and as a result, I and my neighbors end up with a fair bit of trash in our yards. You see, our community is fortunate enough to have single stream recycling, so we can recycle just about anything. I put a lot more out to be collected for recycling than for landfill. As such, I have a full-size trash...
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Design Vocabulary: Learnability
Having written about both Discoverability and Findability, I feel obligated to address Learnability as the next vocabulary term.
Learnability is not a term specific to Interaction Design. Dictionaries will provide definitions such as “the condition of being learnable” and “the ease with which something can be learned.” That’s clear enough, but the term does have more specific meaning when used in...
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Working with Developers Survey
I mentioned some weeks ago that I’m pushing ahead with the presentation I’m not giving at Interaction 12. To that end, I have put together a survey for designers working with developers. My intent is to find out to what extent the average Interaction Designer is integrated into their software development team. If you are a designer working in the realm of Interaction Design and User Experience,...
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Design Definitions and Relationships Realized by...
Aaron Geiger is one of my graduate students this semester, but he is actually a Master of Journalism student. He’s been taking the course because he needed an elective outside of his department, and he is very interested in design. This was actually the perfect course for him, as it was primarily reading, writing, and discussion.
It is no surprise, then, that Aaron took a much different approach...
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When Undo is No Help at All
I remember when Photoshop only had one level of undo. You had to take great care with every action, or you would be starting over. Today, nearly infinite levels of undo and redo are standard fare. Why would anyone complain about having an undo feature.
There’s a particularly poorly designed piece of software used for media presentation in worship services called MediaShout. The UI defies all...
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Mindless Inflexibility
One of the capabilities of an application I’ve been working on for two years now is the generation of graphs as PDFs. The UI allows the user to choose a type of graph, select several parameters, specify which axes they go on, and set a number of options. We are using JFreeChart and JasperReports to generate the graphs. I was designing a new type of graph for the next version of the application...
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Voice Mail Fail
My company outfitted our new office with Cisco VOIP phones. They seem to work as well as any other office phone, but the voice mail indicator is woefully inadequate.
You see that little red line above the display? That’s the light that comes on when you have unheard voice mail. It doesn’t blink. It’s just on or off. I didn’t even realize that’s what it was until one of my coworkers pointed out...
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Design Issues
There’s one week left in the masters-level class I’ve been teaching. It is mainly a seminar-style course with a few complimentary projects. The semester was organized into seven units. These are the readings that my students were required to write responses to and then discuss in class. This is a good survey of the current state of design theory.
Defining Design Beautiful Diversion - NextD...
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Museum of Obsolete Objects
There’s a rather amusing, and quite clever, YouTube channel titled the Museum of Obsolete Objects. Short videos demonstrate the use of objects that, as the name implies, have become obsolete. The dial telephone, instant camera, and abacus are examples. The videos are well-produced, and many of them point out unintentional quirks, such as how a pencil was used to wind up a cassette tape that had...
November 2011
22 posts
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Design for Social Innovation
As the potential of design continues to realize itself in new domains and wicked problems, schools are developing new programs to prepare students for work in the field’s wild west. I recently received a letter from Marc Rettig, principal of Fit Associates, introducing me to a new masters program in Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Marc is helping to launch...
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In the Details: Questions
Why is it that so many financial sites think that a bevy of questions is a good security precaution? I’m willing to believe that it is potentially an acceptable backup, but I find many of their implementations to be lacking. Take this one, for example, from a credit card company.
They provide a list of 10 predefined questions, from which I am expected to choose five. I have a few criteria for...
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Timeline of the Design Landscape
Andrew Sheldon approached his visualization primarily as a timeline. Starting in the 1400’s with the invention of the printing press, he presents events in each of the major design domains right up to Steve Job’s passing. Events are color-coded and linked to their domains with lines. Domains are sized based on typical salaries, and arranged so as to show interrelations by overlap. Color bars on...
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EASy come, EASy go
Dave Malouf made a perspicacious observation in his recent blog post about the Emergency Announcement System (EAS) and its first national test.
EAS has a huge flaw. It requires being attached to a radio or TV. However, a growing critical mass of people are never on a major broadcast system and thus EAS will never get its very important message to a core unit of the population.
He’s right. Case...
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The Design Landscape
I’ve been teaching my Design Issues seminar this semester, and as in the past, the first project was to visualize the design landscape, demonstrating an understanding of the major disciplines and how organizations, firms, luminaries, and methods relate to them. There are many different approaches to mapping the information; Kofi Opoku decided to group the disciplines based on whether they...
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Design Vocabulary: Discoverability
Unlike the word findability, which I covered last week, discoverability can be found in the dictionary as “The quality of being discoverable.” Also unlike findability, it doesn’t have its own Wikipedia entry, but instead is included as a section under usability. This section doesn’t really explain discoverability, asking questions that are more about learnability, which I’ll address another day.
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A Public Service Announcement
I don’t tend to get very involved in politics, but occasionally there are issues that irk me enough to act. There are two internet censorship bills: The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is in the House, and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) is in the senate. If you care about net neutrality, freedom of speech on the internet, and the future of web innovation, you should educate yourself about these acts. The...