Design Thinking Digest

The Why and What of User Experience

I created this post for an internal blog at Microsoft, I thought I'd post it her as well, some parts have been edited for clarity.

Mention the words ‘user experience’ in a meeting these days to a marketer, customer, product designer or software developer and it’s more than likely that heads will quickly start to bob up and down in agreement that it’s a critical aspect of their jobs that they must do well to be successful, but what is it? How do you do it well? Alas, these inquiries only lead to more questions most of the time.

In fact, you’ll find the answers to those questions are as varied as the titles of its practitioners. For example, what’s the difference between an interaction designer, an information designer, an information architect or a user experience architect? Do solution architects and developers need to worry about user experience or is that the job of ‘creative’ folks and the usability lab to best determine?

What do companies ‘do’ when they practice user experience, are there activities that make some user experience efforts more successful than others? These are hard questions that are quite frequently given ambiguous answers by the design profession and our computer human interaction brethren. As someone that’s been a designer for the past 14 years some of this is my fault, I was never happy using generic titles or terms and a common vocabulary and neither were my friends. For example, for over 6 years I was a creative director at IBM. However, if I went down the street to Avenue A/Razorfish they may have called me a user experience director. A usability engineer might be called a customer experience specialist. An information architect might be an information designer at one firm but neither might be an interaction designer. Front end technologist, human centered design? Don’t get me started.

Recently designers, implementers and marketers of products, services and software have worked harder than ever to develop common language and practices that allow us to apply principles of user experience that are repeatable, reliable and teachable. As a matter of fact many of us are motivated by things like this and this and even this.

This new design understanding has enabled a revolution to occur in how we purchase and consume products and services as consumers and in the enterprise. Some of this happened because things simply got to complex. But the other reason it happened is because user experience is at the intersection of two things that are driving the software industry and many others—design and innovation.

Before you can answer or have a basic understanding of ‘what’ user experience is and ‘how’ user experience can be done it’s important to understand the ‘why’. Titles don’t matter too much in design and neither do the names of design or software development phases, but having people accountable for user experience execution and having a toolkit of repeatable patterns and processes matter a great deal—and understanding why user experience matters and what it gets you as a user of software and as a creator of it.

Good user experience in a meta-sense connects all the disparate parts into something that is ultimately more useful and valued that its individual parts. Office 2007 Enterprise is more valuable than Excel when Office applications were less connected. An operating system that updates itself is more useful than one that doesn’t. An operating system that can guide me through how to set up a network connection is more useful that one that does not—one that can get me connected in three steps versus 14 is even better! User experience puts processes and patterns in place that keep this from getting to complex. At a more granular level a focus on user experience raises the bar for these interactions and differentiates the experience of using suites of applications or services. Intelligent engineering of products enables people to create new marketing opportunities and create new efficiency and productivity in the they develop.

User experience is about making products usable, no cryptic dialogs, one click versus five.

User experience is about making things more useful, by visualizing data and information graphically and richly that mimics models we use to process information in the real world or to reveal patterns to us that might not be obvious.

User experience is also about adaptability and having software, hardware and services adapt to context, such as working in a network connected or network disconnected state.

User experience is reliability, the trust that a system will perform in a way that is expected that won’t compromise your productivity or privacy.

User experience is also about desirability, about the joy we get in interacting with products, services and software.

When we can combine all these principles we frequently don’t just get a great user experience, we get an innovation. Remember these works when you want to know what UX is—it’s usable, useful, adaptable, reliable, trustworthy and desirable.

This next part is very Microsoft centric

But user experience isn’t just about how we make things, but how we make tools that others can use to make things. Remember this, it’s important. Not too many companies make products that you both use as a consumer and then also the tools that you use to create them. Even fewer companies think about the user experience of those developer tools. It makes us a bit unique and the mantra of developers, developers, developers has actually never been more relevant and important. Just remember to add a new mantra which is, say it with me…designers, designers, designers—because the combination of those two professions is what is driving the current generation of innovation in our industry.

The Laws of Simplicity

If 2006 was the year that the Web 2.0 and social media reached a zenith and viral video and my space changed how we interact with technology I would submit the meme that has really driven all of this can be reduced to one word. Simplicity.

John Maeda, of MIT gives us ten laws that (if one looks carefully) closely align to who has been most successful in matters of innovation and design thinking. John summarizes that laws as:

Reduce

The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction

Organize

Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.

Time

Savings in time feel like simplicty.

Learn

Knowledge makes everything simpler

Differences

Simplicity and complexity need each other.

Context

What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.

Emotional

More emotions are better than less.

Trust

In simplicity we trust.

Failure

Some things can never be made simple.

The One

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

 

John also left us with three keys:

Away

More always appears like less by simply moving it far, far away.

Open

Openness simplifies complexity.

Power

Use less, gain more.

 

I suspect that many folks might be prone to misinterpret some of Maeda's guidance-such as where he does acknowledge that there is some complexity that is impossible to remove (or it's complexity that shouldn't be removed). He also talks about one of the most important complexities that is onften overlooked, that of time. Something that can make or break the best experiences in both interactive experiences and in service oriented design.

Update, I've notices some recent pushback on the concept of simplicity from folks such as Don Norman (which is eloquently commented on at joelonsoftware.com). For those of us that work with existing services or applications the principles of simplicity sometimes need to be addressed in ways that are different from the current crop of Web 2.0 applications. One prime example, the Office 2007 suite which although still complex embraces many of the principles that Maeda outlines.

Does Apple make the best PC Laptop?

I recently had to by a new computer to run Vista. I travel alot so I needed something light and portable, but I'm a designer so I also needed something with decent performance--ie dual core, no embedded graphics, etc. Finally, I'm a designer, I care how things look and feel, yada, yada, yada (although it's important for computer manufactures to note that EVERYONE cares about this at the end of the day whether they admit it or not).

If you want a PC laptop and you want something stylish, your options are limited if you want to spend a reasonable amount of money, scratch that actually, they barely exist.

My two favorite laptops in recent memory were an IBM Thinkpad T43 and a 12 Inch Macintosh Powerbook G4, I still own the Mac. I'm still of the opinion that nobody makes a better laptop keyboard than IBM and the only think that kept me from getting one is that fact that the tablet I wanted to purchase didn't have dual core or dedicated graphics, nor a high enough resolution display. The newer Thinkpads don't do it for me, they've gotten a bit thicker and unwieldy (Update, the new tablet Thinkpads are nice machines, get one if you don't need dedicated graphics).

My G4 is the perfect form factor for me, the right size and the right weight. It's drawbacks are a too small display and it's a G4, so no Vista.

Which led me to a quandary. Dollar for dollar and pound for pound and for pure esthetics nothing beats the 15' Macbook Pro with the 256 Megabyte graphics card. In fact, go to a design or developer conference these days and I'd say it's actually the computer of choice no matter WHICH operating system you are running because it runs them all and I challenge you to find a better equipped machine at that price point for which it is offered on the Apple Store.

There must be a market for a machine as good that is made by a Dell, HP or Toshiba. These guys need to catch up. (Note, I don't mean performance or specwise but I do mean in terms of style, form factor and weight).

The only contender in my opinion right now is Sony--which is what I wound up getting. It's a beautiful machine that's made of carbon fiber and weighs under 4 pounds, it's got similar specs to the 15' Macbook Pro baseline configuration in a much more compact, but much more delicate form factor. Plus it's got a keyboard I can't stand--if I could graft a Thinkpad keyboard onto it I'd be a happy man. Let's not talk about price either as the Mac is a much better value.

The bottomline, the 'elites' of the computing world are all drifting towards Macs, regardless of the OS they use. It seems to me that there is a huge market for Dell, HP, Toshiba, Sony and others to bridge this gap--I'm simply shocked at far ahead Apple is.

So my next machine wound up being a Sony, but the 12' G4 is getting long in the tooth, if an Intel-based machine in the Macbook Pro form factor comes out I'll be picking one up.

Designing for Interaction Review

Dan has written a great primer on interaction design that can serve as a powerful foundation for an introduction into interaction design and ALL the realms that it can influence. You'll be introduced to foundational concepts in interaction design such as Tesler's Law of Complexity and Fitt's Law but Dan also goes much deeper and surfaces issues that will impact the domains that haven't quite embraced design and principlals of interaction.

Dan covers the basic processes that can drive interaction design and lays out the pros and cons of each, from user centered design to task oriented design, system design and genius design. Some of the most powerful topics that Dan covers concern the areas of community and service design and enabling users to find both the seams in interfaces or products that they develop but also understanding the critical theory of flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

If you're interested in a primer on interaction that can frame the processes and techniques I don't think there's a better book on the market that covers this--athough I'm also still fond of the Elements of User Experience as a general cookbook and the more recent Ambient Finability that discusses some of the most current and pertinent challenges in interaction design.