Interaction Design | Elisabeth Hubert

Guest Post by: Kofi Aidoo, Intern

It’s been 6 Mondays since I landed at O’hare and came directly to the famed Merchandise Mart ready to begin a new chapter. After spending 3 years placing designers and putting my own creative needs on the back-burner, I was here to start again and begin my journey towards becoming a UX designer. So, exhausted from my last 4 days in New York, I walked into the 1871 space at the Merchandise Mart, luggage in tow and duly impressed by what I saw.

After several years of going to IxDA events and flirting with the idea of UX as a career, I decided that it was time. In making my transition I had spoken to a good number of people in the industry and received some valuable advice. I knew I wanted to dedicate myself to the practice and also that I didn’t want to pay too much money. The ship and build philosophy, the location, and the very reasonable price made Starter League, my current focus, a very attractive option.

For those who don’t know, the Starter League is a 1.5 year old “school” that teaches different aspects of web design and development. The Starter League was founded by Neal Sales-Griffin and Mike McGee, two friends who had faced the challenge of learning the skills needed to build their own digital products. Realizing that there weren’t that many opportunities and resources available that truly help the uninitiated, they began the Starter League. The root of their drive and methodology is to help people learn the skills needed to create and ship viable products fast.

They offer classes in Beginner and Advanced HTML/CSS, Web Development using Ruby on Rails, Visual Design, and User Experience, the class I’m taking. All courses last 3 months and attendees are encouraged to take more than one course to round out their education. The UX class is taught by Carolyn Chandler, co-author of “A Project Guide to UX Design” assisted by Veronika Goldberg, a visual designer turned UX designer and alumnus of The Starter League.

A typical class starts with the review of the homework, Carolyn asks us about any insights and pain points and then we delve into the lesson for the next 3 hours with a ten minute break at the half-way point. We’ve already learned about visual design, heuristics, personas, user stories, surveys and research, as well as, have begun to do some initial wireframing and site maps. All work is project based and done in groups that were formed in the second week. Groups… which leads me to one of the over riding tenets of the course. Collaboration!

Collaboration forms the spine of the learning. In the programming classes, students work in pairs during class, but for the design classes, students work in groups on one “real – life project”. They work together, as practitioners, looking to develop and launch an idea. The high point of all this collaboration is Starter Night at the end of term when teams from all the classes will join together to build an app and then present their app and their process to the rest of the League. Think of it like a 6 week Hack-a-thon without the begging for money at the end. One of the taglines displayed heavily on the Starter League homepage reads: Start Careers. Launch Products. Build Companies. But after 6 weeks here I can definitely say the emphasis, besides being on collaboration, is more heavily on the last 2 tenets.

With such an emphasis, in the UX classes especially, the process can sometimes feel a little lacking on feedback. With 3 months to cover everything there is a speed that is obvious but not overwhelming. However, our homework assignments are mere discussion points and serve ultimately as a roadmap to the construction of an app. Topics and processes are well covered, but we seem to touch on them only once or twice and don’t come back to them as we move on in the class. More than one of my colleagues and I have raised this point, and Carolyn and Veronika have responded admirably. Homework review is taking up a little more of the opening minutes in class while some information that can be consumed as reading material is placed in an extra file. The emphasis on in-class activity and familiarity with the UX process has gone up, and that is great. But enough about Starter League, the question for me remains:

As one of the many here focused on making a career change, and on making UX my livelihood: How do I KEEP IT REAL and become a UX professional while I’m here?

I was trying to keep it real even before I started the program. On deciding to come to this program I have not only left my job but have also made a not so insignificant financial investment. I wanted to make sure I would use the time wisely and be efficient. So, the first thing I did when I was accepted was to prepare myself mentally for the challenge.

Inspired by a Steve Martin quote, “So Good they Can’t Ignore You” is a book by Cal Newport, a Georgetown Computer science professor who’s been writing since high school on different tips for academic success. This latest book looks the idea of Follow your Passion dead in the eye and forces it to blink. To summarize, his claim is that a successful career isn’t about “Following your Passion”, instead your passion arises from using deliberate practice to build career capital, build valuable skills in your industry, gain more control over what you work on and then couple that with a mission statement that drives success and that elusive Passion. Skills are the foundation and that foundation takes work! This has become the backbone of my practice.

But deliberate practice isn’t just about work it’s about receiving critical feedback on that work and then working to make it right. So when my friends in the NYC IxDA community alerted me to this internship I jumped at it. I had known Lis from going to IxDA events and knew she was a well respected straight shooter who would definitely help me refine my craft. Along with this internship I was pleasantly surprised that the Starter League had also put some thought into mentoring and would provide anyone who wanted it with a professional in the city as a mentor for the duration of the course. I was lucky to have been assigned Patrick DiMichale, a colleague of Caroyln’s at Manifest Digital.

The most important thing I’ve done is immerse myself in the work. The Starter League is full of people working to put their ideas to market. Regardless of their experience they are developing projects that require good User Experience design. I’ve aligned myself with 3 of these projects (including my own), and have been using the things I learn in class to look at the projects from a user perspective as well as a business perspective. I’ve given both my mentors a lot to chew on in the past weeks and it’s been invaluable to have their input.

As I look at the next 6 weeks the end seems both far away and right around the corner. I’m not 100% sure if I’ll be ready to start a UX career by the end of my time here, but I do know I’ll be on the right path and will have built a solid foundation from which to move forward. No matter what the challenge, being mindful about the skills that are important, as well as coveted, and working on those will be the guiding principal in my practice. I urge you to read Cal Newport’s book and look at his 4 principals to a happy career. No matter what the environment Keeping it Real starts with knowing your stuff!

This Fall I had the opportunity to facilitate my very first conference all day workshop. I must admit that when FOWD asked if I would be interested in conducting a workshop I was terrified at the thought. But, in true FOWD fashion, they saw something that I clearly had not yet seen… that I really could conduct this type of thing. So, with the help and advice of some amazingly generous colleagues (thanks Jeff Gothelf, Christian Crumlish, Donna Lichaw, Ray DeLaPena, Andrea Mignolo, Julie Blitzer and all others that helped me out!) I was able to present the workshop, Interaction Design Beyond the Interface, at both The Future of Web Design NYC conference as well as The Future of Web Design Prague conference, to pretty positive reviews (and to some amazing feedback on how to make the workshop even better).

The basis of the workshop is to instill in Interaction Designers the knowledge that we are the ones ultimately responsible for the design of the solution (we, of course, do not do this in a silo and are supported by our teams. But when #$%^ hits the fan we are usually to blame. ), and also to point out that the interface itself is NOT the solution, but instead is the medium through which users interact with the solution.

The workshop focuses on curating essential design skills including understanding and utilizing the step in the solution process of first identifying and exploring the problem space, and then understanding the solution at a conceptual level before transmitting that solution into one or multiple interfaces (Think about responsive design. How can we really do this well without understanding the solution in a conceptual way first?). We end the workshop by modeling the soultion, without doing an interface, and then we work on how to present this solution model to our teams for consensus.

All in all the workshop was a great experience for me, and I look forward to bringing it to more conferences and work places in 2013. If you enjoy the slides, have feedback, have complaints, or want to know more about how to bring it to your company please let me know! I’d love to help spread the word about how interaction design is beyond the interface… and is, instead, the solution creator.

Interaction Design Beyond the Interface

Recently, Johnny Holland Magazine graciously offered me the opportunity to share my thoughts on UX with their audience. Together we decided to create a series entitled The UX Athlete in which I use many of the lessons that I’ve learned while playing sports to highlight how we can all be better designers. The first post, UX Success Starts with a Good Strategy, just recently launched and I have been receiving some great feedback on it. Be sure to check it out along with the others that will be going up in the near future. And, as always, I’d love to hear any thoughts or feedback that you have on any of the posts, or the series in general. Enjoy, and thanks again to Johnny Holland for allowing me to participate.

As I have mentioned before (see I’m Dublin Bound! for more), I had the opportunity to travel to Dublin, Ireland earlier this year to speak at the Interaction 12 conference. It was an amazing experience, and I hope to get the chance to attend next year’s event! For everyone that was able to make the talk in Dublin, I’d love to hear any feedback from you. For those of you who missed it, the video is now available. I’d love to hear what you think… Enjoy!

One day, as I was drifting off into one of my frequent reveries, it came to me. How, I said to myself, can we really call ourselves Interaction Designers, when the majority of us aren’t really designing any new interactions? I know what you are going to say. “But Lis, surely you agree that we design interactive sites, apps and other digital products all the time!”. But we need to ask ourselves, are we really creating new interactions based on human capabilities or just reusing old digital interactions in new ways. Chance would have it that this amazing article crossed my path, A Brief Rant On the Future of Interaction Design, and it greatly helped to clarify my thoughts. In this article, the author talks about how many of the videos and hypotheses that we see of “future” interactions are really just riffs off of technology that we already have. He uses the example of touchscreens heavily throughout the article, and points out something very key; that these so called “future” touch interactions are not really based off of the gap between human capabilities (how humans are capable of interacting) and current human interaction (what people are already doing today). Instead they are based off of the fact that we have touchscreen technology and thus feel the need to figure out more interactions that people can do with it. The author’s plea is for us to “be inspired by the untapped potential of human capabilities.”, and to me, the people that do that… are the real interaction designers.

So what if my whacky theories are true? What is the big deal? Well, I’ll tell you what the big deal is. The problem with us believing that we are interaction designers without really taking into consideration human capabilities is that we are stunting the ability to design new and meaningful interactions for our users. We stunt creative and innovative design growth because we plateau and refuse to push ourselves further. “We’re already interaction designers”, we say. “We’re the creative ones, the ones that can see into the future of digital interaction, so we must be right.”. Wrong. We are a big part of the gap that users have between interactions today and their physical capability to act further. Thus, what we end up really designing for are technical advancements as opposed to human capability, and our tools are not really for use by real people, but are just pushing the limits of technology to see how far we can take it. That is not design, it is selfishness and greed.

But, I promise you this, we can solve this problem, we can make ourselves part of the solution. The first step in doing so is to take a minute, stop and think. We need to, at a minimum, take the time to understand human capabilities. That is really what user research is all about. Bret Victor, the article author above, mentions that user research is all about understanding how people are already using interactions and tools, noting user goals and needs and then noting gaps and hiccups in the interactions the user is having. We need to go back to the roots of the user, the human, in order to design for them, and not for our own technological progress.

By understanding human capabilities and the gaps in interaction between those capabilities and the user’s potential for the interaction, we become interaction designers. Real interaction designers. We can create more meaningful digital interactions (and physical if that is the space you are in) and we then come even closer to meeting and exceeding our users’ goals. Being an interaction designer means that you have taken an oath, an oath to make the world a near effortless place to interact with. So, take that first step and understand your users capabilities so that you can begin to design for them as opposed to designing for the technology. By doing that you are making this complex interactive world an easier place to interact.

(This post is the fourth in a series devoted to looking at how sports and design are aligned. For more in this series see How being a jock makes me a better UX Designer, UX and Sports? Ya Damn Right!, and How to find the best UX mentor. I also presented some of this material at Interaction 12. Be sure to check out the slides from that talk as well!)

I remember the summer well. It was the summer right before my freshman year in high school. Somehow, I had been asked to play with the Varsity soccer team, and therefore I was attending the twice a day practices (practices that were brutal, to say the least). There was one hill nicknamed “The Rambo Hill” that was part of our everyday routine. In short, this was a steep, rocky (no pun intended) hill that we would run up and down. It was painful (especially falling down the hill after your cleat comes untied… but that is another story). Being one of three freshman on the team I was younger than everyone else, and because of that had very little, if any, clout. I decided to try an experiment, both for my own mental stamina, as well as to test the relationship with my team. But more on that later.

I’m telling you this story today because I think that we, as designers, are lacking the same sort of clout within our teams and organizations. Although UX is the newest buzz term, and everyone thinks they need us, they still have not granted us enough respect to really understand what we do. If you think that being “needed” on a team in order to draw the picture in omnigraffle is respect, then I challenge you to a duel. Luckily, times are changing. But, we aren’t quite where we need to be to be truly respected. And, therefore, perhaps we should try a similar experiment to the one that I conducted back during that summer.

First, I think it’s important to acknowledge the problems with not having enough respect (insert Rodney Dangerfield voiceover) or clout. First off, it is just plain demoralizing to be the only one in the room that respects your work and really knows what you do. As I said, respect isn’t just about being invited to the party, it’s about being invited to the party for the right reasons. And, unfortunately with us, that is not always the case. The second problem is that it is extremely hard to bring the correct solution or any solution forth for discussion when your position within the team is misunderstood or under respected. The third issue is that it is even harder to expect to get a representative at any higher level in an organization if your role is misunderstood and lacks clout.

So, what is the experiment that I ran with my soccer team that summer? I decided, on my own free will, to become a motivator. Doing so meant that I was the person cheering on the team no matter how much pain or exhaustion I felt. When we were running up the hill, around the field, over the river and through the woods I would yell out “Come on girls! We can do this! Whatever doesn’t kill us, makes us all stronger!”.

Bringing this over to design… this means our solution to the problems I mentioned above lies in becoming motivators. That’s right, you should motivate your teammates. Tell them, aloud, when they are doing a good job. When was the last time you saw a developer on a tight deadline all stressed out and said to them “Hey, you know what? You got this. You’re doing a great job and I know you can do this.”. Pretty powerful statement right? Imagine how they will feel when you say that? Also, you want to keep things on the project positive and push your team to excel both with your words and your actions.

You’ll be surprised what being a motivator can do. That summer, my cheering became my tagline. It was probably, after awhile, pretty freakin annoying, but it didn’t matter. This type of cheering, as well as keeping a positive attitude and complimenting and motivating individual teammates as well as everyone on the whole, shifted something. People began to trust in me as a teammate. They looked at me as someone who understood how they felt, even if I was less experienced. They wanted me around more. And by coupling this with my will to work hard and learn I gained a whole lot of respect and clout.

I think that running this same experiment will work within design. By keeping a positive attitude, recognizing effort and pushing your teammates (especially your non-design teammates) to excel you will earn a great deal of trust and not long after a high level of respect. You are no longer the creative who sits in the corner and does the fun work… you are a part of the team! You are showing that you understand how everyone else feels and thus you can be trusted. And once you earn this clout and respect the sky is the limit for how far you can take your role and the role of this profession. By letting down your guard, and pushing your team to be better, you become the one they want around more, and not just for your wireframing skills either.

When I was first introduced to the field of user experience it was the summer of 2005. After leaving my job as a Java Programmer in Hartford, CT I moved to San Antonio, TX where I randomly fell into a UX job (talk about lucky). It’s an understatement to say that I had no idea what the hell I was doing, and I scraped along for awhile trying to figure it all out. Back in those days, my role was not UX Designer or Interaction Designer, in fact, the term UX didn’t even exist in my world! Instead, those of us that weren’t visual designers were called Information Architects, and that was exactly what we did. It was our job to architect, organize and make sense of the information within a website or application. After we mapped that out (either in an IA doc or some sort of concept mapping), we worked with a visual designer to put our mapping into an interface.

Unlike a lot of what we see today, the first thing I did on the job was NOT learn how to wireframe. In fact I didn’t create my first wireframe until I moved back east to NYC almost three years later. Instead, the first thing I was instructed to do was visit Jesse James Garrett’s site. I was tasked with understanding what the Visual Vocabulary for describing information architecture and interaction design was from a conceptual standpoint, and was then expected to map out IAs for my projects. There are several reasons why this was my first step. Reason one was that we IAs and VDs simply needed to know how information was related and prioritized within a website or application before we could design the interface for that system. How else can you design a proper interface solution unless you understand which information types need to be included in that solution, and which are most important to the solution? Without knowing this information, we would have been guessing at the interface. Reason two was that we didn’t want to show an interface to our non-design partners and stakeholders as our first deliverable because what we really needed from them was not feedback on the visual, but feedback on the content and context that related to the system. It’s seven years later, and, sadly, it seems that the time I’m speaking of has come and gone. And, because of that we are facing a huge problem in the world of UX.

The problem UX is facing is, simply, we are devolving. The definition of de-evolution is to degenerate through a gradual change or evolution, and it seems to me that by removing the information architecture step from our day to day process we might be on that path. To be fair, I’m not saying how that IA phase should be structured in detail (that is for another post), but I am saying that this type of thinking needs to be done and signed off on by certain team partners before we can move into interface design (including wireframes).

We see several problems that come out of skipping the IA phase. First, the team (UXers, Visual Designers, Project team members, other stakeholders) won’t all be in agreement on the prioritization and context of the information to be designed for which will cause disagreement in later phases. Second, by showing wireframes without agreeing on IA, we are focusing our stakeholders and other partners on the interface and not on the real thing we are designing for… content and context. Third, we are, in essence, beginning to lie to ourselves. We are lying to ourselves by telling each other than UX is not just about form, but it is about function as well. Because if it was about function, we’d spend time on the information (the IA phase) before we went right into talking about the form that the information should take (the wireframe phase).

To make matters worse, we, as an industry, have been trying to validate the discomfort that many of us feel subconsciously with skipping the IA step, by turning to “sketching” as the end all be all answer. Of course, sketching is important, but it all matters what we are sketching and when. What I’m talking about is that we UXers think that since sketching doesn’t involve putting our wireframes into an electronic format, than it doesn’t really count as skipping straight to wireframing. But guess what, even sketching the interface without first sketching the structure of the information means you are skipping the one step that will make your designs truly successful. That step is where you think about the content, context and users, and force your stakeholders to do the same, WITHOUT thinking about the interface (also known as the IA step).

So where do we go from here? How do we stop this process of devolution and backwards movement? Well, we bring back IA! Ok, ok, I’m not saying that we should all learn Jesse James Garrett’s Visual Vocab (though it wouldn’t hurt) or that we need to institute a structured process that we follow the exact same way every time. But, what I am arguing we need to do is slow down, put down our sketching pens, and our omnigraffle and just think. Think about, draw out and get buy in on your content, your context, and your users. And do so without a wireframe or a sketch of a wireframe. Pick up the Polar Bear book, and ignore the wireframe chapter and learn IA.

By bringing the IA phase back and by concentrating first on the information, several things will happen. First, your sketching and interface design becomes much, much better because you have prioritization and buy off on the content, context, and users you are designing for. This means that your wireframe/prototyping phase becomes a lot more about the interface and not what content should go in the interface and why. Second, you are showing your stakeholders that UX design truly isn’t just form, but really is also about function. We are moving away from the interface, which is how we started, and towards a real solution of which the interface is only a part. Third, we stop lying to ourselves, and we stop saying that the best UX solutions aren’t just the coolest or the best aesthetically, but they are those that take content, context and users into consideration while creating an aesthetically appropriate interface. Most importantly we stop UX’s slide down the evolution scale back towards the time of print design and outputs, and instead continue our climb up the mountain towards being the user experience experts.

It’s that time of the year… time for another Interaction conference. My bags are all packed, and in a little under 24 hours I’ll be hoping that express bus from NYC to Newark Liberty Airport to catch my flight to Dublin. I couldn’t be more excited to attend this year’s conference, and have high hopes after attending both in 2010 and 2011. This, however, will be my first international conference so I’m interested to see how the location influences this year’s event.

When I return, be prepared to see some posts referencing the event. With such an amazing line up, I’m sure I’ll be learning alot. And, knowing me, I’m sure I’ll have opinions and insights to share as well.

So… here’s to what I’m sure will prove an amazing adventure in Dublin. Can’t wait to tell you all about it!

This post is the second in a series devoted to pointing out How being a jock makes a better UX Designer (Also, if you are coming to Interaction 12 in Dublin, be sure to check out my talk How being a jock makes a better interaction designer!)

As UXers, we are really great at researching and designing solutions for our users. The problem is that we are not so great at convincing our teams and clients, that 1. research is needed, and 2. our design ideas are sound. One way to combat this is to understand The Importance of Rationale. However, today I wanted to talk about a new method gleamed from the wide world of sports that can help you to evangelize your ideas both within your organization as well as with your clients.

First, I think it is important to highlight why not being able to sell our process and design ideas is a problem. Besides the fact that it makes us completely depressed about our profession, and therefore makes us wonder why we are even part of a project to begin with; not being able to sell our work means that when we walk into the project we are prey waiting to be pounced on. Any know-it-all marketing person, business manager, project manager or other project team type can out talk us and make our ideas look idiotic (even when they’re awesome) just because they don’t agree with our solution (or it doesn’t work best for their part of the organization). Thus, what happens by us not being able to push our process and ideas is we end up sacrificing our expertise to the greater team (everyone is a designer, afterall) and allowing group think and design by committee to create solutions for our users instead of us. Now, of course there is always room for critique and brainstorming, but what I’m talking about is different. I’m talking about someone just pushing their ideas over you, and through the machine in order to be the hero of the organization.

So how do we solve this? One way is to look at a timeless lesson taken from the world of athletics. That lesson? Be a teammate. Yes, it really is that simple. All jocks know this one. To be successful, you have to be willing to swallow your pride, be the bigger person, and admit when something is and is not your responsibility. Sure, you can have opinions about anything, but to be honest, the marketing numbers or the coding, or other non-interaction design focused things are not your responsibility. Might you be a better marketing representative that the person on your team? Sure. But you aren’t the marketing person responsible for this project, you are the interaction designer. Respect the other person’s role. Offer up suggestions to them in a kind way, in a way that you want people to offer up design suggestions to you, and then… leave it alone. You are not the saving grace of this company, you are a part of the company team. By recognizing and taking control of your responsibilities and by letting your other team members do them same, you are showing that you have faith in your teammates, the overall team and the team philosophy.

The outcomes of being a teammate are mutual respect and acceptance on both parts (yours and theirs). Having these makes it a lot harder for people to rip apart your design ideas in a meeting just because they might clash with an opinion. By showing respect and acceptance, you are asking to get them back in return (see “Respect is Something You Need to Give” for more thoughts). By letting your guard down you are inviting your teammates to do the same. And once they do, they will start to see you as a valued part of the team and will then be a lot more likely to help you to curate the best solutions possible for your users.

This winter, I was asked by the awesome folks at Web Designer Depot for some predictions about what will happen in the world of web design in 2012. After I told myself to stop be baffled that they asked me, and after I got over the fear of putting my thoughts out there to their wide audience, I was able to come up with a few ideas. You can read them below.

Now that HTML5 and CSS3 have been unpackaged and utilized, and given the emergence and popularity of responsive and adaptive web design, 2012 will bring us back to the future of the web. After years of driving the two apart, 2012 is the year that we will begin to bring mobile and desktop technologies back together by using the web to bridge the gap between the contexts. From that, we will be focused on designing for a holistic product experience.

Expect to see an explosion of mobile/desktop web solutions that can work on many different devices and platforms. Mobile First as a methodology will grow in popularity, and people will also be thinking more about how their product extends across these many different contexts.

Look for an outbreak in designers and product developers wanting to better understand users in order to create appropriate solutions for coherent experiences. We’ll be looking more and more towards psychology and user research to better understand our user base as well as better translate our product into an interface.

From this we’ll see the appearance of new ways to navigate through site content (in order to stay responsive), as well as new patterns for creating delightful and engaging user experiences online.

There are many more predictions to review! Be sure to check out the full article: Web design predictions for 2012