Innovation is everywhere and I want to go there

The term innovation has been frequently crossing my path lately.   And that’s good because I’m really ready to find better ways to think creatively and improve my innovation skills, well, I hope I have at least some to improve.

Who wants you to innovate

The president wants us all to innovate.  President Obama recently spoke on the subject at Hudson Valley community college on the topic of innovation. American car commercials are pushing innovation. In fact, GM and the Chevy Volt are really impressive in their commercials and make their work look innovative. Hell, even my kids are “innovating.” They built an entire city out all kinds of toys this weekend. And when a Playmobile treasure chest turns into a volcano that has a steel fence around it to keep in the lava, it’s another form of innovation!

Closer to UX, Matthew Milan gave a very inspiring take on Innovation Parkour at IDEA 09 in Toronto. Any presentation that involves the speaker to ask if “innovation is fun” and the majority of the room raises their hands and the next slide says “bullshit”, well you know you’re in for a good one. He went on to say it’s hard and perhaps we can train ourselves for to be better at innovation. Check out the slides and video from the presentation.

And finally, Paul Boag just put out a blog post on the topic of becoming more innovative. In his post two things stood out to me that are circulating around this idea of innovation. The first was the concept of turning off the TV and laying off the lame excuse of no time in the day to work on new ideas and or subjects. For the record, I do have DVR and I’ll grant that it is a slight of hand trick to say I’m turning off the TV, right.. after… I… set… the… recording.   And the second was the way of innovation. We should be challenging the way we work and why we make certain decisions when we are trying new concepts.

My pledge to being more innovative

There are alot of great ideas in the presentations, posts and commercials listed above. UX requires you to be innovative and challenge your current thinking so here’s my own personal recipe that I am going to follow.

1 hour per night for ideas – sans TV

It’s that simple. Anything that I think I really want to watch from 9:00 pm – 1:00 am isn’t really that critical. Let’s face it. Keep in mind that I own a DVR, aka the cop-out. But seriously, I can guarantee I will get more satisfaction out of not watching TV for at least an hour and devote some time to ideas.

1 hour per night for ideas – sans TV and sans computer

No computer! But how can you push the envelope and get out your ideas? Here’s what’s been dragging me down. I sit in front of this lousy laptop hour after hour everyday. And I like it. But after dinner and hanging out with the kids the laptop is only for Twitter, Facebook or Google. No matter how much I’ve wanted to press on with other research and or work, it’s just not there lately. So instead, I am going to drop, not literally, the laptop and pick up a sketch book, pencils and some very lousy but semi-effective drawing skills. Sketch away ideas, concepts or even some text about sites, products or anything. As long as I’m doing some thinking I may stumble upon an idea.

Keep reading outside of my field

I enjoy reading and I’ve always read UX books and many times strayed outside of UX. Sometimes I feel guilty about it and I should read a little closer to home. But I think to innovate we need to keep looking past our work and see what others are doing. Subjects might be farming, biographies of famous physicists or maybe some old detective novels. Whatever the subject covers, it’s good to stretch the mind and at the same time letting it relax and not worry about work.

Photographing everything that seems relevant

Obsessive, maybe not that far but need to do it a lot more  However, I have noticed many ideas from objects I see that I swear I am going to remember. And I just don’t remember them at all. So using either the blackberry camera or investing in a nice small pocket size camera I want to “document” other ideas and catalog them(that’s the next idea by the way.) Why?

Take a look at this picture. This is what I literally saw while working today.

I see a very contextual targeted message to the “reader” of the Frosted Cheerios box. “A whole mess of awards” refers to the author’s accomplishments and is the right tone for young people which is a direct tie to this cereals “user population.”   I may one day want to turn to this picture as an example to drive home a point regarding the tone of a project.  A stakeholder may not agree but if it meets the user population why is it wrong? General Mills does it on their boxes and I think they’re kind of doing ok.

Report back with findings

It might be a blog post, a tweet, a white paper, a flickr upload or just logged somewhere and analyzed at a later date. The main point is that the outcome of these ideas and or exercises needs an outlet for others to review and or add to the concepts. There is no point in storing up information and ideas and not acting out on them. In Boag’s post he brings up an excellent point about rolling out sites and why do we protect sites(aka ideas) like it’s Fort Knox. Maybe we might get better ideas and refine them quicker if we open ourselves up for speculation and analysis including ideas and inspiration.

 

 

Jack Taylor – Early UX work

Last week I flipped on the Sundance Channel and became engrossed with a documentary about the legendary tailor Jack Taylor of Beverly Hills.  For the back story on his amazing career and in the interest of not writing a biography check this link out.

Besides becoming enamored with the actual footage of Jack Taylor and his impressive clients a few minutes of footage on his process dovetailed directly to UX and create an “ah-ha” moment.  The director filmed a sequence of how Jack starts to work with a new client and focused on showing the fitting process.  What jumped out at me were his “charts” on every client and how similar and or influential these charts can be to personas and user snapshots.  Apologies for not having the clip of the process ready yet, a day or two please.  However, the picture below shows the chart.   Taylor takes various notes on the body type, measurements and other factors that go into customer tailoring.  And he keeps track of everything moving forward.  Your weight is marked.  Gain a few pounds a couple of months later? That is updated along with some advice to only eat half portions from Taylor himself.

Jack Taylor taking down measurements from fedoralounge.com

So what’s the point of this?  As I’ve noted before in other posts and conversations, UX needs to constantly look around at other disciplines and understand their methods and techniques.  As a practice, we can learn how to improve our own techniques and adapt other styles to our practice.  In this instance, Jack Taylor has been keeping track of his clients for decades.  Beyond the person, he’s keeping track of the fabric they’ve used in the suits for the client.  Each client sheet has a swatch of the fabric used for each suit taped on the back.  Imagine that!  He can go back to someone like Monty Hall and know every suit he’s ever built for him and what it looked like.

When we’re developing applications we too should be keeping track of our “swatches” and decisions.  We should be reflecting back on our work and understanding our users, our decisions and use this information for our future decisions.  Even beyond just recording our past personas and decisions can’t we turn these into a living breathing document and/or site.  For instance, can we tie our site’s analytics to our personas and visual identity documents?  Imagine being able to track a segment of your user population and see what is working for them and where your site is having trouble.

Stay tuned.  There is a lot more that we can learn from other fields and I’m working on a more in depth look at what techniques and ideas we as a practice can learn from Taylor, other fashion techniques and even film directors John Cassavettes and Sam Peckinpah.

New skin on architecture and sites

On a very long run last month on the Kent State campus I came across one of the many building renovations underway at the music and speech building.  From the outside the building is getting a massive face-lift. As we know, running is good for the body and the mind and mine started to wander and think about my time in that library in the basement during my years at during research for my Music Theory classes at Hiram College.  I remember the interior being a shining example of 60-70’s architecture.  Glossy vinyl flooring, painted brick and heavy wooden doors that seal off every room from each other.  Sure, you could get your work done, but I must admit, it was a bit stifling and not the most conducive environment for creativity hour after hour.

So what I find interesting about this project is that they are updating the outside and it will look more inviting.  But I’m wondering if they are updating the rooms inside.  Are they going to make it better for artists and staff to work on a daily basis inside?  In other words, great cover on the book but what good is it if the story inside is dreadful? Instead of those boxed in rooms are they opening up collaborative spaces?   Based on research I’ve dug up it indeed does look like improvements are being done to other floors but the older classrooms will still be the same.  At least it’s a start.

Study rooms with glass.

Consider this.  The Cleveland Art Museum has been going through a massive construction project for years now.  Our family recently visited the museum and we were amazed at the new work.  However, to me one of the more interesting parts was how we got to the new wing.  For the time being you need to go through the basement where all of the new class rooms are located and the curators portion of the museum.  As we walked by the classrooms, you can see inside and see all of the artwork that either kids or students are working on.  But one loss for the museum was not showing how the museum runs.  Why not open up the curators area with glass partitions and you can see first hand how archivists work to restore paintings, catalog sculptures or even unpack new arrivals.  They museum is definitely moving forward in the right direction but this last step could have sent a visitors experience through the roof.

Site redesigns can easily fall into this situation.  You and your staff may be tasked with giving a fresh look to the site.  Great, users may want a new way to view the content and interact with the site.  But can you do more than just re-skin the look?  Isn’t this a time to jump in and see where you’re site should be going and deliver a more useful site for your users?  Take the time to dissect your users experiences and you might discover a new way to approach the content that would provide a very rich experience.  If your site is a service site there is even more opportunity to do this.  Reach out to stakeholders and conduct interviews.  Why only re-skin something when with a little more work you might be able to deliver a better experience.

Memories and assumptions

Two different readings have me thinking about our users and user experience in general.  The two books I’m reading that our bringing out these thoughts are Designing Design by Kenya Hara and Graphic Communication as a Design Tool by Omar Farque.  The books themselves are coming from different angles when it comes to design but there is one section of overlap when they discuss information architecture and user interaction.  This is even more intriguing from a user experience perspective when you consider that they each one is not written from the UX or internet perspective.  In fact the Omar book on sketching was published in 1984 but falls right inline as a valuable source for today.  Proving once again that we need to be reaching out to other sources and fields for inspiration and information when it comes to UX.

Memories in IA

However, back to focus of this post.  Hara’s book is steeped in the world of physical design.  His topics range from tactile shows that he’s curated in the past to designing the opening program for the Nagano Winter Olympics.  He discusses the thought and feelings that go into the physical design of his and fellow artists works.  But in one section he discusses the information architecture of print material.  Hara digs deeper and talks about the memories shaping the users context within the information architecture.    He points out that users when viewing a document or book may think “I’ve seen this before.  This looks familiar and I didn’t like the look of this before.”  From that point on they are carrying a bias, either positive or negative, as they interact with the material.

As UX practitioners we should be cognizant of this fact as well.  Your typical user probably doesn’t stick to one site.  Instead they are browsing numerous auto sites for instance and looking for the best deals and the right information to make a car purchase.  Therefore, your site needs to be easy to access, up to date and a pleasure to use.  In other words, your site needs to stick in their mind and resonate over your peer’s work.  Like it or not users are carrying baggage that may influence their use of your site.  If their last site visited was a horrible experience, well it may not be hard to please them. If it was positive you are going to have to win them over.

I know the next few lines people will utter.  “But we don’t know our users memories… Or we don’t know their experiences.”  I agree but we should be aware that there is potential to get to this information.

• We should also be in touch with our competitors sites and be aware of their work.
• We should be conducting user task analysis, focus groups, lab tests or even just simple one off interviews will keep us in touch enough to keep us honest.
• Finally, we should be studying our metrics and logs to piece together the experience of our users on our sites.  Where did a visitor enter the site, what did they look at and when did they bail?  You aren’t going to uncover everything but you can definitely begin to look for patterns and potential user pitfalls.

Making assumptions

Farque’s book discusses in detail sketching and using sketches as a communication tool.  His writing parallels UX when it comes to people making assumptions and decisions when they reach a physical location like a city.  His theory is that when people visit a city they make numerous observations within the first five minutes.  “But upon leaving they are left with a general impression and can only remember a few details.”

So think again of a large auto or news site.  Users are making decisions and assumptions rapidly about what content they want to view, if they feel the content is accurate and if it’s something they would like to remember.  Tie in the fact illustrated above that they are coming and going quickly to other sites and carrying memories and assumptions… well we’ve got a lot of variables to contend with when developing sites.  Easy to remember is a key component to usability and can be accomplished using a few simple steps.

• Cut down the noise on the site – if it’s not critical to the content on the page, get rid of it.  You may remember a cool avenue and the shops located on it when you visit a city.  But you may not remember all the details of each shop.
• Find out what users want – again, get in touch with your users and stakeholders.  You can cut out more than you think.
• Good IA for navigation – Organize your navigation based on users needs found out in card sorts and interviews.  If user drops in to your site from a search they need to be able to orient themselves to your site from this one page.  Check out Luke Wroblewski’s presentation on page structure as a reference point.

Power of positive thinking and actions

Last night I attended a community meeting here in Kent, Ohio that was meant to outline an ongoing proposal to revitalize the downtown with new development. Without going into a history lesson, like many small downtown locations throughout the United States, Kent has been going through some rough times. It is in desperate need of new life blood and new ideas to bring it back to life.  At the end of the meeting, I was very impressed to see well thought out plans and a very positive outlook to accomplishing these tasks.  And I see parallels in their thinking and steps to user experience and the type of projects we work on a daily basis.

Erie street development (from Recordpub.com)

The plans that were shown last night were very promising and look to be on the right track to bring in a new era of vitality to the city.  One aspect that made it exciting is that there is a truly positive nature to what they are trying to accomplish.  Why?  Again, no history lessons but as most city projects go, there are many people at the table and typically that leads them to trying to muscle their plan forward and their needs ahead of everyone else.  I wasn’t in the meetings and perhaps that has taken place but what I saw last night looked like the results of  a joint effort that was reflected in a cohesive plan that ties many ideas together.

UX perspective on people’s agendas

You may be in meetings with stakeholders who are at odds and have different agendas.  It’s important that you shepard the “team” through their issues and keep the end product in sight.  People will need to make compromises and adjust for the sake of the project success.   I know it’s easier said than done, but a user experience role isn’t always about the boxes and arrows.  In my opinion, it’s digging into some of the business logic, understanding the process and facilitating the hard discussions to provide the best user experience for the site/applications users.

The city and Kent State University, who have been at odds with each other in the past to the point of detriment, are working on a plan to tie together the two entities through an esplanade.  One of there options is to build a hotel and conference center.  What I like about their plan is the conference center is will be a medium sized conference center and not a 1,000 seat center.  They’ve seen a niche and understand that they should play up to a different angle of conferences rather than try to bring in giant conferences.  So if you have a small conference in mind (say 200-300 attendees) just wait, a state of the art facility could be right around the corner.

UX Perspective

Play to your strengths. Embrace and understand your weaknesses.   You need to know your product, your users and where you want to go with the user experience.  If your site is targeted towards retirees and their entertainment needs(totally made that up by the way) than play up to what they need for the site.  Your users weakness maybe a severe lack of using the internet.  So embrace that aspect and make the simplest navigation system, the easiest to read and comprehend pages and a drop dead simple check out system.  Sure, all sites should be that easy to use.  But in this case you may be dealing with a demographic that is being exposed to the internet for the first time and you want to make a great experience.  Over time, this user group will grow and become familiar with the internet but for now tread lightly.  The conference center is using that approach.  While Kent State is a fairly lare university, it is still in a fairly rural county and sits between two cities, Cleveland and Akron.  So they realize they can’t attract mega conferences but can definitely appeal to smaller ones.

A very important player is the local public transportation agency (PARTA.) They are trying to locate funding for a multi-modal transit station with shops in downtown.  This, in my opinion is the key to success and it looks like there could be federal funding to make this happen.  It’s a great way to bring many people downtown not only from Kent State but also from neighboring towns and even Cleveland and Akron.

UX Perspective

The PARTA station has been a relatively late partner on this project and can be seen as a new angle on the project.  User experience practitioners should be adept at looking at a situation and running through different scenarios to fully vet the right experience.  Too many times projects are dictated by the timeline and only a cursory design or experience exploration is given.  And unfortunately, a gem of an idea could be lost because we didn’t take the time to look at a project from different perspective.  So how do we do this.  Sorry, but you need to think fast and move even quicker.  Deadlines and money are a reality that we need to navigate between as efficiently as possible.  Rapid research, guerilla tacticts, sketching and looking at other projects(internet and beyond) are ways to get it done.  For instance, check out Todd Zaki Warfel’s presentation on prototyping with sketching and paper.  It works.  If you have more time, great!  Work fast and iterate a few more times.

And whatever you do, keep everything you can and file it way.  This is meant to be both physical and mental artificacts.  The city continued to rely on past iterations of this project and modify them based on todays needs.  They also learned from their past mistakes and did not repeat them.  UX teams have to do the same.

Since this is in my backyard I’ll be keeping an eye on the progress. But overtime I imagine that more UX examples can be drawn from this future development project.

Reverse affinity diagram

I’ve recently been working on a Mental Models project with our UX team based on Indi Young’s Mental Models book.  We’ve been brainstorming our tasks and have conducted an affinity diagram session to develop groups of tasks that our potential performers may complete on the site.  During our session we organized the tasks on a white board and created group names shown below.  While we were conducting the session we had to transcribe the groups to Excel for our next step and then clean up the room and remove the cards from the whiteboard.

After removing the cards we had a road map of data still on the board.  Looking at the colors and words it looked like we were onto something even without the data being there.  It looked like containers were still on the board and something  had to be inserted into these buckets.  Thinking it through it occurred to me that it would be a good test to have potential users fill in the containers with their own words by telling us what tasks they would place in each bucket.  For instance, what tasks would they expect under “subscriptions” or “client related.” This would be a way to cross check our brainstorming with users concepts and see where there are overlaps and gaps.

If there are tasks that they would drop into the “buckets” that are along the lines of our thinking, than we are definitely on the right track to making a successful application.  While it may be a similar philosophy to a reverse card sort or even a Delphi card sort this is just a quick way to gather a users view.   It has to be noted that interviews may also uncover this data.  However, this can be another way to collect the data rather quickly.

In the reverse affinity diagram session the users would have a defined group.  But in this session the users can put anything that they would feel is appropriate under each category.  The sky’s the limit for them to “brainstorm” and put their own take on the tasks.   For example, if we are conducting an affinity diagram session on researching a home purchase. Some top levels might be research home styles, research builders and research locations.  For each category there could be a variety of tasks that a user may want to accomplish.

Example of reverse affinity session

Affinity session
Task Group: Styles
Tasks:
•    Research styles
•    Review current styles
•    Select by floor plan
•    Select by square footage
•    View floor layouts

Examples from reverse
Task Group: Styles
Tasks:
Compare styles
Review styles
See floor plans
Modify layouts

In the style examples we can clearly see that there are tasks that our affinity diagram session would not have uncovered.  And since these are coming from our users it may not be a bad idea to conduct further research and see if this is a good fir for the application.  Finally, this could be done in person, over the phone or even through something as simple as excel with the headings already in place.  All the user needs to do is drop in the tasks they would expect to accomplish within a group and we’re off and running.

This could be another avenue to get to a users perspective on an application.  And it’s yet another way to merge our own work with the user’s frame of mind.  If you’re using a similar technique I’d like to hear how you go about conducting the tests.

Current readings for next couple of weeks

I’ve revved up the reading engine lately.  Imagine that, finish a masters program and you still feel like you need to grab every book in site and digest it as quickly as possible.  So up this week is a split between design theory and John Cheever.  Related?  Maybe somewhere but that’s for another post.

Design Theory

Designing Design by Kenya Hara

From Amazon.com

I came across this on Designers Review of Books and the great Cleveland Public Library had a copy.  I have literally just cracked it but the forward blew me away and I know I’m in for a mind shifting read.  He opens up with discussing the concept of being asked to redesign a glass.  Simple enough but goes on to state you eventually “lose a bit of your understanding of glass.”  And then he proceeds to really lay it on.

“Arrayed in order before you are dozens of glass vessels of gradually varying depths, from “glass” to “dish.”  What if you are asked to clarify the exact boundary point between one and the other?  Faced with the objects, you’re at a loss.  And again you become a little less sure of your knowledge of a glass.  However, this doesn’t mean that your knowledge has been overturned.  Indeed, it’s just the opposite.  You’ve become more keenly conscious of glasses than before.”

In UX design we are targeting the exact answer every time.  And the gray, blurry area leaves many people shaking in their boots or outright annoyed and angry that the answer isn’t clear cut.  But we need to look at the “boundary point” between our problems and solutions.  Perhaps the true answer is in there.  I’ll keep plowing through this book but after the openining shot this morning I have a feeling more posts will be on the way.

Paul Rand: Conversations with Students

A very quick read.  Essentially, this is transcripts from conversations with students at Arizona State University in ‘95.

Paul Rand

Right off the bat the candor and vigor of his conversations is strong regarding design and teaching design.   Regarding art museums:

Michael Kroeger: Do you think people are searching for something to give meaning to their lives:

Paul Rand: I do not know; do not ask me.  You will have to ask a psychologist.  This book (Art as Experience) deals with everything – there is no subject he does not deal with…This is his most famous book.  All of you students should read it.

There are a lot of great references that I now need to pick up like Dewey’s Art as Experience. Only 88 pages so this should be a short and powerful read.

Finally, a few other titles.

• Creativity in Science: Chance, Logic, Genius and Zeitgeist by Dean Keith Simonton
• Graphic Design Reader by Steven Heller
• Graphic Communication as a Design Tool by Omar Faruque
• John Cheever by Blake Bailey
• Falconer by John Cheever

Heard About voice search

I’m finally starting on a project that I’ve been thinking about for a couple of months now. I’ll be posting some sketches and wireframes in the next day or so. From there, I’m trying to assemble a tiger team consisting of a designer, a Ruby on Rails developer and one person that wants to dig into the iPhone. The premise of the project is sometimes we hear things that we want to remember and 20 seconds later its out of our mind forever.

So if you’re a slick ruby developer, iPhone developer (aren’t we all now that we can sign up for the sdk) or just interested let me know. This is in the extremely early stages but I want to get this up and running.