Eleganthack

There are no events to show at this time.

Powered by LifeStream from iBegin.

I suppose if you are one of those folks who keeps getting effective and affective mixed up, the title of this post will annoy you (I’m not one of those! heck no, not me!), but let’s just say emotions are important. If we are designing and not considering the emotional effect we have over our users, we are probably painting in gray scale.

There is a new intriguing collection of resources for those of you who would like to be working in full color. I suggest you swing by and take a look– articles, videos, and a ton of reference makes this a juicy collection I’ll be noodling over for some time.

http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/affective_computing.html?p=2c76

One of the most flumoxing issues I encounter when reviewing design work is misplaced interface objects.

When you craft a sentence, you’d never think to write something like “Fluorescent, she picked a red.” Somewhere or another you learned that — unless the lady in question was glowing faintly — “fluorescent” should be placed next to “red” to modify it.

Yet over and over I’ll see a design where a filter or an undo button is off in a corner, far from the thing it is supposed to filtering or undoing. I’ll hear a designer say, “well users can be trained.”

But think about that sentence again… you were able to guess the red was fluorescent, but it stopped you in your tracks, didn’t it? Design’s job is to disappear into the pleasure of use.

Next time you review a design, consider treating interface objects as if they were verbs (or adverbs) and figure out what word they affect. Then read your sentence out loud and see if it makes sense!

Read the rest of this entry »

I signed up for the 30 day RWE writing challenge, but have been remiss on acting on the daily prompts. Today’s resonated with me however.

I was listening to a great book on my drive in to work again, Nonviolent Communication. I have taken to listening it it any time I suspect I’m going to have a difficult conversation. The book describes a technique that was developed to deal with conflict situations, such as those we see too often in the middle east. It engenders conversation focused on expressing needs without demands or blaming, which can lead to defensiveness. That morning, I ended up hearing a section in which he describes how to make yourself miserable. He recommends comparing yourself to supermodels in looks, and in accomplishments to people like Mozart who composed symphonies at age 5.

To imitate is to see something and decide you would rather model that you see than value your own self. It is born out of a painful uncertainty and lack of trust in yourself. It is self-immolating. It is you telling yourself “I have seen better than you can ever create, don’t bother.”

When I studied painting so many years ago, we were instructed to go to museums, select a great work and make a copy. It is part of an artist’s formal education. As you follow each stroke of the master, are you destroying your self? Not at all, you are learning to see as they see, move as they move. It is a path to mastery. If at the end you look at your copy, note the differences and sigh, I’ll never be that good, then you have missed the purpose: to be taught, not to imitate.

You cannot be Renoir or Picasso. You could be the greatest forger in the world, but that has a unique notoriety. You have your pride in deception, not the pain of living in the shadow of greatness.

If imitation is suicide, then comparison is the razor.

Harry is one of the smartest people I know, and gets a ton done. When he agreed to share his morning ritual with me, I was grateful. And when I mentioned it to some folks at SXSW, they asked me to write it up. It’s a simple way to collect what you need to do, and determine what priority they hold.

First, do not open you email. This must be done before anything else.

1. Role Based Scan.
To do this each morning, first you’ll need to create a mental map of all the roles you play in your life: wife/husband, father/mother, friend, colleague, partner, boss, employee. Then each day you go over that to see if there is something you should be doing in that role.

2. Collecting Yesterday’s Bits and Pieces
We all have ways that we keep notes on things we want to remember, be they to do’s, books or ideas. Harry keeps on them on his 3×5 pad, so he goes through them. You can go through whatever you do. I have a notebook, and I write sentences and put a little checkbox next to each, so I would collect those.

3. Review Calendar
Look back three days, look forward three days. Was there a big meeting that requires follow up? Will there be one that needs preparation?

4. Yesterday’s emails
Finally you can open email, but switch to the sent folder. Now look through yesterday’s emails quickly, and see who you owe followups, and who owes you one.

5. Process into actionable list
Harry uses Remember the Milk, but there are many tools here. He categorizes all that he has collected. His categories are not “work” and “home” but “next” “attention” “ping” i.e. what needs to be done with each item.

6. Batteries
What is the one physical thing you need to make your day go smoothly. For Harry, it’s making sure his recording devices has batteries. Could be a laptop cable, your phone… in my case it’s a red notebook I’ve been using for my brain lately. I leave that at home, I’m in trouble.

7. 3 avoidances
What are three things I’m avoiding. Prioritize them against the rest of the day.

Now you can open email, and start work on your priorities.

I just read a lovely article on how to critique design, and it was insightful and all that, but I can’t remember a single thing it said now, ten minutes later (could be my worsening ADHD. Shiny! Shiny!).

Here is a simple simple way to critique a design, so when people say “what do you think?” you can say something actionable and useful.

How to Critique a Design in TWO steps

1. Look at the design.

Ask yourself, “What is the single thing the business wants people to do, according to this design.”

For example, look at Amazon, a fairly successful business, I think we can agree. And look at their page. Amazon wants you to buy things. Usually one thing; today for me it’s the kindle. And although I’m sure wishlists and saved items, and recommendations are important, today they want me to buy a kindle, and aren’t going to distract me from that.

Here’s another one to try to decode: Google. Can you guess what Google wants you to do?

2. Ask the person who is asking your advice “what is the single thing the business wants people to do?” If they can’t answer, you can say about the design, “Looks nice to me.”

Because your advice is just as valuable as when your wife asks, “Do I look good in this dress?”

Be polite, back away slowly. They are doomed.

But if they do know what they need their users to do, well voila! You can now match that against your impression of the site, and say either,

“It’s working for me”

or

“I think it’s needs a little work. I’m not getting that message.”

Advice without context is like wine without a corkscrew: not only useless but frustrating.

My job is one of the most challenging (and most fun) I’ve had in a long time.  A turnaround is a lot like a startup,very fast paced, very risky, and occasionally terrifying. There are times when it seems like too much. When I feel a little overwhelmed, I try one three points-of-view that help me gain perspective, and get back in the game.

1. Brazilian Soap Opera
A turnaround is a time of intense change, good and bad… and sometimes just surprising.  For some people this can be tough, as personnel and business models get refined (and sometimes removed). So when things happen like the co-president suddenly resigns, we inherit an entire business division, or we hire the genius who reinvented Red Bull’s brand,  I just say, “Well at least Mike Jones’ evil clone didn’t come back from the dead.”

With a soap opera, you look forward to every twist and turn, you aren’t afraid of it.  Change is fun! Remember, we love drama, Vonnegut told us so!

2. Video Game
I think this POV  can help anyone in a fast-paced job. Rather than succumb to stress, just treat it like a video game. Nicole Lazaro has a taxonomy of fun, that includes “fiero” or “hard fun” which is the joy we feel when we triumph over adversity. When you are on level 28, and the aliens are coming down too fast and you only have two lives left… well isn’t that when you have 100 emails on a chain about a potentially broken homepage takeover, you are at a demo of a new product that just crashed in front of the c-levels,  and you get a call from an SVP about a 2M dollar opportunity but it’s due Wednesday? I say bring it!

3. The Lab
Lots of us live our lives in  fear of action. What if I make the wrong call, what if I confront this person and they get upset, what if, what if… what if your job was a lab? And you are a scientist, all cool and observant. Now go ahead, and make a decision. observe. note. measure. and from the results, make a better decision next time. Nervous about a new feature? release in an AB test, and measure.You are afraid of confronting a colleague that you disagree often with? Try a new style such as being more blunt, or admitting it’s hard to talk to the them because they are so aggressive, or passive.  Measure.

Work often becomes too much about you and who you are, and it can keep you from sleeping at night, worrying and wondering. But if you can get a little perspective, you can stay clear headed and make better decisions. Try one of these POV’s yourself.

measure.

learn.

change.

I just updated my twitter one line bio. It used to say “I like food more than I like you.”  I assume it was at least occasionally true, since I don’t actually like everyone on the planet. But I like quite a lot of the human population.

But I like food, or rather, I care deeply about food. Food is more than a tasty treat, it’s a critical building block of who we are. What we eat makes us thin or fat, energized or lethargic, clever or slow. We build obese children or lively ones simply each time we put a plate in front of them. Each bite is an act toward a future self.

Even more, the food we eat is deeply tied into our politics and our ecology. Read Food, Inc or Omnivore’s Dilemma to better understand how much the food industry shapes our lives. I like food, because I like you, and I want you to be happy and and live forever.

So I realized I couldn’t really leave my silly little one line bio up, because it belittles my realtionship with the act of eating. I’m not a foodie, I’m not a gourmet; I am a human animal who eats to celebrate and shape life.

I also couldn’t leave it up because the last couple years have been hard, and I’ve been a bit misanthropic. I needed to back away a bit from people, and not let them too close.  But now I think I am ready to like you as much as I like food, and certainly I can care about you as much as I care about the food you and I eat.

I still like food quite a lot.

The new line is still a bit silly, it says “Taking over writing duties of the soap opera of my life.” All life is a soap opera, it goes on and on and on. It doesn’t have three acts; it has any number of acts until it gets cancelled, and until then the surprises never stop. But rather than letting life be something that happens to me, I’m ready to shape it. All things are possible, and I’m going make sure I take advantage of it.

When we think of robots, we usually envision something with wheels for feet, and arms spinning like the Lost and Space guy crying “Danger Will Robinson!”  The alternative is the robot many of us now live with, roomba, spinning and beeping like R2D2. Roomba is the only vacuum cleaner to whom I’ve said: “you are so stupid.” The robot is inscrutable. It does things according to its programming, and you can neither influence it (except with a nudge of the foot), command it nor educate it.   It has the appearance of free will, thus the appearance of a lack of good judgement when it gets stuck under a kitchen shelve or tangled in a throw rug.

The shuffle, of all the ipods, also appears to have a will of its own. When I’m on my bike and want a podcast, it seems determined to give me FatBoySlim. When I want to get motivated, it may obligate with Car Wash, or it may suddenly provide Howl (a poem, while inspiring, not really inspiring one to run any faster….)

I think the shuffle, unlike all other ipods, became a robot in persona if not by strict definition simply because it has no interface. Instead of me requesting things and getting them it uses randomness that resembles will. And thus I say, as I try to climb that last hill on Arestadero Road to William Carlos Williams “you are so stupid, shuffle.”

“Up in the Air” came out at a funny time for me. I had just taken a job with Myspace that required me to fly to LA every week. This didn’t really bother me at the time. I have always had a bizarre affection for hotel rooms, and an easy relationship with flying. It seemed to fit my new lifestyle (or at least, was no more weird.) I already had to drop my daughter off at school every Wednesday knowing I wouldn’t see her again until Sunday morning. Why mope around my Palo Alto house, sleeping with Felina and Little Fifi when I could be living the highlife on a travel stipend in Los Angeles?

So every Wednesday I wake up amidst love and squalor, enjoy a long snuggle on the couch, pack a lunchbox and suitcase, and drive to the school and the airport, in that order.  And somehow, as I take off my shoes and coat and remove my laptop, I also shed myself.

They say travel is dehumanizing. We are nesting creatures. Walk around the office. Do you see a cube that hasn’t been marked in some way? A few books, a diet coke can pyramid, a picture in crayon pinned to the low wall: all marking territory and making home.  But travel refuses you the ability to make home happen. Sure you can pack candles or a photo to put by the bedstead, but knowing a few days later you’ll have to put them back in the suitcase makes it almost worse.  Gestures of home are futile and uncomforting in the face of the housekeeper’s ability to wipe away every trace of you. I find human connections a better comfort.  I’ve squandered a lot of opportunity to explore in exchange for the pleasure of a waiter who knows I like my steak rare, or the chance to teach the parakeet in the lobby to whistle a sequence of notes. The desk clerk worries over my cough, the night watchman offers me tea.

Read the rest of this entry »

After an extensive search, I find I have not written this down (at least in a blog– I have referenced it in talks.)  Now, most of these points can be/have been addressed in one way or another. But one might ask yourself, what other deliverable is as criticized as wireframes, and could there be something better?

Firstly, wireframes emasculate the designer. Wireframes have often had a place in multi-disciplinary teams where the graphic designer had come from print, and didnt’ really understand interface design. The interaction designer came from software and was making ugly terminal-esque interfaces. So in order to make sure the end result was palettable, the interaction designer (or information architect; I’ll use this term interchangeably in this post) would make a pig, and then the graphic designer would put lipstick on it.  This was 1998.

But as designers got savvy to interface, they started resenting the restrictions on their ability to creating compelling and useful designers. After all, a designers toolkit is essentially font, color and layout. The webbrowser stole the first, if the IxD steals the third they are relegated to the sorry position of kid with crayons handed a coloring book. Think hard of the last wireframe you saw. Didn’t it look a lot like a paint-by-number, with only the numbers missing?

Read the rest of this entry »