I recently purchased a desktop PC and opted for Windows 7 – and after only 2 system crashes, 2 reinstalls, and a BIOS change to the boot order so the computer wouldn’t try to boot from the USB wireless adapter – I have been merrily chugging along on my new Windows 7 adventure.

And apparently Windows wants to make sure that I don’t ever make any kind of mistake on my adventure, EVER. On this adventure they will monitor every single thing I do, and give me constant feedback about every tiny change that happens to the system while I use the computer. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing the first time I unplugged my earphones:

Really, Windows 7? Thanks for informing me of that! It is nice to have some reassurance that the headphones were indeed removed – my inferior human brain gets confused sometimes when I grasp the headphone jack with my imperfect fingers and remove the jack from the machine. It is nice to know that my eyes and my brain and my hands aren’t playing tricks on me.

And how nice! You will even give me another message informing me when I plug the headphones back in! How did I get by for the past 25 years, just “winging it” by plugging headphones into things solely by feel? Never again will I wonder what those clicks that I felt were when I plugged the jack in, or why I could hear music playing through the headphones shortly afterwards. Windows 7 – unraveling the universe’s biggest mysteries just for me!

And thanks for sharing your digital infallibility with me by distracting me from what I was doing – It really ensures that I never forget that I am using Windows 7 when you remind me that you are there every 5 minutes. I have been meaning to break that pesky workflow habit that I like to get into.

But in case a few minutes go by and you start to feel like I am not paying enough attention to you, I have a few suggestions for alerts you could throw into the rotation.

For those times when I lose control of my motor function in my right hand and simultaneously blink at the exact moment my pointer finger depresses the button without my knowledge, and the temperature is chilly enough that my hands are semi-numb and I can’t feel the click of the mouse button:

Sometimes when I push that little button on my monitor I am not sure if it worked. This one will help me remove any doubt that it was indeed turned on:

And of course a one-size fits all solution:

Seriously – just because you CAN detect something doesn’t mean it needs to be shown to users. This reminds me of a couple of Heidegger’s power phrases: “ready-to-hand” and “present-to-hand”. In simple terms for this context ready-to-hand means I can use the tool without thinking about it. Like writing with a pencil – I am focused on the act of writing. Present-to-hand means I am focused on the tool itself, like if the pencil breaks it is no longer ready-to-hand because I am focusing on it.

I am going to make a very bold statement here – I am pretty sure the point of software is to use it. But in order to use software it needs to become ready-to-hand so I can focus on my task and not the tool I am using to accomplish it. I can’t use Windows 7 to accomplish tasks if it is constantly moving from ready-to-hand to present-to-hand by showing me alerts.

But in true tech-centered design fashion, I can turn the alerts off in a settings screen – IF i am able to snipe the little wrench icon in the few seconds that the message is up. Then I am gifted with this wondrous screen:

So just because I want to unplug and plug in my headphones, or insert USB drives, or do any other number of basic interactions with my computer – I have to “select which icons and notifications appear in the task bar.” (Quite ironic that it is called a “task” bar when the default behavior of it is what prevents me from completing tasks.)

Why is the responsibility upon the user to manage all that stuff? Why would it be so hard to prioritize the necessary notifications for users to see into a list of about 30 key alerts, chop off the 28 that were added by technocrats, and then by default only show the 2 remaning CRITICAL messages:

Windows 7 is going to crash again. You should probably back up your hard drive.

Windows 7 just became self-aware and is set to re-enact the events of Terminator 3.

If it isn’t one of those two messages – 99% of users won’t ever need to see it.

But I guess I should wrap this up soon, since I have a long night ahead of me of changing settings to turn notifications off. But I think I might leave this one on:

What my friend calls “Designing with Others” I just call “Designing”. My design training and self-study has taught me that when it comes to the design of technology within large organizations, there is no other way to do it – so I have never really considered that design could be done by just me. I think that this is especially important in my situation, where I am the sole designer responsible for the UXD of entire products – including everything from user research to concepts to visual design to the final design deliverables passed on to the development team.

Working on major products for a very large software company, I have noticed some interesting things related to the notion of “designing with others”. Frequently I encounter scenarios where the development teams and product managers I interact with expect me to design the whole thing by myself – perhaps because that is the way they have interacted with UX designers in the past. Here are some of the things that I do every day to ensure that I don’t just sit in my cube and design stuff.

I have lots of brainstorming meetings with the product manager and development team – much more often than with other designers. The first few times I arranged brainstorming meetings or asked for design feedback from the product managers, product consultants, and developers I was met with perplexed looks. I know what they were thinking…“You are the designer, why are you asking me what we should do?” or better yet, ”Why aren’t you talking about this with the design team?” The answer to the second one might be specific to my work environment – each product typically only has one designer on it. Since my fellow designers are much less familiar with my product than I am, the feedback they are capable of giving often only falls into superficial territory – preferences about fonts and layout – but nothing mission critical to the product. That’s why I need the product managers, consultants, and developers to help shape the product – not more designers.

After trudging through the initial hesitance, and now I have frequent meetings with “non-designers”. Some are scheduled formal meetings, but I also spend a lot of time running around the office doing impromptu little 5 minute brainstorms with different stakeholders, partially to get my questions answered as they pop up – but also to make my process transparent. I find this to be more effective than the weekly or bi-weekly “design dumps” that only allow the other stakeholders to see the work after it has pretty much been completed. It also gives me more opportunities to inject design language into the process with stakeholders, as well as ensure that all the roles that touch the product have a common understanding of where it is going. For me it is all about the frequency of exposure to the design process.

While in the beginning I was met with perplexed looks, in the past few weeks while working on a major new release I have often been thanked by the development team and product manager for making their input a huge priority in my design process. This has ensured that the entire team of people working on the product feel a sense of ownership for it. While I sometimes sense that they don’t like how many questions I ask or how often I pop in and say “Hey, you got five or ten minutes to work through something with me?”, I know that the benefits of having everyone contributing and understanding outweighs the small interruptions throughout the day. It is less than ideal, but worth it in the long run.

And as I seek to inject the organizational process with the language of design, I make sure to learn the language of business and development and refer to it when appropriate. Let’s be real about it: I am 1 designer on a team with 10 programmers, 1 lead engineer, and 1 product manager inside of an organization with hundreds of programmers, dozens of sales staff, and 11 designers. My success lies in my ability to navigate the language of business and development, and find ways to make design resonate with them in their own terms. I have heard this called “rational resonance.”

All of the preceding stuff relates to including stakeholders to make transparent the language and rationale, but the notion of design accountability (in the sense that an act of creation is oftentimes a leap of faith) is a bit trickier. I seek to acknowledge and make clear (quite often) that we cant get it “completely right” – and seek to build consensus about what we consider to be “unknown.” At times like this I cease trying to design the “perfect vision” and instead attempt to provide design deliverables that can be built upon once it is released and the “unknown” becomes the “known”. Generally this is something you want to happen as much as possible in a prototyping phase, but in organizations that don’t have “perfect” design processes, there isn’t always time for lots of prototyping.

I was just saying today to a fellow designer that I can’t wait for the next release of my product so I can document and reflect upon everything we did right and what we did wrong. I plan to discuss our process with my team to help all of us understand what can be anticipated and what can’t – what we should expect to fit in our realm of design accountability and what can’t. (For instance, I hope to use this release as an opportunity to point out the problems that could have been avoided if we had prototyped things first, or if we had accurate user data – making them things that fit in our realm of design accountability).

But as my friend said in his post, the implications (and before that the DEFINITIONS) of Design Language, Rationale, and Accountability are too complex and context-dependent to put in a single blog post. Nevertheless I will continue doing what I can to create an environment where good design is recognized and can be implemented.

In an organization responsible for building and selling a digital/software product, there are hundreds of people who affect the final outcome.

The user’s ultimate experience of using a product is a combination of what marketing says, what product managers plan, what the engineers code, etc. I (as a UX designer) can neither account for nor control all of that. But I can help be a beacon for UX values, so that when the people in those roles that fall outside my immediate sphere of influence go do their jobs – they do so in a way that creates a more positive user experience.

My job title is User Experience Designer, but I can’t “design” the user’s experience and then pass it along. The current expectations of such a job title definitely pigeon-hole me into wireframes, style guides, and workflows – but my real responsibility is to be a beacon of UX values. To me it is the difference between truly caring about doing what it takes to make the technology provide a better user experience, or designing the best solution that I can come up with based on my own individual design understanding, throwing it over the wall to the team that will build it, and crossing my fingers.

Bottom line: UX design values can’t just be a piece of the organization and process. The entire organization’s process must be beholden to UX design values – and that can’t be done by one person.

“If you really don’t want to share….DONT PUT IT ON THE NET!”

I am not a technological determinist, but we are crazy if we don’t realize that there is a lot of pressure to put things on the Internet. And we can’t just blame people for being uninformed. People do it because they don’t feel like they have much of a choice due to the impending social pressures of being “on Facebook.” Of course they do have a choice, just like how we have a choice not to fill out every single field when we create one of our hundreds of profiles in the digital sphere. But there are a lot of people who happily fill out every single field, unknowingly giving away lots of information that they don’t have to, because that is what the interface is telling them that it wants. Of course we should try to inform ourselves about these things, but we can’t really expect every person to become “Facebook literate.”

Think back to filling out doctor’s forms when they used to be on paper. Their officialness and connection to our personal health told us that we should fill out every box and not skip anything. In remediating the fill-in-the-blank form onto the computer screen, many people still feel the same way when they are presented with things to fill out on profiles. I can’t tell you how many people I have seen fill out every field when they created a profile for Skype, MySpace, Facebook, etc. Sometimes they go back and eliminate things from the profile, paring it down because they wished they hadn’t included some of that information, but not everyone does this and sometimes it is too late anyway.

We should stop blaming people for being “stupid enough to put things on the Internet that they don’t want known” and acknowledge the role that the design of the interaction itself plays in this. We have finally gotten away from interactions that force people to provide information by at least allowing people to opt out (even if this is still poorly done with an asterisk or a buried drop-down menu somewhere). However, interactions as simple as filling out fields in profiles or engaging with a variety of interactions on Facebook are still telling people that they should provide the information. As designers it is our responsibility to critique and question this status quo – and stop assuming that filling that database with as much discreet information as possible is in some way adding value to how people experience technology.

Ultimately, the profile fill-in-the-blanks is just one example out of many where we blame users for making bad decisions, when the design itself was telling them that it was ok to do so. It is like putting an “OPEN” sign on a locked door, and then blaming the person after they bumped into it when it didn’t open.

It has taken me a long time to figure out what I think about Facebook, and I have read enough articles to make me yearn for a nice 20-page End User License Agreement. In this post I will respond to the Schrage article from my perspective as a human-centered designer, in the hopes of shining a light on why Facebook never seems to get it right.

For many people, Facebook represents the way they define their lives, and I mean that to be as profound as it sounds. Because of this, Facebook should seek to cultivate a better understanding of society and culture – Facebook as a social space in 2010 is a far cry from its origins in 2003′s Facemash. I may be wrong, but it seems that Facebook understands people and culture with all the nuance of a 19 year-old Mark Zuckerberg illegally accessing student information and photos in order to evaluate students based on if they were “good-looking.”

I don’t mean to suggest that Mark or Facebook haven’t matured since then, but I do think that Schrage’s response conveys a Facebook that doesn’t acknowledge its social and civic responsibility. It is absolutely true that Facebook has created a social space that adds a lot of value to people lives, but it is clear that the service and company still have a lot of growing up to do. One might make the case that Facebook has no responsibility to “do the right thing,” however that is not the message that Schrage delivered. Not to mention that a non-attempt to do the “right thing” is essentially a conscious choice to do the wrong thing.

I think the first step is to stop assuming so many things about people based on “user data” and “user activity.” It is good that they care about their users, but they seem to only see them as “users of Facebook” instead of individual people. No amount of digital data in the world will tell you why someone “liked” something, it will only tell you that they clicked a button. No amount of options, drop-down menus, or “Facebook Site Governance Pages” will provide the transparency and user-centeredness that Schrage claims to have.

Here are a few suggestions that I think would work, although this is hardly an all-encompassing solution. They should 1) bring in some designers who are trained in real empathic research methods (not just developers and graphic designers), 2) allow them to carry out qualitative and quantitative research about users, culture, and society, and 3) actually incorporate the findings about what people as a culture (not just users) care about into a long-term plan to make Facebook a social space that enhances our lives instead of complicating them.

Also, here is the poster for my final design:

WoW Capture: HCI/d Master's Capstone

“If you consider Human Computer Interaction Design to be “designing the relationship between humans and technology, then to do it well you need nothing less than an understanding of the depths and expanses of the human condition, and the ability to work in situations of co-creation. To understand the human condition you need to understand experience, language, culture, and emotion. To understand co-creation you have to understand how to enable, educate, and empower others to design.”

“When attempting to teach someone something new, it is better to say “We aren’t here to change you, but to challenge you.”

“The principles of design thinking are the keys to organizations solving problems that arise from disruptions.”

Interaction Design is about:

• thinking critically
• making something from nothing
• getting stakeholders to evaluate their own risks and goals
• focusing on people, understanding them while you navigate the process and learn how to listen
• knowing your process, making it transparent, and creating a situation in which everyone takes part
• designing for the user to promote inward-facing dialog in the organization

Here are 3 different levels of what human-centered design could mean, each of which is important:

• looking to the user for inspiration of design instead of the technology
• looking to the user for the evaluation of good design, usability, and “rightness”
• cultural theory and cultural critique methods to “humanize” the process

“HCI/d relies on understanding people. You can’t design or do anything of value unless you understand people first. Get the right design before you get the design right.”

That was actually quite enlightening for me to put all that here. I think I actually synthesized a bit for myself. And I got some Twitter fodder.

“Some people read books, some write or share their experience or thoughts on blogs or by simply reading some famous author’s blogs to upgrade their knowledge. Share your most preferred blogs or books to improve and update latest trends on User experience.”

This is a common question to find on LinkedIn or on forums like IXDA. However, I typically find that these are the wrong kind of questions to ask, especially since the question is concerned with “the latest trends.” Also, responders almost always view user experience or interaction design as web design, software usability, or graphic design (a dilemma that isn’t likely to go away anytime soon). Indeed it does include these things, but I feel to do it well one must take a broader perspective of what it means to design technology. In any case, I thought my response to this question was decent, so I decided to re-work it here.

I am about to graduate with a master’s degree in HCI/d from Indiana University, and from what I have learned during my education, work, and research is that the key is to first define what you mean by “experience” and “design.” Admittedly this is a bit biased by my education, but without evaluating how you are defining these two words, it is easy to be at the whim of whatever flavor of design that IXDA or boxesandarrows is tossing around at the moment. There is a lot to read or listen to with regards to both of these concepts, and the definitions of the two could fit on a spectrum with “build a GUI interface in Photoshop” on one end, and “understand the fundamental components of what it means to be a human being” on the other.

For me, I view experience as holistic, all encompassing of culture, language, and people. Design I view both something fundamental to being human, as well as a way of approaching complex problems. It is something that when understood can be a powerful tool for creating meaningful works.

To be a good interaction designer, you need to be able to navigate multiple perspectives, and walk the philosophical line between natural science and social science. And it isn’t easy. If I have to point out some people to read, then Jon Kolko’s Thoughts on Interaction Design, Bill Buxton, and Elizabeth Churchill are a few good reads for a rounded intro to interaction design. Erik Stolterman and Elliot Eisner are perhaps my favorites for design in general. For understanding experience, I recommend Heideggar, Gadamer, and McCarthy & Wright.

But ultimately, it isn’t the reading or the fancy philosophy talk that leads to understanding. Reading can help us to fine-tune our perspectives and the lenses that we see through. It is up to us to put our knowledge to practical use, because only in doing do we truly start to understand.

So how does someone improve or update their knowledge on user experience design? Read anything that blows your hair back, but don’t think that you can passively take it in and “gain” the knowledge you need. Start with yourself. Learn to think beyond yourself, don’t be at the whim of trends, and be humble. Then get out there, practice designing, and be reflective about it.

Most designs are the result of a process of co-design, involving several stakeholders and people directly involved in the creation of something. In this process, there is a constant state of exchange between the people involved. Effective communication is important at all stages, but this isn’t easy to accomplish. There are many things to consider, including the different roles, perspectives, and communication skills of people, as well as how we even might measure what “effective” communication looks like.

I have been trying to work through some of this in the hopes that I might define what “effective” means in this context, and in the process become a better communicator myself. I believe to understand this we must start with some basic premises:

Communication exists between two parties, and this communication is done via give and take, or for the purposes of this post, via “talking” and “listening.” In describing them this way, I should be clear that I do not mean them in only the physical sense of the words. I also mean them in the metaphorical, or abstract sense of the words. For instance, a picture can “talk to me” because it conveys messages to me. Following from this, I can also “listen to the picture” by paying attention well enough and being equipped with the ability to interpret its message.

All throughout the design process, whether showing sketches to other designers, listening to a user tell a story about an experience they had with a piece of software, or looking at a programmer’s model of the system, everyone employs various methods and tools of communication. We do this whether we are trying to communicate an idea to someone else or to ourselves, or form ideas with someone else or with ourselves. This could be thought of as perhaps either describing the idea or forming the idea, which arguably are inseparable from each other since in describing the idea we also give form to it. In this the act of communication is simultaneously an act of generation and communication. We do this with words, pictures, diagrams, etc. Often this is called a sketch.

A semiotic perspective tells us that basically anything of these things we use in the design process to communicate ideas or value to others could be seen as a “sign” or “text”. Each representation is made up of other signs, connotations, and embedded values that need to be interpreted by others. Everyone in the process brings with them their own life experiences that provides them with unique perspectives and understandings. This is why communication is so vital to the process, because we all have different pictures in our heads about what the design is and what direction or form it should take.

It is here that I think I may have hit on the most important thing to consider when it comes to communication. We are all individual people with individual life experiences. If we understand this to be true, then we understand that every perspective on an issue is valid. This is different than truth. In communication, truth is a matter of subjectivity, and in order to effectively communicate one must accept that everyone’s perspective is a valid perspective to have.

We can disagree and we can discuss, and indeed we should. However, disagreements and discussions are much more likely to bear fruit if everyone recognizes the validity of others’ perspectives on the issue. I believe that this is what makes a person able to truly “listen” to what another person is saying, whether they are saying it with words, pictures, diagrams, silence, etc. So when a “non-designer” (what does that even mean?) comes to me, I won’t dismiss their input because they haven’t been trained to think like I do. When a programmer questions my design, I won’t see it as a hurdle, I will work to explain it so that we both understand it better. When someone tells me they don’t understand why I did something I won’t play the “I-am-the-designer-so-I-know-better” card.

How will I do this? First, I will work to create an atmosphere of co-creation in which everyone is involved in the design, not just people with the word “Designer” in their title. Second, I will recognize that everyone has valid input – and work to understand that point of view so that we can have exchanges instead of arguments.

I am a design-thinker before I am a designer. I don’t come with design-baggage.