UX nerd

This, together with a copycat review of Apple’s latest gadget (whatever that is at the moment you’re reading this) is the kind of post that I never though I would write here: “10 worst usability mistakes”, “10 best website designs”, etc. But I would like to think that I’m vindicated by originality and Paul Graham… These are my 4 bits of design wisdom that may come in handy some day, you can judge for yourself :)

1. A thorough gathering of requirements should include the following questions: What should the system do? But also… What could it do? What must it do? What must it not do? Nice piece of advice borrowed from my dark (hard-core engineering) past, who would have thought it’d turn out to be so useful in design.
2. Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes (Goodhart’s law). What does this mean? That relationships between two variables in historical data (as for example between speed and user satisfaction) will not necessarily hold after you start acting on one of them to influence the other one (like in: increasing speed past a certain limit will no longer produce an effect in user satisfaction).
3. Conway’s law ([...] organizations which design systems [...] are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations) is not meant to be humorous! Evidence courtesy of Microsoft Research.
4. Good design needs not be perfect. At one time, Westinghouse began to work on heat pumps that could provide heating and cooling, and believed that he might be able to extract enough power in the process for the system to run itself. Lord Kelvin told him that he would be violating the laws of thermodynamics. Westinghouse replied that might be the case, but it made no difference. If he couldn’t build a perpetual-motion machine, he would still have a heat pump system that he could patent and sell. The rest is history.

As designers, we always concern ourselves with graceful product life cycles, re-use, recycling… anything that can deliver us form the trendiness-issued pile of garbage that we don’t want to leave as our footprint. I know I do, you can read about it here, or go for this article by the director of the London Design Museum, that says it much better. We live under one belief: however obsolete, broken, passé you think something is, it holds the seed of something new. This is the Ying-Yang of design.

A long time ago I attended a workshop with Alan Dix that applied this principle to leverage ancient (failed) wisdom for design inspiration: how to produce a good idea out of a bad idea. How does it work? You can have a look at the example Tomaso, Ting, Maria, Valentina and I worked on. Continue reading ‘Ying-Yang Design’

One of the toughest recurrent moments in my job is the “qualitative research moment”. The moment when I have to convince someone to do some in-depth user study with a few participants to produce a list of qualitative results and derive design recommendations. Whether I suggest observing users or interviewing them, the moment I stray outside A/B testing there it comes… the disbelieving look™, like I needed three degrees to become a fortune teller :S

I want to write a full post about prototype fidelity and testing methods later, and some (approximate) guidelines about when to do which thing… so I’ll try to keep digression to a minimum ;) Now, without further ado… my humble best attempt at explaining why qualitative research can be objective, reliable and produce useful insights about how users experience systems and products (and take that look off your face already, I can see it in my crystal ball and I’m not liking it ;) Continue reading ‘Qualitative research’

I want to write today about measuring subjective qualities. I’m going to talk about “comfort”, but it applies to lots of other things: “easeness of use”, “satisfaction”, “goodness”, whatever you can think of that can’t be measured on a scale (i.e. scales: °C, meters, number of errors).

I’m working on a project that involves some ergonomics, more specifically it requires or would benefit from the label “comfortable”. Like we always do, we designed a test, collected participants, drafted consent forms, prepared the facilities… and then… the unexpected. To my embarrassment, we had to repeat our whole biomechanics experiment because we had gathered our results in a manner that didn’t afford any meaningful analysis. This is the brave account of what went wrong and how we solved it, which I send into the world hoping that at least one less designer will stumble against this cheeky stone ;)

Continue reading ‘Comfort-o-meter: how to measure the subjective’

After analyzing the results from the survey, we decided to create a concept that would afford piler and filer styles. We had to create a 3 minute video and a prototype. I think I’ll post the prototype, for which we made a comic, just because we had to scrape so much off the concept to make it to the required video length that I don’t think the video does a great job portraying the idea :S

I would have preferred to have a working mock up, but as we were all doing this as a side project and we had so many features, this proved impossible. So a comic had to do.  Should we have done something simpler which was easier to convey? Well, time was a constraint, there were no clear guidelines, no client, nothing at stake, so I think we just indulged: it’s a lot more fun to develop an idea than a prototype. And even if the philosophy behind the group of features we presented wasn’t explicit and we could be accused of lack of cohesion, the audience were experts in the industry, we expected them to be knowledgeable enough and trend-aware enough to put the pieces together and see the concept behind :)

You can see the prototype here.

Some months ago, I asked you to complete a questionnaire about your tabbed browsing habits. Thanks! I got 99 responses. What follows is a brief summary of how I analyzed the data, the results I got and some analysis. Later we used the results to design an alternative to tabs for the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge summer 09 (with Maria and some help from Nico), but I’ll write about that later.

Continue reading ‘Tabbed browsing usage results’

This post has been in my drafts for a long time, it looked like I’d never get around to finishing it. Probably it was because the design of a remote control for the elderly is not my favorite subject. However, I really enjoyed working on this project and I think we got a neat result, and a quite original one if you think of how many remote controls for the elderly are already in the market. Also, I didn’t want to omit this project because to me it shows how there’s still room for substantial improvement even in long standing commercial product ranges, and how you wouldn’t even think there’s something wrong until you introduce a UX designer and then it seems unbelievable that no one came up with these simple but life changing tweaks sooner. And, no, it’s not about boosting our egos, it’s about bursting those of the people who think they can do without us :P

I worked on this project, some time ago, with Wenzhu, Valentina, Paulo. When I was told we had to design a remote control for elderly people, I googled it, and then sighed. Usually I try to avoid the “yet another…” projects but this time it was not up to us, so I set to work thinking at least that socially it was quite a relevant project. Actually I learned that most developed countries have around 10% 65+ people (I knew it was a lot, but 10% is mind blowing) and that they watch TV an average of 3,5 hours a day, so it makes sense to want to adapt remote controls for their especial use. Continue reading ‘Design of a remote control for elderly people’

Emoticons were officially born on 19 September, 1982, when Scott Fahlman suggested that people use :-) to distinguish jokes from literal messages on a message board at Carnegie Mellon. Since then, people did a lot of research on the impact of emoticons assuming that emoticons are the facial expressions of IM, even applications have been developed to help capture facial expressions and turn them into emoticons. However, after spending considerable time reading about it, we couldn’t find a clear origin for the assumption that emoticons are equivalent to facial expressions. On the other hand, there is evidence that emoticons were created as punctuation marks, for which depicted faces acted only mnemonics. So what is it: facial expressions or punctuation marks? And what difference does it make? At first glance, this may seem a rather academic discussion; but you may want to reconsider how important it is to get the gist of emoticons in a world where people are increasingly relying on mediated communication. And if not, think of the efforts the MIT Media Lab is putting into affective computing and news on patents such as the Nokia glow and follow the smart crowds.

In any case, last month, Toon, Dominika, Valentina, Maria and I designed and run an experiment to test if emoticons are actually the facial expressions of IM. Are they used in the same context a real facial expression would be appropriate? Is there a correlation between use of emoticons and real facial expressions produced during an IM conversation? This is how we did it and our results.

Continue reading ‘Emotions and emoticons: are emoticons the facial expressions of IM?’

So we (Natasha and me) finally didn’t work on the GPGP application I posted about. You can’t always make things that make you proud but you can always make things in a way that makes you proud. So, I guess I reconciled with the world, in a selfish way.

We ended up working in a kind of calendar/to-do/agenda/personal assistant application that prompts the user to carry out a task in the optimal context in time and space. This application would help the user manage his/her activities. For tasks that have a fixed scheduling, its functionality is limited to providing reminders, exactly as a regular calendar application would. However, for tasks that may be executed freely at any time before a given deadline, it suggests the best moment to do something using information about the nature of the task and the user’s preferences, live monitoring of his/her level of busyness, time, location, etc.

Before I explain how it would work, and because I can picture you shaking your head and tightening your lips, let me say something. This idea sounds familiar to you? Yes, to me too… When talking about applications that are supposed to be smart enough to suggest what you may or may not want to do, there’s a very thin line separating awesomness from complete failure. That’s what, I think, when you present an idea like this to people, makes people stand in two very distinct camps: either you love it or you hate it. There are few things, in UX, as polarizing as agents. I was very sceptical about this idea at first. Then something happened.

Continue reading ‘What we finally worked on’

In Buenos Aires, you can often find women selling home grown produce at the entrance of supermarkets. They lay a blanket on the sidewalk and sit on it, next to multiple fruit boxes. In one of these boxes, they usually have a baby. These babies never cry. Actually, the babies are never awake because they give them alcohol to sedate them. This is what allows the mother to work undisturbed from the early morning to the late evening, in the 40°C we get in the summer and the 0°C that are normal during the winter, it’s easier than having to tend a child while they work. The moral of this story? Firstly: these women need help. But also: not everything that makes your life easier makes the world a better place.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an area estimated to be twice the size of Texas that acts as purgatory for all our modern conveniences. Why take your TV to the repair shop when you can get a new one for only twice the price it’ll take to fix it? Like the new iPod 2282th generation? Non-returnable plastic bottles FTW, it’s such a hassle to take bottles back to the store…

Every day, in my job, I come across many “opportunities to make people’s lives easier”. Sometimes you get to choose what you work on, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes, like today, you have a day when you’d rather spend the largest part of it just staring through the window. Continue reading ‘The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (with edit)’