Today I join Twilio in San Francisco as their newest designer. Twilio makes powerful tools that empower people to build communication apps on voice and SMS. Joining Twilio’s outstanding team is humbling and massively exciting. I’m inspired to work with a group that helps people to realize great ideas, build a better society and of course, improve communication.
Improving how we share information has been a thread throughout my career. From my days in narrative as a news designer, to working on the chat app at RockMelt to disrupting the translation industry at myGengo to the core of my design thesis, I’ve been thinking about this space. I’ve nestled up with big questions to understand how humans share information and communicate. Plus, I just love developers. Twilio could not have been a more perfect next step.
I’ll be working closely with Andres Krogh, Rourke McNamara, Danielle Morrill and many more stellar Twilions blending my interaction design and marketing chops. There’s a lot to learn and a lot to teach. Please join me in celebrating this exciting new chapter on my path.
Where’s Nina? This year took me through 12 cities in 4 continents. Between the time of someone asking “where are you?” and me being able to answer, I was somewhere new. So here’s how 2011 played out.
I celebrated the commencement of the year Cape Town on a life-changing trip to Southern Africa with the perfect travel mate. I saw a dear childhood friend and did research to inform my graduate school thesis. In the flutter of a tweet, I earned my Master’s and started packing boxes to pick up nearly a decade of my life spent in beautiful Bloomington, Indiana.
En route to San Francisco, I worked in Tokyo with myGengo, like Twilio, in the 500 Startup powerhouse. I learned from their brilliant team and earned intense design empathy and mountains of personal growth. Call it Manifest Destiny if you will, but I started working my way West. I skipped through Detroit and Chicago and did projects for with SigFig, Milewise and Posterous while planting my feet in San Francisco.
I spent a week under extreme conditions in the dessert that taught me important lessons about design and experience. It yanked everything human about me to the surface of my being and I truly went through a Rite of Passage.
I went to St. Louis to see old friends from my journalism world at the Society for News Design’s conference. I talked on a panel about careers as a 5 year reunion from SND’s first intern competition and got to thank so many mentors who raised me as a professional.
It’s taken me years of patience and an unreal amount of work to build the life I now have in San Francisco. I couldn’t have predicted most of what happened this year and I can’t say what the future holds. But 2011 is not over yet and I’m having the time of my life on this ride.
Nina Mehta is a designer and writer living in San Francisco, working at Twilio.
Upon departure to a week of dancing, meditating, bike riding, art project exploring and big dreaming in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, I wrote a cheeky little e-mail to my office.
They all knew I was taking my first trip to the Playa, but still, I sent out this courtesy note. “Team, I’ll be out of the office next week without access to the internet,” I wrote. I gave myself the permission to divorce from communication mediated by technology. I spent the week having collocated interactions with people. I had human-to-human conversations that over flowed with emergent ideas and were loaded with implications from body language.
“I’ll be in Black Rock City, Nevada” I said, which for a week is actually Nevada’s 4th largest city and otherwise non-existent. For 7 days, 50,000 people gave gifts of music, food, teachings, photos and so much more.
I was given so much in Black Rock City. My bike pedal broke twice while on the Playa. The city is too big and the weather is too extreme to commute by foot. I found a bike-expert in our village of 170 people. He found a piece of wood and told me to search neighboring camps for a saw. I kid you not, he prototyped a peg-leg wooden bike pedal for me. And within and hour, my new friend, with his big heart, gave me the city back.
I’m “doing participatory, ethnographic research” I continued to my teammates. I immersed myself in an environment that was beyond foreign to me. I was living in a sci-fi novel. Yet, people repeatedly said, “wow, you’re really in your element here.” Socially, geographically, culturally, economically, I had a new lifestyle. As someone who studies people, their desires, their wants, the emotions, their motivations, there was so much to learn here. In my life of international travel, I have consistently found humans to be relatively the same all over the world, in the most beautiful way. Stripped down we share our qualities that make us human, our desires, our challenges, our drives. So here, at Burning Man, were people any different? What do we do when the societal rules change?
Take away money, take away time, take away digital devices, are we the same? Pretty much.
I cooked for my camp each night. I started cooking dinner when the sun was a few inches from the peaks of the mountains. The camp knew when the sun goes down, dinner is ready. There was no 15 minutes late, time was about light.
We had some friends who camped about a mile away. In the afternoon we asked if they wanted to hang out at night.
‘Sure. just come by later. I don’t know what we’ll be up to.’ So sure enough we suited up with headlamps and coats. It was like an after-dinner ritual. We tricked out our bikes with El-wire trimmed wheels and loops of glowsticks on our handlebars. There are no streetlamps in the dessert, so we, ourselves need to be illuminated. There are thousands of commuters and yet not many bike crashes. People take care. Culturally, it’s understood to keep yourself lit as a method of identity and expression but also as a way to be visible and safe.
So, we rode over to our friends’ camp and, after all that, they weren’t there. We kept riding, it was no big deal. It was like the 90s. There was no follow up game of sms ping-pong or trying form a tweet-up. We just kept riding. We found something new to do and you know what? It was so fine.
So I told my colleagues, I’m doing research on “urban development.” Before campers arrive and after they leave, Black Rock City it’s an empty desert. Everything there is intentional, something that is there is because someone has brought there, it’s designed. Nothing remains from last year except the dust.
How would people build a functioning city in a week? What does a new city look like? It has bike repair pros, spas and brunch spots and a census. I worked in the post office and our neighborhood bar. If we could build a city and roads and culture and economy, just for a week, what’s a better way to do it than the way it is where we live? And every year Burning Man must be different because every year, the people change.
“User experience,” is something I listed I was researching. I thought a lot about what I read in grad school by Plato, by Dewey, by McCarthy & Wright, by Russon and their philosophies of experience. Burning Man helped me meditate on the Sensual, Emotional, Compositional and Spatio-Temporal 4 threads of experience. These are the same threads that weave into our every day lives but are center but at Burning Man are imposed front and centered. We’re faced with manufactured, designed art projects juxtaposed against the backdrop of the sun as our clock and the desert as the canvas. We have only one objective measure of time, then sun, and half way through the daily cycle, the sinks behind the mountains and without our anchor, the night is infinite.
If you were so lucky to dance all night in the dark, cold desert, you might have heard Lee Burridge play a siren songs to beckon the sun. And with the last drags of our tired feet, we turn our backs to the DJ, gaze to the horizon and see the edges of light peak above the Earth and the next day begins. There is no alarm clock.
“and human-computer interaction design.” was the last point I said I’d be researching. There we are, 50,000 people, doing whatever we love to do most, for a week, with our friends, some new, divorced from communication technology. And yet, in this natural, beautiful place we are still immersed in a space with impressive light design, massive sound systems and volts of power thumping through generators to power the art and music projects.
I got to see how else humans and computers can interact with each other. That being, humans and humans, computers and computers and humans with computers. We do it all with dust in boots and sweat on our brow. We have a lot left to learn about what we as people want and need and how we’re going to get it, if we ever do.
But having dropped myself in some places that are beyond other-worldly, I’ve learned how delicate our fleshy, vulnerable, skin and bones and hearts are. If we’re going to design chairs and phones and streets and clocks and code whatever else it is that we design, let’s give our work voice and human touch. Someone, some person, will be using it.
During the second and final year of graduate school I worked on a research and design project related to news, design and storytelling. I created Newskite, a platform to engage people around the world about major global current affairs. I presented my capstone (that’s like a design thesis) to my faculty and peers at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana last night and to alum and friends via ustream.
Presentation Video
Scrub to 01:02:00 for my 15 minute talk. You can follow along with the slide deck below.
Slidedeck
Audio Stories Edited collection for presentation
Full stories
Poster
Gratitude
Thank you to very many many people but especially to professor Hans Ibold who pushed me hardest and mentored me more than anyone else at Indiana University.
Feedback
I also received constructive feedback written commentary.
Wesley Michaels and I tracked him down in Boulder and asked if he would share his insights with our peers who couldn’t make it to the conference. His invitation was part of our semester long research and design project to improve the professional development resources for HCI Master’s students in the School of Informatics and Computing at IU.
Much of our community is struggling to communicate what we do and why it is important. Carl emphasized how important it is for us to tell stories that have characters and tangible examples. Otherwise, people will continue thinking we do magic, or do nothing. The best thing we can do is open a dialogue with people who don’t understand what we do and above all–thank them for being interested in the first place.
Major Points
An example would be useful about now. Got a GPS device in front of you? Talk about it.
Tell an “IxD at work” story that people can see.
Don’t sweat the edge case. It’s ok to start by saying we make website or phone apps. Something like that is tangible and can open a dialogue.
It is your job to shield the world from IxD’s internal debates.
Start where the listener is. Think of your listeners as users. Then have a user-centered designed conversation. You know how to do that!
Q&A with students
Is UX and IxD a buzzword? Not necessarily. A buzz word is when usage exceeds comprehension and maybe more people are using the word but don’t know what it means.
The best work comes from identifying part of a project where you can have an impact.
The industry will benefit as a whole from students coming from young programs. From schools will come more agreements on terminology and practice in the profession.
It’s common and expected for interaction designers to inherit and learn new tools fast.
There is a difference between user research and market research just as there is a difference between users and consumers. When designers engage in research they come out of their research transformed and empathetic.
Getting excited about work is essential. You can begin to think, “do you have any idea of what this will mean to people!?” When you have a person in mind you can really talk about solutions and begin to solve them.
Play well with others.
People can be very creative. Even or especially non-designers. Let them know you realize that and draw on it. Be interested in them and make sure they know.
What is it called when our minds see something in nature that looks and feels like a remediation of technology? Deremediation? Probably not, because I made up that word.
For example, Instagr.am is an service that lets people saturate and filter their photos. They are what researchers Bolter and Grusin would call a remediation of old film cameras. Months ago I was driving on highway 280 near Half-Moon Bay between San Francisco and Mountain View. I thought the rocks I was seeing looked a lot like the fake rocks I saw at the Universal Studio’s movie set. The movie set rocks were of course meant to look like real, natural rocks.
What is it then? What is it called when our mind begins processing things in the natural world as if they are produced by technology? Maybe it’s not anything except you thinking I’ve gone absolutely mad.
My entire life has changed because of f.lux. I usually wake up before sunrise and when I don’t it’s because I have worked late into the night. Throughout the day f.lux adjusts the tints on my screen with based on my location and time of day. At night, my screen has a slight red-orange hue (tungsten) that keeps me from squinting at my computer and burning my eyeballs. Doing graphic design work that requires precise attention to detail and color? No problem, there’s an easily accessible feature to disable f.lux for an hour. If you try this for a week and still don’t love it, I’ll give you your money back!
Big surprise that I read a lot of news–from a lot of different sources. Blogs, journals, news sites and so on. Because the media industry wants us to click on more links, more share buttons and more ads we are bombarded with visual noise. Readability is a bookmarklet you can add to your toolbar that wipes all of that away. I dream of a day when design is so good we don’t need Readability. But until then, one click to quiet salvation is not so bad.
This is way I wish all technology worked, quietly in the background. The one click Chrome extension makes all New York Times stories one page. You know that 12-page essay about lemon farming in Brazil? While you’re clicking next, next next, I’m smooth sailing down down the coast Rio sipping lemonade and not a penny spent. I wish I had this for the entire internet.
New York Times Standard vs New York Times with Adblocker
I did some browser to browser comparisons and the free Adblock definitely works. It also apparently it won the about.com Reader’s Choice Award in 2011–for what that’s worth to you. My favorite part is no longer having twirling, dancing motion ads crying for attention. Hulu ads got you down? Try pressing the “mute” button; that trick always works.
There is an remarkable amount of opportunity to do game changing work in the journalism space. There always has been and there always will be. Why? Because there will always be uncovered stories, truths and narratives to be told. There are always people, problems and more than two sides to an issue.
I’ll start by telling you about my transition from being a news designer to interaction designer. Then I’ll talk about visual.ly at large.
I’ve been asked how I made the leap from one field to the other. Really, folks, they are one in the same to me. Both roles share the same toolbelt: sketch, iterate, prototype, reflect, tell stories, interview, explore, think big, collaborate, write and design at all fidelities.
People ask me why I made the leap
Why did I jump the journalism ship? For me, there really was no other choice. I wanted to improve the quality of how we learn about what’s happening in our world, what I think news does. To do this, I needed new tools in my tool design belt. So, I went back to graduate school to study HCI.
The other reason I jumped ship is actually quite sad. I tried and tried and tried to motivate digital approaches at various media organizations I worked for–not just one in particular. And my freshly graduated tech savvy peer/colleague journalist friends were all trying to do the same thing. Some have been successful. But most of us realized weren’t going to get anywhere until publishers were willing to invest in the future of digital, in a real, thoughtful, way.
Sure the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and other major news hubs pump out fantastic digital work. But we don’t talk as much about solutions for readers of all the gazettes, journals and couriers across the country. That’s why creating a platform can be so powerful.
I wasn’t going to make progress any time soon in the old boys club, so, I jumped. I didn’t want to spend any more time commemorating the good ol’ days, I wanted to design for the future.
Do I look back? Of course. Do I want to go back? No. Am I obsessively grateful for all of the brilliant mentors and experiences I’ve had? Of course.
People ask why I went to graduate school
In my grad school application I said I wanted to work on the news problem. I said I would graduate and leave the traditional news community for a while and arm myself with education and experience at smart tech companies. And when the timing and opportunity is right, I would work in this opportunity space again. I had a really nice metaphor with light and darkness.
People are doing things outside journalism that benefit media
I’m writing this post today because it relates to visua.ly which has me oozing with excitement.
Watch their demo at 500 startups. Scrub to about 34 minutes in.
The cofounders, Stewart Langille and Lee Sherman come most recently from Mint.com, the infographic heaven for visualized data about your money. They are taking advantage of a space and area that has never been more important and had more opportunity. Watch the video and see how they view the future.
They are trying to solve the problem of “big data” and are “targeting publishing and advertising.” A publisher has a monthly with subscription with Visual.ly which connect them with third party data sets, designers, analysts and an an editor who oversees the creations of these visualizations.
I’ve said this many times before, and I’ll say it again, if journalists in newsrooms don’t take serious, thoughtful action to move the news industry forwards, other people will. Quoting myself:
Newspapers, radio and cable television should be taught in media history classes. Students should be taught to produce for and think about Mobile apps, Google and Apple TV, Ubiquitous Computing, Virtual Environments, Chat clients, Facebook, Twitter, Bloggers, GPS devices, etc. The list goes on and on. If the medium is the message, it’s time to open our eyes to everything else out there.
We should have invented Twitter. We should have invented RSS feeds. We should have invented Craigslist and Groupon and Youtube and the iPad and Google Search and Yelp. It’s okay to hire developers. It’s okay to take a risk. If people inside the news industry don’t change the model, people outside will.
10 August 2010
Visual.ly “gives publishers the horse power of a New York Times visualization team without the cost; New York Times has 40 people on their visualization.” It’s curated crowdsourcing. ”Using our data, or their own, users can grab-and-go making amazing visualizations” the founders say.
So, to my dear friends in newsrooms, fighting the good fight, every day, whatever you do, keep moving forward. If your editor is not taking advantage of your potential, work for someone who will. If no one will, start doing whatever you think needs to be done, yourself.
Light and happy on my feet, upon arrival in Barcelona (2007).
I don’t check luggage and I love developers. I’ll tell you what the two have to do with each other.
I came across a wonderful post about travelling without baggage. It highlights 4 ways to travel light: bring nothing, fill only your pockets, keep only a day bag or borrow everything you need. He says:
I’ve done it. Traveling with no bags is gloriously liberating. You move fast, close to the ground, spontenously. You feel unleashed, undefined by your possessions. It is just you and the world. I am convinced that you think different when you have less stuff to manage. You learn a lot, fast.
Many of those same ideals are celebrated in recent posts I have read about lean ux (a method for interaction designers). It is reflective of agile development methods and a step forward from the slow waterfall process.
Lean UX is the practice of bringing the true nature of our work to light faster, with less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed.
So what can travelers and designers learn from one another?
Be lightweight. Be agile and quick on your feet. Limiting yourself to physical artifacts (wireframes or big bags) plant you to the ground and can limit your scope
Be aware. Continuously be in a meditative, reflective state where you are learning from yourself, your environment, the people around you and your process. Then, obviously, iterate. Do whatever you were doing before, better, or at least differently if it wasn’t working.
Be flexible and open. Writing a committed, formal plan before the actual process begins detracts from the opportunity to discover the unknown and unexplored.
Spend time and money only on the essentials. Living with little or no waste often lends itself to having more time, energy and money for what and when it is most important.
Learn the local language. Do as the Romans…or the ruby developers…do. Immerse yourself in the environment. Learn it, live it, and use what you already know to make smart decisions.
Focus on experience. Do this for your journey, or the people you are designing for will have. Experience shall be a high priority.
If you can do a week in a backpack, you can do a month. If you can do a month, you can do a year. I once went somewhere with only a purse. I’d like to take on the travel bloggers’ challenge and bring nothing with me at all. I’m working on a non-smelly solution.
As for lean ux? I’m cutting the fat a little bit each and every day. But it’s really going to take a team effort.
A great post from thingist with an articulate reminder that we are all in this together. When we lose sight of what we’re doing, the people we make things for often suffer the most–and isn’t that contrary to the whole point to begin with? Helping each other out rather than ripping a new one every here or there can’t hurt.
My fellow nerds, geeks, hackers, designers, makers, builders, and DIYers, there is something very very wrong with out culture right now. We’re jackasses to one another.
…
Except nobody told me that I sucked at skateboarding, or that my form was terrible, or that I should give up on it. In fact quite the opposite. One day at the skatepark I was sitting off to the side just watching everybody else and kindof wishing that I wasn’t there. One of my best friends, Steve, came up to me to ask what I was doing.
“You’re not going to learn anything by just staring at that thing. If I ever catch you sitting on this bench again, you’re not invited to the skatepark anymore.”
However, there is also a place for tough love and an honest, constructive critqiue.
Experiences belong to the people having them. Designers do not own the experience. Designers are not god and designers cannot design an experience someone else is going to have. The experience belongs to the person (or people). There inlies the ownership.
I have been looking at a lot of portfolios, business cards, blog posts, tweets and job descriptions. “I design experiences” is a phrase that really bugs me. With all the tooting and fan faring about ‘user centered design’ and putting people first, it is awfully bold for a designer, developer or manager to claim they will decide and thereby design what kind of experience someone else will have. How can we possibly define their emotions, their thoughts, their environment, their fears, their childhood memories, their little delights? Have we lost all sense of humbleness and humility?
However, experience is a very important element to consider, if not an essential part of a design framework, philosophy or value. The experience people have using a product or service is what I care about. Well, let’s also not forget all the people whom our work effects that are not necessarily users. I bet that is something ringtone designers think a lot about, the non-users. Anyone notice how the chimes and bells have gotten more office friendly? The dude in the cubicle next to you is a non-user but certainly effected by that ringtone. But, I digress. Perhaps we can design for an experience. The difference is humble intent.
Human behavior never ceases to surprise me. People will always use tools and services in a way we may not expect. We’re humans, we appropriate. And if we do indeed appropriate, how can anyone other than you ultimately decide what experience you will have?
I celebrated the commencement of the year Cape Town on a life-changing trip to Southern Africa with the perfect travel mate. I saw a dear childhood friend and did research to inform my graduate school thesis. In the flutter of a tweet, I earned my Master’s and started packing boxes to pick up nearly a decade of my life spent in beautiful Bloomington, Indiana.
I spent a week under extreme conditions in the dessert that taught me important lessons about design and experience. It yanked everything human about me to the surface of my being and I truly went through a Rite of Passage.
