Contribute to this Quora thread that tightly relates to my recent post on lean ux and travel. However, I do not advocate for the Bose Noise Canceling headphones. http://www.quora.com/Travel-Hacks/What-are-the-best-travel-hacks
[Photo via jaaronfarr]
Something to learn from print
Thoughts to tuck in your brain for the next time you’re thinking about intuitive, easy-to-use design. Print design is old. They have been iterating for a while.
[via Khoi Vinh]
Chrome Notebook CR-48: light hearted but heavy handed
Google made a computer. A laptop, a notebook. It does one thing and it wants to do it well: go online. The entire operating system is a browser. Open it up: browse, post, read, chat. If you can do it in a browser, you should be able to do it on this notebook, the CR-48.
I’ve been playing with my Chrome Notebook (CR-48) for a few days. It came to me in the mail last week as a gift from a friend at Google. But, I’m still not comfortable calling it a CR-48; I’m not a robot.
The first use experience was better than most computers but did not have a magical presentation like Apple’s packaging. I had to ruffle through a few layers of plastic to get to my computer. The battery came charged and setup should have been easy except I had to wait at least 15 minutes for the OS to upgrade which was just long enough to be a buzz kill. The very subtle smiley face has been an incredibly redeeming factor.
The notebook came with a large sheet of stickers to lay over the cover. The undesigned looking design of the notebook begs for it to be personalized. I’m far from being a “bumper sticker person” on my cars, guitars, bikes and computers but the silicone-like texture and very neutral design politely asks, “please make me yours.” I’m now making a personal relationship with my notebook, de-homogenizing it. Slapping a few stickers on the machine transformed it from a CR-48 to my notebook.
I, like may people, lay in bed and on the couch with my laptop. I prop my knees up and type across my lap. But computers that overheat either leave my legs burned or require me to put on a snuggie. This notebook does not set fire to my flesh, and to no surprise, it is wicked fast. As someone who only uses Google Apps for word and spreadsheet processing, this notebook makes sense for me. However, it is not compatible with the Indiana University wireless secure network nor Netflix (and Hulu is sometimes choppy) deeming it significantly less useful for me, at least while I’m in Bloomington.
Below are my major pros and cons with the my notebook. I have only been using it a week and am only reviewing the features I found myself needing so far. I’m primarily a heavy, Macbook Pro user and have been using a desktop pc 20 hours a week for work at Indiana University.
Pros
- It does not overheat (and burn my thighs)
- Chat persistent across tabs
- Easy setup thanks to sync
- Pleasant logoless design
- Fast startup and shut down
- Great battery life
- It is narrow, durable and light enough for me to slip in my purse
- It has a keyboard
- It has a search button
- It has a video camer (though I haven’t used it yet)
- Important buttons on the keyboard are bigger (shift, arrow, search)
Cons
- Gmail loads with a horizontal scrollbar
- For a computer that’s just a browser, it’s quite heavy
- The tint of the screen at night burns my eyeballs (maybe because I’m a f.lux user)
- Minor adjustment needed from Macbook Pro keyboard
- Does not connect to Indiana University Wireless
- Difficulty switching between wireless networks across different locations (home, work, starbucks, etc)
- Does not stream Netflix
- Streams Hulu slowly
- I cannot figure out how to sign out of chat
- The letters on the keypad are impossible to see at night
- Trackpad is fussy and sometimes unresponsive
How does it stand against the iPad? Well, at this point, iPad with the keyboard mate seems like a better bet. But who knows what the future holds and how much one of these puppies will cost?
A brief history on title design
A lovely evolution of moving typography. Look how far we’ve come and back around. I love it.
And the RJD2 song that shows up everywhere.
LeanUX: a journey without baggage
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.
For people who make things for people
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.
You cannot design an experience
4
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?
Disputes encouraged. Photo [flickr_lulalola]
(Fiona) Apples to Apples on the new iPad 2 Case
Apple generally does a superb job choosing songs for their ads that charge our emotions. There’s an interesting story about that cute tune in the new magnetic iPad 2 case video. It was written by Fiona Apple, of all people, and titled Extraordinary Machine, of all names.
Six years after Fiona Apple wrote the album, in 2008, happy as a clam–or as happy as Fiona Apple could be– it was shot down and sent back to the drawing board. Many tracks were reproduced and rumored to be against her creative will. They were produced and arguably overproduced, before going to market. The original album ‘accidentally’ leaked to music-internet junkies across the web while American Eagle and many radio stations played the shinier, more sellable album in stores.
What does this have to do with the iPad? Not much really, but it’s an interesting back story on on a sour Apple and an Extraordinary Machine.
Read more on Pitchfork’s music blog.
Designing for interests, beliefs and values: how traditional demographics no longer drive the future of media
There is an upside to having your taste (and clicks) monitored by advertisers, Johanna Blakey of University of Southern California says. It’s being respected, not presumed. Old media looked at age, gender and income to guess what you would like. You are not your demographic. You are your values, interests, beliefs and so much more. That is how you connect with people and new tools–social media–let you do the connecting with people on your own terms.
We use these tools to connect beyond gender, age and income. Now digital tools see who we are, what we like and what we want to do.
Blakely shows that women, by far, outnumber men in use and time spent on the social media space. If women control social media and social media is overtaking traditional media, will women overtake traditional media? If so, then are we going to start seeing more women in media? and more chick flicks? No! She predicts more women working in these fields will mean more interest and value driven media. No more ‘lame’ movies. Better content and smarter targeting, not for women, not for men but for all people. We cannot say whether or not women will ‘take over’ the media, but Blakely makes a good guess that they will drive the future of the industry.
Is there a future where I watch the Super Bowl and not see one car commercial unless I’m shopping for a car, which I discussed last year: http://ninamehta.com/blog/2010/what-if-ads-werent-such-a-bad-thing/
Entertainment influences our beliefs, our work, our play and values. Designers, developers and managers must consider, explore and practice this. At a newspaper, we call our users ‘readers’ and in radio they are ‘listeners’ and on tv they are ‘viewers’ which were all valid titles because the communication and content went one way. But as soon as these people could interact with content, they came ‘users’ which is a shred more respectful than reader because it at least empowers them with the ability to use and interact.
Meaning, implication and tone get tied up in our language. ‘Users’ is a firstwave HCI term from the 80s, at least, that dehumanizes the people we are talking about. The word came about when ‘interaction designers’ were concerned with usability, efficiency and – well — use. As we consider the values, beliefs, ideas and interests of the people who use the things we design, our language needs to change too. What should we call these people? I don’t know yet. But thinking and talking about as more than users or humans, but as people will likely change the way we work.
Let’s not confuse ‘user-centered’ and ‘user-led’
Some designers all in a huff about a post written on fast company arguing against user-led innovation. It’s flying through my Twitter stream and just came into my inbox via my dear friend and Poynter colleague Jose Kusunoki. He sent it out to our Poynter list-serve asking what we thought about the following quote.
The Apple and IKEA way
Take Apple. One evening, well into the night, we asked some of our friends on the Apple design team about their view of user-centric design. Their answer? “It’s all bullshit and hot air created to sell consulting projects and to give insecure managers a false sense of security. At Apple, we don’t waste our time asking users, we build our brand through creating great products we believe people will love.”
Below is my critique on the commentary folks are making about the post, rather than the post itself. In short, all I’m trying to say is, calm down.
I think a lot of things about this. It’s passing like wild-fire through my twitter stream right now. First of all, not every company is, can be and should be like Apple.
Building brand and product are certainly related but are not the same thing. In this post,it seems the two words are being used interchangeably. The writer here also is confusing user-centered and user-led. Attention to brand, identity, marketing, product, design, motion, function and many other elements are crucial. They live together in an ecology. But they are not all the same thing.
User-led design puts a product in front of some people, they give feedback and you redesign based on their feedback. Crudely, you could say it disregards the judgement of the designer.
User-centered, however, in my opinion, designs for the need, pain points, problems, pleasures and other elements per required by the user, and many other factors. This method considers feedback from users. But feedback, research and findings are one element of many qualitative and quantitative data points that inform the design. Along with, yes, judgement from the creators of the product or service (designers, developers, managers, etc).
One is designed for users. One is designed by users. I advocate for the first, this post and possibly Apple seems to be arguing against the second.
We’re not god. We’ll never know how people are going to understand, interpret or use the things we design. Did anyone know newspapers would make awesome hats in the rain? No. But turns out, they do.