No Cost for Culture

Oh geez, what am I doing? I’m in the middle (well more like the 1st quarter) of the UI Spec and happily working my way through it and I’ve stopped to post a blog (so I’m keeping it short!). The thing is, I was looking at the Garrett IA stencils in omnigraffle, and suddenly stopped and thought - wait, what are these ‘areas’? So I googled it, and duh, came across Garrett’s own Visual Vocabulary Page. I’ve been here before, but never fully absorbed it I guess. Hope this helps someone else, in your hour of need.

i’ve been reading different articles about how young people manage money, how the future is looking for generation x & y as far as earnings, savings, and retirement go, and even thinking about the national debt and what the implications are for americans as individuals. I even just watched a short film by Lauren Greenfield about teens in Los Angeles and their money. If you’re turned off by the Beverly Hills-shopping girls at the beginning, hold on - it gets better/more realistic!

I don’t want to get too political, but you have to wonder what kind of example our country is setting if its national debt breaks down to ~$500,000 a person, if it were our duties to “pay it back” (I read this recently, and now can’t remember the source). Is our government sending a signal that credit is good, debt’s ok? (As an aside, I’ve always wondered what’s to stop us from printing up our own money and cover our debt! Who decides how much money is in circulation?)

I’m also wondering, more practically, where this kind of information fits when conducting research for a product. I’m saying, there are these studies, there are statistics, and they inform what I know not so much about users as individuals, but about the world at large that these users fit into. I think these are important things to consider because although the users are the ones who will using the product and will ultimately decide if it’s a success or failure, in a sense, users’ habits are a symptom of a larger problem - at least in the case of a product like Finabler.

The idea for Finabler certainly came about partially because I was raised to be aware of money. My parents stressed about it - not so much about not having enough, but about making sure to save it and invest wisely. My mom balanced her checkbook by hand, and I carry this tradition on in a sense, by recording my receipts into quicken and reconciling my input with the bank statements at the end of the month (although this is a tedious task, so often I end up doing a few months at a time). And certainly, my habits were strengthened by having to develop more of a head for numbers by handling the books at a nonprofit for four years.

But I see the pain in what I do (i experience it!) and I see that others simply aren’t willing to track their money in that way, so Finabler is born. I suppose right now I have to realize that what I’m talking about her may lend itself more to business case than UI spec, and on with my work! But these things are good to talk through nevertheless.

Tonight my body aches from the stress and exhaustion of this week. I’m quite adept at wasting time on the internet, but I decided I needed to laugh in between the horrible flash project I’m working on, so I visited my trusty lolcat friends at http://icanhascheezburger.com/.

If, somehow, you’ve escaped the lolcats the past few years, I recommend starting backwards so you can see some of the original images first.

Here are two of my favorites. I think I laughed a little too hard at the 2nd one. :/

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1758.html

Here’s something you can listen to at work. How does google approach the user experience? Irene Au is the Director of User Experience at Google and she talks about how Google differs from other companies that she’s been at. She also talks about the culture at Google and even their hiring process for any googler-wannabees out there (that’s me, if you haven’t caught on ). I’ll come back to this with some comments after I’ve listened to it again.

(ps - this link comes to me from Therese Nielsen, my classmate from Columbia and now my colleague-from-afar who is studying HCI at U of M!)

I kid, that’s not what it’s called - but it is useful for stalking! Google maps has a new feature that is flat out amazing. It’s called ‘Street View’ and it’s just that - type in an address, click the street view button and the little icon and a photo pops up showing you the building/streets/whatever that’s at the address. A street-level photo. And not just that, you can click and drag along the image to get a full 360-degree view of the street you’re looking at and you can even virtually ‘walk’ down the streets to see what else is in the neighborhood. The icon on the map will update to show you which way you’re moving.

Note that this doesn’t work in Chicago yet - so I’ve been stalking the streets of San Francisco today. For example, let’s visit the Tonga Room! Just go in the hotel, walk downstairs, and you’ll be in a tropical paradise.

This is potentially awesome and scary in a variety of ways, of course.

Awesome: I can check out neighborhoods I’m interested in moving in to to see what’s nearby, how the building looks from the outside (if I can figure out which one it is!) and talk a virtual walk around to get a feel for the neighborhood.

Awesome: Landmark-type directional people will have a handy way to see where exactly they’re going if they’re not familiar with the area.

Not awesome: others will know exactly where we live and people that value their privacy may get ‘caught’ by google’s big bro cameras. (However in Chicago between surveillance cameras and police cameras, we’re pretty much under surveillance whether we like it or not).

From an interaction design standpoint, this is a lot of fun!Google has thought of almost everything I might want to do - like can I pick up my little guy and make him go somewhere else? Yes! Can I click and hold on the picture to keep moving down the street? Yes! Can I decide to move a perpendicular direction when I’m in an intersection? No. But, when I get to the intersection the photo has overlays that tell me the streets I’m at so I can just move my guy on the map to the street I want to explore more.

So now the question is what’s the technology involved here? Is some creepy van driving up and down the streets of San Francisco taking pictures of each and every street that exists? Are there little drone helicopters flying low down streets and taking 360 degree pictures? Will this ever become a countrywide-or even awesomer-worldwide feature? I guess time will tell.
Here’s a little blurb about street view from webware.

And a blog post from a googler about the feature - it’s in 5 cities!

Yes, I was watching 60 minutes again this Sunday and on comes a great story about the One Laptop Per Child project. I’ve seen the interface Sugar before - a whole new operating system was developed for this laptop so that it could be understood by anyone, anywhere (or at least this is the big hope) - actually here’s a video of it! (my wordpress blew up when I tried to embed this video)

I’m really excited and inspired by the whole thing. The MIT professor who spearheaded this project travels all_the_time promoting this project and trying to get the laptops in the hands of needy kids. And this sucker is totally rugged, and product-or-not, I’d say it’s innovative - in fact its platform is essentially the idea that knowledge is power and even if kids aren’t getting a great-or-any education, maybe having access to the world through a laptop will help.

You can read a lot more about the laptop and the 60 minutes segment on 37Signals’ site.
Now on to my main point: a big issue that came up during the 60 Minutes segment is that OLPC, which uses AMD processors is facing fierce competition from for-profit companies such as Intel who want a piece of this gigantic, underserved market of 3rd world countries with little-to-no technology. They’re trying to steal business away from OLPC and get their computers in the hands of kids worldwide.

I was thinking OLPC and its fiercest competitors should have a usability-test-off. Get kids that haven’t touched a computer before to try to accomplish different tasks on the various computers and see which UI works best. This is at least how some countries or schools (or whomever the powers that be are) should decipher which computer to go with, instead I imagine it might come down to empty promises or perhaps bribery.

I’d love to help with the usability-test-off myself, but most of all I can’t wait to see how this plays out and I can’t wait to see how the world changes as a result of One Laptop Per Child.

So I think my blog might jump the shark a little bit this week - I thought about blogging about this real estate website Redfin that I saw on 60 minutes on Sunday (the 60 year old in me loves 60 minutes), but I’m not sure what to say, except “neat”.

I’m kind of a sucker for any/all map+whatever mashups that are out there and this one saves you on real estate commission to boot. I can vicariously live through future-kelly and say “420k for a 1bedroom TIC in San Francisco sounds reasonable” and then I remember that it would be just me and Joel pulling in the dough to pay for it. No tenants to help pay the mortgage.

Hey, speaking of tenants (this is where I jump the shark), mine are moving out. Yes, I am a landlord of exactly one apartment (if anyone’s looking for a 3bedroom, 2bath apt in Pilsen for $1100, you know who to talk to) and I’m in the midst of showing it this month in the hopes of renting June 1st. So in the shower this morning I remembered to leave a note for our tenants letting them know that I’d like to show the apt this weekend. Except, of course, I forgot to do this once I got out of the shower.

So I was pondering this just now as I went out for lunch and I realized that if I just had a magical shower notepad, I could jot down notes, ideas, and to-dos to my heart’s desire when my mind seems to be the most active: in the shower (for reference, the shower is where i got the brilliant idea that a certain project for one class could be repurposed as a certain project for another class thus lessening some workload). Maybe Nadine’s magical pen can help with this - or maybe there’s a semi-permanent, but still dry-erase-esque technology out there that could assist with this sort of thing? It seems like a dumb enough idea that people would go for it.

I just heard about restickable dry erase paper which sounds totally awesome and I want to randomly stick all over my house. I have one smallish square dry erase board, but I need more. I like it much better than paper or computer for brainstorming.

Sometimes it’s nice to take a step back from whatever projects you’re knee-deep in and start fresh. Work on something else, hone your skills on something you’re not so involved in. Or just look at things from a new perspective.

I was reminded of this today, because I came across Cooper’s Interaction Design Test (pdf alert) for prospective employees. This is a two-part test: first, we redesign the table creation steps in Word, and second, create a design for a phone.
They say, “We’re most interested in your conceptual design decisions and how they affect the interaction and interface design of the product.” I’ve found that this is really the ‘magic’ in what we do - first, how do we take research and effectively translate our findings to design, and second, how does design translate to interaction? It involves a lot of distillation of ambiguity into organization.

Speaking of such exercises, I’ve seen IDEO ask potential employees (interaction designers or human factors specialists, I believe) to sit somewhere for an hour and observe people in a public space and come up with observations of patterns of behavior and ways the space could be improved. It’s a simple enough thing that we could do almost anytime, and I like that it takes us away from glowing screens for a while.

What are some other ways we can practice different skills without having to make a commitment to a long and involved process?

Given that we’ve been working on different types of documentation like site diagrams, user flows, and wireframes, I’ve been thinking about and researching different ways of representing these deliverables.

My project Finabler is a web application that I imagine being interactive and drag-and-droppy, but also retaining many menu-structures and functionalities that are more common in desktop applications, and I’m still kind of at a loss as to how I’ll represent things that are functional, but not pages unto themselves.

Anyway, looking through the software prototyping book for our prototyping class, I came across a dependency diagram, which I thought was a great way to get ideas down for user/task flow and how things relate to one another. (sorry I can’t find a good example online - check out the book, if you’ve got it!)

I also found this ye olde User Task Model that I thought was interesting, in a holistic way. It helps to put our scenarios into action in a way others will understand.

And a couple months ago I came across Todd Warfel’s Task Analysis Grid, which he shares the template for on his site. It uses scenarios, tasks, and subtasks to outline how the functional requirements of a system will be met. He also puts a human face on it and includes a term I love, and I think it says so much - Pain Points! What are we trying to fix? Anyway, this document seems like a great way to streamline our documentation.

Finally, over at Boxes and Arrows, Andres Zapata talks about using guided wireframes in powerpoint to tell the story of how a rich internet application will function.

What methods have you found to be useful?

So being an introvert, I’ve always been interested in how people make their initial connections with new people. There are several people I ‘know’ whom I’ve never been formally introduced to and therefore may have never spoken to - even if I’ve been seeing them at the same events for several months or more!

I really like having the chance to make worlds collide and introduce one group of friends to another, point out what they may have in common, or at least what my link to that person is (such as, ‘Mary is my oldest friend - we lived next door to each other and were born two days apart’) and hopefully they’ll be able to take it from there and at least recognize each other and be friendly, if not friends.

I’ve done analog projects that provide this purpose, introducing people to each other, and it’s quite fun.

I’m interested in how the internet and mobile communication and the great hopes of collaborative web 2.0 technologies will help us meet each other. How will we go beyond the computer and start to really meet people as we’re out and about? have any of you out there made good friends off the internet/myspace that you didn’t know in ‘real life’ first? Are you interested in being out and about and knowing that someone is nearby with similar interests? The more I brainstorm about this, the creepier it gets. I’m not an early adopter to new mobile technologies, I can barely bring myself to text message anyone, nor do I see a need in my life for a blackberry-type device. And yet I’m intrigued by the idea of taking some of the awkwardness out of meeting new people and making us all more of a social and aware society.

Anyway, here are some things I’ve found in my googling/ruminating on this topic:
Dodgeball looks cool because it’s based on who your friends are and their friends - you sign up and can let others know where you’re at for impromptu meetups (and it’s not like some GPS-creepy-stalker thing, you decide when & where you’ll be located). The Crushes feature is fun - but I think I’d be a little embarrassed about using it! (hmm, further googling tells me dodgeball was acquired by google. Wonder what the plans are…

My thoughts are so timely - just a few days ago a moble social networking patent sold for $2.6 million right here in chicago.

and this is a copout, but before I explore further, here’s a link to mobile social networking’s wikipedia page.

Oh yeah, and Meetro! I almost forgot. I like this one because it’s about who’s in your neighborhood (or at least the one you’re in). And i don’t have to be thumbing-off text messages to strangers. This is the one I’d be most likely to try - I’d be curious especially to see if any users are in Pilsen.

Do any of you use these type things or something else? I’ve made a lot of ‘internet friends’ that I met IRL since I started on AOL about half my life ago (whoa), but when location-awareness comes into the equation, it seems riskier and certainly less anonymous. I wonder how this will all play out and evolve.