No Cost for Culture

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.

Before this blog started I saw a series of ads for the Guardian that knocked my socks off. I could hang them up on my walls and never paint or put any other posters, photos, or art up and be forever satisfied (no this isn’t true, probably, but let me be dramatic for a moment)!

(You can read more about these ads and see them bigger over here.)

So then I thought, well gee I don’t think I’ve looked at the Guardian much, what the heck am I missing out on!? So I went to their website.

But I was taken aback by how small and centered and cramped it was. Uck! Not like the New York Times in its newspapery-but-still-very-digestible glory, that’s for sure.

However, I was happy to see the Guardian had a section called Ideas. Ideas make the world go round, after all. So i went inside, and saw an interview with Tom Kelley, from IDEO (this is from last year, but it’s still relevant). I was happy to read more of his thoughts on innovation, and his take on Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates, and he’s kinda dramatic, but he says “if you don’t innovate, you die”.

On a smaller level, I suppose that if we don’t push ourselves, our spirits will die. My creative spirit was definitely hibernating in some areas of my life for a couple years before I came back to school, but all I can do is be wary of this, and watch myself, because I probably can’t be a student forever! (and like Alfred said in our class last night, some of the job is going to be the boring stuff - my job happens to be the boring stuff right now, so I’m writing this in the meantime!)

Back to the Guardian - I think they’re being kinda retro-innovative in a way by offering their entire newspaper, page-by-page, digitally. Maybe this is the reason why the website isn’t spectacular, they want people to pay and read the paper online. You can view a demo of the paper here.

Hmm I should have looked before I linked (ha ha), I’m kind of disappointed by it. I think this may be useful if you’ve seen the paper already and want to go back and read an article you missed and it’s easiest to find it in its physical location (online). The text treatment of the articles is totally boring, just plopped in there. The images have to be opened separately, not viewed with the article, in context. It seems rather limited in its usefulness, and more of a novelty than anything. Is this for people who have read physical newspapers for so long that they can’t wrap their mind around a new way to browse the articles? That could be, my mom would definitely fall in that category. But she’s more likely to keep stacks of papers to read and cut out articles than to go to a newspaper’s website, surf around (are we allowed to say surf anymore ) and bookmark articles she found interesting.

I gotta cut this off. I think I made some interesting points and I hope someone has the courage to make sense of a part of this and reply. Or at least read it most of the way through. Until next week!

As much as I love learning about theory and conceptualizing and brainstorming, I still like to take the ambiguous and make it something concrete. Which is largely what I think our job is as IAs, UXDs (UEDs, if you prefer), IDs and all those other acronyms, taking in data, filtering it, and making it work for people. I like education to be a blend of Columbia College, and SAIC - one is very skill-based (Columbia), the other very conceptual (SAIC), at least that’s my observation as a member of the former who has worked with and managed the latter.

So I’ve been thinking about what DePaul’s HCI program is, and comparing it to what I know of other HCI and design programs, and also comparing it to what I thought I’d be learning about in school and what I’m actually learning about and how to still get what I want out of my last 8 classes here.

Some things I think we’re not talking about (or doing!) that we should be:

• Strategy: How do the changes we propose to a system tie in to the world at large? What can we learn from studies, stories, etc. that will affect our designs and how do we effectively represent what we’re learning with what others have learned?
• Innovation: When I took HCI 440 (that’s a usability engineering class, for you non-depaul-hci folks), one of the first things we did after learning we’d be proposing interfaces for all-in-one office machines was a competitive analysis. To me, we sullied any wide-eyed freshness we might’ve had that would have given us a new take on what these machines can be by looking to the competition and saying ‘oh that’s pretty good’ or ‘yes, i’ll take these parts and then make it more ipod-esque’. The ultimate irony of the class was that we were talking specifically about IDEO, who pride themselves on real innovation, and then doing something that amounts more to “best practice”. Which maybe is how it’ll work at 80% of the places that have UCD teams, but I’d like to learn how to be a part of the other 20%.
• The Real World: Back to Columbia College where many professors were working professionals who taught part time. They got it. They were able to talk and teach from a place of experience, and when I’m looking for the concrete, rather than conceptual I like to know what’s happening out there, so I’m excited that this quarter we’ll not only have a working-professional teacher, but also guests!
• Community (awww…): Really. I don’t want to leave here and feel like I barely know anyone I went to school with or those who are working in the field we’re looking to enter. I know that’s up to me too, but our HCI-info list has so far only been a place of announcement, rather than discussion, and I know a lot of people are going to school part time and working full time and we have relationships and other lives and all that jazz, but we should look out for each other too. More guest speakers for the whole program or casual happy hour meetings at exchequer or whatever! I’ll see what I can do. Or maybe Matt will get to work on that linkedin-esque network for HCI students to move us along.
• Higher standards, more critique, more intensity: I know, I’m asking for it. But we’ve all got portfolios to build, right? We should have lots of iterations, lots of process, and lots of research through at least wireframing, if not execution, to show. These quarter systems and low standards do not a great portfolio make. But again, that’s something I can do on my own.
• human-human or human-world interaction: I was partly inspired to get into a HCI program because of The Design of Everyday Things (and because Don Norman himself said that you shouldn’t try to get into this field without having specifically studying it!). All day long I think about how the world can be improved - people could wait for those getting off the train before they try to cram on to it, doors could be marked better, stop signs could be more apparent, etc. And I’m interested in how to delve more into that whole idea of experience design without a computer being part of the equation. I don’t know if that’s something that would work for me career-wise, but I like the idea of going beyond people and their interactions with computers.

Overall, I’m quite happy. I’m learning what I wanted to and meeting nice people and feeling more employable each day - these are just thoughts on what may be missing. I’m an idealist and pursuing HCI is my way to change the world, even in small ways, so I don’t see why school shouldn’t be a bit of a utopia on its own.