No Cost for Culture

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?

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.