Jarrett Interaction Design

I read about TripIt.com a few months ago but hadn’t taken the time to try it.  It is a site that you simply forward e-mail confirmations of travel plans, and it organizes a nicely readable, interactive itinerary for your trip automatically… and it’s free.

I just forwarded all my upcoming trips, including confirmations of friends who are traveling.  Now I have a lovely site full of information about those trips!  There are even calendar feed links and the ability to share your trips with others.  Awesome awesome awesome.  Go join immediately! 

 I’ve been looking for a way for a number of friends and me to keep track of where and when our travel plans may cross.  This one can now do it auto-magically.

 By the way, you can look me up as “James Jarrett” or “jjarrett”.

I went to the local UPA meeting last night. It was a good presentation by the user research team at Revolution Health (a startup founded by Steve Case, former founder of AOL), Leah Rader and Beth Toland. They were a lot of fun, and had a cool “rapid user research” method they used that they call the “Revolving Door Method.”

Key ideas:

I attended another Microsoft design presentation about the design of the Office 2007 Ribbon that has replaced the menus and toolbars of the traditional apps.  Presented by Jensen Harris, it was a refreshingly self-deprecating look at the history of the Office UI and the design goals and methods that led to the ribbon.  His presentation style was beautiful, and it had great musical cues attached to each major point.

Fundamentally, the ribbon came about because with each successive release of Office, more functions were added to more menus, more toolbars, and more task panes.  I can’t remember the numbers exactly, but by Office 2003, there were something like 35 toolbars, 18 task panes, and 1500 functions in Word.  The old menu/toolbar paradigm had crumbled under this.  I’ve only been using Office 2007 for a few months, and I struggle to find a few functions that I used to know where to find, but I have a new appreciation for the challenge behind this design – and I think I’ll get used to it.

Tidbits:

• “Whenever UI designers don’t know what to do… invent a new rectangle!” Referring primarily to the addition of task panes to office a number of years ago.
• Results-Oriented Design: rather than naming a function, show the result of the choice, live and non-destructively, before committing to the choice.
• Biggest problem with Office prior to 2007, based on research data: “The sense of mastery was gone.”  Users were no longer masters of the software.
• The office team gets HUGE amounts of data from the opt-in user experience improvement program.  He showed a few months of data where the most-used function (paste) was used over 14 million times by people in the program.  The least used function (convert rectangle object to lightening bolt) was only used 3 times in that same period.  All this data was used in very interesting ways to drive choices in the new UI.
• Design tenets must be religion.  Everyone who touches the product must truly believe in the tenets, or the designs will stray.  My favorite tenet for Office 2007: “Consistent but not homogenous.”  Consistency is important, but not to the detriment of each product’s own personality.
• Longitudinal usability studies where the most important feedback the team got on their design.  The first couple hours of use of a new design provides interesting feedback, but data on immersive, extensive, and expert use over a few months of intense study was invaluable.

I just attended a presentation on the design of Surface by its manager of interaction design, Daniel Makoski.  As a prototype product, Surface is pretty neat, but the design process and goals are much richer than you can see in the demos they provide.

Surface is a prototype of what is called “Natural Computing” with a “Natural User Experience”:  using natural human interactions like gestures, voice, etc. 

Some tidbits:

• Richard Grefe of the AIGA coined this articulation of experience design:
  (Form + Content + Context) ÷ Time = Experience Design
• Liz Sanders of MakeTools.com says it we can’t design experience, because experience is only to the person experiencing it, but we can design for experience.
• Microsoft has collaborated with the IDSA with a competition to envisioning the next generation of PCs.  One that caught my eye was the Zen PC – with a completely haptic screen for use without vision.
• He showed a really cool vision video from the Industry Innovations Group showing how the experience of health care might be changed with natural computing and other innovations.
• Aspects of Natural User Interfaces: physical, direct, contextual, focused, and realistic.
• Surface design principles: natural & intuitive, unique & magical, social & together, aware & responsive, premium & authentic.
• Neat idea with paper prototyping: laminate the paper so it can be marked up with dry-erase markers.
• Acronym for non-WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing device) interfaces: STaG (speech, touch, and gesture).
• A great video from Sarcastic Gamer that puts a new audio track on the Surface video.

My final Adaptive Path session to day was on design methods.  After a quick introduction of all the different methods that one might apply to solve a specific problem, we worked in teams to write a “method card” for a specific method.  Experts could share insights and teach the novices about the specific method.  I got to define and teach “comparative  review” to some folks who had little idea what it was.  Great fun.

Guy Kawasaki interviewed Steve Ballmer for today’s keynote.  It was really good: very funny, very edgy.  Two powerful men in the technology industry trading jabs and information in a real-life interview.  Loved it.  Make sure you watch it in the sessions from Mix08.  No key takeaways, other than I really gained a bunch of respect for both of them.

Another Adaptive Path session looking at the interaction design step of the process.  Another nice, simple, interactive sessions of brainstorming solution ideas, then a one-level grouping of ideas.  The scenario included user research data and a couple of personas to help drive the direction.  I need to teach modern K-J diagramming techniques to folks… it’s such a powerful way to do affinity work.  Multi-level grouping, summary themes not categories, relationships and priorities.  The best step-by-step guide is a chapter in Perry and Bacon’s new book, Commercializing Great Products with Design for Six Sigma.