Whither Clippy?

Clippy came to mind when I was in Japan, a nation and culture richly populated with animated characters. On every surface, there are characters — talking penguins, inflatable dogs, instructive manga characters — and their cumulative presence seems to make the environment more engaging and friendly.

I saw this little guy in the UI of a Nintendo DS when I toured ATR, the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Kyoto.

I don't know what he's saying, but he sure is cute.

So, after my trip to Japan, I'm worried that we've taken the wrong lesson from the shortcomings of Clippy. There must be an appropriate a place for characters in interactive systems that are not simply games — not all interactive systems, but some, maybe?

My question: Can anyone point me to some good implementations of characters in non-game software? Or recommend some best practices?

The 5 habits of highly effective project teams

Here at Cooper, we’re pretty well known for our holistic and methodical approach to design, but don’t let that fool you - when the situation calls for it, we’re more than happy to get all “mavericky” with our clients and provide some good old fashioned ad-hoc consulting.

For example, I was recently asked to provide management support to a client who is in the midst of implementing a Cooper re-design of their robust web application. As I immersed myself in the project, I was quickly reminded of my previous life as a project manager and business analyst at a large software company, and how easy it is to fall into the many efficiency traps that often permeate large-scale development projects.

Over the course of my recent engagement, I identified several critical success factors for effective project teams, and some specific things that both project managers and team members can do to ensure project success.

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Agile interaction design for startups: A conversation with Cameron Koczon, Co-founder, Border Stylo

Recently I’ve been trying to figure out how interaction design can be blended with Agile development techniques. William Pietri and I have been working closely with Border Stylo, a web-based startup located in Beverly Hills. Through a series of short workshops, we’ve been helping them find the appropriate blend of Agile and interaction design techniques for their team, and evolve those methods as their needs change.

Cameron Koczon and Eduardo Prats were at Cooper October 27-29, 2008 for a series of collaborative design sessions. I took the opportunity to chat with Cameron about his experiences working with a design consultancy as his small startup interleaves product definition, development and interaction design in a nimble fashion, without losing ownership if the vision and end results. Lane: Please introduce us to your company, Border Stylo.

Cameron: Border Stylo is about five months old. Our founding team is a group of very good friends from way back. Myself, Diego and Oscar went to high school together, Eduardo is Diego’s little brother, and Evan and I were college roommates. We raised a little money to build a proof of concept of a Firefox extension. Based on our proof of concept, we raised some series A funding and that took us to where we are now, constructing our Alpha release.

Lane: What is the composition of your team? How many people and what are their skill sets?

Cameron: We all wear a lot of hats. Diego, our CEO does investor relations and makes sure we stay the course in terms of our vision. We’re going to do a lot of data mining and analysis and his educational background will help us with that.

Oscar, our COO, is in charge of developing and implementing our marketing strategy. Because many of our investors are international, we plan on conducting an international release of our product. He also does a lot of the work that has to get done at a startup but is not very glamorous. He makes sure the rent and bills are paid. He handles legal, accounting and is involved in hiring. I actually don’t know how he keeps track of it all.

Eduardo and I do visual design, UI design, product definition and some of the implementation associated with that. That’s not sustainable, so we have to bring on some more people to do that.

We have a development team of three people. One, our CTO Ian, is a badass Rails developer and does a great job of keeping our team on track. Another, Evan, does all our front-end/plug in development. The third guy, Thomas is focused on the back end, making our product scalable. Again, we are in the process of expanding the team to a more sustainable size, but for now that is the full dev team.

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The Ford Fusion SmartGauge: Good Stuff, Missed Opportunities

There's been a certain amount of buzz in automotive circles about the new SmartGauge dash display in the Ford Fusion hybrid. What's so cool? According to Ford, the car encourages fuel-efficient driving habits by giving users constant feedback. What's not to love about encouraging cleaner driving (if we can't get people out of their cars entirely)? Then there's the customizable LCD, which is what really has the car geeks going (check out this video of how it works).

Unfortunately, Ford missed multiple opportunities by thinking of the LCD as basically a digital translation of an analog dashboard--right down to the secondary km/h display on an "analog" dial--plus the ability to display some pretty pictures. The real benefit of that LCD is that you can show users exactly the information they need--and only the information they need--at any time. The less visual information there is, the more likely a driver (who already has a heavy cognitive load) will be able to make use of it. Unlike a physical dashboard, a digital display doesn't need to show engine temperature, for example, until it's becoming a potential problem. I suspect most people would much prefer to see their dash display driving directions or even the name of the song currently playing on the radio.

The visual display itself could be rendered much more legible. For example, it would help not to have lines running behind the numbers on the mpg display. If the green leaves are supposed to make drivers feel good about their behavior, that's a legitimate aim, but a simple gauge would make the fuel-efficiency of my driving style easier to interpret.

Since there's an onboard computer assessing driving style, Ford could have made better use of the information the car is already gathering. For example, if the car knows the fuel tank and battery are half-full and knows how fuel-efficient I'm being, why can't it save me some mental math and tell me how many miles I can go without refueling? Also, if it knows what makes my driving style less efficient than it could be, why not visually point out behavior (such as shifting to a different gear) that would be more fuel efficient?

Kudos to Ford for thinking green and for incorporating a long-overdue technology in the car dashboard. As is so often the case with technology products, though, I think I'll be waiting for version 2.

User Research Friday

I ventured out of the office last Friday, to join Bolt Peters and friends for User Research Friday at Mighty in San Francisco. Billed as “Emergent User Research Methods. And Drinks” URF08 was attended by about 150 professionals and students interested in the topic of user research. During his opening remarks, Nate Bolt talked about the benefits of user research, and remarked that “good ideas don’t just come from the guys in the black turtlenecks.” Nate’s comment got me thinking, what are the strengths and frustrations of the user research community, and how can interaction designers get the most benefit from user research techniques?

The userati: Dan Saffer, Indi Young, Cyd Harrell and Nate Bolt

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A unified approach to visual and interaction design

During my seven years as a visual designer at Cooper, I’ve learned that designing for complex digital products and services requires input from a number of unique perspectives to be truly effective. Furthermore, each of those perspectives must be effectively integrated throughout the lifecycle of the design process to achieve results that are consistently and predictably usable, useful and desirable.

In the course of managing, consulting and teaching, I have not only had the opportunity to define and discuss design process with my colleagues here at Cooper, but with countless practicing designers from organizations all over the world as well. Unfortunately, my observation has been that even when all of the right people are involved, more often than not, the various design disciplines opt to compartmentalize the problem. In other words, they divide the project into an interaction design problem, a visual design problem, and an industrial design problem. Each of these problems is then tackled separately, and the resulting individual design solutions get bolted together at the end. It’s a Tower of Babel situation, where huge opportunities are lost because the team fails to work together to come up with an innovative product solution and to employ a single, unified design language.

A fractured process makes for a fractured user experience

In practice, people view their experience with a product in a unified way. For example, when a user interacts with a cell phone, she doesn’t experience the phone’s behavior separately from the visual and tactile presentation of that behavior on screen and through the physical form factor. Why, then, don’t product teams consider these aspects of the experience in a unified way when designing solutions?

Of course, we know that many digital products and services represent extraordinarily complex, large-scale design challenges. A significant degree of rigor and a rational approach to methodology is required to bring together the diverse perspectives of the different design disciplines in a way that results in optimal creative abrasion, rather than destructive friction that threatens to bring the entire process to a grinding halt(1).To this end, let me share with you a few of the insights that we’ve gleaned from practicing a truly convergent approach to design.

(I should note that in an attempt to keep the length under control, I've focused this article on the convergence of interaction and visual design for products with defined hardware, like PC's or handsets. We're looking forward to sharing our experiences with integrating these two disciplines with industrial design in a future article.)

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A conversation about voice interactions

A while back, several of us in the studio had a little spontaneous discussion about voice user interfaces over email. We thought we'd share some highlights. Please pile on in the comments section.

Steve Calde: What are people’s experiences with voice user interfaces? [A client] is interested in learning more about how to document voice-activated systems, and wondered if we had any experience to share.

Alan Cooper: You could also suggest to them that voice interfaces are inherently bad and will never work very well.

Dave Cronin: Why are they inherently bad?

I agree that they often are bad, but it seems to be more an implementation issue than something intrinsic about voice commands.

Stefan Klocek: The reason they are inherently flawed is that we use our voice for other more important things in addition to the system level input we would like to give to our DVD player. There is no way for the voice interface to understand that the context has changed and that I am no longer giving it a command, rather I am now giving my child a command or am simply muttering to myself. Of course we could imagine a system in which we indicate context by saying “DVD player - pause”, but this is adjusting my input to the deficiencies of the system.

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The missing piece: How interaction design can add to Agile

Since Alan and I attended Agile 08 last August, I’ve had conversations with a lot of people about their impressions of Agile. I’ve talked with people working in a variety of settings, from scrappy startups who are iteratively defining their product and market to large companies with complex business problems working with internationally distributed teams. In each of these settings, some folks are strong advocates of Agile, some are still skeptics. It’s a broad field, and I’m still very much formulating my opinions, but I’d like to share some thoughts and observations I’ve had along the way. I also have a few ideas about how Agile and interaction design might be able to work in concert.

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Beautiful Monsters: Green vs. Green

Jonzing to take part in another 120-mile speed-skating race? You might have to wait 18 years, which is the likely interval between one Elfstedentocht and the next, owing to the effects of global warming.

As you wait for the ice to thicken, you can drive (in an energy-efficient manner) to one of the sustainable dance clubs popping up all over, and sweat your prayers.

So we can (almost all) agree the climate is changing. Not simply the climate that’s melting the ice, though. Also the economic climate, the one threatening to wash away your job. And the political climate, the one that can keep us all afloat.

Just a few months ago, business leaders habitually dismissed arguments in favor of ecologically responsible development because they were too busy pumping gobs of money out of the ground. Now that the price of oil has plummeted along with the rosy profit forecasts from Reykjavik to Whitefish, guess what some “hard-nosed realists” argue? You got it! Investing in clean- and green-tech is now unwise because of the credit tsunami sucking all the cash out to sea, an economic recession that promises to be as deep as it will be broad, hyperventilating stock markets, dazed and confused finance ministers, and a crumbling government in Washington that’s trying to bring down thousands of animal and plant species with it.

Who has time for the love of bugs and bunnies when the sky is falling and you’ve got mouths to feed! When the weather’s fine, there’s no apparent need to fix the leak in the roof. And, anyway, you’re too busy enjoying the sunshine. But when it’s raining nobody wants to go out on a slippery roof. In other words, it’s hard to set aside the time to look ahead. But in times of turmoil we all want to know what’s coming around the bend.

The best way to predict the future, as everyone knows, is to make it yourself. Particularly if you’re a designer, since your job is to anticipate future needs and desires and create what fits the bill.

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Demand a better ballot

Election Day is finally here, and as ballots are cast and counted, I’m hopeful that voters will declare victory for the candidates and measures that I care most about. But as I review my sample ballot in preparation for my visit to the voting booth, I am discouraged to find that it includes many of the design flaws that the AIGA’s Design for Democracy project has been working to expose and eliminate over the past 8 years. As AIGA reports on their website:

“In July 2007 the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) accepted AIGA Design for Democracy’s research and best practice recommendations for ballot and polling place information design. Guidelines and editable samples were distributed to 6,000 election officials across the country this January. As a result, local jurisdictions now have the tools to apply communication design principles and make voting easier and more comprehensible for all citizens.”

Why, then, am I holding a ballot that violates at least three of the Top 10 election design guidelines, including the use of all caps, center-alignment, and tiny fonts?

As Marcia Lausen notes in Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design, typographic specifications are often dictated in well-intentioned but misguided election law. So while the valuable work of Design for Democracy is to be commended, it alone is not enough to bring about the change we need in the design of ballots and other voter information and materials.

So as you head to the polls, review your ballot carefully — not only for its content, but for its design. Make note of the ballot’s flaws, and contact your state and county registrar and representatives to press them to implement the AIGA guidelines. In addition, consider participating in the Polling Place Photo Project, which seeks to document what is politely described as the “richness and complexity" of the voting experience in America.

Most of all, don’t forget to vote!