Finally: IxDA 2009 – Vancouver, BC, Canada, in five parts

Arrival

The Interaction Design Association is a young professional organization that just put on its second annual conference. I missed the first in 2008, held in Savannah, GA. I had wished to attend that one and heard good things about it. As 2008 closed, I wanted very much to go in 2009 but was uncertain given the economic climate and tightening finances at my current employer. However, positive thinking prevailed and I landed in Vancouver on Wednesday, February 4^th full of anticipation and apprehension.

Why apprehensive? I felt like the new kid starting school in the middle of the year as well as a bit of an interloper. All of these people probably knew each other well and I had only met a few briefly. Plus, so many of them have degrees in a field barely ten years old! I felt unknown and unqualified to be attending. Also imposing was that my area of focus in interaction design has been speech recognition, little known and less understood. I have done some web and desktop app design, but nothing on the scale of many of the attendees. I was actually going to be around people responsible for design thought and work that I had admired for years. For me, it was a bit like being a guitar player (oh, actually I am) and getting to meet someone like Eric Johnson. But I knew virtually none of them would be able to relate to my daily craft. Nonetheless, I was determined not to be a wallflower and so to meet as many people as I could, find out more about them, and hopefully, make some sort of decent impression. Most of all, I hoped to really stretch my brain into design areas I have only dabbled in or read about, especially mobile and service.

Things started well right after arrival. An uneventful flight and border crossing led to sitting on a bus with three guys from Chicago’s Manifest Digital, Jim, Kevin, and Jason. They were there as sponsors and participants. We briefly traded details of who and where and then concentrated on finding our hotel. I would meet up with them again later, to my gain in more ways than one.

The afternoon weather was fantastic and I was able to walk around bit taking photos and had a bite to eat at Steamworks, a brewpub in Gastown. Their Coal Porter brew was the best micro I’ve had in a long time. After that, I headed to the room (by the way, I found the Four Seasons to be very comfortable and I had a great view) early due to no energy and wanting to be ready to learn in the morning. I followed a few arrivals via twitter and settled in.

Next, Day 1.

Sick and tired of being sick

I'm still very under the weather, so once again a few links to good design articles:

James Dyson tries to kickstart design-oriented manufacturing in the UK

Mobile Maps in the NYT

An IA primer of sorts

Johnny Holland, an online IxD mag

Soak up the design yumminess.

-pnl

Busy week, strong links

So, I haven't had enough time to fully pull together my own thoughts about IxDA '09, but go here for what others have had to say:

Lots o'links Courtesy of SemanticWill

Also, a couple of cool other tidbits:

Why Interaction Design Matters

Becoming a Customer Experience-Driven Business

Fight the good fight. Every moment. Every Day.

-pnl

Back from Vancouver - IxDA'09

Just got back. Really tired but so happy to have gone. This view greeted me on the last day of the conference.

I'll post more links and thoughts during the week.

Good design 2009.

-pnl

IxDA09 in Vancouver

On day 3 of the IxDA conference and have loved every minute. Tweeting (@designoutloud) like a madman (at least to me). John Thackara, Rob Fabricant, Dan Saffer have enlightened and inspired. But really so much good stuff. This is a big deal.

More pics.

Making 2009 the Year of Good Design.

-pnl

Time for IxDA 2009!

I'm very excited to have the chance to attend the second IxDA conference, taking place in beautiful Vancouver, BC. I hope to have many wonderful things to pass along when I get back next week.

Meanwhile, if you read this, give me a comment or two! And tell your friends and acquaintances!

-pnl

It's time for a movement!

Being a designer who uses verbal language, I, and many of my colleagues, pay attention to Language Log, a blog by various language academics and other professionals in the field. James pointed out this post, which came out the same day as my previous post here.

Coincidence? Yeeesss, but for all the right reasons. This is bad, people. We have to fix things before more people get more hurt and more stressed.

Persistent bad design is immoral.

-pnl

Bad Design Is Immoral

Persistent bad design is immoral.

(For those of you into relativism, I encourage a contemplative tour of This is Broken in regards to design.)

Those companies and people who produce designs that continually cause difficulty, stress, frustration, tension, anger, delay, waste (esp. time), confusion, harm, etc. and do nothing about it when faced with its effects are committing absolute crimes against their fellow people.

Persistent bad design is immoral. It is life-sucking.

My first exhibit is personal. Summer '08 I "upgraded" from a 3 year old Treo 600 to a Verizon XV6800, i.e. an HTC running Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0. I did this vaguely aware of the bad rep WM had, but I figured it was no worse than the desktop/laptop OS. I now know the depth of my ignorance. Suffice to say that the review I linked to feels effusively, and two-headed calf wrongly, positive.

Some of you might ask, "why give up the Treo?" or "Why not an iPhone, design phreak?" Well, the Treo was outdated, the camera sucked, etc. and I am a fairly happy and committed Verizon family plan customer. And I wanted a touchscreen, so a CrackBerry wouldn't work. So, after much cajoling from a colleague, I took the plunge. I'm still gasping for air.

How has this $400 device plagued me? Let me post the ways:
1 frequent lock-ups, often requiring battery removal
2 vibration starts and won't stop until a reboot
3 screen update latency often leading to repeated numbers during dialing
4 constant task interruption telling me it has sent a text (why do I even need to be notified of that? I am only interested in failure. I assume success.)
5 inability (until recently) to modify basic system functions of notification and sounds
6 The voice activation button is exactly where a thumb goes for regular holding of the phone
7 The volume won't go above moderately loud and so fades badly in noisy environments
8 MS ActiveSync has no setting for "don't sync until I tell you to"
9 When charging, there was no way to tell how charged it was
10 The camera, which takes decent pics, requires psychic or omniscient powers to use it. The buttons are baffling and there is no help on the device

Now, those aren't my top ten, because what I can't even write coherently and succinctly is how amazingly bad it is at handling phone calls when something else happens, like an incoming text. Or how confusing it can be to use the call history. Or how many steps are required to modify a contact. In fact, the only thing I can really say is easy is to move files onto and off the device from my laptop. And while that is handy, it is not a daily/hourly vital task like some of these others.

Which leads me to the highlight of the story. WM 6.1 was released in the fall and I heard promise of "major" improvements. I'm thinking I don't want improvements, I want do-overs. So I put it off until yesterday. And imagine my glee when I realize that there are TWO updates now. Since updates WIPE the phone, it's as if Suckrosoft figured they'd repay all those who complained the first time around.

So here's what happened. At the end of the day, I download the update files and transfer them to the phone. Then I open the readme docs, which, I find out, are helpful screenshots of the install program I am about to start. But onward. I begin. The dire warnings come that I am erasing ALL data on the device (Thanks, I know). Thirty minutes later, it finishes. Let me stop here for a moment to say that I am a "I'll figure it out"-geek, meaning that I can get through, but I'm not hacking core software, and I can easily imagine that a non-technical person might never have gotten through this alone. But all appears okay. I even download and install a couple of decent UI customizers to make me feel better on the surface.

I feel good about this and go to bed.

I awake this morning to hear my phone ring. For half a second. I get up and go to it. It rings again, barely long enough to see that it's my friend Chuck. No way to answer. Then one more time. He and I are supposed to talk later in the morning, but I need coffee first. I make it, then call. Or, rather, try to call. "We're sorry, but Verizon Wireless does not recognize your phone as an authorized device". Hmm. Upgrade? Erase all data? Crap.

So I call the activation number, which I happen to have memorized for reasons you can guess. "Programming successful!" Phew. Calling Chuck. "We're sorry, but Verizon Wireless does not recognize your phone as an authorized device". AAAHHHHHAHHAAAHHAHAHHHHH!!!!!!

All that work for FAIL?!?! Calm down. 1..2..3... They mention a number. I call it. The "Account Authorization" department will help me as soon as a representative is available. One comes on. I give my number. She finds my account. She fixes the issue. Great, I say. "Anything else I can help you with?" Yes, say I, did the upgrade cause this? "Yes, that's what I fixed. When the update is done, we have to go in and fix the account." AAAHHHHHAHHAAAHHAHAHHHHH!!!!!!

COULDN'T SOMEONE PUT THAT IN THE INSTRUCTIONS?!!?!!?!?

Persistent bad design is immoral.

And here I am. And here we are. I have been thinking about this subject, the immorality of bad design, for a while now and this story is good to kick a series of posts off with. In addition to the time I spent working on this post (about 2.5 hours), I have spent far more painful times dealing with the phone while actually trying to get things done. A tool, a device, especially an expensive one, that is bought to help with life should HELP!!!! This phone has interrupted important business calls, caused incorrect information to be sent, prevented timely wake-ups, etc. with all the attending difficulty, stress, frustration, tension, anger, delay, waste (esp. time), confusion, harm, etc.

It's wrong. It should change. We should demand it. We should make it better.

As I said earlier:

"Be bold in identifying bad design.

We simply must change the role of design from creating specifications to improving life."

-pnl

Quick thoughts on ... design!

Argh, it's been too long.

This was a response to a LinkedIn discussion (here: "UxD, IxD, or Web Designer?").

Be a good designer, not a generalist. Perhaps you design in the visual realm for desktop, perhaps for web, maybe for mobile. Maybe you design in voice. Maybe you design information structure and relationships (IA), maybe you design the back and forth and how (interaction), maybe you design the look and layout (graphic). Web designing is not coding. But web designing is designing...for the web. Be a good designer and design for more than the web. Design for people. Design for customers. Design connections. Play around. Break the barriers in your mind. The ones we think are in the world are mostly false.

- pnl

Designer documentary

This just showed up on gizmodo via ixda, a documentary about designers. Looks very cool.

Let's hope it make us designers feel all warm and fuzzy but also opens eyes about the whys and hows of design.

-pnl

Do your dinner guests quiver in excitement...or in fear?

Can you cook? I mean really cook? I mean your friends and family love it when you host the dinner party and your appetizer is the first one attacked at the potluck. If so, chances are that the word recipe has significance similar to "guidelines" or even "suggestions" rather than "rules" or "the straight and narrow". Design is like cooking. And as with cooking, there are those who generate joy and delight during the creation and consumption, there are those who get a job done, and there are those who really ought to re-examine the color of their parachute.

As I was contemplating writing this post and using this metaphor, I came across this from Bill Buxton (in his wonderful book Sketching User Experiences, also linked to earlier): "(L)isting ingredients is always risky. Just because I give you flour, milk, yeast, eggs, and an oven does not mean that you know how to make bread at all, much less the multitude of variations that you might find in a good bakery." This is exactly the sort of analogy I had been thinking about. Just because someone knows the design process and a pattern or two and what the end product is generally supposed to be like does not mean that that person is a designer. He goes on to discuss the complexities and content of designing, but let me make sure this is clear. Neither I, nor he, are drawing a parallel to needing more unrestrained creativity in design. In other words, the parameters of cooking are typically a little larger and looser than the design we practice, and I am not stating that designers should practice wild creativity, though it can be a good thing. I am saying that far too many people calling themselves designers are at best good only at finding and following a recipe and at worst are burning toast. Now, I don't mean most, but simply too many. But that condition has been true for many years and has led to many of the problems that we have with consumer rejection of our interface product. All who call themselves designers need to frequently examine whether they are truly performing a service in the best sense of that word. I have come to believe that there is an element of morality in the design profession, similar to being a physician or a law enforcement official. Which means that practicing design simply to earn a buck or have something to do is lacking ethically and morally. It does a disservice and may even cause harm greater than the negative economic consequences it leads to.

So, if you cannot claim to be even a recipe follower, then I encourage to do some self-examination and consult people you trust about changing careers. If you are a recipe follower, I encourage you to seek the path of becoming a chef. And if you are a chef, I implore you most strongly and even charge you with the responsibility of exercising ethics and morality in your design practice:

Always practice the best design possible.

Always point out when design compromise will lead to intolerable consequences.

Be bold in identifying bad design.

We simply must change the role of design from creating specifications to improving life.

Make 2009 the Year of Good Design.

Happy New year!

Winding down 2008

It's always been funny to me that we feel a sense of something ending as the calendar changes from one year to another. Out of all the things we do customarily that are time-limited, such as projects or pay periods or monthly services, the year-end/new year markings always seems the most artificial to me and yet we treat it with the most emotion. Oh well, holiday-weariness musings aside, I hope this time of year does have plenty of good things to remember and to anticipate.

I will be posting new thoughts soon on trends I see in user interface and interaction, why IVR might have peaked and be in decline, and why bad design is immoral.

For now, for all you designers, I leave you with the strongest possible recommendation to put this book on your Q1 2009 reading list: Sketching User Experiences. It is a great treatise on the need for the design process as well as enlightening concerning what sketching is and why it is so important, which helps me understand why some of us push so hard on doing sample dialogs early in the design process.

Design well!!
-pnl

Let's try to catch up sometime

One of my favorite things to pick on about the little speech reco world we play in is how often we seem to let it slip our mind that there is a much larger world of interaction design for software and its users out there. It's not that some haven't tried to show us over the past decade, but somehow our entire focus keeps turning back inward to our industry and our practice. I believe this is unhealthy for multiple reasons and said so most publicly in my talk at SpeechTek 2007.

Though it is understandable, to a certain degree, one of my little missions is to change that as I can. So, occasionally, I will link to older content on the web that I think provides valuable input to our efforts from outside our normal ping-pong ball sphere of operation.

These will be in no order other than when I think of them and/or run across them. The first is from a respected and multi-facted web designer, Cameron Moll, and is a presentation he gave in the fall of 2006, Nine skills that separate good and great designers.

While some of this is about visual interfaces specifically, most addresses thinking about and creating great design in general. Enjoy. Please.

Published - VUI - Art with Science

The column I referred to a few weeks ago is out now. Thanks TMA Associates! Read it!

Rules and instructions - People behave like water

In a nice Speech Technology mag article from Dr. Susan, she highlights that people, in this case callers to automated systems, frequently behave like water (my interpretation, not hers). That is, they try to find the easiest way to get what they want most of the time. Other times, they barrel over any seemingly arbitrary obstacles when they perceive that there is a way to accomplish what they want.

She rightly points out the fine details of how to deal with these issues in a couple of specific situations. The larger lessons are: a) if you make rules (right or wrong) for customers, make sure they know them and make sure they are consistent across the board; b) to maximize success all the way around, facilitate the fastest, easiest way (according to the customer!) to get where the person wants to go.

Too often, our designs provide interaction that is more like dams and channel locks and less like soothing mountain streams.