Time has always bothered me; I don’t really believe in it. It’s a human invention, a representation of reality. Now the passage of time, that’s something I can believe in. You can feel it. You can measure it. But it’s always, ALWAYS, relative to something else. Like when you’re in the train station waiting for the train to leave and you don’t know if your train has started moving or if the train next to you is moving — you don’t always have a constant to base it on.

I was at Philly’s 30th Street Station recently, and I was hungry, but I only had 5 minutes before I had to get on the train. I saw the sign for Ben & Jerry’s — perfect, quick.

As I approached the counter, I saw this sign:

Be Back in
30 minutes.
Just milking
the cows and
churning the
butter!!!
:)

While I am a big fan of their ice cream, and their determination to stay on brand, this sign was completely useless.

When did the sign go up? Would the cashier be back in a few seconds, or in the full 30 minutes? Should I stand there patiently, or walk away to find other food?

Ben & Jerry’s signage might be cute, but it certainly isn’t informative.

Social activity streams use a combination of relative time (30 minutes ago) and absolute time (12:20pm). Relative time can be very useful, particularly with short intervals, because it helps us to understand the recency of an event without having to do the mental calculation. But it only works when the system is able to continuously update the indicator with the passage of time.

Unfortunately, a piece of paper taped to a sign does not have this capability.

The jars of toppings on the back counter taunted me, and I stood for a minute or two furiously looking around for someone in a smock and visor. Then my train number was called over the loud speaker, and I sulked onto the train, ever hungrier for a delicious scoop.

• Photo of the day: You must be in one of the first five cars
• Photo of the day: Departures and Arrivals
• Photo of the day: Penn Station, Charging Station
• Photo of the day: A Restroom on a Mission
• The Flawed Dining Experience at Hill Country

Last week, Fortune.com (CNNMoney.com) published an article and screenshot gallery titled Hey Facebook! Here’s your privacy redesign, and I was fortunate enough to have my work included in it.

Reporter JP Mangalindan reached out to me a few weeks ago and asked me to mock up a couple ideas for how Facebook could redesign its complicated privacy settings, then he interviewed me on my thoughts about the flack they’ve been getting.

Also included in his piece is the work of rising star Catriona Cornett; Jason Brush of Schematic; the Sapient Nitro team of Nathaniel Perez, Eddie Gomez, and Omar Mendez; and Michael Jones of Smart Design.

My concept (which was cropped for the article) was not to redesign the privacy settings page, but instead to bring the functionality onto the profile page itself in order to give better context to what content those settings actually control.

With Facebook, it’s largely a communication issue. Privacy settings are completely divorced from your actual information. You have to either bring up both pages simultaneously, which is cumbersome, or you have to remember what you put into each of those fields and what those fields were labeled, which isn’t typical behavior. So when redesigning, I didn’t think the issue that needed tackling was a better design of the privacy settings page necessarily, but actually the context in which those privacy settings are being set.

[Read the full article]

Info Tab

Additionally, I added a couple settings to the top of the Wall to control who can post to it and who can view the posts.

Wall tab

I really enjoyed thinking through these ideas, but the necessary caveat must be made: I would never produce designs for a client without first gathering user intel — either via interviews or usability testing. Still, it was fun to toss around some ideas and have them seen by such a wide audience.

I didn’t quite expect the article to get passed around as much as it did. And while I can’t say for sure if it had any impact on the Facebook team, just a few days later they announced their simplifications to the privacy settings. Read Facebook Bows to Pressure Over Privacy in the NY Times.

Learn more about the changes on Mashable here and here.

Thanks to JP and Fortune for including me in this great piece. I hope to be able to participate in more design brainstorms like this in the future.

• Twitter updating Facebook status without permission
• Interviewed for “Facebook, Google, and the data design disaster”
• Twitter Redesigns Follower and Following Pages
• People you may know
• Volume 1, Issue 1 of the Journal of IA

Yes, I’m obsessed with Konigi’s Omnigraffle wireframe stencils, but what if you could have real-life stencils to help you sketch? You can. They’re called UI Stencils, and they’re made by Design Commission, an experience design agency in Seattle.

Drawing can be intimidating for a lot of folks, and the fear of not being a “good drawer” prevents people from picking up a pencil to communicate their ideas. But UI Stencils make that a breeze by providing stainless steal stencils for common UI components for websites, iPhone and now iPad. Their kits also come with a mechanical pencil and PDF templates. Not bad for just 18 bucks each.

They also sell sketchpads and sticky pads with the browser chrome pre-printed so you needed worry about drawing to scale.

Follow them on Twitter @uistencils.

[I honestly can't remember how I happened upon these, or if someone sent me a link directly. If it was you, tell me so in the comments. I apologize in advance :)]

• Steal inspiration from everywhere
• IxDA NYC: Todd Zaki Warfel’s Prototyping for UX Practitioners
• Twubble
• Design — Architect — Engineer
• Photo of the day: A man in need of an iPad

My friend Paul Isakson recently posted this great quotation by Jim Jarmusch, the indie filmmaker (Broken Flowers, Coffee and Cigarettes, Ghost Dog).

His words so beautifully capture something I’ve felt for a long time, and I wanted to share it with all of you.

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that
resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.
Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings,
photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations,
architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds,
bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things
to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do
this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.
Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent.
And don’t bother concealing your thievery — celebrate
it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember
what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take
things from — it’s where you take them to.”

– Jim Jarmusch

Reading this out loud just now gave me chills.

I’ve never put a lot of stock in ideas; I’m much more motivated by actions. After all, actions have momentum and actors — people in motion, striving to create something, eager to affect the world. Ideas are building blocks, but they’re static without action. So if you spot an idea that is stuck in place, steal it and use it and move the world forward.

• Holy crap…I gave the closing plenary at IA Summit 2010
• Sketching made easier by UI Stencils
• Twitter Redesigns Follower and Following Pages
• Web 2.0 Expo NY: “10 Tips for Creative Environments” with Adaptive Path’s Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson
• This email is bloggable

I just got home from Savannah last night, and I’m already missing everyone terribly. The four days I spent there at IxDA’s Interaction10, their third annual conference, was one of the best conference experiences I’ve ever had (and as you may know, I go to a lot of conferences!).

Not only is Savannah a wonderfully beautiful, slow-paced, historic, elegant town, that on the whole pays extraordinary attention to customer service — the experience of the conference itself was designed to a tee.

This has been the case with the past two Interaction conferences as well, but something was missing last year when it was held in Vancouver. I loved the city, but the conference was held in two hotels, and didn’t have the same flourishes that I have come to expect from the Interaction Design Association (IxDA).

This year, back in Savannah (the inaugural conference was held here), the spirit of the community was at an all-time high. I went into it knowing I would be inspired by the sessions and excited to spend time with old friends, but I never expected that I would meet so many new people (some whom I knew from afar and some I had not yet heard of).

It finally occurred to me that the size of this “community” that I speak of so often is actually infinite. There is no boundary around us. We are always expanding, always moving into new corners, absorbing other practices, and finding people who are just starting to identify themselves. It’s so thrilling to know that we can never possibly all meet each other, that there’s always going to be someone new out there to teach us something we never knew, make us think in ways we haven’t considered, and generally elevate the visibility of our profession to the world.

As usual I captured the moments that meant the most to me via Twitter. I hope you enjoy living vicariously through the notes (or reliving, as the case may be).

See you in Boulder, CO! (I’ve already registered)

Day 0

• “Interaction 10 welcomes you! Welcome to Savannah!” (Don’t get that greeting at every UX conference!) #ixd10 http://tweetphoto.com/10398201
• Only one thing wrong with my beautiful hotel room at the quaint Planters Inn: no desk. That’s ok though cuz I prefer my lap.
• Free wi-fi in the hotel room at Planters Inn on Reynolds Square. Even the Sheraton doesn’t do that
• I somehow missed the memo on the total AWESOMENESS of the #ixd10 venues this year. Sessions being held in a restaurant, a pharmacy, a square
• Bummed that it’s so cold and windy in Savannah today. What’s a good place to go that’s indoors?
• Funny quirk about the elevators at Planters Inn: the two banks operate on two different sets call buttons, so make sure you push both
• At the Jepson Center for the Arts. Yes, that is a giant plastic bag tube that looks like intestines #ixd10 http://tweetphoto.com/10411916
• !!!!! RT @zakiwarfel: Time lapse video of design, sketching and prototyping for #rwtw #ixd10 http://bit.ly/atSOe5
• If you’re at #ixd10 and have a cartoonish avatar, please change it temporarily to your real photo so people can spot you and say hello!
• More !!!! from @russu http://is.gd/7HhDB #rwtw
• Downloading my first ever app to my iPod Touch…the IxDA Interaction10 app of course!
• @livebysatellite @lukanx @erinhawk @morville @dantemurphy @tuvafk @martytdx @robtannen @oyvindstrandbc @monicaferro @vickytnz @adenademonte
• That’s who I had a great dinner with tonight at Ruan Thai! Now we’re off to Moon River for beeeer.

Day 1

• #ixd10 starts now! I’m soo excited to hear what the amazing minds in our community are thinking about. Will surely leave me changed
• I really wish there were power outlets around the theater.
• Nathan Shedroff is giving the opening keynote. Is he not on Twitter?
• Shedroff says the only thing businesses can count on for lasting, organic growth is innovation. It’s the only true path
• “Everything we create is an experience.” But experience is essentially invisible, so it’s difficult for people to understand & value
• #nts Read Pine and Gilmore’s The Experience Economy
• Customers are looking for consistency across touchpoints with a company. Experiences need to be holistic to feel comfortable
• Companies should feel like one person. Customers can grow to know and understand that person over time = increase loyalty
• Designing experiences need to take several things into account. 1) Breadth = product, service, brand, name, environment, price
• 2) Trigger = sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, concepts, symbols. Consider the cultural implications about each of these when design
• I am not on top of my game on this live-Twittering. It’s still too early for me. Follow @bnunnally for amazing running commentary
• You need to understand how your customers prioritize them in order to design the most meaningful experiences
• Shedroff found there are 15 universal meanings: accomplishment, beauty, creation, community, duty, enlightenment, freedom, harmony…
• …justice, oneness, redemption, security, truth, validation and wonder. But everyone prioritizes them differently.
• What are the top 5 means for your organization? Ideally you should be doing research to find this out. And what about for yourself?
• Whoops, some tweets got out of order there
• There needs to be a UX conference at the expert level where speakers talk about concepts we aren’t already thinking about
• This is a good presentation but I feel like it’s for the wrong audience. CEOs & Product VPs need to hear this, we’re already doing it
• What’s the deal with wi-fi in The Olde Pink House ballroom?
• Wi-fi at the restaurant is hidden. Go to “Join Other Network…” and type PinkHouseWiFi it’s an open connection
• The lovely and amazing @bobulate is up now talking about Frames: Notes on Improvisation and Design
• @bobulate reminds us that many of our first experiences with improvisation was playing the game of Telephone as a kid
• Each person is reanalyzing and reinterpreting the phrase that’s passed along the circle. Tension between the creator and the consumer
• “That tension is where co-creation can happen” – @bobulate Signs of all kinds help us to improvise our way through experiences always
• @bobulate asks what if we allow for improvisation in the experiences we design. By putting frames into the design where it can happen
• @bobulate grew up playing instruments with her family. She was attracted to jazz because of its lack of constraints, improvisation
• She finds that jazz & design share many same values. @bobulate telling Miles Davis in converted church story, birth of modal jazz
• @bobulate playing some Chopin while we look at sheet music. This represents a closed system of design…
• Closed system: prior knowledge needed, a right and wrong way of doing things, a system of notation. While jazz is an open system
• Emergent systems of design require no specialized knowledge, judged on deviation from the original, no right or wrong behaviors
• @bobulate is looking at the shift from closed to emergent systems in history to learn from its lessons. This is gonna get real cool
• Attributes of improv patterns that are present across disciplines: 1) Present. 2) Detectable. 3) Responsive. 4) Additive
• Present = involves the audience. Detectable = requires no prior knowledge. Responsive = defines parameters in the moment.
• Lastly, and my favorite: Additive = accepts all offers. Yes, and. Collaboration. “Plussing” is what Pixar calls it
• @iamshimone Stephanie & woman-I-don’t-yet-know at front of room “improvising” by saying what first comes to mind looking at slides
• “Yes, and” exercise an example of “soloing” — the part of our brain responsible for monitoring shuts down and storytelling lights up
• “This brain activity is what we see when a person is dreaming. So as designers, how do we mimic this behavior in our experiences?”
• I’m now at @gregvassallo’s session on what living in the hospital for the year with his son & wife taught him about design consulting
• @gregvassallo & I went to CMU’s MHCI program together, & he’s a wonderful guy. Learn about his son’s story at http://loveforluca.com
• I know this story, but hearing @gregvassallo tell it from the beginning is incredibly moving. It’s giving me chills now
• NOTICE: The events scheduled for the Square today are taking place in the Lucas Theater
• @gregvassallo is talking about the experience of living in the hospital while his infant son was treated for a rare form of leukemia
• They decorated the hotel room, brought in a coffee maker, had all of Luca’s toys, made it their own. And the staff played a big role
• The slew of doctors that helped Luca over the course of the year is incredible, but there were other folks who aided in the process..
• Music and art therapists, clowns, knitting teachers, and more came to help both Luca and his parents get through the experience
• Healthcare related to design consulting = both coordinate large, interdisciplinary teams, explore multi solutions to complex probs
• Both require building consensus and trust, iterate and change course, charge a lot of money
• Don’t feel like you have to have all the answers by yourself. 5) It’s ok to disagree. Not everyone on the team will feel the same way
• 6) Admit to mistakes, and learn from them. Be honest about where you went wrong. What are you going to do better next time?
• 7) It’s ok to say, “I don’t know.” Because when you do know, it will give people a lot more confidence in your answers.
• 8) Treat the patient, not the illness. An illness is like a fully formed design challenge. You might be missing the big picture
• 9) Methodology can only take you so far. (amen) Don’t fetishize the methodological process or you’ll end up obscuring the design prob
• @gregvassallo did an incredible job. Such poignant and relatable lessons. Make sure to check out http://loveforluca.com to learn more
• I’m getting chills listening to the comments & questions from the audience. It seems people were really moved by @gregvassallo’s talk
• Lunch at The Olde Pink House with @rayraydel @cchastain @michelet @lwcavallucci and @nickheise … and many other #ixd10 -ers
• Rain = not awesome
• Fabulous discussion about interaction design education and profession taking place in the Lucas Theater
• From Observing Failures to Provoking Them has *packed* The Olde Pink House. Nicolas Nova talking about failure of automatic devices
• The “individual-blame bias” is when people don’t think they know enough to figure something out. Read sociologist Everett Rogers
• I love this concept of failure as a design technique. By creating failed uses you can identify new ways to invent the future
• Can someone explain how tonight’s festivities have changed? Sounded like what’s already on the schedule.
• Lovely dinner @ 700 Drayton w @russu Nicolle @stellargirl @yoni @annaknoll @stephenanderson @zakiwarfel @judyphilip @megfrisch @uxjam
• It will be disastrous if I don’t meet @willsansbury and @lorenbaxter by Sunday

Day 2

• Oops. Got to the Day 2 opening keynote late, so no live-Twittering for me. I’ll step up my game next session
• Manzini is talking about interaction design as social service design, right? Can we agree now that they’re the same thing?
• Interaction design = changing behavior through the interface of a system = service design /cc: @livlab @mojoguzzi
• I’m really jiving on this talk. I think the world that Manzini is talking about is much closer than we all realize
• I’m at @timoarnall’s Designing for the Web in the World. He’s starting out by talking about RFID tags embedded in all sorts of goods
• @timoarnall is showing some videos on experiments of new, more playful, explorative interactions using RFID-enabled phones
• RFID waves are invisible, but how might we start thinking of it as and working with it as a design material?
• Watching videos so it’s harder to capture the essence of what’s happening. Instead of RFID for simply identification, adding emotion
• Nike is the prototypical RFID product. A shoe that talks to the web, a few years ago would have seemed radical, now it’s common
• Glanceable displays that are physical in the environment, not necessarily a screen, in your peripheral attention that give you data
• Nike data being sent to Twitter creates an immediate satisfaction that validates and encourages your behavior.
• I love how soft spoken @timoarnall is. The audience is hanging on his every word
• There’s a long-term incentive in using an object for a long time, that changes your use of it over time and your relationship to exp
• This is exactly the kind of session I love at a UX conference. Lots of real world examples of the work we could be doing, how and why
• Yay! The super awesome @k is now presenting Augmented Reality: Is It Real? Should We Care? http://bit.ly/12B84N
• Augmented Reality term invented 18 years ago by Tom Caudell at Boeing. It’s mixed-reality (live and not), not virtual reality.
• We already have augmented reality. In football, the first down yellow line is layered on top of the feed, not actually painted :-P
• Check out the RJDJ iPhone app: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1LuxWeo11w http://rjdj.me/ Music beats react to your environment
• @k asks, why if AR has been around for a while are we paying attention to it now? Camera phones more prevalent, better connectivity..
• GPS more prevalent on phones, compasses, etc. The tech has caught up making it more useful and ubiquitous
• LEGO is already using augmented reality in their stores. Check out how hot this is! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGu0N3eL2D0
• TOPPS has 3D live trading cards! http://bit.ly/xrfXe and AKQA did a demo for a USPS virtual box simulator http://bit.ly/PsNBc
• But @k is noticing a lack of design patterns across AR tools. They aren’t consistent and aren’t very usable either
• GPS isn’t totally accurate. iPhone has a disclaimer that says, “The gps on your iPhone can be off as much as 100 meters…”
• But some aspects of tech aren’t there yet. Image recognition, processing on mobile, RFID proliferation. Challenge to getting it right
• When trying to use GPS indoors, iPhone displays a figure 8 to help calibrate. “Makes you feel like you’re trying to cure hiccups” @k
• CScout Japan’s Cosmetic Mirror lets women preview how make-up will look on their face: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5zZ5qZP5Ok
• @k says Nokia is working on optical character recognition for sign translation http://bit.ly/cqLAqy “That’s Star Wars right there”
• Another awesome project is BMW’s training for mechanics using AR http://bit.ly/aj14vi
• Smartphones are increasing rapidly. 42% market share as of Dec 2009. This will help extend the usefulness of AR apps
• Augmented reality contact lenses: http://bit.ly/DrY8Z Google Goggles, visual search app for Android: http://bit.ly/71IO2p
• @k says we’re hardly in the game. US searches for augmented reality not even in the top 10. South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia at top
• Augmented reality is more than just useful, creates immense pleasure for ppl using it. Feels like much more than looking at a screen
• Check out @k’s augmented reality ghost-hunting game for the iPhone http://arghgame.com/
• @k quotes William Gibson “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed” Groans from the audience. But isn’t he right?
• Audience asking about the relationship between AR and remote technology (like ubiquitous tech in the home). @k says they’re different
• Fascinating quote in other session! RT @bnunnally: OH: “Is Twitter the new ‘god’? Something that always tells us we are never alone.”
• Yummy lunch and stimulating conversation with @k @lorenbaxter and @jonny_sf at the back bar of the Olde Pink House
• Damn, I’m late to @livlab’s talk Ceci N’est Pas Une KPI. Live-Twittering starts now!
• Numbers out of context don’t have meaning, but they answer questions and we need to pay more attention to them as designers
• @livlab’s talk title comes from this iconic image which means it’s a representation of a pipe, not an http://tweetphoto.com/10602239
• “We don’t need to define user experience in order to measure it.” — @livlab “You can improve what you can’t understand”
• Numbers help us define where we are, not what we need to do — that’s design research.
• Context sets the frame for what KPIs make sense. Consider your specific objectives and users. Check http://kpilibrary.com for ideas
• KPIs are a measure of how successful we are on delivering on our goals. Whoever owns the KPIs can direct the internal conversation
• @morville’s UX honeycomb helps us move past usability, so our KPIs should reflect that expansiveness as well. Consider all facets
• Adaptive Path’s Linking Elephants: business problem > desired behavior > behavior metric > value metric > financial value
• Still @livlab says that’s not a KPI because it isn’t a direct, concrete measure — though it does help frame the problem space
• KPIs are concrete metrics (quantifiable/measurable), relative (to predefined goals), understood in context and about behaviors
• I love numbers and I love that @livlab talked about numbers and I love @livlab!
• @livlab is likely to be the most significant thoughtleader in the next wave of the field of UX. Her approach to her work is inspiring
• Can’t wait to go home & dig into http://kpilibrary.com. Lends itself so well to cross-section of UX/business consultant I’m becoming
• @livlab is launching into her UX Health Check and I’m realizing this should be its own talk. People are hungry for this analysis!
• I meant workshop! @livlab already has this as a talk. I want guidance on how to do this for one of my clients
• Paola Antonelli says that she is more comfortable with objects than she is with people. They talk to her about their properties
• Check out http://significantobjects.com Seemingly insignificant objects from thrift stores & the like paired w/ writers enhance them
• “This is the Tamagotchi. I hate the Tamagotchi.” — Paola Antonelli Why? Because 2 months after her brother’s died, he died. Woah.
• Objects can take on personalities as we integrate them into our lives. My Roomba has one. http://bit.ly/9qW0ed
• Have you seen Laser Tagging by the Graffiti Research Lab? Using lasers to write on the sides of buildings http://bit.ly/91TFh0
• Wow, such great photos coming across the screen from Paola Antonelli, but I can’t possibly capture them all.
• Paola Antonelli is the senior curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at the MoMA in NYC. http://bit.ly/cum6T0
• All of this is where interaction design becomes art. A really fuzzy line, something interesting for us to explore, understand purpose
• Networks/systems make the devices themselves irrelevant. You can replace your iPhone without caring much. It’s the data that matters
• Paola talking about information designers in a way I havent heard the term used before. I think of info designers as IAs, not artists
• Paola is talking about putting together an exhibition on the @ sign and its evolution in use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign
• I really liked what Paola had to say. It wasn’t revolutionary, but it was a new frame of the subject, succinct, and well illustrated!
• Great Q from the audience: how do you gather this information? She says she uses everyone she has. Emails everyone, travels, etc
• @chrisfahey is blowin’ up! Paola talking about his talk. So bummed I missed it today, man. You must reprise at home…please? :)
• How late does the shuttle run TO the Gulfstream Center tonight? We’ve got a group of 17 at the Olde Pink House ready to head over
• @andrewmaier @petermarch @likehow22 @ixdiego @bnunnally @mkammerer @fritzism @rayraydel @kevinfarner @ambroselittle @dlichaw @erova…
• … @alexislloyd @dantemurphy @elimalone @jonesabi @hilaryue That’s who we had dinner with!

Day 3

• Day 3 is starting now with @cchastain’s Thinking Like a Storyteller. Go Cindy!
• @cchastain showed a series of recent tweets discussing the importance of storytelling in interaction design. Not everyone agrees
• User stories, personas, scenarios, storyboards, comics, brand stories, product stories. They’re a communication tool and a framework
• Most importantly, there are *self-narratives* — the stories users tell themselves as their using a product. How do we optimize it?
• What can we learn from the *discipline* of storytelling that will help us design for more meaningful & engaging product experiences?
• Slow disclosure = a narrative that engages us both cognitively and emotionally, that ultimately leads to a surprise
• If we had better understanding of how stories are crafted, we’d have better understanding of how to craft deeper kinds of engagement
• All stories are, “in their general conception, modes of imitation.” — Aristotle. They’re all representation
• What makes stories different are their: objects, medium, manner. Two manners of storytelling: narrative/telling & dramatic/showing
• Aristotle 8 qualitative elements of drama: plot (events), character (agents), thought (ideas/theme), diction (lang.), song (pattern)
• In interactive products, the user is also an agent or character who can effect the outcome of the narrative — @cchastain
• Every decision a user makes in a system, the system has a response. Those back and forth actions continue through the interaction
• We need to be aware of the narrative flow we’re creating in an interactive product, in order to attend to it and enhance it
• Plot: to understand a film’s story is to grasp what happens & where, when & why it happens. Are we being clear about those elements?
• We need to do a better job gently and purposefully ending our stories in interactive products. Things end much too abruptly now
• The essence of @cchastain’s msg is to be more thoughtful about the stories we want people to tell themselves as they use our products
• I’m at @erova’s UX Show & Tell. A series of ixds are going to shand up and show us their work. I love this! @semanticwill up first
• @semanticwill is clearly illustrating how prototypes can be more useful than wireframes: conditional components
• @emenel showing a mental model he created. It’s not the work behind these that scares me, it’s the production work. Share a template?
• Great tip from @emenel: if you make an HTML prototype and then save it as PDF, it’s a vector file that can be zoomed into w/ no loss
• Check it out! RT @chrisfahey: My “Human Interface” presentation is up on Slideshare, refreshed and up-to-date: http://bit.ly/8lHk10
• @gretared’s talk is amazing. I’m regretting not live-Twittering it now. Really inspiring work. I’ve gotta find a way to do this stuff
• People care a lot about the output, but not at all about the product — @gretared
• Approach your designs from an impressionistic perspective! @gretared
• Being too process driven gets you to a predictable place. Break out of your own flow in order to create the real revolution
• Come get a last-minute brew with @eduardoortiz and me at Moon River
• Back at home after an incredible four days in Savannah at #ixd10. I miss everyone already. Met so many new people and still had more to meet
• If at any point I said I’d send you something, wanted to talk to you about something, or just said “remind me,” please remind me :)

Endless congratulations go to the co-organizers Bill DeRouchey and Jennifer Bove, Samantha Soma, Will Evans, Todd Zaki Warfel, Dave Malouf, Jonathan “Yoni” Knoll, and the endless other volunteers who made this wonderful conference happen. Thank you for your tireless efforts and desire to create a special experience for us.

• IxDA Interaction 09: Day 1
• UIE Virtual Seminar with Tamara Adlin: Ad-Hoc Personas
• Twitter talk at the IxDA NYC Recap of Interaction 09
• Hanging out at IxDA’s Interaction09
• Gel conference videos now online

More than a year ago I very proudly announced that Boxee, the much-loved social media center software company, had hired me as the user experience designer for their beta. In the five months that I worked with them, I conducted user interviews and usability testing to identify people’s needs, behaviors and frustrations, and redesigned the app’s navigation and key screens.

Earlier this month the Boxee beta was released, and the consensus so far is that the overall experience is a huge improvement over the alpha. While I have not been formally engaged with Boxee since May (such is the life of an independent consultant), I am incredibly pleased to see that many of my ideas were implemented and made all the better by Boxee’s small but outstanding team of visual designers and developers.

The Process

I conducted interviews with six prospective users (people who at the time had never used Boxee) and five existing users. I also performed usability testing with five existing users (three on their laptop and two on their home TV).

For the user research, I asked a boatload of questions about people’s media consumption habits and attitudes. Of the 11 people I interviewed: two people subscribed to basic cable without DVR, five people subscribed to digital cable with DVR, and four people did not subscribe to cable at all.

Everyone I interviewed watches TV and movies using their computers, at least in part; approximately half have substantial personally-stored media collections and almost all use streaming media online. All interviewees also consume digital music and photographs to some degree.

These individuals all consider themselves tech savvy, but represent both ends of the spectrum: from tinkerers to zealots. While some are programmers, others work in technology only tangentially as business analysts, writers, designers and sales representatives. They also have varying use of social networking websites, web applications, blogs, and other websites.

The questions I asked during my interviews are below.

User Interview Questions

• Tell me a bit about yourself. Where do you live? Where are you from? What do you do?
• What kind of computer do you have?
• What kind of TV do you have? What stuff do you have hooked up to your TV?
• Tell me about your TV watching habits. Cable? Satellite? How often? Where?
• Who do you usually watch TV with? How do you decide what to watch?
• What kinds of shows do you watch? Are there shows that you watch regularly? How do you remember to watch them?
• What are your movie watching habits?
• Do you watch movies on your computer? How? Where? When?
• Do you watch videos, movies or TV shows online? How? How often? Where?
• Do you subscribe to Netflix or similar? How do you use it?
• Do you use Hulu, YouTube or other online video sites?
• What is your personal movie collection like?
• Are you using any media centers now? Which ones? Experience with them?
• What is your personal music collection like?
• What are your music listening habits? How and where do you listen?
• Where do you find music?
• Do you listen to music on the Internet? Where?
• Have you ever played music at a party you were hosting? How? Where?
• Have you ever played music through your TV? What do you use? How do you navigate? Keyboard/remote
• What is your personal photo collection like?
• Where are your photos stored?
• What photo applications do you use?
• What photo sites do you use?
• Have you ever displayed your photos on your TV? How? What do you use? How do you navigate? Keyboard/remote
• What websites or blogs do you frequent?
• Do you comment on blogs? Review sites?
• Do you use Facebook? How?
• Other social networking sites? Twitter?
• Other web apps?

Usability Testing

Not only did we want to get to know prospective target users of the Boxee application, but it was also important that we receive input on how existing users are currently using the system. To measure the ease of use of several areas of the Boxee experience, I conducted usability tests with five existing users: three of whom most regularly use Boxee on their TVs, and two who primarily use Boxee on their laptops.

The usability tests started with each user simply walking me through their typical usage scenarios, from launching Boxee, to finding a movie or TV show to watch, to scanning through their music. Then after approximately 30 minutes of this natural navigation and discussion, I asked each participant to perform a series of tasks. This helped to identify breakdowns in user flow, usability flaws and bugs, or generally any problematic areas in the experience.

The tasks were as follows:

1. Start watching one of your favorite TV shows.
2. You just realized that you’ve already seen this episode. Switch to the next episode.
3. You’re done watching this show for now. Switch to another favorite TV show.
4. Our friend is in an episode of Army Wives. Find it.
5. Now you’re in the mood for some music. Play one of your favorite songs.
6. Check out the latest episode of This American Life on NPR.

These usability tests resulted in a wide array of findings, and several themes emerged across participants. I have collected the most pervasive and significant areas of difficulty and have provided my recommendations on how to resolve the problem. The issues are organized by content area.

Personas and Scenarios

To aid in the design and development of the beta, I developed three personas derived from insights I learned in my research to depict Boxee’s target users; I called them a Practical Dad, a Techie Bachelor, and a Principled Fan. The personas do not reflect a single person, but rather are an amalgamation of various interviews. There is a lot of intellectual property captured in the personas so I will refrain from sharing them here.

I also developed a set of high-level scenarios to describe how each of the personas would interact with an ideal Boxee application. The scenarios helped us envision the right workflow, step-by-step, and allowed us to identify the key features necessary to meet users’ needs. A selection of the scenarios we aimed to support are:

• I want to see if a movie is available online
• I want to subscribe to a current season of a TV show
• I want to pick up where I left off in a movie or TV show

Features

From the scenarios I was able to draw out an extensive list of features across multiple areas of the app that would need to be implemented in order to meet our target users’ needs. Overall, we wanted to provide users with greater ability to discover content across sources, easier ways to sort and filter lists, and quick access to their favorite programming.

It was a long, long list, and not everything that ideally belongs in the app was realistic for our release schedule so we were forced to triage. We started first by prioritizing scenarios, and then marked each feature as Must Have, Should Have, Nice to Have and Won’t Have. This helped focus the team on what we needed to tackle immediately.

Flows and Wireframes

Now with the full set of features we were intending to implement, I set out to weave them together in an easy to use way that would make for a pleasurable experience. I drew flow diagrams to indicate how a user would navigate from screen to screen, and then created a series of wireframes of the key screens to recommend layout, prominence of features and content, necessary functionality and data display.

The Outcome

Take a look at some of the key screens of the app below, and see how my wireframes laid the groundwork for the beta’s redesign.

Home Screen

Navigation

TV Shows

In the Press

The Boxee beta has received accolades from some of the top news sources and online publications.

Ars Technica
1/13/2010
“The program’s user interface has undergone a significant transformation that simplifies navigation and makes Internet content easier to access.”

TechCrunch
1/07/2010
“The new version is really a complete overhaul of the app — it’s received a new, sexier UI that makes it easier to browse through the service’s content (and anything you might have saved locally too).”

Mashable
1/07/2010
“The UI overhaul is significantly better…”

Wired
12/31/2009
“Yes, there are many methods for putting web video on your TV, but Boxee is the most elegant solution I’ve seen. For the beta release, the whole user experience has undergone a slick redesign.”

CNET News
12/09/2009
“…new beta has a completely redone interface that is far superior to the alpha’s.”

Lifehacker
12/07/2009
“From the outset, it looks a whole lot more pretty and user friendly.”

Gizmodo
12/07/2009
“What looked impressive during the demo was how cleanly it aggregated both local and online sources of video content.”

Engadget
12/07/2009
“We’re particularly fond of the new global menu for quick shuffling through the menu and to shortcuts.”

What do you think?

If you’re a Boxee user, I would love to hear your thoughts on the beta. Praise, criticisms, and questions are all welcome.

• More than 600 people attend boxee NYC meetup
• Redesigning the boxee experience
• boxee now in public alpha
• The boxee website redesign
• I did the UX design for Brighter Planet

I’m completely in love with this new commercial by Freschetta that demonstrates what “faceted filtering” would look like in the physical world.

Pattern Definition

Faceted filtering is a mechanism that allows the user to progressively reduce a large group of items by selecting the desired attributes from various dimensions (or facets) of those items

Note: faceting filtering is different from faceted navigation or browsing — while navigation is simply multiple entry points into viewing a large set of data, filtering is specifically the ability to pair down that list.

Resources to learn more about faceted filtering

• Best Practices for Designing Faceted Search Filters by Greg Nudelman – UXmatters
• User Interface Implementations of Faceted Browsing – Digital Web Magazine
• OfficeMax search results by Konigi

Examples of faceted filtering (within faceted navigation patterns)

• Welie.com pattern library
• Quince by Infragistics pattern library

Got more?

If you have any other examples of faceted filtering in the real world, please share them in the comments!

[This is the beginning of what I hope will be an occasional series on my blog titled ...in the Real World, in which I explain various design patterns and user interactions by illustrating how they would be implemented off the web]

• IA Summit 2008: “Designing with Patterns in the Real World: Lessons from Yahoo! and Comcast”
• IA Summit 2008: Gene Smith’s “Tagging: Five emerging trends”
• Twitter finally integrates Twitter Search a.k.a. Summize
• Twitter tweaks the homepage, again
• IA Summit 2008: “Presence, identity and attention in social web architecture”

Last May I was given the great privilege to write a sidebar in Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone’s fabulous new book, Designing Social Interfaces. The topic I was asked to write about is “onboarding” — designing welcoming experiences for new users by easing them in. You might have seen a couple blog posts that I’ve previously written about how Plurk and Yahoo! Shine handled the onboarding process.

The authors have given me the permission to republish the sidebar here in full. I hope you enjoy it and find it valuable. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

When you’re done reading, do yourself a favor and buy a copy of Designing Social Interfaces. It’s a must-have for anyone involved in designing and developing social products and services.

Erin and Christian, thank you so much for allowing me to be a small part of your tremendous project. I’m certain the book will be a bestseller, and the patterns will likely spawn a whole line of useful products for practitioners. Best of luck to you both!

Onboarding

What is onboarding, and why is it important?

Most companies think that getting people to sign up is the ultimate challenge, but what about getting them oriented to your site and actually using it? That process of helping people get started is called onboarding, and it’s crucial that you give it the attention it deserves.

When left to their own devices in a new space without any sense of direction or purpose, many users can feel lost, overwhelmed, and confused about what they’re supposed to be doing there. The user might have arrived at your site from a link in an article, an organic search result, or on the recommendation of a friend. In essence, the user is taking a leap of faith that she will be able to achieve something on your site, and it’s your responsibility to shake her hand and show her the ropes when she gets there.

They say you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, and on the Web it’s truer than ever. If you don’t capture the attention of new visitors from the moment they arrive and guide them on their initial journey through the site, they won’t learn that the benefit you provide outweighs the cost—their time and effort to participate—and as a result, won’t stick around very long. Worse, they’ll tell their friends not to bother visiting, either.

Onboarding is the process by which you can help users overcome the cold-start problem—a blank profile, an unfamiliar interface, a general feeling of “what the heck do I do next?” Many websites force users to start from square one and build up content (and value) over time. Social apps in particular are prone to this because so much of their usefulness is derived from person-to-person interaction and user-generated content.

The term onboarding comes from the field of human resources and the common practice of new hire orientation. In that context, the steps in the process are often referred to as accommodate, assimilate, and accelerate—all of which apply quite nicely to how new users ought to be treated in order to bring them into the fold.

Accommodating your users means giving them the tools they want and need to use your site to their benefit. Assimilating means helping the user to absorb the culture of the site and, in a sense, come to resemble the existing users. And accelerating generally applies to delivering on the value proposition better and faster.

Oftentimes, the true value of your product or service becomes apparent only after significant use—perhaps because the user needs a sizable social network to really reap the benefits, or because continued activity on the site ultimately leads to something, like better recommendations. But don’t make the mistake of assuming that your users will stick with you that long. You need to help them get there as quickly and painlessly as possible in order to make your case.

Designing the onboarding process for your site is most commonly limited to a first-time use scenario: from the moment just after a user has signed up until the end of his first session. There are certainly extended approaches you can take to consider the user’s needs during subsequent visits until he is exhibiting a desired behavior on the site, but exert caution, lest you be seen as too heavy-handed or pushy. Typically, once a user understands the lay of the land, he wants to be left alone to explore.

A prime example of great onboarding

One of the best and most often-cited examples of an onboarding process is on Tumblr.com. Tumblr proudly calls itself the easiest way to blog and goes to great lengths to prove its point. The sign-up process itself is dead simple—just a single form to provide an email address, password, and desired URL. Once the user confirms her credentials by logging in, she is presented with the main interface and blogging tool, but most of the page is dimly lit. Her attention is directed to the toolbar, and a large bubble tells her exactly what to do next: “Create your first post!“. In actuality, there are a dozen things she could do from here, but the guide is making a decision for her. By limiting the user’s focus, Tumblr ensures that she is significantly less overwhelmed by the options at this point, while simultaneously being trained on the primary purpose of the product—to create content.

As the user mouses over each of the post options, only the subtitle changes: “try writing about something you did today”; “try linking to a cool website you like.” The language is clear and concise, the value inherent to the directive, and the user begins to conceptualize the variety of things she can achieve with the product despite the very simple interaction that is required.

At any point in the process the user can “x-out”—close the large bubble and exit to the main interface—without further interruption, but the copy and visualizations are compelling enough to urge her forward.

Once the user posts something, the next step in the onboarding process is to customize the blog. Now everything on the screen is dim except for the location of the Customize link. Not only is the user being taught about the ability to customize, she’s also learning where to access the functionality later on when she needs it again. Now that the user knows how to post content and customize her blog, the last step in the onboarding process is to “Follow some cool people!”. One of the biggest differentiators for Tumblr is its highly active community, but until a new user is connected to several other bloggers, she might not truly comprehend its magnitude. Tumblr overcomes this by encouraging users to find their friends early on, in a variety of methods. A user can scan for contacts in an existing email address book, or follow people under Staff Picks, Music, or Art and Artists. By observing the usage patterns of these popular and highly active users, new users will most quickly understand how to use Tumblr to their advantage, nearly guaranteeing more frequent use of the site.

Other variations on onboarding

Onboarding can sidestep the sign-up process entirely. TripIt, a travel itinerary and planner site, allows users to simply forward the site a recent travel confirmation email and TripIt takes care of the rest. By sucking in all of this content automatically, TripIt removes any effort new users have to put into the first-time experience and can almost immediately present the site’s value. They do have a sign-up process (just an email and password), but it is not required to see their tools in action. This strikingly reduces the barrier to entry and is still rare enough to make a user sit up and take notice.

When it originally launched last year, Yahoo!’s Shine, a website for women, had an interesting take on first-time use. Though it is no longer live, Shine’s onboarding process wasn’t directed at recent registrants, but instead was directed at first-time visitors to the site to help orient them to its variety of features. On a user’s first visit, a “Welcome to Shine” layer appeared in the center of the page. It said, “Shine features the best writers and bloggers in women’s publishing. Plus, connect with likeminded women, share stories and more. Take a ten-second tour to see more.”

By clicking the single call to action, a Continue button, the user was moved all around the page, with the browser auto-scrolling accordingly. It was a three-step process that also used the familiar bubble pointing at the functionality on the page with a short description of its purpose. It highlighted access to Yahoo! Mail in the sidebar, a recent activity stream of user-submitted content, and a quick-access headline list at the very bottom of the page. In the last bubble was a Get Started link that ended the onboarding process and scrolled the user all the way back up to the top of the page.

Suffice it to say, there are a variety of ways to handle a new user orientation. The user’s mindset and the site’s business goals, brand identity, and value proposition must all be taken into account. After all, this is the first impression, and you know what they say about those.

—Whitney Hess, http://whitneyhess.com/blog/

• Yahoo!’s Shine
• Plurk You
• Twitter changes its email notifications
• Pleasure and Pain now on UX Magazine
• SeamlessWeb: Don’t get between me and my food

A few weeks ago Orian sent me a hilarious but sad cartoon on the all-too-familiar process of cumulative error and product dilution during a project life cycle: customer request -> finance -> engineering -> manufacturing -> marketing -> delivery. Not only do we fail to deliver on what was proposed, but what the customer said they wanted and what they actually wanted were two very different things.

The one panel that I think is missing from the cartoon is What the User Experience Designer Wireframed — wings.

There’s an awesome site called Project Cartoon that lets you create your own version of how projects really work.

Have fun playing around! Then go print a dozen copies of the cartoon and hand it out to everyone on your team. Whoever doesn’t get it is the weak link.

• Email of the Week: I Do Software
• Whit Hour – Week 6
• My UX Bookshelf on Flashlight Worthy Books
• Whit Hour is back! Week 9
• Old news: UX in the mainstream

A few days ago I got an email from the lovely Liz Danzico asking if I’d participate in a video project she was putting together for the Galapagos Art Space’s Career Camp, “a low-cost, high-value, five-part lecture and networking series for professionals (employed or otherwise!) living in New York City.”

On Tuesday Liz participated in Career Camp’s first session: Digital Design. She wanted to share advice from people who have inspired or influenced her work, and I am beyond honored that she though to include me. I really look up to Liz. She is one of the foremost practitioners in information architecture and user experience, and in many ways I hope to follow in her footsteps.

Liz asked each of us to create a 30-second video responding to the following:

So you’re thinking about becoming a digital designer? If I could tell you only *one thing* about going into the field, my advice would be ___________ .

Watch my response below, and see all the videos that Liz collected. It’s truly remarkable to be included among these incredible people:

• Jennifer Bove (Twitter)
• Kevin Cheng (Twitter)
• Jim Coudal (Twitter)
• Robert Hoekman, Jr. (Twitter)
• Jon Kolko (Twitter)
• Michael Mandiberg (Twitter)
• Melissa Pierce (Twitter)
• Joshua Porter (Twitter)
• Steve Portigal (Twitter)
• Ryan Sims (Twitter)
• Jared Spool (Twitter)
• Michael Surtees (Twitter)
• Alissa Walker (Twitter)

Whitney Hess from MFA Interaction Design on Vimeo.

• MFA in Interaction Design at the School of Visual Arts in NYC
• I have joined the UXnet board of directors
• Facebook Privacy Settings Redesign on Fortune.com
• UX Bookshelf
• Make sure that whatever you design is fitting a need in the world and has a purpose