My talk “Great Storytelling UX in Comics” has been accepted at the Devsigner conference here in Portland, last week of May. I’m excited to see more wild-eyed designers discover the amazing variety of ways that comics show us how to engage the user and immerse them more fully in the reading experience.
Have you seen my talk? If not, this is an affordable opportunity to come see me in my Superman Kilt finery.
Devsigner Con, Portland, May 23-25th.
Upcoming speaking gig: I’ll be a co-panellist for the PDMA meetup “What’s the Big Deal About UX?”. Talking to Product Managers and Product Owners about the challenges of integrating UX into our work – and I get to live the dream, because I wear both hats every day!
You’ll also find me at:
Did you catch my CHIFOO talk last week? Packed house, enrapt audience, 100 full-colour, annotated comics pages to enlighten and entertain. I’m told I was on fire, and I’m thinking hard on whether and where to re deliver this gem (I’ve already accepted one invitation). Let me know if you’d be interested.
Th. March 13th: PDX Web & Design “Unconference” – I’m gonna see if they take the bait on my three-minute “tell me my tool chain sucks and how yours is better” interactive discussion. Best way to goad them into teaching me something. [Update: it worked like a charm. I learned a ton in five minutes and loved the generosity of the audience.]
Tu. March 25th: IxDA PDX “Interaction Design Conference Redux” – will I feel as awkward at this group as ever? Only time will tell.
Th. March 27th: PDMA “UX – What’s the Big Deal?” (Don’t ask me where to find this event – apparently I’ve fallen into a secret society, what with both their chapter page and the LinkedIn group locked behind members-only walls. I’ll gladly teach you the friggin handshake for a beer.)
Sa. Mar 29th: BarCamp Portland – maybe I’ll be there and maybe you will too, if they pull off the radically hacked plan and haven’t all committed suicide.
Ready? Set? Spidey-sense!
One week from now, I expect to see you smiling back at me from the audience of CHIFOO, hearing me regale you with great UX moments I’ve discovered in my favourite comic books.
Like this one:
If that’s not quite enough to entice you out to the warrens of NW Portland, consider this: you will be one of a privileged few who get to see me sporting the masterpiece that is the Superman kilt handcrafted by my lovely partner Sara.
Hope to see you there!
Details here:
CHIFOO Storytelling Comics
I’m getting rather excited about my upcoming talk at CHIFOO on Great Storytelling UX in Modern Comic Books. Over the next few weeks I’ll be finalizing the content and doing a few dry runs to smooth out the kinks and ensure I’m connecting with the audience at each page that I show during the presentation. If you have the time and interest in seeing where this is headed, or helping out a guy make sure he’s making best use of the audience’s time, gimme a jangle.
I’ve been out to a few meetups already this year (JavaScript Admirers, CHIFOO, STC) and helped out my poor dog who had a severe glaucoma attack and had to have an eye removed. She’s bounced back amazingly and doesn’t seem to know that she’s not supposed to be missing an eye, which is a helluva lesson in staying present and adapting to change in this world. (Who knew my dog was a Buddhist?)
Where will you find me in the next couple of weeks?
Further out I’m planning on BarCamp Portland 8 and ProductCamp Portland 2014. Should be a brain-wringer.
If you’re depressed you’re living in the past.
If you’re anxious you’re living in the future.
If you’re at peace you’re living in the present.
(From the Hua Hu Ching, The Unknown Teachings of Lao Zhu, Brian Walker interpretation)
The more we see big flat glass touch panels show up in the dashboard of new cars, the less I am convinced that in-dash experience designers are ignoring in-your-lap tablet experience design principles and norms, and the more it looks like they’re just copying-and-pasting their tablet interaction models straight to the car.
I have a recent Prius and I have long since lost interest in fighting with that hard-to-control-at-a-glance UI. This week I saw this article on the Tesla and felt like if even this pinnacle of beautiful design can’t seem to understand driver needs, it’s going to be a long time (and a lot of road scares and harm) before we ever tune the technology to actually assist and not detract from the driver’s main job.
http://fontsinuse.com/uses/3997/2013-tesla-model-s-dashboard-display
One colleague started discussion saying:
I love Tesla! The Model S is a gorgeous car. Finally, somebody designed an electric car that doesn’t look terrible. As for the dashboard, I think the UI is awesome. But I’m not sure it doesn’t impact the driver’s ability to pay attention to the road. I like the tactile sensation of knobs and buttons when I’m driving. I feel like I will have to pay much more attention to a fully touch dashboard, and thus pay less attention to the road.
I love the intent to question aging, anachronistic design paradigms, and to experiment with “start from scratch” designs. I too am concerned that this “iPad on your dash” hasn’t yet reached the balance between “fully flexible and context-dependent” and “easy for users to learn and fumble to a correct interaction without massive shifts in attention off the many critical attention foci that surround a moving vehicle every second”. It’s concerning that we’re literally performing these experiments on life-and-limb-threatening and increasingly attention-distracted roadways while the industry teaches itself new interaction models.
Without any physical affordances (e.g. edges/boundaries, permanent/predictable/easily-learnable targets) the 17-inch piece of glass is a nightmare of “at a glance, with little attention” interactions in a car for the driver. An interesting middle ground (which I hope we reach in the future) is a balance of bright, big, non-distracting display and haptic/physically-bounded touch targets [for touch interactions] and/or less-intrusive voice/eye-tracking/gesture-based input models.
For me, trying to touch those never-in-the-same-place-from-UI-to-UI buttons on my Prius’ touchscreen is just dangerous, frustrating and error-prone. At minimum, I’d like to see these “buttons” about 2-3 times their current size, so I can just grossly mash at them rather than have to precisely target them.
These kinds of finger-sized touch targets work find on a tablet where you have time to concentrate; very counterproductive in car UI [for the driver] where I’d expect sub-second glance-target-mash-resume interactions should be the interim goal (and “no loss of visual attention on the roadway” should be the final goal).
Colleague 2 said:
The future aviation dashboards are touch rich devices (thales avionics future cockpit won a design award).
But the industry is currently in a bit of a split. The modernization of the flight systems is helping the more mundane tasks like cruising or altitude climbing, but creating huge problems with takeoffs/descents/approaches/landings. Instead of knowing the 10 buttons you need to push/turn, you now need to remember what menu things are under. In an emergency, the manual systems have a better result. There aren’t any hidden features of the aircraft that you might have accidentally triggered.
There is also a school of thought that all this aircraft automation/simplification is creating pilots that don’t know how to fly well. So when an emergency hits. They are just as clueless as the passengers as to what to do.
I worry about this. I sincerely hope that we never find drivers in the position of having to perform emergency interactions with their car’s controls through a flat-glass, multi-level-menu touch interface. It’s bad enough this has begun to creep into the airline industry; hopefully the car manufacturers are being more cognizant of the vehicle occupants’ lives (though I worry that the buried-deep-in-the-bowels-of-the-corporation’s-design-studios’ interface designers aren’t always made to recognize this as the primary goal of every surface of the vehicle).
At least in the case of an airplane at 30,000 feet, there’s a little time to recover from a significant mistake [boy I sure hope that’s true]; in the case of a car, I can’t call up Robert Hays from the back seat to take over when I screw up – no least because most screw-ups that threaten life and limb afford very low latency.
Earlier this year I set out to build for myself a community of people I could get together with after work, and wanted to leverage the amazing array of Meetups, events and ad-hoc gathering spots in Portland where interesting geeks and nerds gather to talk shop, get to know one another and advance their personal and professional interests. I’d started pulling in people I like and that express an interest in the UX & tech scene in Portland, then created a personal mailing, and kept adding more effort to the weekly emails I was sending (like I was trying to impress myself with just how “good” I could make it).Sure, why the hell not? If I can make this work, it’ll make my life easier, reduce the mental burden of getting this stuff “out there”, and open the door for others to contribute on their own. This’ll be an experiment with a different direction: it’s for me, at my whim, and everyone else is welcome to participate or not at their whim.
Hanselman had my attention with his seminal article on the painfully anachronistic icons we still use to this day in computing (long after their relevance to everyday life has passed):
Today I had the pleasure of a different take on some of the most noteworthy icons in computing:
http://visual.ly/origins-common-ui-symbols
What does all this mean to me?
I’m disappointed at the continued “blame the victim” framing these kinds of articles take – as if it’s a simple matter of changing the behaviour of hundreds of millions of consumers every day, it’s their own fault and no one else is culpable for nakedly exploiting this fact of human behaviour. Makes my blood boil.
Let’s take it as a given that when things get so complex that you need to create and force training on masses of end users, you have failed to design a system with which the end users can reasonably succeed.
In the future, as in the past, when people say “so we’re going to build training for that” I will continue to slow down the conversation and ask “is there a way for us to refactor the system that does not require separate and egregious training?”
| Study: Many Consumers Still Untrained On Privacy Risks:
Despite a high rate of concern about online threats, most consumers still do not pay much attention to their privacy settings in social media, and few have had any online security training according to a Harris Interactive survey of more than 2,000 adults sponsored by security vendor ESET… More than half of consumers have not read the most recent privacy policy for their social media accounts, the survey says. About 20% of consumers have never made any changes to the default privacy settings in their social media accounts. “This finding is worrying because of the very ‘open’ nature of most default social media settings, sometimes set by the social network operator to permit the widest possible use of your information,” ESET says in a blog about the study. “It is hard to think that everyone who leaves the default settings in place is aware of the implications.” |
The rattled cough of a Hyper-Empathetic PM 