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.
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.
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.
Encountering Steve early in my transformation to a UX geek profoundly affected me. I’ve been re-reading his seminal book lately and captured a few thoughts I’ll share with you.
His book “Don’t Make Me Think” is one of the most shockingly plain and easy discussions of web usability I’ve seen, with lots of subtle lessons woven into a deceptively easy-to-read discussion. Easy to follow, both anecdotal and evidence-bound, and contains many dozens of insights distilled down to the very nut of the problem. No overlong self-pleasuring discussion of theory or why things should be different than they are – Krug recognizes first and foremost that the best systems give users the easiest path to success, and leaves the art of user experience design up to the definition of ‘success’ (to be struggled over by users, designers and stakeholders).
One of the great lessons of this book is typified by the following passage in chapter 8:
“The point is, it’s not productive to ask questions like ‘Do most people like pulldown menus?’ The right kind of question to ask is ‘Does this pulldown, with these items and this wording in this context on this page create a good experience for most people who are likely to use this site?’ And there’s really only one way to answer that kind of question: testing. You have to use the collective skill, experience, creativity and common sense of the team to build some version of the thing (even a crude version), then watch ordinary people carefully as they try to figure out what it is and how to use it. There’s no substitute for it.”
This lesson has echoed in my head for a year while I ruminated on it. I suppose I wanted to find a shortcut, see of there were other reasonably-equivalent ways to achieve the same outcome; you know how it goes, and you know how it turned out. Now I quote this idea at people all the time, and I keep hammering myself over the head with it every time I try to take a shortcut. Doesn’t mean I don’t take the shortcut sometimes, but I’m making sure I’m aware that I’ve optimised out the most effective way to determine the best design.
Another one that resonates every time I read it: “What testing can do is is provide you with invaluable input which, taken together with your experience, professional judgment and common sense, will make it easier for you to choose wisely – and with greater confidence – between ‘a’ and ‘b’.”. User testing gets presented by some practitioners (usually the ones fesh out of academia, or those who are terrified of the lack of rigor and thoroughness in the business world – or both) as a terribly important practice with lots of rules about statistical validity and ability to “prove hypotheses”. In my own experience even, it’s amazing to get that outside perspective – even if you throw some or much of the feedback and observations away.
I’m also permanent changed by Krug’s perspective and emphasis on navigation. Thinking of it like the navigation you need when walking into a department store is brilliant, invaluable advice. I think of this every time I design a web site (and in some cases even do a passable job of reaching a reasonable level of clarity).
Every UX/usability tome I pick up gets compared to this, and many predictably (and deservedly) fall short. It makes for much quicker reading sessions on the dry or artificially-academic doorstops.
The rattled cough of a Hyper-Empathetic PM 