Ink, etc.

I carry a pencil bag with a set of 005, 01, 02, 05 black Micron pens, a rainbow set of 01 Microns, a few Sharpies, a mechanical pencil, a #1 ex-soft leaded pencil, and a set of colored pencils.

Tip: #1 pencils are far better for sketching than #2. They write with little resistence and erase easily.  They’re used in many libraries because they do not damage paper.

Paper

I am a relentless advocate of the 11×17 graph paper sold by Edward Tufte (purchase here, scroll down).  There is a certain gestalt to high quality, oversized paper with subtle grid lines that I cannot accurately convey in words, but I have learned to take advantage of it and have, as a result, created some of my most inspired work on these reasonably priced pads.

Portability, however, is not the strong suit of 11×17 paper, so I carry with me an ink-friendly 5.5″x8.5″ sketch book by Strathmore. 

Tip: The first thing I do in a sketchbook is go through each page and number it w/ a soft pencil.  This helps me reference and later find a specific sketch and also gives me a nice sense of progression as I sketch my way through a book.

Earlier this week, I had to go to the hospital to have the sort of test you can only have at a hospital because it is specialized and expensive.  I arrived on time and promptly saw someone who got all of my paperwork ready.  Once checked-in, I sat for about 20 minutes waiting for a technician to call my name.

When my name was called, we walked to my room and by some mix-up, there was someone already there.  I was sent to another waiting room and told it would be 10 more minutes.

I felt a little frustrated, but in a cattle herding bottleneck sort of way — What’s to be done? This is just the way it is.  I respect that hospitals are places with clear priorities.  When I have to wait a very long time for attention, there is a karmic logic that assures me that if ever I am in need of priority No. 1 status, I’ve earned it through prior patience.

When a different and quite apologetic technician came to get me 40 minutes later, I was surprised by the fact that she validated my inconvenience.  And when the departmental manager stopped by to apologize personally and ask me if there was anything she could do to right the situation, I didn’t even know what to say or what my options were.  (A $5 cafeteria voucher was handed over as consolation.)

This experience has changed my mind about the rights I have as a user in a hospital, or at least this one (Durham Regional).  The next time I go, I will have higher expectations of the staff.  In exchange for those expectations, Durham Regional will enjoy my recommendation as a hospital with staff who really care.

Some takeaways:

1. This positive observation would not have occurred without the negative situation (the room mix-up).  How you respond to something negative can be more significant (in terms of loyalty and the impression you make) than preventing the bad thing from occurring in the first place.
2. In what situations do your users feel powerless (a.k.a. “That’s just the way it is.”) and how might you surprise them by actually caring?  What is there to lose in a situation like that?  What is there to gain?

There’s an enlightening read over at PsyBlog – Memory Improved by 20% by Nature Walk – about how walks in nature enhance our ability to remember things as opposed to walks in an urban environments.  The reason?

1. Our brains are involuntarily attentive (we can’t help but pay attention to things that threaten our survival like, in the author’s example, a bus coming towards us).
2. Our brains use directed attention to cope/reason/understand that which distracts us involuntarily (we realize the bus isn’t going to hit us if we move out of the way, but in doing so we need to watch out for that car in the passing lane).

In nature we have less of these attention-demanding stimuli and can let our brains process unthreatened.  In the study PsyBlog mentions, improvements were seen even when subjects looked at pictures of nature vs. urban environments in the time between their memory tasks.

What can web folk do with this information?

We can respect that our users are at the mercy of involuntary attention.  And while there are no virtual buses to avoid online, the beeps, bells and flashes we provide in our UIs are all involuntary attention grabbers.  These things chip away at our users’ ability to stay focused and retain information. We should save use of signals like these (even attractive colors like yellow) for situations where the benefits outweigh the cognitive cost we’re charging.

In November I created The Smartwool Experiment, which is a online brand/science experiment using social- and multi-media tools to chart the wear and tear of four pairs of Smartwool socks.  Every morning I would click a little bookmarklet (see above) entitled “add sock,” which took me to my Smartwool dataset on Swivel.  I would add the date (by way of a keyboard shortcut so that I do not have to look it up), the sock color and shoes I was wearing and then hit enter.  It took 20 seconds.

Things were chugging along swimmingly until one day in mid-December when I logged into Swivel as the museum* to determine if there was a correlation between actual museum visits and museum web visits (there was an 87% correlation, btw).   And as I would expect it to, Swivel saved my login information as the museum, not the Smartwool Experiment.  The next time I logged into the site, I got a 404 error (as evidence by the screenshot above).

In this scenario, which is easier?

• Logout and login again.
• Do it tomorrow.

Do it tomorrow won.  Why?  First, browsers do not consistently remember passwords. Some are remembered through sessions, some through cookies, some through browser data, some never not at all.  I didn’t trust the situation to not inconvenience me and in that moment, I only wanted to devote 20 seconds to the task. Second, I overestimated my ability to remember what socks and shoes I wore on what date.

Which is easier?

• Logout, login, remember what sock/shoe/date combo I neglected to enter, enter today’s.
• Do it tomorrow.

Without any effort at all (literally!), I created a snowball of reasons to do it later.  Over a month has passed and I haven’t entered any data about my sock/shoe combos.

The point is this: When you are in a position to encourage people (inc. yourself) to contribute something (opinion, media, money, etc.), be hyper vigilant about lowering the threshold for contribution.

Something else to be considered: When we make it super easy to contribute – go look at any YouTube video with more than 1,000 views – online community management becomes increasingly important.

* ’sbeen awhile, huh? My current job is at a science museum.

This inaugural installment of “Atta-Thing!” celebrates the user experience of a coffee mug – in particular, my Life is good. coffee mug – because it reminds me that incorporating optimism into experiences I create for people can make them feel better about themselves and their lives.

Dear Life is good.,

On any given morning, I have fourteen coffee mugs from which to choose and I nearly always choose yours. The reason why is because your mug makes me feel active and optimistic and down-to-earth.  It reminds me to appreciate the morning, and my coffee, and my life.  And I often take an extra moment to do just that.

I have learned from this experience that even a mundane, repetitive action completed by an often groggy, distracted me has the potential to define my perspective, my day, myself.  Putting that messaging on a coffee mug, where I have the opportunity to experience that everyday was a great idea.

Thank you may I have another?
Beck

Last week, a friend told me about the Blue Ridge Run, a 200 mile relay race through the Blue Ridge Parkway. As he recounted the turn of events that landed him an open spot on a local team, he said that he’d spent an hour “playing around” on the website before deciding to sign up.

My ears perked as I imagined a) what the analytics might look like for a site that had enough content and interaction to spend upwards of an hour consuming; or more likely, b) what a webmaster might assume after seeing an out of range visit of 00:59:42 on a site that probably averaged visits of 00:01:37.

“What exactly did you do for an hour on this website, Don?”

After giving me a puzzled look, he confessed that he didn’t spend the entire hour on the website. He’d spent an hour on the topic, which was the Blue Ridge Run… oh, and also long distance relay races… and local runners that might be potential teammates… aaaand the history of the Parkway… and Google maps of Virginia and North Carolina… and running shoes… and travel accommodations.

And then I thought of something I hadn’t really thought of before.

Often, we are just one stop in a person’s larger quest for information… or tennis shoes… or whathaveyou. Speaking for myself, I sometimes look at my site(s) as a be-all-end-all sort of destination, instead of diversion or quick stop.  How might our websites change if we designed them to serve as spring boards to and landing strips from other (potentially completely unrelated) websites?  How much could our users’ experiences improve if we anticipated their offsite needs and acknowledged them onsite, even if that meant sending them away?  What are the potential rewards for this sort of UX approach? 

As a homeowner in the midst of several home-improvement projects I’m THE CLIENT an awful lot lately.  Seeing how it feels to trust someone to do things I can’t (or don’t want to) do has been an enlightening experience – especially given that my role as a practitioner puts me in the position of selling and delivering on exactly that… for someone else.

“Well, it just so happens that I’d love to organize your 40,000 pages of content! Rock on!”

“How many gigs of log files do need parsed? Half a terabyte?  Perfect!”

To some, the problems I help solve are as overwhelming as building a new deck or laying a new garden path is for me.  

Take, for example, the landscaper I’ve hired for our garden.  Her positive attitude has completely changed the way I view the space that she’s creating.  A space, it should be mentioned, that I’ve never been happy about or proud of because it’s represented something insurmountable and problematic since I purchased the home.  She’s redesigning my yard for all intents and purposes.  I redesign things all the time! How can I generate that sort of positivity with my creations?  How can I convey my excitement and positive attitude to my client during the redesign process?  Most especially, how can I transfer that excitement and positivity so that my client feels it about what I’ve created?

In the last two years I’ve had a deck built from scratch; a broken water heater replaced; trees that were too close to the house trimmed back; and a 70-foot-tall oak tree that fell in a spring storm triaged.  In my own recent experience I’ve been THE CLIENT from a host of perspectives and that reality extends itself into web-related work.

Clients are coming to us for new ideas, improvements on old ideas, fixes for broken systems, maintenance needs and disaster relief. We practitioners need to recognize why our clients need us beyond the fact that they can’t (or don’t want to) do it themselves.  Someone with a idea for a new website is of a very different mindset from a client with an outdated one.  Someone whose website is broken is going to approach fixing it in a very different manner from someone whose site has just been hacked. From a practitioner’s perspective, the garden (or website) might end up looking the same no matter where the starting point, but from a client-relationship viewpoint we’ve got an opportunity on our hands. If we can understand where the client is emotionally and why they need us, we can approach the solution with an unexpected sensitivity and deliver a truly fulfilling experience.

Yesterday while visiting my alma mater, I decided to enter a building that was basically my least favorite place on earth during the fall of my freshman year.  Motivated partly by nostalgia and partly by nature’s call, I wandered the now renovated halls in search of a bathroom.  

Upon finding one and, er, utilizing it, I noticed a sign at eye-level on the back of the stall door.  The sign read: “Water-Saving Dual-Function Handle.  Pull up to flush #1 (liquid waste) and down to flush #2 (solid waste).”  

I instantly appreciated the environmental consideration, the clever form factor and the subtle humor. And being the designer I am, I also asked myself, “Would I have placed this sign here on the stall door or above the toilet on the wall opposite?”  I turned around to flush and, there the sign was, again… on the wall opposite.

Bravo!  I thought and then proceeded to appreciate the handle and adjacent “cheat sheet.”  I appreciated it so much that I got out my iPhone and took a picture.  

Then, finally, I flushed. (and inadvertently pressed down on the bright green handle.) 

One, I felt like an idiot.  After spending all that time thinking about flushing, which is an atypical thought process during an activity I experience several times a day, I failed at doing it right.  

Two, I wanted to flush the toilet again, which is in direct opposition to the design’s intent.  I wanted to experience an “up flush.”   I didn’t, of course, and therefore left the stall (experience-wise) unsatisfied.

Had I the opportunity to visit this bathroom on a regular basis, I’m sure I would adjust my flushing tendencies.  I presume, though, that if this were the case, my re-learned behavior would result in unsatisfactory flushes in lesser advanced toilets, which are the majority of toilets I use.

This begs further research, but for now I’ll say this:  As interaction/industrial designers, we are often asking our users to re-learn something so that it can be done “smarter” or “better” or “more easily.”  Expectation and habit are powerful forces  and they need to be reckoned with. 

Inspire your client.

For all there is to know about carpentry, I don’t know much. I have ideas about what’s important: “measure twice, cut once” for example. I am familiar with the tools involved: wood, nails, hammers, saws. I’ve even had a little experience myself building a Blue Bird house for my dad last Christmas. But building a deck, even knowing where to start, is beyond me.

When Howard encouraged me to create sketches, I didn’t know enough about decks or carpentry to even know what was possible. I went to Google to search for pictures of decks and I stumbled across an article that said the most beautiful decks are the ones that are an organic extension of a house. For me, that’s when inspiration struck. My house is the treehaus, my deck needs to be the deck of a treehouse.

From a client stand point, I need to provide my clients with information that inspires them. They don’t need to bury themselves in material that explains IA or UX and why it’s important, they need stories of what success is on the web (caveat: for sites like their own)… and when and why websites aren’t successful.

Give your client the freedom to create.

So what does the deck of a treehouse look like? In my mind there are trees, and rope, and ladders and bridges. I started to sketch these things on graph paper and when Howard came to discuss them, I was full of ideas.

Considering a scenario where a client comes to me inspired with their own IA and layouts seems like the recipe for a nightmare project. My first thought is that I’ll have to talk them down off the cliff of ill-informed organization and design. But Howard sat confidently at my kitchen table and listened to all my ideas. He had me explain things that he didn’t understand and he contributed ideas as he thought of them.

As a client, I didn’t expect him to build exactly what I sketched. I wanted him to take my ideas and use his expertise to improve and build upon them.

Escape flatland, somehow.

My favorite thing about the new deck is a 15′ rope suspension bridge that extends from the deck to a fire pit in the woods. The fire pit end of the bridge is secured by two cedar trees that have been cut and concreted into the ground.

Coming home after the first day of construction, those posts were already up because the concrete holding them needed to set before anything else could be done. As a client, seeing the transformation of an inspired idea evolve from sketch to reality (in the form of cedar tree and concrete) was beautifully cathartic and fulfilling.

For my clients, I should aim to give life to the site or application in a way that let’s them experience the maturity of their idea.

Establish trust.

This whole process has been exceptional because I trust Howard to do the job well. I trusted him before he rebuilt my deck because the work I’ve seen of his is remarkable and his company has an excellent reputation. But I trust him even more now because he handled my project with respect and confidence and wisdom.

With my own clients, my reputation and portfolio will precede me, but my composure and attitude during the project will be what follows me. I should make it a priority to instill trust into my clients by listening to their ideas and when appropriate, contributing wisdom in a gentle, but confident way.

1. Breathe. 

There are two parts of your brain that compete for response in a stressful situation: one part is cave (wo)manly, the other is the thoughtful and intelligent you.  Cave (wo)manly brain is there for a reason and can get you flown or fought out of very bad situations.  Problem is, though, clients and/or co-workers don’t respond kindly to fleeing or fighting in a board room… usually.  So, do yourself a favor and make it a point to breathe in stressful presentation situations. Oxygen is great.

2. Reserve the comedic routine. 

The first thing you should do in a presentation, unless you are a comedian and/or you know your audience exceptionally well, is prove that you aren’t an idiot.  Reserve your jokes until after an audience has a reason to respect and listen to you, then if it feels right, deliver the joke.  

3. Be honest. 

Sometimes you will be asked questions that you don’t know how to answer.  Instead of making something up, just respond honestly.  ”I don’t know, but I can tell that’s important to you and I’ll find out and send you the answer,” is measurably better than fumbling through or dancing around an answer you aren’t prepared to defend when you aren’t in the hot seat.