Wireframing Fidelity and Activation Energy

Enjoyed this discussion on LinkedIn. I’ve checked out Balsamiq and Axure and OmniGraffle. OmniGraffle wins for best name, for sure…but I’m no Mac user, sadly.

The discussion ranged widely, and the issue I think is FIDELITY. We talk a lot about fidelity of mockups in ID, and wireframes are prototypes. And that’s why paper sketching seems to be a good starting point for me and a lot of other people. I get that there’s the issue of workflow – if it’s going to be digital, start digital. but there’s also the issue of Energy of Activation – for me and a lot of others, picking up a pen is a lot faster (and portable) than sitting down on a computer. Low Fidelity, but high speed and low activation energy.

Make Love, not products.

I was invigorated by Marisa Peacock’s account of Forrester Research’s report on Emotional Experience Design Principles.

The key take home is to “engage with the customer, not the product.” How?

Invest in ethnographic research: To uncover users’ unmet needs and aspirations Forrester recommends using qualitative insights gathered through ethnographic research.Techniques like contextual interviews and field studies can provide insights for designing broad-based customer interactions that span channels and provide context for users’ website visits

Garner emotional feedback during testing: Companies should supplement screen observation with other tools for gathering nonverbal feedback such as facial expressions and body language so as to learn more than just where people went and what they said as they tried to use a site.

Non-verbal information, emotional values, thoughts and dreams (more here) are what we need from consumers more than what simply does and doesn’t work.

As Tucker Viemeister said “Beauty is to function as making love is to Lust”. Mere function is not good enough. We have to connect emotionally, to make love!

Beauty:function :: love:lust

Small Revolutions

Reading Steve Portigal’s article in Appliance magazine and watching Stephen Anderson’s talk from MX2008 got me thinking…UX people seem to be interested in culture primarily because we have to try to change it all the time, in little ways. Steve says “Driving these kinds of cultural changes isn’t trivial, but it isn’t impossible, either” while Stephen points out that good ideas are, by nature, revolutionary.

And getting new things to happen usually incites a push-back of inertia: That is not the way we’ve done things. Stephen points out out that the struggle looks different from the inside of an organization (as an “innie”) or as an outside consultant…but either way, we have to use intelligence and patience to make change happen.

Again, it all comes down to empathy!

“Fomenting a revolution isn’t always possible or appropriate, but starting from your locus of control and pushing outward can produce steady results. Understand how customers make sense of the world, and make all your small and big decisions with that understanding clearly in mind. Show colleagues and superiors how that understanding manifests itself in product decisions and track the outcomes. Being mindful of your own successes will help others see the impact this approach can have on the bottom line.

“We need empathetic individuals to make empathetic organizations, which will in turn make more empathetic individuals.””

Being Ecumenical: Dell Hymes

I read Dell Hymes’ Obit today.

What strikes me about his approach to Linguistics was that it was all about context. Language took place in a cultural context, not in a mathematical wonderland, as Chomsky would have you believe.

Not to harsh on Noam, or anything.

But the word ecumenical came up in the obit…meaning general in extent or application.

Merriam-Webster tells us it comes from the Greek oikoumenē ,meaning the inhabited world.

The first step to solving a problem is to look at where it happens. To go where the problem is. Have Empathy, as @whitneyhess said here. And using an ecumenical approach, use whatever tools you need.

Steve Portigal on Improv and Creativity

Yesterday I hit an IXDA free event at RGA. Steve Portigal gave an awesome talk on Improv and its implications/applications to UX design and research.

He generously put up his slides here…which, had I known he was going to do, Maalik and I might not have taken such furious notes!

One idea from his talk that blew me away was this diagram. Everyone defines the norm in relation to themselves. I don’t know if everyone considers themselves in the center of their bell-curve reality…but everyone thinks of their behavior in relation to others. “I am more _____ than my friends” is a great thing to walk away with. When people describe their behavior, make sure you get the context they see themselves in.

His performance was really the big take-home for me. Steve created an environment where people shared, we unafraid to fail and were open. A lot of questions centered around this. How can we create a culture (or cultural moment) for ourselves or our clients where people can share ideas unhindered by fear or the “editor” that stops good (and bad) ideas? A great message was: Come up with bad ideas. Try that out. “what if we made poisonous cereal?”

I think once you relax into the possibility of failure, success is easier. There’s less fear. Getting up to do the “one word story” exercise I was, at first, nervous. I wanted to do well. And then I said to myself “screw it up. fail spectacularly.” And then I could relax and participate in the game, fully.

I’m looking forward to doing more of that.

The Uncanny valley in Monkey Land

Apparently the Uncanny Valley is for Monkeys, too:

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/uncanny_valley/

I’ve been trying to find the 30 Rock episode wherein Tracy Jordan designs a pornographic video game, defying the uncanny valley…but the media lords have made it hard.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, first of all, I like the idea that telling the difference between reality and fiction is innate, even in our primate ancestors. Secondly, it is always a reminder to me that keeping systems simple and straightforward makes them more pleasurable and more believable. Restraint and symbolism is better than spending our energy on full-blown simulation and actualization.

Consumer Insights: Participatory Design

 

Last night I went to see JooYoung Oh give a presentation on her participatory design methods at The Change You Want to See, a very cool activist and co-working space in Williamsburg. I was tired after a long day, but the exercise of  putting lots of stickers on a page to describe my ideal product experiences with words and pictures was lots of fun, and was a great jumping off point for solid and insightful conversations about people’s product lives. Getting that visual insight, tagging images and tracking what they mean to people is a very cool method.

Also, we went out for drinks afterwards and wandered into a quiz night. I am proud that our team was in the top half, despite missing half of the rounds! We could have been contenders. I’m sure of that.

Consumer Insights: Soft and Visual

Working on a food project right now and found these great “rules” for food Michael Pollan culled from a slew of web comments. I particularly like the variety of presentation methods and how emotional and direct the insights are.

Mashups: Websites that are videos. Pictures that are movies. Video, video, video.

Thanks to twitter and @flytip, I read 87 cool things from Google Creative Labs at http://bit.ly/3SuAq1.

Some faves were http://animoto.com/ which takes your pics and short videos and makes a very sweet movie from them all, using a sound track of your choosing.

Another Youtube Mashup was Youtube Karaoke. Am I the last to know about this? http://karaoketube.vipinnova.com/?v=JlXadnomXyQ

How fun is that? A real mashup of two internet resources to create real user value in one place. Very cool.

I was also very impressed with BooneOakley’s home page…a video with embedded links. It seems like a very unconventional way to tell your company’s story…but so direct and obvious when you see it.

From an Ethnography perspective, I’ve seen how pictures don’t seem to cut it anymore…At Pratt thesis presentations the last few years, animation and movie clips are the way that people tell stories, not through static pictures and text. The same goes at the office: video clips edited together are a must and always win the client’s attention and imagination.

Twitter: Thanks for teaching me new things, like small studies work. Now I can go back to my job.

@ogilvydigital inspired my first tweet-induced post. Hit the graph to read the whole story…but I loved this one graph. For usability, we’ve definitely found this…after 3 or 4 interviews or home visits, you start to see the same problems over and over. It can get dull…but…if you stick with it, you get the unique points of view or the great short that makes your story complete.

Small studies work. Thank the gods…because that’s what my job is all about.