Tag: UX

Brainstorming and UX Development

Nothing quite strikes dread in the heart of the account executive like a Vice President inviting clients in for a “brainstorming session” to involve account, design and creative. These sessions, which have the potential to devolve into multi-hour, tangent-filled meetings where the client or creative over powers all other discussion to rail on about “this is how we’ve always done it” or “I’m the expert here.”

Which is 100% not the reason why we’re holding the brainstorming session to begin with. The very nature of brainstorming, love it or hate it, is to get new, out-of-the-box ideas out on the table. These sessions are often held when nothing else is working, or when new clients come online.

Brainstorming, in many cases, takes place for all the wrong reasons.  Some managerial level employee went to a leadership conference or read a book that said that effective teams hold brainstorming sessions and so we do them.  But the art of brainstorming isn’t that simple. Effective ideas meetings require experienced leadership, a culture of creativity, and, yes, structure.

In the world of user-experience (UX) focused design, these brainstorming sessions are of crucial importance. But they’re never free-for-alls with no goals or structure. Some lessons that any organization can take from these designers are:

1. Start with a purpose in mind – what problem are you trying to solve? What goals are you reaching for?
2. No ideas are bad ideas – this is said by everyone and acted on by practically no one. We all judge each other, that’s human nature, but the worst offenders on this topic are often leaders or creative types who feel that their processes or prestige are being threatened by a process that values all ideas
3. Create a structure – set a start and (loose) end time; use brainstorming activities to add value to ideas; never just sit in a room for an hour and throw out ideas – this is almost never effective and leaves many people sitting in the room feeling overpowered by the more dominant personalities.
4. Act on ideas – creating a work structure that shows participants that their ideas (collectively) will be acted on at some point encourages buy-in from everyone. Who likes going to a meeting where nothing happens with any of the topics discussed in there? In other words, don’t brainstorm just to brainstorm. Have a clear action plan in place and share that plan with your fellow participants.

Brainstorming works best on teams or in organizations that have more horizontal power structures, but even the most rigidly traditional company can create a temporary horizontal team by making the goals of the session clear to all participants and then actively valuing everyone’s contribution. Not everyone will contribute equally. Some participants will come up with initial ideas, others are much better at building on the ideas of their colleagues. The ideal team leader will assemble a team with a variety of strengths and encourage active participation by all team members.

Design Delight

Ever clicked a link on Twitter or Facebook to a news article that sounded interesting and then realized you don’t have time to read it now, but want to save it for later?

I have this problem all the time, and recently found ReadItLaterList, now called Pocket. It’s a browser plug-in and a collection of apps that allow you to save articles for later. On the iPhone and iPad, the interface is extremely clean and easy to read, giving you just the text and the photos or video from the article (although this is not without some bugs/missed text, due largely, I believe to legacy design elements on webpages like drop caps and text that is actually an image).

Anyway, I’ve been enjoying this app both at work on my Firefox browser and at home, and especially appreciate the ability to save and view articles across browsers/apps using a single log-in.

What I really want to talk about, though, is one particular function that I find, well, delightful.

When reading articles in the iPad app, if the device is rotated, the app immediately asks if you want to lock the rotation, by bringing up the Apple “rotation lock” icon in the center of the screen. One touch and the screen is locked so you can view the page from any angle (say, laying on your side in bed) without triggering the screen rotation.

The first time this happened, I locked the screen rotation and kept reading, not thinking much about it. But the next time it happened, I realized what a delightful function this was. Screen rotation isn’t inherently a function or problem associated with this basic reader app, but it’s something that would require at least a couple of touches to adjust, if not for the built-in icon. Few apps consider these user experience issues for things only tangentially associated with the function of their apps.

And it’s the same for many websites, but not all.

Nieman Journalism Lab, a blog that focuses on news about news and the media, and on cutting edge news technologies, has a very subtle, but charming user experience function that few people might notice, but that makes reading it’s articles easier and more attractive.

When you click on an article, it takes you to a standard page, with menus, sidebars, and a header. But as you scroll down (or, as I like to think about it, engage the page), the sidebars fade to almost invisible, leaving the text of the article the only thing your eye focuses on. If you scroll over the sidebar, it reappears so you can click additional links.

This seemingly small and almost invisible function makes reading an article easy and eliminates distraction, focusing the entire user attention on the writing, which is key purpose of the site.

These two examples share a certain aesthetic, which I admit not everyone will find attractive, but I appreciate the simplicity and beauty of the site and app almost as much as I do the content, and it definitely makes me more likely to return (as a counter example, see Salon.com, which I think has the ugliest user interface on the web, and as a consequence, rarely finish articles on that site, even when they’re really interesting).

 

A focus group of one

Seven days ago, Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs died at 56 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.  Apple fans across the world showed love and support for the man, the brand, and his family, often through a medium that Jobs himself was responsible either for creating or for promoting.

I was down on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue on Sunday to one, buy a suit for interviewing, and two, shoot some photos for photojournalism, and came across an Apple Store covered in multi-colored Post-Its with messages for Jobs and his family.  And one-by-one people walked up, left a message on the wall or an apple on the ground, snapped a photo with their iPhone, and went on their way.

Jobs was not a fan of focus groups, audience research or user testing.  I am also not a fan of those things.  He believed that often with groundbreaking technology people had no idea what they wanted until you told them what was possible.  He was, among other things, an excellent salesman of the possible.

I, on the other hand, simply do not like conducting these interviews.  It’s not that I don’t see their value, although I do challenge the audience Kool-aid that says that we should simply ask people what they want and then give it to them.

In journalism school, it is expected that students inherently know how to talk to people about a product that they are working on.  They’re supposed to know exactly how to express a sense of empathy and immediately build a rapport with random strangers who the journalists are supposed to miraculously find on street corners and in coffee shops and convince to dedicate 20 minutes of their lives to answering a journalist’s prying questions about their lives.  Professors and administrators do not seem to see that there is a difference between this type of interviewing and interviewing someone for a story.

Audience research is very, very good at finding out what people like and how they behave.  Unfortunately, even the first man who bought an iPad has only been using it for fewer than 2 years.  And his world of experience is limited to the type of apps and interactivity that a small group of developers has been able to dream up.  And of that very small group, only a very few of those are doing any sort of groundbreaking work, while the others are using their innovations to display content.  So, essentially, the ideas of a couple of men and women are the sum of iPad experiences that exist.  And asking an iPad user what they like can only encompass those ideas.

We can ask people to imagine what they would like, but they will still be limited to their experience of interacting with the device.  Even the truly visionary random man on the street might suggest something that we couldn’t possibly execute.

We’re warned about the dangers of the “focus group of one:” essentially using only your own experience to make decisions.  We’re especially warned about that in our class.  As a group of 13 girls and one boy, we have chosen to create a magazine for men.  As a group of 23 to 28-year-olds, we’ve chosen men age 35-55, which for most of us means neither our friends nor our fathers.

And so, if you need me on Saturday, I’ll be hanging out at a Starbucks in Skokie, stalking men with iPads and asking to see some ID.

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