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A bit back I wrote posted about the great similiarities in the definition of industrial design and interaction design. A coupla days ago, my biz partner Mike pointed his fellow Pathers to a couple of essays from a year 2000 IDSA conference on bringing user-centered design methods from interface design into the industial design process. The first essay is "Integrating User Interaction Design Processes into the Industrial Design Curriculum" (.PDF). From the abstract: User interaction (UI) design has become increasingly more important in the design of "intelligent" (software enabled) products in recent years. This paper intends to provide information to industrial design educators interested in incorporating UI into the design process in applied industrial design (ID) courses.
It is the result of research into what industrial designers know and would need to know to design good interactive products. It identifies three challenges for industrial designers in the design of interactive products. It goes on to discuss processes that user interaction designers use that would address these challenges, and it provides examples of projects that integrate UI and ID.
Nothing earth-shattering, but a good primer on the issues. The second essay is "The Challenge of Understanding and Designing User Experience" (.PDF). The abstract: One of the most noteworthy developments in contemporary industrial design is a new interest in specifying products, communications, and services to support the design of user experience. As presented in this article, significant developments in the business sector (e.g., the demands of the new economy, the commoditization of quality, etc.), coupled with a more mature understanding of the value of design in everyday life, are fueling this development. Pioneers in design -- including Doblin Group, SonicRim, Razorfish, and others -- are, in fact, already building expertise in the design of experience and will likely be joined in the coming years by a wave of other design consultants.
To take full advantage of the opportunity, this article suggests that new methods and processes for designing user experience need to be developed and articulated. It includes an introduction to a method that is being explored at Arizona State University. Called a(x 4), this method combines elements from ethnographic research and scenario building. A full description is provided, detailing how ethnography and scenario building influenced the development of a(x 4). The article concludes with the results from a unique multidisciplinary workshop conducted at ASU last spring which focused on an informal investigation into the effectiveness of using ethnographic methods (e.g., a(x 4)) to spark the development of provocative design scenarios.
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COMMENT #1
When I read your website, I don`t know what you`re talking about. I mean, really, I can`t follow it at all. So I have to wonder-- what are you on about? I took loads of courses in design-- graphic; industrial; etc. I worked in Biz Dev for 2 Internet startups. I know something about the Internet. I spend hours and hours plugged in every day. If it is inaccessible to me....?????then who are we talking to here? My user experience hasn`t improved over the years. In fact, it has gotten steadily worse. I am just wondering about the utility of all this theory. Because honestly, I can`t see it going anywhere. I don`t really know what Adaptive Path recommends to people but I can tell you whatever is going into websites is making my experience less comprehensible, not more so.
Posted by Majordomo @ 01/13/2002 08:36 PM PST [link to this comment]
COMMENT #2
As a fellow website (and consumer product) user, I sort of agree: most things do suck, not just websites. And when one's confronted with overwhelming tangible experiences of sucky products, seeing Design Theory in all it's murky, vague glory doesn't help. If this is how designers think, no wonder everything is so bad! Even a couple of courses in design, I hope, was enough to see that that in general, designers DO care about making things better, even if that doesn't translate merely to "easier to use." Most of the theory on Peter's site, at the Adaptive Path site, and elsewhere, is an effort by designers to understand that "make it better" impulse in general, and generative ways. In other words, designers are trying to learn from other designers, and other ways of doing things, in order to learn how to make stuff better. Really. Academic theory almost always sounds like jibberish to non-specialists, and sometimes it is, but not always. The two papers Peter links to here are pretty solid, comprehensible, and useful efforts. I've found the presentations at Adaptive Path to be among the most concrete and appliable stuff out there on this topic; they're really pretty theory-free. We all feel the way you do: despite genuine improvements in processes, and absolutely genuine efforts to make things (like websites) easier and more productive to use, in general things just aren't improving. They're certainly not improving at the rate we'd like, or at the rate we were all promised they would over the last six or so years. There's a lot of reasons for that: one is that design and users/customers matter a lot less to most companies than other stuff. Despite many years of effort by designers to bring users into the picture, it remains to be seen whether user-centered design can really be as profitable as, say, feature innovation and technological product lock-in. Microsoft's products can be moderately usable, and are arguably improving their usability, but that's not the reason they make money or keep customers. (Charles Ferguson's "High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars" has excellent discussions of exactly how issues other than usability dramaticly affect product success, it's a great read.) In a way, user-friendliness remains a "value-add" for an awful lot of products and services. Plus, people _don't_ buy products based only on their usability. That sucks, but as long as our markets value innovation and brand distinctiveness as highly as they do, that won't change. I think much of what you feel is also due to ever increasing expectations. More things work better now than they used to, which only hilights how much other stuff doesn't: for example, two years ago "getting online" involved more technical knowledge and effort than it does now, but now I'm annoyed that DSL isn't available in my neighbourhood; in my experience getting things like printers and digital cameras to work with computers is far easier than it used to be, so I'm annoyed as hell when I have to install drivers for non-USB devices. So we all have a lot of work still to do, thank goodness.
Posted by Andrew @ 01/14/2002 05:41 AM PST [link to this comment]
COMMENT #3
No, it`s just websites that suck. We don`t actually agree.
Posted by Majordomo @ 01/14/2002 08:27 AM PST [link to this comment]
COMMENT #4
No, lots of things suck, and surely we agree on that. My bank statements suck to use, VCRs suck to use, most customer-service phone numbers suck to use, cel phones definately suck to use, airport signage can really suck, many reference books suck. Wait, what was my original point? Oh right. Still got a ways to go making stuff better. Should think harder about how to do this.
Posted by Andrew @ 01/14/2002 12:14 PM PST [link to this comment]
COMMENT #5
VCR manufacturers are not sucking up staggering amounts of venture-capital money and constituting a huge part of the market. People are not spending as much time on their bank statements as they are online. Customer-service phone #s are not cover stories on Time magazine. Different ballgame. Given the huge amounts of time, money, and (arguably) brains poured into the Web, it seems that websites could be a little less.... lame. They do not really create their own world, but are a shadow of what goes on in real life. So, their value lies in improving on that, but also continuing to refer to it. It`s a finite world. A world with a ceiling. All the extravagant theory in the world could be used to just improve the basic functions the Web serves. But the grandiosity attributed to the Web (for $$$$) gets in the way of that, and keeps `information architecture` as badly off as it is. Look at the iPod. Look at some city designs. Look at actual building architecture. It is possible to design something extraordinarily well. But you have to know what its function is. Sometimes I get on the Web and realize that function is not thought out at all.
Posted by Majordomo @ 01/14/2002 08:25 PM PST [link to this comment]
COMMENT #6
VCR manufacturers are not sucking up staggering amounts of venture-capital money and constituting a huge part of the market. People are not spending as much time on their bank statements as they are online. Customer-service phone #s are not cover stories on Time magazine. Different ballgame. Given the huge amounts of time, money, and (arguably) brains poured into the Web, it seems that websites could be a little less.... lame. They do not really create their own world, but are a shadow of what goes on in real life. So, their value lies in improving on that, but also continuing to refer to it. It`s a finite world. A world with a ceiling. All the extravagant theory in the world could be used to just improve the basic functions the Web serves. But the grandiosity attributed to the Web (for $$$$) gets in the way of that, and keeps `information architecture` as badly off as it is. Look at the iPod. Look at some city designs. Look at actual building architecture. It is possible to design something extraordinarily well. But you have to know what its function is. Sometimes I get on the Web and realize that function is not thought out at all.
Posted by Majordomo @ 01/14/2002 08:27 PM PST [link to this comment]
COMMENT #7
>Look at the iPod. Look at some city designs.
>Look at actual building architecture. It is
>possible to design something extraordinarily
>well. Ok, so my bank-statement/VCR comparison wasn't perfectly parallel, but there's been plenty of money, brains, and effort poured into those over the years as well. I wish I knew why things with lots of money, brains, and effort put into them still are lame. Some things with hardly any brains or money put into them are great; there's no correllation between these attributes. Doesn't excuse wasting zillions of VC dollars on Aeron chairs, true. Still, there's probably an even greater amount of airy theory floating around product design, urban planning, and building architecture than there is around web building. Just a matter of those things having had a lot of years to develop theories about. They also have experts with years of education and training, standards bodies, licensing, and so on. Holding web design to the standards of mature products or industries was (and is) a terrible mistake. I think there's a long time to come in which the web will seem lame seen in that light. Most software, too. I'm not denying your basic complaint, which seems to be: "all this theory and money doesn't make websites better. In fact, it makes people associated with them often seem kind of ridiculous and arrogant, especially when most websites are still pretty lame." That's true.
Posted by Andrew @ 01/15/2002 02:08 AM PST [link to this comment]
COMMENT #8
Lame and getting lamer all the time.
Except for blogs, paradoxically. I suspect that the Web is really at its essence a creative medium. And that pageviews and all that...all the stuff about endgaining to make mega bucks off it....are a logistician`s approach to something that excels at the nonlinear. I used to be in Biz Dev. I have the rough notes for a blog I will be starting. I am currently in an animation program, fulfilling a longterm desire to go to art school. So those are my biases. Through them, I do see the only hope in the Web in the nonprofit areas; in the areas of pure creativity. That is where the Web resonates with me. Trying to put all this information architecture shit on it is not something I can even really complain about. It just mostly, to me, totally misses the point. Life is about play-- not about bombarding people with the science of popup ads. OK, so my basic complaint is-- those designing the commercial part of the Web have absolutely no sense of humor. Or play. The iPod is playful. Spongebob Squarepants is playful. You know-- pick some examples from your own life. You know when you are having fun. The Web is not having fun. Thank goodness for me-- I am. :-)
Posted by Majordomo @ 01/15/2002 07:37 AM PST [link to this comment]
COMMENT #9
Oh, was that it? The web, playful? Jesus no.
Posted by Andrew @ 01/16/2002 12:11 AM PST [link to this comment]
COMMENT #10
Perhaps the Wall Street Journal site should use Comic Sans font and neon green and yellow colours too. Bah! Everything has its place. If I found a serious looking site for Ben and Jerry's ice cream, that would be terrible. If I found a playful design for a financial site, that would be bad too. A good designer knows what's appropriate and what's not.
Posted by MadMan @ 01/16/2002 03:47 AM PST [link to this comment]
COMMENT #11
On a related note, did you see this - http://www.fawcette.com/interviews/beck_cooper/
Posted by Sue Foster @ 01/16/2002 08:23 AM PST [link to this comment]
COMMENT #12
Ah, but I do have expectations that it will be more so in the future. I do think that it is still in the flourishing stage, and the rush to commercialization (along non-Internet lines) was premature. It is a fun medium. The dead-serious content that has been grafted onto it is a big snore. And no, the Web is not playful.--- People are. *grin*
Posted by Majordomo @ 01/17/2002 09:33 PM PST [link to this comment]
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