Some thoughts on Frames and Interaction Design

Michael Angeles brings my attention to David Malouf's latest post on language and interaction design.

In "The language we use," David Malouf discusses how ideas about user interaction can become so ingrained in what we are familiar with, that our language begins to reflect that familiarity.

It strikes me that a useful thinking tool on this topic may be the concept of Frames. I became aware of Frames, when Cognitive Psychologist George Lakoff popularized the idea in his book, Don't Think of an Elephant. However, the idea predates his use of it by 20 years, going back to 1974 and Sociologist Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience.

A simplistic description is that a frame is the subjective definition someone may assign to a situation and as such relies on the past experiences, culture and language that person uses for interpretation. Applying this to Dave's post, the "click" frame was being subconsciously applied by the student, based on his own past experiences with interactive technology, and this was limiting the range of imaginable solutions the student could devise to the problem.

Dave's suggestion for how to overcome this challenge is a good one:

...you need to deconstruct your language. Write it down. Write down your narrative of your interactions and look for affinities that develop around words and phrases and see if anything calls out to you the way the word “click” called out to me.

In addition to a little critical self-analysis, I'd add a technique I learned early in my training as a designer. Try to consciously re-frame the problem at hand. It's not a pencil, it's an instrument for writing. It's not a post-it, it's a portable reminding device. It's a simple technique but it can shake loose the subconscious frames that limit your thinking.

Labels: analysis, frames, interaction design

What is ethnography and how does it aid customer understanding?

Simon does a wonderful job here describing the value of ethnography, getting past the typical arguments re: depth of understanding (where most explanations stop) to explain the enduring business value of the models of human experience that can result.

But perhaps the most significant advantage of high-calibre ethnographic work is derived not from its academic legacy, but more directly from its recent history as a business tool. Most of the pioneers of applied ethnography developed approaches that were tailored to innovation, decision-making and production processes. In practice, the focus on building models is what realises an ethnographic programme’s value to a business. A model can be applied to issues that weren’t part of the original research brief, and it can be updated and extended long after the original research programme has ended.

Full article: MyCustomer.com

Labels: business, ethnography

How to Keep Innovating

Bill Buxton on cultivating your inner learner. Great advice for designers.

1. Always be bad at something that you are passionate about.
2. You can be everything in your life—just not all at once.
3. When you get good at one skill, drop another in which you have achieved competence in order to make room for a new passion at which you are—yet again—bad.
4. Life is too short to waste on bad teachers and inefficient learning.
5. Remember: You can learn from anyone.

via: BusinessWeek

Labels: interaction design, teaching

Teaching kids about engineering

Michelle Levesque, an engineer at Google, puts together a very nice overview of "what is (security) engineering" for elementary school kids. For most of the presentation, Engineer could be swapped out with Designer.

Thursday and Friday there are hundreds of kids coming to Google for National Engineering Week and somehow I got roped into giving the big tech talk to all of them. (I have to learn to stop doing that whole 'volunteering' thing.) So how do you keep 100 middle school children entertained for an hour while you talk about the ultra-snore topic of What It's Like to Be An Engineer?

via: Catspaw's Guide to the Inevitably Insane

Labels: design, teaching

Deconstructing Analysis Techniques

A straight-forward and clear overview of the major components of analysis for experience design. A must read.

Analysis is that oft-glossed over, but extremely important step in the research process that sits between observation (data gathering) and our design insights or recommendations. In many respects, analysis is crucial to realizing the value of our research since good analysis can salvage something from bad research, but the converse is not so true. This is where the literature tends to fall a little silent, jumping over the analysis techniques straight to a discussion of how best to document and communicate the findings from analysis. This article seeks to begin to redress that imbalance by breaking down the analysis black box into its major sub-techniques.

Full Article via: Designing For Humans

Labels: analysis, user research

Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles

A good litmus test for your life and work, particularly in the current economic environment.

1. Work on something that matters to you more than money.
2. Create more value than you capture.
3. Take the long view.

via: O'Reilly Radar continued in this Video Interview with Tim O'Reilly.

Labels: teaching, value, video

Theses inspired by Hipster Runoff

Emerging criticism on what the author hopes will not be called postpostmodernism.

It strikes me as the apotheosis of a new category of critical discourse that, for better or worse, has been slowly congealing over the past few years via such various modalities as LOL cats, Vice magazine do’s and don’ts, flame wars, douchebaggery and douche bags as a widely recognized species, text messaging, sock puppeteering, YouTube karaoke, intensely and disturbingly self-referential video art, and so on.

via: PopMatters | Marginal Utility

Labels: trend

How the Crash Will Reshape America

Richard Florida's counterpoint to David Brooks' piece on the American unshakable desire for a suburban/exurban liefstyle.

The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?

via: The Atlantic Online

Labels: economy, urban design

I Dream of Denver

Looking for an academic exploration of the suburban/exurban experience a la Learning from Las Vegas. Suggestions?

The time has finally come, some writers are predicting, when Americans will finally repent. They’ll move back to the urban core. They will ride more bicycles, have smaller homes and tinier fridges and rediscover the joys of dense community — and maybe even superior beer.

America will, in short, finally begin to look a little more like Amsterdam.

Well, Amsterdam is a wonderful city, but Americans never seem to want to live there. And even now, in this moment of chastening pain, they don’t seem to want the Dutch option.

via: NYTimes

Labels: urban design

Journey To The Center Of Design

Quoting Whitney Hess paraphrasing Jared Spool on the growing inadequacy of hard-line user centered design philosophy.

Last year at IA Summit 2008, Jared Spool declared that it was time for us to retire the dogma of user-centered design, citing that the most effective design teams don’t follow a specific methodology, but instead have a whole toolbox of techniques and tricks to use when the time is right.

view Jared's slides here: Journey To The Center Of Design

Labels: user centered design

Old World Lessons for the Next-Gen Web

Describing the trend toward specialized sites, one way to deal with the very real user experience problem of finding relevance in the information glut.

Whatever and whenever the next generation Web x.0 is labeled, it will have two defining traits. First, it will be more specialized. Second, it will be more editorialized. A large part of current behavior will continue. We'll still use large, incumbent, generalist sites like Google and eBay. But at the same time, there will be a movement toward more specialized sites as we seek a better balance between authoritative, expert-endorsed content and broad, less bounded user-generated information.

via: HarvardBusiness.org

Labels: media, trend

WikiDashboard and the Living Laboratory

More evidence on why the current techniques of user-centered design need an overhaul.

Artificially created environments such as in-lab studies are only capable of telling us behaviors in constrained situations. In order to understand how users behave in varied time and place, contexts and other situations, we need to systematically re-evaluate our research methodologies.

via: Augmented Social Cognition @ PARC

Labels: user centered design

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

Note to self: Get Supermemo

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

via: Wired

Labels: science, software

The No-Stats All-Star

A really great article about excellence and measurement, and how the two often are not in sync.

Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.

via: NYTimes

Labels: analysis, anecdotal evidence, metrics