4 and a half years ago, I started teaching; today was the last day of school.

I'm feeling reflective, but I also have this hilarious smile on my face :)

This is interesting. The quarter is ending, and that's always a time of chaos and reflection, but this quarter is more chaotic and reflective than usual - it's my last quarter. I've had a really good chunk of time here at SCAD, and I think I've learned more than I can claim in all of my other jobs combined. I got to work with some pretty amazing people - not just the faculty, but the students, too. I'll certainly miss it a great deal.

The next move is in the works. It's come down to Boston, San Fran, Austin and Pittsburgh. Jess and I should know what we're doing in the next few weeks - I'm OK with any of those places, and the companies in each location are equally as compelling. It's nice to have choices, and it's nice to be so at ease about it, too. I would normally have a huge amount of anxiety about a change like this, but I think I'm at a point where I can be content, happy and fulfilled if I'm challenged.

Something else is coming up in a few days. Six years?! What?

So the conference is over, and I think it was a great success. The content was great, the attendance was absurd (2700 people!), and the week was generally fulfilling and extremely exhausting.

I attended sessions, had a bunch of interviews, went to a wedding, went to San Francisco and back, saw old friends from college, saw old friends from Trilogy, saw old students, drank a huge amount of beer, recruited for grad students, learned a bit, and generally had a great time.

Here are just a few pictures of the week:

Sarah & her mom

And the ladies

Rick, in his typical pose

And Kelly, relaxing

Katie Minardo and Wilson Chan

A sweet exhibit at the San Jose Art Museum

Tucker Viemeister gets the crowd in hysterics

Design Research was a big topic.

Bill Buxton, Terry Winograd, Meg Armstrong, Bill Moggridge

The beautiful view of San Jose, from the 22nd floor!

CHI07

The Internal Consultancy Model for Strategic UX Relevance
Jim Nieters, Subbarao Ivaturi, Cisco

Cisco built an internal design firm; the goal is to "be an IDEO inside of Cisco". Other organizations have implemented this model. This is a relevant model, and Cisco has had good results. Cisco progressed through several models from 2000 to today.

First model - Central Funding Model. Your organization pays for UX resources. You manage all UX resources across the company. The organization grows within the larger enterprise. Challenges occur; you appear to be a cost center. A large central organization doesn't work. Some UX leaders like the Central model because it ensures consistency. Senior VPs have a challenge with it, however. Strict profit and loss targets that they have to meet, so everyone that impacts the product needs to be accounted for.

Distributed Model. Independent UX groups in each business unit. Sometimes the different organizations don't talk, so there is lack of consistency. This allows for prioritization and accountability.

Hybrid Model. Central and Distributed. More maturity around user experience.

Client Funding Model. Business Units fund the central User Experience Group, and you manage all the UXD resources. Each business unit pays into a central pot of money.

By 2004, each user experience engineer was working on about 4 projects. This is difficult, as it is hard to make a deep impact. Product teams would compare the internal team to an external design consultancy. This makes sense if the headcount is there.

Internal consultancy model. Teams pay per project. UE Project will have a project manager, a generative researcher, a UI architect, an interaction designer, a visual designer, and an industrial designer. Challenge - each team can only work on small amounts of projects at a time. Cisco Focus Team - highly focused on a single project, and focused until the project is complete. Have enough resources to make a big impact, but not enough resources to span the whole company.

Ask project teams to pay money, and deliver results. But there are central resources; costs can be shared; responsibility can be shared, and accountability rests with one individual (lead of the entire team).

"The experience itself is the next advanced technology for Cisco".

Requirements for a successful internal consultancy: Ecosystem partnerships; world class consultants. A portfolio. And engagement and funding model.

Engagement model has UX requirements - UX team owns the user interface, and is integrated into the product team. There exists a shared funding model, and a statement of work (or project brief) and executive commitment. Solid deliverables with personas, task analysis, use cases, wireframes, and final screens.

CHI07

Jeremy Ashley
VP Applications User Experience, Oracle
Industrial Design - Challenges and Successes towards an Integrated Product Development Process

Process, Acceptance and Change - or "Out of the window"

Enterprise Applications. These are software based, supposed to be hardware agnostic, which means that design is trapped on a platform. Talk about mobile devices and platforms, but design is done in a window.

The Industrial Design Process, which is followed at Oracle. Concept, Design, Code, Release. The processes are very similar. Understanding, Iteration, Prototype, and to Product. The processes are not unique nor are they separate. This is the new generation, and application of standard design process. Industrial Design Process is well established; there is a sense of product. The product has an immediacy and a visceral knowledge of what a product is. There is also a high visual demand; we can understand how many they are or how they feel, and they become part of your physical space.

UX Design Process has an emphasis on Making Technology Usable. Technology can only ever be well engineered, but a product can be well designed. There is a "360 view around it". Software is a designer/craftsman style manufacture, instead of a mass production and assembly style.

None of it matters, if you aren't part of the integrated design process / product development process. Design, QA, Documentation, Coding, needs to be integrated.

Acceptance. We product digitalness in the window. I think there is a certain degree of acceptance, that one cannot affect change to the hardware; we accept the fact that we have to use complicated devices to get to an end.

Acceptance of Form Factor - that input devices, desktops, and WYSIWYG are all accepted. These are iterations on the same thing.

Acceptance of Complexity. Computers are hard to use, yet traditional industrial designers build specialized tools for specialized things.

We still design within the window; rarely do we get beyond the window, the hardware platform.

CHI07

Tim Wood
Creative Director, Strategic Design, Interaction Design

Reinvention
The converging worlds of Industrial Design and Interaction Design

POV = GUI. User Experience at Kodak across consumer products and services. Intersection of user interface design and industrial design is an inclusive parallel: experience design. We see issues of interaction design, information design, usability, industrial design, psychology, HCI, and visual design. A multidisciplinary approach has always been part of the UX perspective. A degree of cross over between disciplines.

Ubiquity and density - the amount of devices in the marketplace, and then the need for differentiation. We want to stand out; businesses are looking at ID and experience as a way to stand out from the crowd.

The onward advancement of technological advances. Forcing classic methods of interaction to be reinvented. Looking at communication and telephony; moving towards mobile devices, and then challenging established paradigms. The implications are interesting.

One example: a key trend from a device perspective is that hard controls are moving away towards softer interaction. Industrial Designers need to understand the integrated services in which physical devices play a significant role.

GUI techniques are also being transitioned from the screen to beyond the screen; visual feedback systems. Optimus keyboard - a device where the keys have display capability. Migrating screen based ideas to other frontiers.

Ersatz physical interaction technologies - F-Origin.

Being engaged in product definition earlier and earlier. Being engaged at the level to understand new user physical and digital behavior. Designing the interaction in the LED systems in the camera and display systems. Buttons that may have back lighting, or may react to you in an interesting way.

Successes: Build a culture of collaboration and an inclusive management style. Building familiarity between disciplines to create a well structured team. Engage early - well before the design process has started - to create a sense of design culture in the organization in general. Frequently visualizing, demoing beyond the milestones for a client, but as a way to communicate between the design team.

Leverage robust user centered design

Organizational hierarchy and design authority can be a bit problematic. Establish a culture where you can question authority. The organizational chart can be a hindrance to the creative portions of design. Reward risk and encourage challenging the norm.

Challenges to an integrated model. Development timelines are not always in sync. UI comes later; ID comes earlier. There seems to be a more concrete set of schedules and deliverables for hardware.

To address this reinvention, we as design professionals need to continually reexamine and redefine our roles.

CHI07

Gary Marsden
Social Impact Award

PhD Stirling, 1998
Edits "Under Development" for Interactions

Doing HCI Differently: Stories from the Developing World

Co-recipient of the years Social Impact Award
Cape Town is the southern, western most cit in Africa.

When you live in Africa, you don't expect anyone to pay attention to what you are doing.

Award given for bridging different disciplines. Adapting HCI to Africa.
Africa is a disaster, according to Google. Aids, crisis, orphans, poverty.
But there is a great deal to celebrate in Africa too. "I've never laughed as much as I have living in Africa".
A man with a bicycle, that he's augmented into something that works for his life; to carry eggs. If you give people a few resources, they can make a lot with it.
Marion Walton; "No one can use my interface". People were confused by a button. South Africans don't like uncertainty. They avoid uncertainty. Tried to translate the button into another language - Iquosha (button). Finally, a user said "That is not a button. It's a picture of a button".
There is a different literacy at work. It's not enough to translate the interface; we often equate the picture of the thing to the thing. Additionally, hierarchical menus don't translate; a "family tree" is linear in Africa. It's not enough to simply translate the menus into another language .

Papers and computers are different things. When you paper prototype something, people understand it is just a prototype. People who have never used computers can't make that jump - they can't abstract from paper to something more mutable. The difference between physical and digital buttons doesn't translate directly.

Iterative design may not work either; six months of training was required to get people to use the mice, and keyboard. Once the users learned the design, they didn't want it to be changed at all.

So what was done? Ethnographic/action research based approach. Critical and participatory action research. Augmented with real access criteria. It's not human/computer interaction; it's community/computer interaction. Criteria for doing projects in developing worlds: [developed with bridges.org]

- physical access to technology
- appropriateness of technology
- affordability
- human capacity training
- local content
- integration into routine
- cultural factors
- technology trust
- local economic factors
- government/legal/industry support

The ethics of doing the research are pretty exceptional. How do you explain to someone what a university is? "I am a teacher..." Expectation management is a problem. Huge intervention into people's lives, but then a three year PhD cycle means that students leave. There needs to be an exit strategy.

Technology in South Africa. Percentage of population who have Internet access: 12%. Percentage have land-lines: 10%. Pay income tax: 11%. Have cellular handsets: 77%. So a great deal of research is done on cellular handset usage and applications. Wireless has been so successful because they don't rely on wires. Wires implies an address, and a fixed location. Can go days without electricity; they are robust, and they are relatively cheap.

Assumptions: People do not have a pc, but have and use a fairly standard handset. Technology is fixed; no messing with handset hardware.

The phone becomes an essential part of the user, and the user doesn't have a laptop. So how can you browse thousands of photographs? People share photos too, but without laptops.

CyberTrackers. There are trackers, who are phenomenal at understanding animals and movement, but are illiterate and are unable to communicate their findings. They can interpret symbols, so the approach requires iconic interfaces.

Africa is an interesting place and cellular handsets now mean people finally have access to computers. HCI should reach beyond and look at the needs of the new users, and there is a lot still to do. DIS2008 in Cape Town. Designing Interactive Systems.

CHI07

Who Killed Design

Bill Moggridge
Bill Buxton
Terry Winograd
Meg Armstrong

Bill Buxton - You have to be alive before you can be killed. There is no indication that, in high tech, Design ever was alive in any significant form. There is not a single software company in the world today that has a track record of innovating new products. The entire industry has been grown on acquisitions and n+1 products. Adobe's entire history has done precisely two. The major corporations grew through acquisitions. That means there is a clear failure in the development of new products.

The problem with talking about Design is you fall into the definition problem. You cannot rely on Don Norman to tell you, because he's not a Designer. When he has an epilogue telling you that everyone is a Designer, he's wrong: Design is a distinct profession.

Part of Design is being open to being wrong; you create a strawman to understand ideas and to have dialogue and discourse. Bruce Nussbaum says unmitigated nonsense; Design is not Innovation. Designers are "repeat offenders"; they aren't one hit wonders. A Design professional has a distinct set of skills, and a way of working, and a thought process. The last thing you want is for everyone to be a Designer; you want diversity. You don't want Designers managing your software development process, and you don't want software developers managing your design process.

Designers suck at understanding, themselves, what it is they do.

Ask any Designer "how important is the critique to the creative process", and they swear by it, but it's never been documented. (Wrong - it's been articulated in Vizibility).

Designers are bad at illustrating what makes them distinct, and what they bring to the table.

There's a critical role for Design; it's not a visual lollypop. It's equally important to the technology sector. The low hanging fruit has been plucked, and now we need to follow the same tradition of Teague, etc. Software is at 1929, and it's time to move on.

Terry Winograd - Bill criticizes the idea that everyone is a Designer. But everyone is a Designer; there are just different flavors of what it means to Design. What are they doing when they are a designer? Herb Simon said "Everyone Designs who devices courses of actions…" Design is a way of doing. You don't plan and do it step by step, although that can play a role; it's a way you respond to the world. It's clear that I'm not a Designer in that sense. I'm reminded over and over that I am a foreigner. I speak the language with a bad accent, and I do awkward things that foreigners do.

Engagement with the user - the people who you are designing for. Of course I believe that, but there's a sense of engagement with the user that is deeper than that. The inspirations come from the people - not the validations.

Design is seriously interdisciplinary.

Taking Experience as Teaching very seriously - learning by doing, instead of learning by planning. Iterative prototyping. What is a prototype for a course, or for a system, or a service? Do things to learn from them, instead of internalizing and pondering.

Design is alive and well, and the influence is growing.

Meg Armstrong - Design is about multiple perspectives that are not consistent and can interact. Design is about moving from an existing situation to a preferred one. Intervention as a basis for understanding Design, and then thinking about how complicated it is to intervene. Who Killed Design? There's so many other disciplines that are getting in the way of even talking about it. Design as it was once understood, as the part of the modernist aesthetic, is an old term and we've had a hard time replacing it.

There's a lot of fragmentation in education, and there's also a lot of cross disciplinarity. Communications with the scientists, and communication with business and management, and communication with design and the social sciences. It can then be useful to think about the role of ethnography in the design of interactive things.

In interaction design, there is a great deal of unity. Interaction Design has been a leader, as the methodologies have been based around the design of experience. This requires an iterative and non-linear process, and has given design a large amount of capitol in the creation of user experiences (ie, in the bubble and dot com world). Yet in undergraduate education, we don't prepare students for a holistic approach to problem identification and creation of solutions. In design education, you need 45 credits of liberal arts. There is rarely a time when that set of credits is directed in any really strong way towards a mastery of other disciplines, so that when you get to a graduate or executive program, this may be the first time that people have had that discussion. If we are going to have some kind of real intervention, we need to heed the Bill Buxton approach - we need to understand the ecosystem in which Design operates. The broad physical, social, and technical culture in which design has meaning.

The context for our wicked problems are extremely complicated, and require Design intervention. These aren't based on a quick heuristic-based redesign. There isn't a quick solution, and there isn't sometimes a solution at all.

In these contexts, we may think about the context of user experience - designing, creating, and owning the user experience was a big deal during the bubble. But we thought a lot about the democratization of participatory design, but never thought about the purpose. In many of these cases, someone else has set the wheels in motion.

The benefit of design based intervention is the ability to own the experience. Articulating Design Methods and planning became a very important activity; need to understand that things aren't only about making economic sense, but are actually about making cohesive and important return to humanity.

Design needs a lot of restraint in the work that we do, and Design needs to focus on some common goals. How does Design participate in the enhancement of creativity?

Bill Moggridge - I don't really think that Design isn't yet alive, like Bill, and I don't think it's close to death either. It's like a teenager; it's gotten involved in some things, but it hasn't really grown up yet. Even the people doing the 1927 stuff haven't even grown up yet. Interaction Design is younger, and we have a lot of learning to do before we grow up. As with many teenagers, there are suicidal tendencies and we get fairly upset about things.

Designers commit suicide in this way: the business person who is leading the company has been told to analyze risk, be sure about plans, be sure the recognition of potential reward is secure enough and there is good confidence and the shareholders will be happy. The design department lead says "I've got this great idea! Just trust me!" That's suicidal.

CHI07

CHI 2007 - Opening Plenary
Bill Moggridge,
Cofounder, IDEO

Reaching for the Intuitive

After 25 years, we should be feeling satisfied and ready to congratulate ourselves for progress that's been made. The processes have become rigorous, and are implemented on all scales. The science behind them are sophisticated.

So I wonder - what should we reach for that's different?

It's time to embrace some of the subjective, qualitative and intuitive aspects of design. Expand beyond the rigor, and sophistication, and try to find ways to harness the subconscious, the subtle aspects of design.

Why?

The problems are getting more complex, and technology has become part of our everyday life. The problems get so difficult that we can't consider them in our conscious mind; the scope and scale can't deal with the complexities of today's design problems. If we rely more on our intuition, we may find a subtler and more broad place. Technology has spread into each part of our life.

For example;
Phone service used to be simple. The phone was a simple product; you stuck something by your ear, and wound a handle, and spoke into the phone. You spoke directly to another human being; it wasn't a design problem as much as a problem of training. The operator needed to understand your request, and then act accordingly. It was a human to human problem.

Compare that to today; if you watt to get in touch with someone now, you have to connect through a complicated set of menus, using your thumb, and then you have to go through your address book, and the connection is you to the machine, and the machine to another person. The problem has become a design problem instead of a training problem. The item is intimate; like a glass of wine; you have to hold it up to your face. But inside of it is a complicated user interface. A tremendous engineering challenge, and also a design challenge, and a system problem. Add to that the design of the service beyond the person to person connectivity; now we can access the internet through these. The providers are used to designing for big screens but are now trying to create things for your telephone.

How do success stories in that area work? The i-mode was started in Japan in the late 1980s, and went to 33 million subscribers in the first three years. Was produced by a small team, and wrote a book called i-mode (the birth of the i-mode). Takeshi Natsuno explained the approach used to design the new i-mode service. 32 million subscribes, and 12 million java phone users. The hardest thing to overcome was the brain; handset can represent difficulties. Always making an effort for the tiny details, and the shape. Have to coordinate for the body shape, from the handset to the content. Software means that you have to have a content provider, while the network service needs to support everything, and the user interface should be easy enough for everybody. Developed 180 icons; each shows a message, like heart. Phones could send email, then could download color graphics, and then could send songs and sounds. With a third generation, due to java, the users can customize the phones - even as karaoke machines.

Takeshi discusses the hierarchy of complexities - the ladder of complexity within the design problem. To be successful, he needed not just a team of people, but also an approach that encompasses an intuitive way of thinking. Decisions can be made quickly without having to justify them; experiments can be used to design.

You can even buy a drink using the i-mode service; looking at failures in user interface design may be just as useful. (Shows video of 32 minute drink purchasing)

AT&T tried to import the i-mode service, and called it m-mode. The first thing found out through a study is that phones are used entirely different in the two countries. People don't use phones in Japan on trains out loud, but they have a lot of patience for understanding thumbing and buttons. Yet in America, we want to talk out loud and so we use the phones in a totally different way.

As technology moves into our lives as consumers, qualitative and subject questions about aesthetics, enjoyment, and beauty become more important. David Liddle, the project manager for the Star user interface at PARC, and was then the leader at Interval, talks about the shift towards technology in consumption.

The adoption of a fresh technology passes through 3 phases; hobby, work, life. Enthusiasts enjoy the technology in an aesthetic way, and enjoy exploiting it. If it's difficult to use, that adds to the fun. Once enough enthusiasts have their hands in a product or technology, one of them will say that they can use it in their work. They try to make the work practical; when the 35mm camera moved from exotica to professional photographers, it stabilized. There was a level of consistency about cameras, and a formal approach towards control. Then, after a product has built up big enough volumes through the business phase, one begins to reach a price point where it is practical for consumers to buy. In that stage, the priorities have changed dramatically, and in that stage, most of the important controls become automatic. Now, when you buy a 35mm camera, it sets everything automatically and so a chimpanzee can take pretty good photos with today's cameras. Enthusiasts want to say "look at my abilities!". The business user wants to say "look at how this increased my productivity!". The consumer wants to say "look at my style!".

The intuitive design process helps us navigate this confusion, and allows us to create design that people can fall in love with and enjoy.

(Shameless advertisement for his book)

So how can we harness intuition?

We need to understand design and design thinking, and then develop design skills. Charles Eames, when talking with Madame Amic, explained that Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as to best accomplish a particular purpose. The design is an expression of the purpose. It may (if it is good enough) later be judged as art. Thus, it needs to work first, and then if it is good enough, we realize it has artistic value.

Design thinking harnesses tacit knowledge rather than the explicit knowledge of logically expressed thoughts. Our conscious mind is the bit that sits above the water, yet we have a huge amount of subconscious ability under the water - like an iceberg. We need to harness the bottom of the iceberg.

So what are the skills one needs to acquire to act as a designer?

1. To frame, or reframe, the problem and objective.
2. To create and envision alternatives
3. To select from those alternatives, knowing intuitively how to choose the best approach
4. To visualize and prototype the intended solution
5. To synthesize a solution from all of the relevant constraints, understanding everything that will make a different to the results.

(Chris Connoly, IIT)

Jeff Hawkings, Palm - talking about GRiD computing. "If you could only make this thing smaller, then we would really like this". In the future, people would be carrying something in their pocket. Palm computing. So in an evening, I set out the parameters of what would become the Palm. Size, Price, Synch with desktop, and fast. It had to compete with paper. Design goal was that there would be no "wait cursors" and no "error dialogues". Design criteria established that solved a number of the problems present in PCs.

Design intuition allowed for the development of the constraints, but that intuition was informed by a great amount of experience.

Tim Mott, PARC. One of the people who came up with the desktop metaphor for the PC. Joined EA as a founder, and then went on to form Macromind. Hired by a publishing company owned by Xerox to learn the system that was being built, take it back to the publishing company ,and have people use it. Resigned, or tried to; then was given the opportunity to set his own course. This course meant spending time with the editors, putting them in front of an imaginary display, and asked them to imagine them using the hardware. People would talk about how they would want to do their current work but with a new set of tools, and the design itself became pretty easy. "Office Schematic", which was similar to the desktop metaphor that we see today.

Tim was using Participatory Design in order to create design alternatives. First you talk to users, and then you go through a process together, in order to discover insights into what they might be able to do if their tools changed.

Then, there has to be the ability to select and prune design ideas. Larry Tesler, PARC, moved to Apple and came up - with Bill - with a lot of the ideas that we see on the Macintosh. Larry would run user tests throughout the day on whatever had occurred the night before. Would talk about ideas, and then iterate, and the first Lisa user interface spec was developed.

Pulldown menu system was developed in one night; as you scan your mouse across the top, the menu would drop down, and they would ruffle as you moved back and forth. So you could scan them all. Command shortcuts were developed. All was developed in one night, "I can't imagine what happened that night!"

The intuition is a moment of crystallization based on all of the computer science and research that was done before.

Prototyping is an essential tool that runs through the stories. Prototyping, and doing it quickly, to see what works and then move on to new iterations. Mat Hunter describes helping with digital photography in a project for Kodak. 1995 Kodak wanted to understand the future of Digital Cameras. Products exist in an ecology. The development of film is a mass market consumer thing, and that means that there is a cultural system around the tools. But we also need to understand why people take pictures in the first place. It's a social enterprise for sharing ideas.

So they developed ideas of what a digital camera might look like. A digital camera would suffer from the challenge that you would have to both take pictures but also share them, mail them, print them, review them, etc. Needed to create an information architecture that allowed for a series of cameras to be designed. A second choice or decision was to understand how to communicate that. They wanted to create something more experiential. A big box with a big camera, and then a cord to a Mac, and they crafted a user interface that allowed for the creation of a picture and then sending that picture to a television. Kodak took the prototype and turned it into the DC210. A remarkable way to influence a camera that is already in development.

The experience prototype - people can try it out and evaluate it for themselves. User testing then becomes easy.

Synthesis occurs intuitively - people need to pull from all of the constraints that occur and are experienced. Synthesis is a skill that can be taught, and learned. Paul Mercer worked on the Newton at Apple, and formed a new company to create chipsets. These chips ended up in the iPod. He discusses the success of the iPod in a clear way.

The culture at Apple has 25 years of building personal products, and with an astute individual at the top that arbitrates what is good and not good. That management capability makes it unique in the industry. Why is the iPod so great compared to the competition? They started slowly and built it over the years. They acquired the technology - Soundjam, to build iTunes. Allow the user to rip the content, so Apple invested in iTunes and improved it over the years. In 2001, they shipped the first device that integrated with the iTunes. The device is simple minded and doesn't do much but let you navigate your music. The simplification was very well thought through. The capability to build it is not commoditized. The iPod has been essentially unchanged for about three years. In 2003, Apple launched the iTunes music store, and this was something that did not exist at a mass market level. They were the first to apply the apple magic to make it possible. They took their time, and it took them a few extra years to even develop the software for Windows. Moving in slow motion, in hindsight, but the industry has not been able to match it.

The success comes from synthesizing all of the attributes in the system; it isn't just the object. It's the systemic understanding of the tools on the computer, the store, etc. Synthesis of all of the aspects is part of the design process.