Archive for the ‘creativity’ Category

The angst of the user experience designer

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

Crowds, (cc) flickr.com/hddod

My work is used by millions.

When the thought first struck the numbers were lower, but I was stunned. I quickly surmised the only way I could retain objectivity and impartiality was to bury this thought, but it wouldn’t leave me alone. I’m hoping that I can now make sense of it by voicing it.

Of course the scale of the web excites me; I’m delighted and humbled that my work can communicate with so many people. Very few roles have such scale. Architecture, perhaps. Journalism. Politics too, although I’m hardly comfortable with that comparison.

While I admit that it’s something of an egocentric thrill, I’m no household name and nor do I wish to be. Web design is far less important than, say, teaching or healthcare. What matters more to me is that I do great work, and having a large canvas provides me with fascinating ways to achieve this.

However, while the web makes it easier for one person to reach millions, it doesn’t make the relationship easier to comprehend. My excitement is tempered by vertiginous apprehension. From these millions, there will be thousands who love my work. There will also be thousands who hate it: people who relied on the old site, who appreciated a section I removed, whose needs I’ve overlooked in the hurry to get the job done.

With such scale, these users are anonymous to me, just as I am to them. While I work hard to understand them and design to support their needs, there’s no way I can know I’ve improved things for an individual user. I hope I’ve done right by them.

The angst of the user experience designer.

Posted in creativity, personal, user experience, web | No Comments »

Blank canvas

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

We’ve been busy. Not only have we taken on ‘leftie number nine, but we’ve also moved into larger studio. Obviously this means higher overheads, which takes careful thought in the middle of a recession, but it also means (amongst other things) we finally have wall space.

A blank wall is an invitation to a designer. As soon as the paint dries, I’m sure we’ll drown in post it notes and poorly-taped flipchart sheets. Heated debates will be held at the sharp end of a marker pen. The war room of my most recent project featured 20′ of whiteboard, which became a great way to sketch and walk through design concepts before stepping into prototyping. Drawing on the walls has thus become a minor fetish. It’s highly visible, and thus brilliantly suited to critique. It keeps you moving and alert, rather than immobile in your chair. And it also has the marvellous appeal of finally being able to do something you never could as a kid.

I hope to to share some of our scribblings in due course.

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Why “best practice” must die

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

Anyone who’s worked in the web is aware of the “best practice” cult. To me, it’s a lazy creed that exhorts us to switch off and plunder others’ work, and the time has come to rebel.

Firstly, there’s the pure language involved. “Best” implies something that cannot be improved upon. A world of best practice gives us creationism, chariots, and gramophones. It negates progress.

There’s also a more sinister side, which is when it’s wheeled out as an argument in design projects that are heading off the rails:

“Ah, but that’s not how eBay do it”.

The unspoken implication is that eBay know better than I, and therefore I should defer to their wisdom. It’s an argument that I find misguided more than insulting. The web runs on the basis of meritocracy in a way that many other industries cannot. “That’s not how eBay do it” is industrial, corporate thinking, entirely irrelevant to the 21st century. For the truth is that large companies often don’t have a clue about design. One’s skill and knowledge are entirely independent of the size of your employer: I’m confident I know as much about my profession as the employees at any large company.

The best practice trump card also fails because it doesn’t understand the nature of practical design. It’s not a transferable commodity: you can’t just screw a design solution into place. Good design must be appropriate and relevant to the particular problem. The factors involved—technological, strategic, sociological—are far too complex and variable for a plug and play approach. To say “Well, a dropdown worked here…” is to ignore factors that can actually work in your favour. A company that rejects the easy route and takes the time to understand technology, strategy and users can offer designs that makes it stand out from the rest.

I’m not advocating isolating oneself from the surrounding environment. For instance, at Clearleft, we regularly perform competitor analysis at the start of a project. It’s useful to see where others’ strengths and weaknesses lie, and helps us understand the landscape. However, not once has it given me the answer to a design problem. That always comes later, with thought, with detail, and after many failed attempts.

So let’s not allow the enforced limitation and unvoiced threats of “best practice” to pollute our thinking. It’s harder work, sure, but standing out and being better always is.

Posted in creativity, design, web | 7 Comments »

Why is technology so dull?

Friday, October 31st, 2008

The concept of personality has us hooked; just look at Cosmo quizzes and the thousands of online personality tests. And rightly so: it’s something that has profound effects on our friendships, love lives (that old “she’s got a nice personality” chestnut) and careers. For instance, Bruce Tognazzini claims that designers must have an ‘N’ in their MBTI, one of the slightly less dubious profiling tools. (I actually agree with him on this. I’m an INTJ myself.)

However, we’re also a little infatuated with personality, and often assume that someone’s actions are caused by the ‘type’ of person they are, while ignoring the social and environmental forces that influence them (the fundamental attribution error). In reality, personality is always framed and affected by the world around us, meaning behaviour can be quite variable. Just because someone’s angry once, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re an angry person. We have to work backwards, interpolating someone’s underlying personality from several observations of their behaviour. You can’t really get to know someone from a minute in their company.

For instance, at a football match, I drink, swear, and slip into a latent Welsh accent. This is no surprise—my environment almost demands it of me, since I’m surrounded by drunken, sweary Welshmen. But you’ll find me behave very differently in bed with a girl, going through airport security, or talking to my Nan. This behavioural variance is part of being human and people who lack it are deemed to be boring. If you behave the same in a nightclub as in a library, you won’t be invited out again.

Constrast this with technology, which behaves in a very rigid manner—the same in all environments. I think it’s time to make technology more interesting by introducing some mild behavioural variance. Sampled over a few readings, we can then start to form an opinion about the underlying personality, which is where we make those emotional connections.

Clearly we can’t go too far. Some behavioural consistency is essential for usability, and some devices are better suited to quirkiness than others. However, the dead zero we’re at now is clinical and drab.

Fortunately, we have the jigsaw pieces we need to imbue technology with personality. We just need to put them together. As mentioned above, behavioural variance generally comes from environmental influence. This meshes nicely with technology’s increasing context-awareness. Bluetooth, RFID, APIs, accelerometers, spimes etc, common geek parlance, all refer to ways technology is becoming more aware of itself, other technologies and us. But it doesn’t need to be this esoteric. Glade recently released a quite silly air freshener that only activates in the presence of a human.

The concept of an emotional response to technology isn’t new, by any means. For example, the uncanny valley:

I happen to think the uncanny valley is bullshit, but I challenge anyone to watch the following and not be slightly saddened:

So let’s imagine an operating system that sees you’ve split up with your girlfriend and says sorry. A program that knows you were out drinking last night and therefore uses muted colours and suggests you take frequent breaks. A mobile that loves going on rollercoasters.

This could be so much more fun. And the exciting part is I don’t think it’s too far out of our reach—for starters, we already give out plenty of these informational cues (knowingly or not):

Ultimately what we’re aiming for is intelligence (or at least pretence thereof) in technology. In the words of Piaget, “intelligence is the ability of an organism to adapt to a change”. I think behavioural variance is a perfect example of this adaptation, and for that reason I think we shouldn’t be scared of giving our future technology a personality of its own.

Based on my lightning talk “A rainy day, lost luggage and tangled Christmas tree lights” given at Skillswap On Speed, 29 Oct.

Posted in creativity, design, mobile, user experience | 5 Comments »

Beauty in web design

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

Just found out that the video of my talk at Reboot in Copenhagen has been posted to the conference site:

Slides themselves are on Slideshare, albeit with some minor font inconsistencies. It’s also worth checking out Andy’s session on the user experience curve, and I particularly enjoyed Eric Reiss talking about e-service. Be great to hear any comments.

Posted in creativity, design, web | No Comments »

Stop the Death Star madness

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

Barclaycard just unveiled their new corporate identity.

Yep, another Death Star.

I leapt to these comparisons right away (as did, it appears, the Creative Review). I mean, c’mon, do we need more of the same? We get it. You’re global companies. You’re bright and forward-thinking. You connect people. Blah blah blah. How much did this lazy, 5-minute bullshit cost you, again? I feel for talented graphic designers, having to watch these shiny, multinational clichés being mechanically squeezed out.

That said, it’s easy to criticise and perhaps I ought to relax. As some of the Creative Review comments accurately point out, it’s unfair to denounce logo design without context. The main sticking point is that identities aren’t solely aesthetic. The brand is what counts – and that goes beyond graphical elements (logo, colours, typography) into marketing, advertising, customer service and, of course, user experience. What does the company want us to think about them? This is a much deeper and more complex thing than whether we like a graphical device.

As an example, I’m coming to the end of my first big Clearleft project, a travel startup, in which part of our brief was to create the logo and overall brand identity. Obviously we produced several logo candidates, one of which was, although incomplete, potentially truly beautiful – exquisite typography, wonderful balance. It also completely missed the mark. In the end, we’ve chosen a logo that lacks the “beauty in the eye of the designer” but is far more in tune with the stance and ethos of the company in question.

I don’t know Barclaycard’s intended brand message, nor do I know their business objectives, so perhaps this is utterly in keeping with both. Or perhaps it’s just another sixth-form metaphor watered down further by design by committee. You decide.

Posted in creativity, design | 4 Comments »

Wolfenflickr 3D

Monday, July 14th, 2008

Some mashups are unlikelier than others. However, none as unlikely as the collision of Flickr and id’s classic shoot-em up Wolfenstein in Wolfenflickr 3D.

The Web truly is a mysterious place.

Posted in creativity, web | 1 Comment »

Thing-A-Day

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

I do find that creativity is hard to sustain in these grim winter months. Those creative juices flow much more freely in autumn. So big whoops of mild interest for Thing-A-Day (via Iain Tait):

Which I’m going to do. The thing that’s swung it is the flexibility: any creative act counts, meaning there are days when haiku will act as suitable filler, leaving my quieter days a lot freer to try something more impressive. 1 February will be a very short cartoon, I have decided. Please help me choose the topic…