Year: 2010

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My primary design tool is a pencil

A close up of a mechanical pencil tip

I sometimes have conversations with designers, and non-designers, about tools used in designing for user experience. While I’ve used many software tools over the years, such as the venerable Adobe Photoshop, some folks are mildly surprised to hear that my primary design tool, one that I use every day, is the decidedly humble pencil.

A pencil is simple, highly portable, reliable, and works well for a number of tasks. My main pencils are mechanical ones that takes .5mm leads. I’ve found that .3mm leads are too thin for my often-heavy hand and easily break. I also have a pencil that uses .7mm leads, but I don’t use it as much.

The primary, though not sole, design task that the pencil supports occurs early in the design process. Ideation involves a lot of generation, exploration, and development of ideas. The pencil is the tool that enables me to capture my visual thinking quickly. Whether used to create tiny thumbnail pictures of a screen’s overall layout, or for capturing more details on a form design, a pencil enables me to get the job done quickly. The drawings are often pretty rudimentary and ugly, but that’s fine for capturing my visual thinking for my own use. For sharing ideas I usually render the visuals in a more refined way.

A companion tool much of the time, particularly when at work, is a 7.5 inch by 9 inch notebook. Sometimes, though, I’ll switch to a larger pad of grid paper. When I’m away from the office or home, I use a smaller Moleskine notebook, which has a lovely tactile quality as well as paper that takes pencil marks quite well. Really, though, any small notebook would do.

In addition to my mechanical pencil, I also use wood-cased coloured pencils for various reasons and at various design stages. They’re a little messier, as they need periodic sharpening and the leads are more prone to breaking, but I like them. I’ll use colours to lightly shade areas in a pencil sketch to help me easily pick out major features at a glance, or use a heavier coloured line to call attention to a particular feature.

As an aside, one of my favourite books is The Pencil, by Henry Petroski. It’s a great read that explores the nature of engineering and product development via an engrossing story of the history of the pencil.

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User Experience in Waterloo Region

This piece first appeared this week as a blog post on the newly launched Communitech web site.

We’ve kicked off a new season of uxWaterloo events last month with a design workshop. As it turns out, Communitech is launching a new web presence this month as well, which makes this an opportune time to write about designing for user experience (UX).

Many articles and books have been written on the topic of user experience, and there might not be a universally accepted definition of what it is. It’s reasonable to say, though, that designing for user experience in a software product will often address the following:

  • Functionality: what does the product do? Is it useful?
  • Interaction design: how does someone actually use the product?
  • Information architecture: how is the functionality in the product organized and presented?
  • Visual design: what does the product look like? Is it appealing?
  • Usability: how easy or hard is it to get something done with the product?

Getting these pieces in the UX puzzle right isn’t easy, but the results can have a major impact on a product’s success.

Waterloo Region is well-known for its innovative software and hardware companies, many of which devote dedicated resources to designing the user experience of their products. For some of the user experience researchers and practitioners who call the region home, getting together at a uxWaterloo meeting is a monthly activity.

uxWaterloo is, among other things, a Communitech peer-to-peer group devoted to building a community around the practice and understanding of creating a great user experience. While we’re primarily software-focused, we touch other areas on occasion as well. At our monthly meetings we explore a variety of topics through guest speakers, workshops, and even just discussion sessions at local pubs. In the last year we’ve explored table-top interfaces, guerilla usability techniques, personas in product design, and more. The atmosphere is friendly and folks are generous and willing to share their knowledge.

So here’s an invitation to all designers, product managers, developers, technical writers, and other interested folks to join us at a uxWaterloo meeting and help us to continue to grow our vibrant community around a common interest in user experience.

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Can I quote you on that?

Since hearing Trevor Herrle-Braun speak at the Communitech Community Managers peer-to-peer group, I’ve been thinking a little about how I use Twitter for messaging.

Like many people, I exchange tweets with friends and colleagues, and occasionally with people whom I know only through Twitter. Being busy with other things tends to limit these interactions for me, though, which reduces my engagement compared with someone like Trevor.

I tweet about events that I attend, including regular events like uxWaterloo and DemoCampGuelph as well as one-off events like the talk by Google’s Alfred Spector last spring. (I also write at this blog about these things, as it turns out.)

One of the staples of my own tweets has been quotations that are, at least for me, inspiring or insightful. In large part that’s a result of my own reaction to seeing great quotes tweeted others. Jim Estill, whom I met while working at Primal Fusion, has been a steady source of such quotes and I’ve often re-tweeted his. John Maeda is another great source for me, with many of his best quotes being his own excellent aphorisms.

The last few weeks I’ve experimented with a higher volume of these quotes. Some of them get re-tweeted by others, so it feels like a worthwhile thing to do.

I discovered, though, that managing my collection of quotes in a text file was getting a little unwieldy. This past weekend I set up a prototype repository to manage the quotes more effectively. I had a few simple requirements. For example, I want to know which quotes I’ve tweeted and when I tweeted them. I also want my quote repository to automatically format my quotes for use with Twitter; I set it up to format my tweetable quotes using real opening and closing quotation marks (like “this” and not like ‘this’) and a tilde character (~) separating the quote from its author.

So far the prototype seems like a good tool and has met its modest goals. As I use it I’ll iterate on the design and implementation and make changes that reflect my usage patterns. Being a designer, that’s about what you’d expect me to do, right?

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Karos Health is hiring

Logo: Karos Health

I’ve been at Karos Health for several months now, and I’m excited by what we’re building here.

Our team is doing innovative work to connect health care records to the stakeholders that need them, supporting collaboration that improves the quality of patient care. It’s a huge area in which to work, there’s a lot to do, and our products make a meaningful and positive impact on people’s lives.

We’re building not just great products, though, but a great company. While we’re a small startup with a great team, we’re growing to ensure that we can continue our success and take it even further. We currently have a two full-time developer positions open, as well as a co-op/intern position for the Winter 2011 term.

Have a look at our careers page and get in touch if you see a fit.

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A dozen ears of corns and a bushel of tweets

Kids enjoying outdoor playground train at Herrles

Yesterday was a meeting of the community managers Communitech peer-to-peer group, held for the first time in their new space at The Hub. The speaker was Trevor Herrle-Braun, of Herrle’s Country Farm Market, who talked about how he has embraced the world of Twitter to evangelize his family’s market and its farm products.

While new to social media when he took to tweeting through @HerrlesMarket last spring, Trevor quickly developed an identifiable and authentic voice and has grown a healthy list of followers that today stands at over 500. His tweets go beyond announcing that fresh corn is available as he has found a way to engage the community deeply through Twitter. A couple of keys to success have been a great understanding of what will work for the Herrle family and business, and a decision to take on one thing and do it well. That one thing, from a social marketing perspective, has been Twitter. Neither Facebook nor blogging have been a part of the mix.

It was interesting to hear how a business as ancient as a family farm has embraced new technology to reach customers old and new.

On a related note, I’ve written in the past about some of the independent businesses that enhance the experience of living in Waterloo Region. Herrle’s is one of the places that my family has enjoyed for many years. The fresh produce is an obvious attraction, but the outdoor play area, corn maze, and generally friendly atmosphere all contribute to a great experience.

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Marshmallow-centred design

A group of people build a tower with spagehetti

Last week I had the good fortune to facilitate not one, but two Marshmallow Challenge events. Briefly, the Marshmallow Challenge has the deceptively simple goal of building a tower using spaghetti, masking tape, and string, that will hold a marshmallow highest above a table top. Of course the lessons learned and the experience of building the tower, rather than just reading about it, are revealing and meaningful. The two big ones are to question your assumptions and to prototype early and often to learn as much as possible.

The first event, on Thursday, was the September meeting of uxWaterloo. The competition was close, and the teams all had a great time. After declaring a winner, we watched a video of a TED talk about the Marshmallow Challenge. That was really just a starting point for some enlightening discussion about the experience of building towers and about the ideas explored in the video. My favourite moment of the night was the realization that when designing for user experience, the user isn’t a marshmallow that can be plopped on at the end. Tower-builders that take that approach rarely succeed, and a user interface that doesn’t involve users early in the design process will often fail as well.

The second event, on Friday, was at VeloCity residence at the University of Waterloo. Having experienced the uxWaterloo event, I knew that VeloCity should go well, but I was still taken aback by the large number of students and by the enthusiasm and positive energy in the room. The event structure was the same as for the previous night, and the students dived in and seemed to have a great time with the challenge. Needless to say, I had a fine time as well, and enjoyed the conversations immensely. A major bonus for me was that Dan and PJ from tinyHippos were their as well, their young family in tow, to talk about what’s important in building software products at a startup.

Thanks for the invitation, Jesse.

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uxWaterloo this week and Ignite in November

This week I’ll be enjoying the September meeting for uxWaterloo (the snappily, and concisely, renamed User Experience Group of Waterloo Region) on Thursday at the Accelerator Centre. We’ve got a fun design workshop planned, which should be a great opportunity to work together with UX folks and maybe we’ll all even learn something, too. Come on out.

Looking farther down the road, Ignite Waterloo has announced the date and location for the fourth evening of talks, conversation, and general good cheer. November 18 is the date, and the new location is the Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts. We’re excited about the new venue, and hope to deliver another great event. If you’re interested in being a speaker, head on over and sign up.

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A user’s experience shapes user experience

I had a conversation with someone a while back about user experience on mobile devices. In the course of it he asked me how much I use video on my iPhone. I responded that I used video occasionally but not much, which was accurate in that it characterized my behaviour but which also felt incomplete.

I’ve been thinking about it since then and observing my patterns of use. I think that I now better understand why I answered the way I did. That is, I now understand the why of my behaviour. It’s not that I’m uninterested in watching video. It’s that I’ve shaped my behaviour to match my experience of the capabilities of the device. Two big factors colour my experience.

The first is battery life. My iPhone 3G will, in normal use, last the whole day on a single overnight charge of the battery. I found early on, though, that watching even a few videos will cause the iPhone to run out of power before day’s end. For a few reasons normal use for me has changed for me over time. So, too, has my iPhone battery’s ability to hold a charge. As a result, many months ago I started to regularly use my mobile data plan for connectivity rather than WiFi — turning off WiFi extends battery life.

More recently, while reflecting upon the video question from that conversation, I (re)discovered that I’m more likely to watch a video if the day is mostly done and I have a good charge left on the battery. This behaviour was almost unconscious; I had to notice myself doing it a few times before realizing why it was happening.

The second factor is network performance. The value of the video needs to overcome the cost of waiting for it to download, which can vary dramatically on my mobile provider’s network. As well, even if the video starts playing quickly, the download is rarely fast enough to allow me to skip ahead conveniently, which I often like to do. In the end, while using my iPhone if I encounter a video that seems interesting I most often reserve it for later viewing on my laptop.

I’ve discovered many other subtle behaviours that distinguish my own use of an iPhone from my use of a laptop on a fast network, but thinking about mobile video is what got the exploratory ball rolling for me.

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Motivation 3.0: doing more at Karos Health

I wrote earlier this week about the importance of purpose in motivating people who are engaged in creative work. Karos Health has a pretty motivating mission that easily provides a sense of purpose.

We go beyond that, though. Karos has a policy of letting employees devote a percentage of their working hours to doing good out in the community at large. That could be achieved by organizing a fund-raising event for a not-for-profit, or building a web presence for a hospice, or serving meals in a homeless shelter — it could be anything. There are only two rules. First, present your idea to the team — not company management, but the entire Karos team. Second, provide updates on your progress with your activity. That’s it.

We truly believe that allowing people to pursue purpose on their own terms, as Dan Pink puts it, is an important path to growing a high performance team.

Does that sound appealing? Check out our careers and get in touch if you think there’s a fit.

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Motivation 3.0: a sense of purpose

Some time ago I read a book by Dan Pink called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates. It’s a fine read and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in understanding how to get the most out of a team (or just out of yourself). If you want to get a taste of the book, have a look at this wonderful illustrated version of a talk that Pink gave to the RSA.

Pink identifies three things that matter to people who are working in creative positions, or positions that don’t just involve repeating the same kinds of tasks again and again.

  • Autonomy. Ideally, over what you do, when you do it, who you do it with, and how you do it.
  • Mastery. Your abilities are finite, but infinitely improvable; improvement demands effort; and mastery can never be fully attained, which is part of the allure.
  • Purpose. Within an organization, use profits to reach purpose, emphasize more than just self-interest, and allow people to pursue purpose on their own terms.

At Karos Health, last week, I was vividly reminded of the role that purpose plays.

Karos Health is about improving the quality of health care through information-sharing and collaboration amongst health care stakeholders. Among the things that our products do, for example, is moving diagnostic images like CT scans from a scanner to a radiologist who will read the scan, and moving the resulting diagnosis from that radiologist to the physician who requested the images.

In a meeting with a customer we heard that in many cases their expected turn-around time for having a CT scan read by a radiologist and a result delivered to the requesting physician is under twenty minutes. Why? It isn’t for money-related or market-related reasons. It’s because for a stroke victim waiting to receive treatment, every second counts. That’s a highly motivating purpose for us at Karos.

Obviously purpose isn’t confined to helping save lives. What’s your purpose?