I came across this great video commissioned by Bassett & Partners, talking about the future connecting world and how interaction design can contribute to it. Many mind-provoking throughts.
My take-aways from it are two points: (1) Embrace “natural” interactions – removing constrains and artificials; (2) Connections among things through sensors and cloud will lead to environment- and context-dependent future interactions. What is yours? Enjoy.
Connecting from Bassett & Partners on Vimeo.
As a big fan of traveling, I was thrilled to find airbnb.com. I am attached to it and visit it frequently even when I am not planning for any trip. It is not only usable but also enjoyable.
This website gives me great experience mainly because of the following 4 reasons:
In case you are new to the website and just want to wonder around and check it out, the fixed search bar at the very top of the page will stay what ever page you are going to visit and quickly help you get back to track when you are ready to search for specific destination.
This simple but thoughtful navigation design can always remind and facilitate users to complete the key task without hassle.
In each individual space page, saving to wish list or sharing function (to Twitter and Pinterest) is handy. It is convenient at any stage to bookmark favorite choices. Overall, airbnb enables different pathways for users do discover fun places and ignite their unconscious desires.
The font used to spell their names is handwriting style, creating a sense of friendliness. Other performance matrices reflect their working style. They helps users to make good matches with the renter they are going to deal with and be aware of what to expect. By clicking the name of the renter, users could check more detailed information and business record of her. All the means very much secured users trust towards the website.
To help users make informed decisions, useful information is also ready available and easy to navigate through. For example, information regarding a renting property could be viewed in photo’s form, geography form, street-view form, and availability form, using tabs to toggle among. Detailed description, amenity list and house rules (e.g., no smoking, and no pets) are also specified right below the photo gallery. 
Above are the major 4 reasons why I have great experience on airbnb. As I browse it, I discover more lovely features that reflect those fine considerations from the website designer. A lesson learned.
Thanks to @mihaela_v, I got a chance to read a comprehensive article about comparison of 3 methods of building mobile-optimized websites. As I am very interested in building mobile-based websites or apps, I would like to take a brief notes about pros and cons of these methods for quick reference.
Method 1: Responsive web design
Same HTML, different page layout.
Method 2: Dedicated Mobile Site
Different URLs: desktop website redirect to mobile website. Mobile-version website is basically a separate website from the desktop version.
Method 3: RESS (responsive web design + server side components)
Two sets of code (HTML and CSS) for different devices, loading depends on server-side programming.
As we are having extensive dashboard design brainstorm meetings going on these days, it is especially beneficial to read this insightful and well-written book written by Stephen Few. I would like to share some take-aways from first 3 chapters that I’ve read.
The first 3 chapters offer more general information regarding information dashboard design with extensive examples, while the rest 5 chapters provide further instructions on solving several important design issues.
The first thing discussed is the clarification of the idea of information dashboard. After examining some existing info dashboard products, he came up with a definition of information dashboard (p. 34):
A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.
Notice how this definition can be decomposed to 4 meaningful elements, each could enlighten us on many design considerations. From the definition, I can see at least the demands on understanding visual perception, and users’ needs.
Bottom line here is: dashboard is NOT a technology but rather a piece of design that aims to communicate, and “the limited real estate of a single screen requires concise communication” (p. 44).
Secondly, Stephen introduced different categorization systems of dashboard. The one most relevant to visual design is the categorization based on the role of the dashboard: strategic role, analytical role, or operational role.
Our project clear fits best to “analytical role”, which requires a good mechanism to provide more contexts to the data, and enable comparisons, extensive historical views, & interactions with data to drill down.
Last, in Chapter 3, Stephen gave a list of 13 common mistakes in dashboard design:
NO separate screen or scrolling, which ruins the benefits of monitoring information “at a glance”.
Just as what we discussed in the brainstorm meetings, the budget amount should be offered with other information, otherwise the number won’t mean anything for the users.
The difficulty here is to show meaningful contexts without introducing distraction.
E.g., displays $98,978,407.78, while it should be $98,978,408 or $99M.
What to show with what unit? E.g., let users compare the amount or show the percentage change instead?
What type of chart or graph to use?
E.g., Stephen is strongly against pie chart: hard to compare 2-dimensional area or angle.
Always use the display that works best. Users won’t get bored because of this.
E.g., unrecognizable color differences, 3-D bar chart, and distractingly bright color.
This introduces mis-interoperation of data.
With a large amount of data to show in a limited space, it is important to place information based on importance and desired viewing sequence. This is why we discussed about what information our persona Matt wants to see first.
Also, design and place information in a way of encouraging comparison.
Don’t make everything visually prominent, or users won’t know where to look at first.
E.g., background images, and other distracting ornamentations.
Color should not be used haphazardly.
Also, don’t reply purely on color to convey information: this excludes color blinded users (10% of males and 1% of females).
Simple but hard to achieve: don’t make it ugly.
I am starting exploring a very possible topic of my thesis: building an online identity management tool. Though my focus will be put more on the design and development of the tool, it is essential to understand theories and current practice of online identity management.
Last weekend, I came across a very interesting and informative paper researching online identity construction on Facebook: Zhao, S., Grasmuck, S., & Martin, J. (2008). Identity construction on Facebook: Digital empowerment in anchored relationships. Computers in Human Behavior, 24(5), 1816–1836. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2008.02.012. As published in 2008, this paper is an early effort to research on online identity management in the context of nonymous Social Networking Sites (SNS).
Important things to notice before reading: the Facebook in 2012 is quite different from the version back in 2008. The most important difference is that now Facebook is not entirely nonymous: you can create fake account and you don’t have to be a college students. However, my interests will still be on those who use SNS to extend offline life and communication, and thus will need so called “identity management”; but not those who creates forged identities that have nothing to do with their offline presentation.
Back to this paper. The methods they used are content analysis of Facebook accounts and follow-up structured interviews. The literature review part of this paper gives very comprehensive review of theories of identity construction. I will list some important ones here as an index that can help to go back to the paper:
The results of the paper are discussed based upon these theoretical framework covered in the literature review. The major findings are two fold. First, the identity statements form a continuum of implicit to explicit claims. At one end, people adopt “showing without telling” strategy, using visual presentations such as photos to present themselves. This is an implicit way, which is the most common among participants. At the other end of explicit expression, people use narrative format to tell and label themselves. This is the least popular among participants. In between, there is an enumerative way to show the “cultural self” through listing one’s tastes on movies, songs, and hobbies etc. Second, the authors examined the types of self claims. Most participants chose to project themselves as “socially desirable” and hid pessimistic personas and academic identities. Though most results fit the hypothesis of showing the “hoped-for possible” selves that are positive, they did find some presented some types of “hidden selves”, through publishing “superficial or hedonistic images”, “less socially sanctioned” quotes, and “sexually provocative statements”.
Some reflections: As mentioned in the discussion part, living in this nonymous online environments, online and offline world is not separated anymore. The negative “hidden selves” being shown online is exactly the reason why we want to build this online identity management tool. People, especially students need to learn how to coordinate their identity claims in online and offline worlds, since they are highly connected. The “hoped-for possible selves” could be the ideal image we would like people to cast online. In my previous study of identity construction on another popular SNS Twitter, I also found the similar strategy continuum of implicit claims to explicit claims, which is very exciting. After reading is paper, I have several research ideas: 1. As suggested in this paper, we should compare the “objective” coding of online content with the “subjective” self-reported online identity construction methods. Basically compare “what people thought they did” with “what they actually did”. 2. Continue my previous study of identity construction on Twitter and compare it with the case on Facebook. To better compare, it will be better if the participants group are comparable. Understanding how people are presenting themselves online helps to discover areas that are commonly failing and yelling “SOS”.
Since I didn’t discover any highlight that I want to share with you here this week, I decided to jot down a brief record of my progress in learning interaction design.
With a more-than-7-year engineering background, I am not a typical “design” person, in terms of making things in a visually appealing fashion. However, my decision to make user experience designer as my career goal is not irrational or impulsive: because I know design for user experience is much more than visual elements, but includes deep empathy, and sensitivity to details, and requires a mind of systematic thinking. I am quite confident that my past and current academic training gave me a good foundation on these, and I will approach this career from a different perspective and skill-set compared to those visual designers or industry designers out there. But I am also fully aware that I need to pick up handy tools to turn my understanding of the users into an interactive and testable product. That’s the reason I am trying to devote some time learning technical skills to render different stages of prototypes.
Things I’ve been up to are: using photoshop to do wireframe and low-/ high-fidelity prototyping; leaning elements that should be sliced from photoshop to be used in frontend coding versus elements should be written just in HTML and CSS; learning HTML, CSS, and jQuery to build interactable websites. With other course work load and research work load, learning these parallel is a challenge and opportunity for me. The best lesson I learned along the way is: learn it when you need it; practice it once you learn it. With several projects in the line, I am pushed to pick up necessary skills as needing them for the projects. This has been an efficient learning journey for me since I don’t typically work in this way as a more “theory”-oriented person. I kept quick notes of handy skills and tried to practice them as soon as having a chance. I tried out different ideas, for both practicing newly-learned skills and preparing alternatives for the design.
Nearly 2 months have passed and I am making progress gradually. Now I would probably call myself a guru in Photoshop for Web design (not for creating arts or decorating photographs, though). I am glad that I figured out what my standpoint and my contribution could be to the UX design area, and I am acquiring corresponding knowledge and skills. I might not become a talented visual designer in my life, but I can really be a good UX designer who always have users in her mind, turn her understanding to product prototypes, and test & improve them constantly.
Finally, Lynda.com is a great resource I would like to recommend to everyone who wants to learn web design and development. Dig up the university’s database, hopefully you can get these great tutorials for free.
I came across this fun video persuading people to adopt user experience work into production streamline:
While it is always fun to watch videos with hand-drawing comics and I always have my thumbs up for integrating user experience components into product development, this video leaves some un-articulated questions behind the good-looking ROI. Things are just not that simple and straight-forward.
First, what to fix?
Before any sort of redesign, there should be intense usability studies to figure out the existing usability issues with assigned severity ratings. Because we need to figure out, in this case, what are the reasons caused those 50 customers leaving the website without donation. Further more, among all the reasons, there are some with higher severity level, which if fixed can result in major improvements; while others are minor, probably only contribute to 10% of the abandon problems. In this case, cost in terms of money and time should be considered by the business to decide to what degree these issues should be addressed at this time. It will be account for the estimates of the investment of redesigning and coding the website.
To read more about severity ratings:
Second, what to measure?
It is seldom the case, if any, that the user experience improvements can bring all the lost customers back. Measurements are necessary and essential to evaluation the investment. Don’t forget that measurement itself costs man power and money, and monitoring the wrong metrics is a waste and can cause slow reactions to the market. @jmspool today wrote an interesting article to discuss the concept of KPI: Key Performance Indicator. To recap, there are three important characteristics of a good metric: related, important, and predictive.
Glad to see the importance of UX is more and more acknowledged, which encourages me as a student, a beginner on this path. Through today’s exploration, I felt I am still lacking experience regarding to the evaluation part though I had some scattered project experience. Will put more efforts on this part in the future projects and thesis work.
