Sometimes you still need locally installed apps

The internet was down yesterday. At least our local version of it. I have installed some cool AIR applications recently, one of them Kuler from Adobe, and I was working in Photoshop when the internet exhaled. Did not disturb my work, but I did want to get some colors and opened the Kuler AIR app… No luck with that. It just goes to show that there is still a need for off-line scenarios. Despite this being written in a ‘Discount Tires’ waiting room. I appreciate them having internet.

Getting back into the Web

Years ago when I started getting into computers more seriously I picked up PHP as my first programming language. I chose PHP because it allowed me to make more interesting UI. Obviously I used HTML on the front end.

Then I began working for Microsoft making software for Windows and I needed a new tool to prototype and play with and dived in to C# and WinForms. With Visual Studio intellisense C# was almost as easy as PHP and while I still think PHP has about the best online documentation and built-in functionality, learning C# was quite easy. Later came WPF which still uses C# for the functionality but XAML for the front end. That is what I have had fun with for the past couple of years. 

But I can feel it is time to back into the web again. Either through web development or just using some of the great services that has popped up over the past couple of years. Now, I am a bit rusty on what is going on in the web world so these lists from ReadWriteWeb.com are really great introductions. I am in no position to say argue whether the right products are on the list or not, but the lists have provided me with a lot of starting pointers.

• Top 10 Web Platforms of 2008 –
• Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 International Products of 2008
• Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
• Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Real World Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 Digital Lifestyle Products of 2008
• Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008

-Christian

Victor Papanek

Fast Company’s article on Building a Sustainable Design Community – Article on Valarie Casey and her challenge to the design world known as the “Kyoto Treaty of Design” got me thinking about my favorite designer; Victor Papanek.

Papanek had a mantra that all designers should contribute to society. As such he spent quite a bit of his career in Africa. He also got the bumper on cars. In the 1950’ies deaths in car crashes were at an all time high. Congress wanted to do something and called a hearing with the car manufactures urging them to put bumpers on cars. But the car manufactures fought back claiming that a bumper that could sustain even 10 mph would make the car so expensive that no one would by cars.

The car manufactures won the debate but as people were coming out of the building after the debate Papanek drove a car into the wall of Congress at 25 mps with a bumper built of two layers of tin cans and came away with an unhurt can and unhurt himself. The story goes that congress went straight back into the building and overturned their decisions.

That, to me illustrates what design is about and that is why Victor Papanek is my favorite designer.

The Small Things

I just bought a Zune. I have waited for a long time to get a Zune, waiting for auto playlists and audiobook support and with version 3.0 audiobook support was finally added. I bought it Monday and Thursday it died on me. Or so I thought. It happened suddenly. No warning. I was listening to music during a workout, turned it off when done and tried to turn it back on when driving home. But it did not turn on again. I thought it was probably just out of battery although it had happened incomprehensible abrupt. When I cam home I plugged it in, but nothing happened, nothing showed me that it was charging. I tried two different cables, and two different computers, but nothing.  I was furious. What the beep. Premium price super device broken after just one week, well, less than that.

This morning before taking it to company store, I thought I would just try one more time, and sure enough, when I plugged it in it started charging, the hints on the screen was almost invisible, but it was there. Subdued, dark grey on black, no motion, like someone coming out of a year long coma. After a while it was back to life, started responding to input and finally got its powers back and started syncing wirelessly.

I like drama, on TV, not when interacting with electronic devices. As good as it feels to have brought the Zune back from the dead, it was something I could have lived without and all it would have taken was ‘low on battery’ message and a bright bleep on the screen when I plugged in the power. Too much to ask? Against the dark visual language of the device?

The darkness of the visuals on the device are in stark contrast to the pink that runs through the PC software. But also a good extension. The subdued, under saturated colors used in the PC player works well with the black/grey + bright highlights on the device.

The Zune is full of little well thought out details, many of them enjoyable. Animations for instance run through the entire application and works really well. Except in those cases where you do not use the software as expected. When you are in the collage view and it changes to the next song, the title and album art slides in from the left. Delicious. But, if you are like me and just play your entire collection instead of a single album and start skipping the songs to get to something you want to listen to, the animation really gets in the way. Small? Yes. Noticeable? yes.

Overall I am very happy with my shift from an Ipod to the Zune. The Ipod and Itunes both look dated; From another area when computers where made of grey. The Zune is like when television got color and pictures started moving.

Humans versus Personas

I try not to use the term ‘user’ anymore. I really strive to not use it. Instead I talk about ‘the people we design for’, or about the ‘people who will use our software’. I think the term ‘user’ implies that these people are defined by using our software and I think that leads us to design for them as if that were true. As a concrete example, every time we talk about designing for the application being maximized to the screen, we commit the hyperbole sin of assuming using our software is all these people do.

The word ‘user’ is also symptomatic of what I don’t like about personas. Personas are made up people and I have a hard time relating to them. I am sure they are made up of real user data, but they are made up from the point of view of someone designing for them and usually make us, the product team, look more important than we probably are.

I like designing for real humans because when all goes well, it helps these people, it has a positive impact on their lives. I think that is the main reason I have a hard time with personas. I can’t impact them, I will never make them have better lives, and they will never call me up or write a blog post about how our product is better than what they had before.

Design as a Process of Becoming

Donald Schoen calls design is a dialog with the material, a dialog where you shift from immersing yourself in the problem and standing back to get a perspective on your work so far. A sinus curve. In, out, in.

But design is not only a dialog with the material; it is also a dialog with the people whom you design for. A process of on one hand understanding their point of view and on the other applying your point of view to the problem. A process of becoming them, taking on your customer’s point of view as your own. It is true; you should not be designing for yourself. You should strive to become the ones you are designing for and then design for yourself. In this way of understanding what design is, the process can be described as acquiring and using a 1^st person perspective and stepping back and applying an outsiders point of view, your own as a designer, a 3^rd person perspective on the problem.

This requires two orthogonal qualities. As designers, we need empathy to understand people and we need director skills in order to impose our view of the world. Without one the other is useless. If we don’t have empathy then our point of view will be just ours. We will construe the task we are designing for on our terms and we will deliver something that is most likely strongly us but with an inadequate understanding of the real task and without regard for the human beings who will use our solution’s real needs and desires. On the other hand if we have only empathy and no point of view or the will to impose it, then we are not designers. Design is by and large about what the world should be like. And the strength of the ‘should’ is determined by our experience and vocabulary. I believe that this is what we primarily bring to the table, an ability to envision the world being different, but again, without the empathy that will be a hollow vision.

To some extent this may sound like method acting. I think the difference is that in design it is crucial that you also step back and get the outsider's perspective.

Fidelity vs Intention

Bill Buxton has given us a language to talk about Design and various stages. He has introduced the distinction between getting the right design and getting the design right

 

Buxton has also talked a lot about hand drawings and sketches. Per his yellow book the difference between a sketch and a prototype is not the fidelity but the intention and what it communicates. I personally talk about it as describing "what could be" vs. "what should be".

 

I think however that there is a tendency to grasp on to the notion of hand drawings (or finger paint as I heard in one presentation (sic.)) and talk about it as if the are the solution to all early design thinking. I would suggest that they are not. Different problems need different solutions and fidelity does not equal done-ness

I am all for doing the right thing given the phase of the project and the problem at hand. But I am very much against lack of critical thinking and dogmatism. Communicating something through a hand drawing does not make it a sketch. I know people who can draw rectangles and scribbles but at the exact relative size so they can make very precise specifications for placement by hand and I know people who can express crazy far out ideas pixel perfectly.