Designing for Humans

IDSA Boston - Research in Focus, May 18

The IDSA Boston Chapter is holding it's second annual design research event on Thursday, May 15th:

"Please join us for our second annual design research event! This year, presenters will focus on how research, strategy, design, and business come together to produce results and create opportunities in the context of case studies. The topics will include how clients receive research, the integration of research in the product development process, and how people work with research as a team. We have a diverse panel of speakers each offering an exiting view of the latest in research results. The presentations will be followed by a question and answer session.

Our speakers include:
Heather Reavey: Senior Strategist, Continuum
Elizabeth Lewis: Director of Research and Strategy, Catapult Thinking
Mikey Siegel: Research Assistant at MIT Media Lab, Personal Robots Group"

You can RSVP via Evite.

IDEA 2008 Jury Experience

A couple of months ago I described my experience as a juror for the ID Magazine Annual Review. For the last couple of days I had the terrific opportunity to serve on the jury of the IDSA/Businessweek IDEAs (International Design Excellence Awards). 

While I am not able to discuss particulars of the entrants or awardees, I would like to share my observations on the experience.  In particular, I'd like to discuss my realization that the social aspects of judging designs is analogous to the social aspects of the design process itself.

What do I mean by social aspects?  Consider the various interpersonal interactions that occur during the design process - collaboration during concept generation, peer critique during refinement, and eventually, client feedback.  The value and outcomes of each of these situations greatly depend on the personalities and interpersonal dynamics of those involved.  This is a natural part of the design process, as it should be of most successful human endeavors.

Collaboration and iterative review were very much a part of this year's IDEA judging.  (For more information on the judging process, listen to jury chair Alistair Hamilton's podcast on the 2008 IDEAs.)  Much like the start of concept generation, the review process began with each of the 20 jurors working independently. During the first phase of judging, each juror independently reviewed all of the submitted documentation (forms, images, videos, etc)  entries within a a set of assigned subcategories. 

But this quickly became a collaborative effort as subcategories were assigned to two jurors.  Following their independent reviews, pairs would discuss their recommendations with each other.  When there was disagreement about particular entries, a juror had to convince his or her partner about whether or not to advance an entry to the finalist round.  Although jurors were not the creators of the designs (jurors were recused from entries that they had involvement with) this back and forth reminded me of the discussion that goes on when designers meet to discuss the relative merits of their concepts or sketches.

In the next round, each judging pair reviewed their selected finalists in person.  This year's IDEA awards judging was improved over previous year's, because for the first time (!), the jurors had access to most of the actual products for the design finalists.  Consequently, the discussions were more focused on issues such as details, comfort and finish - much like they would be in a design review of refined prototypes.  Again, each juror had to "make the case" to his or her partner for the designs that deserved merit.  As in the design process, some designs which sounded good on paper, fell short in person, while others exceeded expectations.

The iterative review process continued with a larger review cycle.  This time three or four pairs of jurors discussed the designs that they had selected.  Up until this point, jurors had only examined their assigned subcategories, so it was comparable to presenting a refined design to a larger group that had not been directly involved, such as a broader design or management team, or even a client.  During this cycle modifications were made based on constructive input and discussion within the working team.  At the conclusion of this phase, each of the award winners had been selected and agreed upon by the majority of each working group.

Finally, all of the designs (both award winners and finalists) were open for discussion to the entire group of 20 jurors.  In this last-check round, any juror could suggest raising or lowering the award recognition of any item, whether they had reviewed it previously or not.  This provided a valuable diversity of inputs and perspectives, but the decision was ultimately left up to the relevant working team because of their deeper knowledge of the particular subcategories.    

In retrospect, it was clear that jurying reflected the design process (arguably, as it should) in many essential ways: small-team collaboration, iterative review, and making the case in front of progressively larger stakeholder groups.  Ultimately, like design, it was a mix of creative, intellectual fun and time-constrained challenges. 

Last, but not least, a nod of recognition to all of the entrants, my peer jurors, and especially the IDSA staff for their excellent organization and support that made this process possible and succesful.

in the cards

You may already be familiar with IDEO's Method Cards, which succinctly show & tell 51 methods for conducting research and design.  The cards tend to emphasize ways of thinking like "Look" and "Try", rather than specific, concrete methods.

Enter design consulting firm nForm with their own set of "user experience trading cards".  These provide more tactical methods, apparently focused on UI design, with cards for "Ethnography" (pictured), "Taxonomy" and "Usability Capture Software".

The IDEO cards are probably more valuable due to the greater diversity of ideas presented (although they do overlap internally in some cases) and are more of a way to think about a problem; whereas the nForm cards are more of a primer to user-centered design methods.  And the IDEO cards are tangible in a more important way - you can order a set of actual cardsfor reference and sharing.

Bryce Rutter on The Soul of Ergonomics

Metaphase's Bryce Rutter, IDSA is prepping to deliver the next session of the Designer Spotlight series. His presentation, titled The Soul of Innovation will reveal how ergonomics can be made sexy. Join us for an online presentation on May 21 at 1 pm EST as he shares case studies and offers how-to tips. To register, call Donna at 703.707.6000 X 100 or visit: https://sslserver.com/idsa.org/absolutefp/designer_spotlight_2008.html

[From IDSA DesignBytes]

Technology Behind Livescribe Pulse

 
While I'm still waiting to receive my "pre-order" Livescribe pen, MIT Technology Review has a technical breakdownof the pen's hardware, as well as a video demo.

And here's some free space below to practice your penmanship...

Ergonomics, the Elderly and Elevators

A couple of interesting articles related to design and ergonomics in the past week:

-Businessweek had a blurb on Nissan's efforts to design cars for the elderly by wearing a restricting body suit (see image).  Although Bw was not the first one to report on this, and in fact other designers have previously developed similar simulation techniques, I really liked this illustration.  See, "How to Drive Like and Old Guy"  fourth image in slideshow. 

-In an unrelated piece, The New Yorker magazine featured an article "Up and Then Down: The lives of elevators",  While intrinsically interesting to anyone who rides elevators, ergonomists and designers will find the discussion of "proxemics" particularly fascinating from both psychological and anthropometric perspectives:

"Bodies need to fit. Designers of public spaces have devised a maximum average unit size—that is, they’ve figured out how much space a person takes up, and how little of it he or she can abide. The master fitter is John J. Fruin, the author of “Pedestrian Planning and Design,” which was published in 1971 and reprinted, in 1987, by Elevator World, the publisher of the leading industry magazine, Elevator World. (Its January issue came with 3-D glasses, for viewing its best-new-elevator-of-the-year layout, of the Dexia BIL Banking Center, in Luxembourg.) Fruin introduced the concept of the “body ellipse,” a bird’s-eye graphic representation of an individual’s personal space. It’s essentially a shoulder-width oval with a head in the middle. He employed a standard set of near-maximum human dimensions: twenty-four inches wide (at the shoulders) and eighteen inches deep. If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the “touch zone”; seven square feet as the “no-touch zone”; and ten square feet as the “personal-comfort zone.” Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range—less than eighteen inches between people—“intimate distance,” the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, “Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.”

Data Visualization of Qualitative User Research

While it is extremely important to gather qualitative data such as user interviews, it can be difficult to make sense of such ‘unstructured information’.   Often the biggest challenge is knowing just where to start.  For example consider trying to make sense of the transcriptions from several dozen user interviews - you might have a mix of positive and negative feedback, anecdotes, opinions and narratives.  You could painstakingly sift through all of the conversations, highlighting meaningful terms or search for keywords.  

But data visualization tools, typically thought of in terms of quantitative data, can also help to understand qualitative information.  Data visualization has been promoted as an effective means to present data, but its enormous value in analyzing data has been largely overlooked. 

One such example is IBM’s Many Eyes.  While this web application set is known to many for its beautiful graphing capabilities, I find the text visualization tools most valuable for analyzing qualitative data.  In particular, the Word Tree in Many Eyes “lets you pick a word or phrase and shows you all the different contexts in which it appears. The contexts are arranged in a tree-like branching structure to reveal recurrent themes and phrases.”

When applied to qualitative data (e.g. interview transcripts, free-text survey comments), the Word Tree allows a researcher to quickly scan through text-based content by searching via keyword or phrase.  For example to see what a group of users said about a particular product feature, the researcher can create a word tree around the feature (e.g. “portable” or “installation”) or around particular terms that are likely to indicate problems (e.g. “difficult to”, “but”).  

Visualizing the interviews around critical terms provides a starting point for reviewing and understanding qualitative data in an efficient manner.  It is not a substitute for thoughtful analysis, but a head-start. 

Note: One significant caveat in the case of Many Eyes is that all submitted data is publicly viewable, so it’s not always suitable for proprietary data analysis – but it is free.

"User Anthropologist" Article in NY Times

There's already a lot of buzz about the April 13th New York Times Magazine article that prominently features the role of field research to inform design.  Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? follows Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase in Ghana.  While the article is great for introducing the benefits of corporate user research to a mass audience, it is also tactially valuable in describing some of the field research and design techniques employed by Nokia.

For example, even when apparently traveling light, Chipchase relies on high-end reliable equipment:  "Pretty much wherever he goes, he lugs a big-bodied digital Nikon camera with a couple of soup-can-size lenses so that he can take pictures of things that might be even remotely instructive back in Finland or at any of Nokia’s nine design studios around the world."

Nokia not only conducts field research for gathering information, but a form of user-driven field design:

"Nokia’s temporary design studio sat in a rented two-room concrete hut at the intersection of two busy dirt lanes, across from a woman selling chunks of watermelon and peeled lemons and next to a large water tank labeled “Church of God.” There was a sheet of fabric strung up in front, with neat painted lettering that read: “Your Dream Phone. Share it with the world.” It went on to describe how the community was invited to come share ideas and drawings for the ideal mobile phone. Prizes were offered. So far, 140 people had shown up to sketch their dream phone."

And on-the-fly feedback on product concepts: "Each time the group stopped to chat with someone, Burns pulled out several prototypes — or “physical sketches,” as he called them — for potential phones, handing them over one by one for examination."

Overall, the article validates that common user research techniques done in context, can provide revealing information to drive design.

Also, see Chipchase's blog, Future Perfect.

Recap: Design Research at IDSA Northeast District Conference

While design research wasn't the overall theme at this past weekend's northeast district conference, it was certainly a prominent part of it.  On Saturday, Marty Gage spoke about the how to better communicate design research findings to designers - focusing on the essential transition between research findings and design solutions.  And research was wide-awake on sleepy Sunday.  We had our two-parter (panel/portfolio review)focusing on design research:

During the morning panel discussion, Art Swanson discussed the value of data visualization as a way of presenting information to clients.  Visualization, as opposed to analysis, presents data in an unfiltered, interactive manner to allow people to draw their own conclusions.  He suggested wefeelfine.organd gapminder.org as a couple of interesting examples of data visualization.

Sunmee Kim spoke next, focusing on the various aspects of a design research project at Motorola.  She finished by discussing an internal tool used by all of the design researchers around the world at Motorola to document and share data.

And Marty Gage appeared again, combining clear tactical advice with humor in discussing what should go into a design research portfolio.  It should be an extension of your design portfolio (if you have one), but is about meaning, not sexy imagery.

Following some great Q&A with the speakers, we had the first design research portfolio review, which was combined with the overall portfolio review (see photo above, courtesy of Core 77, and some more photos from that session).

My initial feedback on participating in the research portfolio review was that while there weren't many examples of detailed research projects to review,  it was useful to have professional researchers giving input to design students.  I'd love to hear feedback from other reviewers/reviewees, so please feel free to add your comments.

NY Times Review of Casio High Speed Digital Camera

Following up from my preliminary posting on the Casio Exilim Pro Ex-F1 high speed digital camera.  Last week, New York Times technology writer David Pogue, wrote a detailed review of the unique camera, including pointing out some limitations and constraints (e.g. light sensitivity, focus speed).  But Pogue is clearly impressed, suggesting that "it does seem ungrateful to criticize such an astonishing camera; it’s like complaining that your 7-year-old violin virtuoso is lousy at sports."

Pogue's article indicates that the camera will be available by mid-April.  I impatiently ordered one from Japan, where it was released at the end of March.  I should have in hand in a few days, so stay tuned...