Interaction with today’s touch interfaces feels numb and yet it seems that device manufacturers are steadily adopting that design solution. I deeply empathize with Bret Victor’s description of “picture under the glass” effect in his article “A brief rant about the future of interaction design“.

I’d like to inquire about the motivs behind why did the “picture” end up “under the glass” and what is an alternative.

Enabling enabling

To start, I am curious to hear what do you do with your smartphone and tablet. Please tell me.

On my smartphone, I:

1. Look for driving directions
2. Send and read messages
3. Check my bank balance.

Yet my smartphone enables me to do so many more things. I find that to be a failure of design to a degree.

Let me put it in a user story:
As a smartphone user, I don’t want to be distracted by all the possibilities that I can use the smartphone for because it’s a waste of time.

With a knife, I cut. Having a knife in a drawer enables me to cut things in my kitchen. Nobody ever blames a knife for not being able to integrate with GitHub. It’s design is complete by the nature of its purpose.

I can use a knife as a door stoper, per say, but that is clearly not its purpose which we can conclude from its design.

Problem with “picture under the glass” design is that it is devoid of purpose – by design.

We are supposed to add the purpose by buying an app that fits our need. In order for a multitude of apps to work using the _same interface_, it needs to be very flexible. iPad design achieved this by making the interface entirely absent and therefore ulitmately maluble.

It seems to me that we spend so much time on the enabling part that we forget to do.

Out of the box

We are already enabled to do a lot of things. Like compute. Our brain is fantastic at computing. The span of movement we can perform is astaunding. We can talk, read and write! These are all amazing capabilities!

So we all have a lot of great things going for us out of the box. Before adding more capabilities to our list, we should ask the question “What am I doing with what I already have?”.

Infinite loop

If we don’t ask that question, we put ourselves in a infite loop of increasing our potential for when we _might_ need it. While it seems like a good idea, one can spend a lifetime of enabling and not _do_ anything.

This situation is humorously described by Joel Spolsky in the article “Why I hate frameworks“.

The Future

My vision of the future of interaction design is about making tools that allow us to _focus_ on the purpose of our action.

That action should not come through a compromise of having a plethora of options that I _might_ use. That action should be the razor’s edge of it purpose.

Would you rather eat your steak with a steak knife or a swiss knife?

In the future of interaction design, I see devices created with their purpose hard coded into them. I see software that doesn’t have configuration options. I see people having the balls to stand behind their design. And if it fails, throw it in the garbage, note lessons learned and make a new one.

Hard coding a purpose into an object requires determination that stems from the belief in its purpose which liberates us to create an _uncompromising_ design solution.

Otherwise we shoudn’t waste our time when we can go dancing instead.

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We’re doing a 3 hour workshop on how to integrate Lean Startup, User Experience Design and Agile Development on January 20th.

This is a more in depth workshop that extends the sold out one hour workshop we gave at the Chicago Product Management and Association in November.

Lean Startup, Pragmatic Marketing, User Experience Design and Agile Development are all approaches to improve your odds of creating successful products. Are they mutually exclusive, or can you assemble them together to make a lean, mean product success machine?

Join Pathfinder Software’s Amy Willis (UX) Bernhard Kappe (Products Strategy) and Reid MacTavish (Agile Development) as they share their lessons learned in making lean+ux+agile work.

We’ll cover:

• Pragmatic Marketing and Lean Startup- which is right for you?
• Lean UX – Design as the differential gear between customer development and agile development
• How to run a successful inception
• It’s never too early for metrics and analytics
• Agile practices and pitfalls
• Continuous deployment and A/B testing
• Team composition and how to hire

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I was at the dentist this morning. When they went to take x-rays of my teeth, it started as usual, with the lead bib to reduce radiation. The technician stuck the uncomfortable contraption in my mouth to hold the film in place, stepped away, zappo, and came back to move it to the next position.

That’s when things stopped being usual. The first thing that struck me was that she looked over my shoulder back toward her work area and remarked “they look good”. What looks good, I’m thinking? Then, without putting new film on the contraption, she re-positioned it and took another set of x-rays. Now I knew something was up. So I asked.

Turns out my dentist does x-rays digitally now. Although it still includes a dose of radiation, it’s apparently a lower dose than traditional x-rays. Plus it allows the dental staff to easily compare images from year to year, enlarge them to see particular spots, or increase the contrast for a better view. They can also share them more easily and clearly with other practitioners should the patient need to be referred to a specialist or change dentist. All around, better for the patient and better for the dentist. Oh, and just in case you were curious. No cavities!

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Pathfinder Software are looking for talented and team-oriented user experience designers who want to design commercial software products. We do a lot of exciting work for both start-ups who have never launched a product and established firms looking to launch something new or redesign an existing product, in industries ranging from medicine and education to consumer services.

We have built a strong reputation as the top software development firm in Chicago that incorporates lean startup thinking, lean user experience design and agile development, and and are looking for more great team members to continue accelerating.

We take great pride in our work environment. We believe in highly collaborative teamwork, informal communication and pairing with co-workers to puzzle through tough problems and generate creative ideas.

Our office is a big open loft space in Chicago’s river north neighborhood, with lots of whiteboards, glass and distressed hardwood, with walls covered in project artifacts, with after work activities like yoga, game nights and happy hours.

We are highly interested in designers with the following qualities:

• You have solid UX skills in the areas of user research, personas, workflows and wireframes
• You will thrive in a team environment and be supportive of the give and take needed to work in a highly effective way with others
• You get a great sense of pride building strong and empathetic relationships with clients
• You can understand a complex domain and come up with UX solutions that are simple and well-organized
• You can write very clear and complete logical requirements – familiarity with Agile methods such as user stories and acceptance tests is a plus
• You can quickly visualize ideas with simple low-fi tools such as markers, sticky notes and a whiteboard
• You can generate multiple design directions for a given problem
• You can prioritIze what is important in a design and help clients figure out what “Release 1” looks like
• You are capable of leading group workshops to come up with user personas, user goals, workflows and rapid storyboards
• You want to give back to the design community by furthering the state of the art, writing helpful blog articles, speaking at professional meetings and conferences from time to time

If this sounds like it might be up your alley, we’d like to hear from you. Go to our careers section and submit a resume and cover letter telling us what you’re passionate about and how you approach design.

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Bob Moll, Pathfinder Software’s Lead User Experience Designer, and I gave a talk on Lean User Experience at the Chicago Lean Startup Circle on June 30th. User Experience is critical to the success of a software product: Well designed apps get used and recommended, poorly designed ones get discarded. But traditional user experience is slow and expensive and doesn’t get high quality products to market faster. This is death to any new product development effort. How can you get user experience at startup speed?

Enter Lean UX …

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Bob Moll, Pathfinder Software’s Lead User Experience Designer, and Bernhard Kappe, Pathfinder’s CEO are giving a talk on Lean User Experience at the Chicago Lean Startup Circle on June 30th.

User Experience is critical to the success of a software product: Well designed apps get used and recommended, poorly designed ones get discarded.

But traditional user experience is slow and expensive and doesn’t get high quality products to market faster. This is death to any new product development effort.

How can you get user experience at startup speed?

Enter Lean User Experience

The Lean Startup Approach (practiced in both startups and innovative large companies) is a way to find market opportunities and to create products and services that serve those markets in a sustainable way. It focuses on validated learning and reducing cycle time, rather than simply building fast.

Lean User experience is an adaptation of user experience design to work within a lean startup approach. Design decisions are treated as hypotheses, and validated as quickly as possible. We use techniques like targeted brainstorming, user visualization, story walls, story flows, low-fi prototypes, story videos, customer testing and priority diagrams to rapidly get direct feedback from end users and stakeholders.

This powers an agile development effort that generates working software in very short cycles. Overall, this combination of Lean Startup + Lean UX and Agile Development quickly reduces uncertainty and risk, reduces waste, speeds development and increases agility.

To find out more about Lean UX and how you can implement it, join Bob and Bernhard on June 30th at the Lean Startup Circle

To register, sign up here: http://www.chicagoleanstartup.com/events/18470561/

We hope to see you there.

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Brainstorming sessions are great for solving problems and generating ideas. You will enhance your results by remembering a few key guidelines for running your session.

1. Create Specific Questions in Advance

To engage a group, it pays to have a plan. For brainstorming, the plan can be quite simple. Start your session with a question. For example, “What words describe the personality our product might want to convey?” is a good question to seed the flow of ideas. By asking for something specific (words in this case), you make it easy for people to immediately offer ideas. Have about five to seven questions ready for a one hour session. They can even be fun or silly if that helps bring out good ideas.

2. Set the Ground Rules

Brainstorming sessions should be abo0ut creating a quantity of ideas. Make it clear up front that judging or analyzing ideas, straying onto tangents or giving long drawn out descriptions are not allowed.

3. Get everyone involved

Some people are more aggressive at offering ideas than others, but as moderator make sure you get everyone engaged. An easy way to do this is to repeat the “seed” question to a particular individual who isn’t talking much. Encourage everyone to participate.

4. Have someone writing stuff down

Sounds obvious but it’s easy to miss writing down a lot of ideas. Sometime it’s best to assign a person to be scribe for a time, and then switch another person into that role after ten or fifteen minutes.

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In the age of hi-fi tools, low-fi tools still have their place and a very important place. But when should you go with low-fi? Here are some insights.

Team Involvement
When team participation is needed low-fi methods are almost always the best. Everyone can relate to and use a whiteboard, markers and sticky notes. Also, with low-fi tools people can easily work together or in teams. This creates a productive chemistry and a fun environment.

Speed
When it comes to developing initial product concepts, more simple iterations usually outperform fewer complex iterations. To iterate fast, low-fi is the way to go.

Risk Management
When a design task is likely to result in something being thrown out, stick to low-fi visualizations of the ideas. When there isn’t a lot invested, it’s easier to let go of something that doesn’t work and have budget left to find out what does.

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While a mobile app may do a lot of things, it’s essential to design the app so it feels simple to the user at any moment during its use. But how do you generate ideas that will make an app simple?

Try the following approach. List the top ten features you want in your app. These should be the most important things that characterize your app. If you have more than ten that’s OK, but try to come up with at least ten.

Once you have ten (or more) features listed, pick the top three. Now from the top three, pick the top one. Next, set a timer for 15 minutes. Draw some concepts of your app so it only does the top one feature. You may want to use index cards or pre-printed storyboard sheets to capture your ideas. After 15 minutes is up, reset the clock for another 15 minutes and create a new design that contains the top three features.

Obviously, you may do many variations on this exercise. Despite the details, the idea at work here is the same. By introducing constraints (number of features and time), the mind tends to be more focused and often more creative when generating ideas. When one feature is viewed as most important above all others, the design will favor that feature. By trying another feature as the top one, you will likely get different ideas.

Try this exercise on your own or challenge your team to come up with designs. Your time investment will be small but the outcome can be quite effective.

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Most design thinking can be thought of as either Top Down or Bottom Up. But what’s the difference? Why is each important? And what are the strengths and weaknesses of each approach?

Top Down thinking is goal driven. For example, if you were designing a house, a Top Down approach would be to consider the number of rooms, the type of rooms and the overall style. Top Down thinking deals with solving the critical side of the design problem in an organized way.

By contrast, Bottom Up thinking is more emotion driven. In our house example, a Bottom Up approach would be to list out all the cool things you would want in your house, like a screen porch and a fireplace.

Both types of thinking are important to creating good designs. This can be appreciated by considering using one approach without the other to balance it. Pure Bottom Up thinking can result in missed deadlines, blown budgets and getting stuck on ideas that are not important in the overall scheme because everything is driven by emotion. On the other hand, pure Top Down thinking can result in a lifeless design that lacks impact and that nobody gets excited about.

It’s important in any project to balance both approaches. To do so, it’s often useful to engage in one form of thinking at a time. For example, a brainstorm session should be done Bottom Up, where the emotional ideas can flow freely. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP), though, will need Top Down thinking to get to a minimum set of features that can satisfy the target goal.

To deliver designs that are both strategic and have impact, use both Top Down and Bottom Up thinking.

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