I’m at the start of a new phase of our development, and we’re at the point where we need to generate ideas for our interfaces. I’ve observed that wireframes aren’t always well-received by people who don’t understand them – clients who think they need more color, developers who want to code over it, etc. If the only resolution we have to this problem is educating the public, I think we’re in for a very long ride.

This might be because wireframes aren’t obvious enough to people.

You heard that right – if people are misunderstanding your wireframes for a finished product, or your sketches for a placeholder for a WYSIWYG dev tool like Visual Basic – there’s clearly something inappropriate about the tool’s use.

I believe some of us take wireframes for granted, such that we see no other way of implementing a product. While wireframes work well for some designers, I sometimes think they take up time and that there might be better, faster, more efficient ways to build software.

Also, wireframes aren’t great for super-dynamic AJAX-heavy interactions. And they aren’t great if you want to break out of the 2D mode, and work with more dimensions (how do wireframe a keypress, or an animation, or audio?).

I remember the first time I used tons of wireframes on a project, and ended up realizing that we wasted all that time building hi-fidelity prototypes just because I felt it was the right way to design an application. Time was wasted testing the prototype because we didn’t get THAT much insight out of it, simply because it was so blatantly obvious – we should have just tried it on ourselves before testing it on other users.

I’m probably stepping on some UX no-go zones – aren’t we supposed to test apps on real users, and not ourselves? Well, I think there are some things which are so blatantly obvious you needn’t waste the users’ time to fix or test. Testing via paper prototypes a la Carolyn Snyder isn’t always going to save you time. There are much faster ways to get it done, if you think through it a little.

I’m not advocating against wireframes. I’m just advocating against getting locked down on a specific method – against “methoditis” – you know, when you start believing that one method is better than another just because.

Basically, you might want to re-think wireframes if they:

• confuse the people you’re communicating to
• take up time when something else can be so much faster
• cut down too many trees

Here are some examples or ideas of doing without wireframes:

• http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch11_Dont_Do_Dead_Documents.php
• http://code.new-bamboo.co.uk/polypage/ (a tool developed by Clearleft and New Bamboo)
• method-acting (see Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences for an example a designer “being” the device)
• plasticine? feel free to add your own examples.

This isn’t technically a food review, since it was part of a London IA “Field Trip” excursion organized by @AliceNWondrlnd. The main attraction of the restaurant was the interactive tables from which you could order your meal from. There are no waiters coming to take your order. They sit you down at a table, and each table has a “session”, during which you can order drinks, desserts, food, play games, change the table “wallpapers”, spy at the kitchen, track your order amount, and some other interesting stuff.

Interactive Tables

The tables are given an immersive environment via overhead projectors and a trackpad on the bottom right corner of the table. Despite the excitement, the table was not a touch sensitive surface – we had to use the trackpad just as you would a mouse to navigate the “hand cursor” to interact with the system. I actually think it would be hard to design a system like Microsoft Surface, as we were resting our palms and arms on the surface of the table and not wanting the computer to pick those gestures up as interactions.

A small menu slides out, showing icons that indicate “drinks”, “food”, “table”, “entertainment” and “service” (I’m assuming all this, because the icons were not annotated with text or mouseover help). Each item leads to other sub-menu items, and they’re fairly easy to navigate.

Making an Order (Remotely)

When you make an order, you select an item from the menu and it appears on your order list. When you’re done with the order list, you hit confirm and wait for the food to be served by a waiter – it sort of just comes “automatically”. There is no interaction between you or waiters between any of the orders unless you specifically call for them.

This is quite a novel experience, but some people were afraid that they might have submitted the wrong order. A waiter assured us that it is possible to revert an order even after it has been confirmed, which is a good thing – but I think the interface could’ve been improved to cater for this – a waiter actually confirmed that this problem happens very frequently.

Placing an order was way too easy, which meant that the bill just kept going up. It was a bit like Amazon’s 1-click system – and it wasn’t obvious at first how to remove items from your order list (you needed to hit the minus sign next to your item in the order list).

Interactive Tables

In between waiting for the food to arrive, the table “entertains” you by giving you the option of playing one of two games (battleship and those picture puzzles where you have to move blocks around). You can also change the “tablecloth”, which was quite a nice touch as that made the whole experience so immersive. You could also view the live “kitchen cam”, and see what the chefs are up to. I didn’t find the “entertainment” options too distracting that I ended up not talking to the others. And to be honest, our discussions weren’t always focused on the experience of the interactions, despite being user experience geeks and all.

Overall experience

Interestingly, the waiters didn’t take long when we used the interface to “call” them. Service was fairly prompt and cheerful, so no complaints there. My only rant was that my set meal was a bit small – I ordered the cod set meal, and it was not enough for my large appetite. Despite this, the food tasted really good but you really end up paying for the overall experience, really.

The table “session” stops once you hit the “call for bill” button. Once that’s pressed, you can no longer order anymore items (unless you call the waiter), nor can you check the total of your order – which was a shame because we had wanted to pay separately. Thankfully, they were able to provide us with a seat-by-seat breakdown of the damages.

The trackpad was okay except when I accidentally placed a small bowl of miso soup on it, and the undersides of the bowl had some sauce so it make my trackpad sticky. One person mentioned her left-handed accessibility issue.

It’s not the only restaurant in the world to integrate interactive order systems. I’ve frequented Sakae Sushi when I used to live in Kuala Lumpur, and they use a more conventional mouse and screen setup. But obviously Inamo wins hands down for sheer experience, food and otherwise.

I am turning in my dissertation in exactly one week’s time. I’m taking a short break to write this post, not because I can, but because I just can’t concentrate on revising my project right now. And I was thinking to myself, maybe this isn’t a good time to be blogging about the course you’re going to be assessed on – but actually, this is about as real as it gets.

Just leave me alone

At this moment, I realize that all the effort I’m putting into this MSc project is going into polishing my ideas – i.e. writing a literary piece that’s able to stand on its own. And while I absolutely agree that bad writing sucks and that we should all strive to communicate things clearly, half of me wants to just give up and do something else – like, personas or wireframes or jQuery.

For one, I actually prefer to build stuff and see things work. And instead on being assessed on how well I’m able to design solutions, I’m being graded on how well I communicate my research ideas based on the work that I’ve invested in the project. It could be worse, I suppose – but it’s a little frustrating.

Sucking as a Designer

You don’t need an MSc in order to build things. But that’s not why I decided to take up this course. I did it because I was tired of convincing people that they need to build things better for people, rather than just building things so that it functions well. So, in a way, my goal was to learn how to convince people about building things better.

But halfway through the course, I realized that I wasn’t getting any better at convincing people about how to build things better. Instead, I was learning to convince myself about how to build things better.

So, really the MSc basically opened a can of worms for me – it showed me just how bad a designer/developer I really was, because I was focusing so much on solving the problem, rather than implementing the solution.

The Sobering Irony of Academia

The question is – did I really need to go down this path to know that? Did the course make a difference in my life? Would it have been better for me just to focus on building stuff and pick things up as I go along?

I think the answer is yes/yes/no, and maybe it’s because I took the road less travelled and I know of no other route. Firstly, all that effort I put into the course forced me to reflect on my abilities and goals, and I think I wouldn’t have realized there were much better ways to implement solutions without truly assessing myself critically.

It’s ironic that this still doesn’t guarantee that I’ll be able to build better things. But at least I should be a lot more sensitive about building worse things. So, maybe that’s what I’m really being assessed about – my ability to judge and reason about good design, which is more than just writing up a good project.

But mark my words, though – I’m going to park Word aside for some *proper* hands-on stuff when I’m finally done with this.

UXCampLondon has been the best UX event I’ve attended so far. Maybe because it was because I helped organize it, or that it was all of us presenting such amazing stuff, or that the team was so fantastic, or that the sponsors were so awesome or that Addlestones provided cider perks for the barcampers at the end of the day – a perfect treat out next to the Thames. No, it was a combination of all of the above, and more.

Presentations

Because I was half keeping an eye on the food order, I didn’t get to see all the presentations I wanted. But those I attended were really insightful:

Stuart Cruickshank‘s UX for Search presentation provided insightful thoughts about better search interfaces because seriously, we’ve been stuck with old pagination paradigms for ages.

Angela Arnold made some insightful propositions for the use of images as internal tools to effectively communicate user needs to stakeholders – which I will definitely attempt to apply in my existing projects.

Alex gave a good talk about personalization – a tricky thing to design for, but no less compelling. A key takeaway – do users tend only to personalize things that they are familiar with, that they know they can’t mess up? E.g. sorting a sock drawer < theme-ing a Windows XP desktop < pimping an automobile.

I had a lot of fun at Darren‘s session playing team-building games, a nice break and bit of variety from all the other presentations.

Cennydd and Dees‘s discussion panel about location was really engaging – a lot of people sharing their thoughts and perspectives on what we really mean when we say “location” – x/y coordinates are not used in the same context as “in the pub with me mates”.

My own presentation on Diary Studies went fairly well. I was really nervous, but I think based on comments and questions from people showed they got good things out of it, and I was delightfully surprised to hear some perspectives about Diary Studies from other people as well – particularly how Diary Studies can be used to explore the entire user journey of a person.

Organizing UXCampLondon

Working with the team was absolutely brilliant. I got to know some really great people, and seeing it all come together and how everything sort of fell into place was just fantastic. I volunteered to help sort out the food order for the day and that was well received, so despite all the madness of ordering Indian food (waiters passing the buck, failed promises on call returns, GPS-less cab delivery) it all went well in the end. Suffice to say, you’d be better off ordering from somewhere else other than Dawat from Tooting. Mark my words.

The Awesome UX Community

I really love being a part of the UX community here. It’s small enough that you do meet some familiar faces fairly often, but big enough that you meet new people who are genuinely interested in building better experiences. It’s also amazing to meet ex-UCLIC students who are now established in the industry, like David Whittle and Whan Kim, and even more amazing to learn crazy stories like how I almost bought a used copy of Bodyspace a year ago from David and realizing that it got sold at the last minute this another guy who turned out to be Fabien.

Perks

• Meeting Jesse James Garrett and Kate Rutter from Adaptive Path a day before the event
• Free flow of cider from Addlestones at the end, and drinks on tab courtesy of Saros
• Hanging out after the event in front of the Thames
• Free FOOD – esp. sushi from Matsuba om nom nom nom – thanks to Amberlight and Vodafone
• eBay/Gumtree offices FTW

Best Posts on Twitter about #uxcamplondon

• mahemoff: “please don’t take a photo of the wifi key and put it on flickr” #uxcamplondon
• proactivepaul: being unqualified is the best qualification for ux @cdewsnip #uxcamplondon
• bash: This representation of Twitter search results makes me very happy. http://twitpic.com/eu4iq #uxcamplondon
• sjjh: @DominicTravers finds out what happens when you’re late for a talk at #uxcamplondon http://twitpic.com/eu4rs
• andybudd: Sometimes I worry that UX people over think and over complicate problems a lot of the time! #uxcamplondon
• mahemoff: Just realised eBay owns gumtree, that’s why they’re in the same building #uxcamplondon #duhMoments
• Cennydd: “Methodologies… I think we did all of them.” #uxcamplondon
• adrianh: Wait… what was my talk title again? (wanders off to the board to check…) #uxcamplondon
• Cennydd: “In the beginning… was the command line” – @joelanman in ‘The Power of Text Interfaces’ #uxcamplondon
• eyetie: “the best way to make people passionate about your business is to make them better at what they’re already passionate about.” #uxcamplondon
• andybudd: @Cennydd’s online game avatar is acute girl with pigtails! #uxcamplondon
• twhume: OH: “the hardcore market is male dominated” #uxcamplondon
• cyberdees: Addlestones and The Thames #uxcamplondon http://twitpic.com/eviwo
• dominictravers: To me, this slide represents my worst UI nightmare #uxcamplondon – http://mobypicture.com/?633l5g

I’m looking forward to the next one!

What I like about A/B Testing using Google Website Optimizer:

• It helps provide real, direct data (as opposed to sheer guesses, or “eye-balling” secondary sources of data)
• It helps you build strong skills in testing
• It’s fairly straightforward to setup
• It’s fairly flexible – allows for HTML markup, etc.

See how 37 Signals puts A/B testing to the works here.

See Carsonified’s blog post about doing A/B Testing with Google Website Optimizer on WordPress here.

For a quick overview, watch the video from Carsonified below:

How to do A/B Testing with WordPress

I’ve been looking all over for 40-year-old participants for my diary study, and I’m glad I’ve finally recruited three willing participants. The last few participants I recruited were fairly young, about my age, apart from one 59-year-old woman, who provided some very interesting insights into how users search for images.

I am excited about this because diary studies are an easy way to get to know people, and in particular, the way they do things and why. In some ways, it takes less effort over a longer period of time, because you don’t need to be with participants to get insights from them. You only need maybe a first initial meeting to build rapport with them, and the subsequent interactions can be over the phone.

Here are some things I’ve learnt, in order to get the real creamy insights that will impact data.

It’s good to step out of your comfort zone and meet new people

I wished I had started off recruiting participants a few degrees away from my main social network. The 59-year-old participant I interviewed showed that she listens to a lot of radio and uses the email a lot. This influences her use of the Internet, because most of her web use is triggered by email links, email newsletters or similar kind. While she doesn’t stream radio from the internet in her car, she does use the BBC iplayer to catch up with programs she’s missed out on.

In fact, the more boring participants tended to be the ones around my age, because we did pretty much the same thing – checking up facebook, blogging, browsing for items to buy, using Google Maps and searching for good restaurants to dine in…

Diary Studies are flexible, and they’re meant to help you get the most out of your session with the participant

Most of the time, the data that will end up being written on diary forms will vary greatly from one user to another. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that for each activity, or item in the form, you manage to get a decent amount of information by asking the right questions. The forms are meant to be flexible so that users don’t feel trapped, because it should only take a couple of seconds for them to fill in a simple question – what are you doing now? (don’t get me started on using twitter for diary studies)

It’s good to do a few pilot studies, in my opinion, with a varied set of participants – say, one within your social circle or demographic, and again with a participant who’s quite different than you. Do it over a proper period, say – two weeks. I only manage to get a sense of how often I needed to be calling people, what kind of questions I should be asking, how they generally tended to respond, etc… after the third participant.

YMMV, of course – but still, it’s good to not put your eggs in one basket. A trial is often a good way to deal with this.

Diary Studies fits very well with Grounded Theory for analyzing patterns

The whole point of using diary studies is to observe patterns in user behavior in order to establish some kind of claim or conclusion about the area of study. And one of the best ways to do this is by using the Grounded Theory method, by coding various bits of data and correlating them with each other, and also comparing and contrasting against each other to observe any other patterns.

The “data” can come in several forms – some studies have used the jottings that participants have written down in the diary forms. Some use audio transcripts from interviews. Some use activity logs. And usually it’s a combination of several of these. The nice thing about it is that the raw data is very powerful – because of its authenticity and appropriateness within the context of the particular environment or activity. This is in contrast to a lot of lab-based studies, where participants may feel obliged to act or behave a certain way.

Diary Studies help me build rapport with real people, and helps me appreciate and gain new skills in user testing and observation in the field

One of my main objectives of this project was to gain experience observing and working with participants in real-world contexts. This can often be quite stressful or intimidating as it sometimes requires being in a completely new environment. Diary studies help soften that a bit – since you can still get insights about the context/environment via subsequent interviews and/or visits. As opposed to, say, sitting next to the participant while he does his work throughout the day (e.g. shadowing, contextual inquiry).

I’ll admit that just by interviewing people and talking to them about their diaries has helped me appreciate user research, and I feel a bit more confident in recruiting participants, facilitating user studies, and getting good data by interacting with participants in various ways. I don’t feel I need to hide behind a one-way mirror. And I think participants don’t mind sharing their thoughts and experiences, as long as their being treated as a fellow human being.

Now that I have two laptops that don’t talk to each other (politically), I have every reason to not take my desktop apps for granted. I still swear by some awesome apps like Adobe Lightroom and less awesome apps like Microsoft Office (meh) that I use to get stuff done, but seriously the Internet is the new Workstation.

Why? Because I don’t play games anymore.

Games was the single most reason I wanted to get a hardcore workstation. I’d call it a playstation but that’s already been taken. But back when I was a college student, I didn’t have enough money to keep up with new games so I gave up and decided to play with the Internets instead.

Today, I live on the Internets. I move from one place to another. In fact, today, I told some Facebook people that I wasn’t living on Facebook so much anymore. I was trying to be nice, and I was hinting at nicer places on the Internets compared to Facebook.

When new technologies change, people change along with it. You can’t control the way people change their tech habits, but it’s important to understand why it happens. Thus, when we build for user experiences, we’ll need to take this into account, because we’re ultimately designing solutions to support the habits that people have grown accustomed to.

While it’s easy to assume the ubiquity of email, the slickness of the iphone, and the power of the internet, there are occasions when those technologies will fail – and this is why we shouldn’t grow too fond of them, lest we become victims of our own devices.

So, I just posted a few days about stumbling upon UX taking 6 months.
That process can be cut short by reading one of those really awesome articles about what UX is all about.

This one by Whitney Hess is superb:

http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2009/06/so-you-wanna-be-a-user-experience-designer-step-1-resources/

I was having a reflective conversation with Darren on our way home from Cambridge the other day, after our meeting with Microsoft about our MSc projects. The both of us had very similar experiences stumbling upon UX.

In fact, i had come across it from understanding usability, or more specifically, web usability. And I think I was most familiar with the work of Nielsen’s first book, Designing Web Usability, that led me there. I had no idea (at the time) that it was related to HCI in that sense, which I acquainted mostly with robots and artificial intelligence.

But between that time when I first started learning about HCI and User Experience, to the point I really understood what it was – took about 6 months. That’s 6 months of constant, thought-provoking, soul-searching months – and not something I kind of stumbled upon and appeared to me in a flash of light.

That got us (Darren and I) thinking – if it took us that long to “figure out” User Experience, how long does it actually take regular people to understand it? And some of these regular people can end up being our clients, our bosses, our customers, our co-workers. Do we need to take this into account when we’re trying to communicate the stuff to people, and just be patient about it?

Or, could it be that people do get it once they actually see it work – as in, good design blends into the background – you don’t even notice it’s there.

But some of this matters, right? When you’re trying to communicate design in a project, or when you’re trying to sell a concept to a client, or when you’re trying to push forward a piece of work that no one else seems to understand except you.

My question is – does it matter? And if it does, how can we communicate user experience in the most effective way?