As a User Experience designer I’m responsible for providing design specifications to engineers. Sometimes the design problems are easy but more often they are complex and difficult to visualize. As designers we’ve latched onto some tools to help us communicate our ideas to our stakeholders. We use wireframes, mock-ups, omnigraffle/visio UML diagrams, comics, Powerpoint and a few other techniques to convey what we mean.

Here’s the problem: If you’re using a different tool, and designing without input from users then you are doomed to fail, or at least have a major communication breakdown eventually.

Have you ever read a book and watched a movie made from that book? Remember back to how different it was in your mind than how it was interpreted on screen. There are hundreds of pages with fantastic descriptions and still the interpretation can be so far off from person to person. That’s why it’s critical to get ideas into a working state as quickly as possible.

It allows the user to soak in the idea and start concentrating on the details. What if it did this? How does that work? Where do we collect this data? All important questions to be answered early. The user can’t start asking those questions unless they can interact with the interface, play with things and exploring. That’s where they prototype comes in.

Learn to design quickly, allow for full uninhibited feedback then iterate. That will give you the best chance at a successful, usable product.

At work I was assigned the task of evaluating the major libraries and selecting one for our web applications. I spent some time reviewing the major players and decided to switch from script.aculo.us to Jquery for the following reasons:

1. CSS syntax - Jquery uses the same syntax as CSS to identify elements within the DOM

2. Unobtrusiveness - Because the function identifies the object using the css selectors, there is no need to add any JavaScript in the markup.

3. Microsoft - It seems more and more apparent that Microsoft is hooking their cart to Jquery. Since we’re a .Net shop it was an easier sell than the others.

4. Support - There is a thriving community with examples, tutorials and forums for answering questions.

I’m at the UIE 13 conference. It’s day 4 and I’m learning about “gallery pages”. I sat at lunch where the discussion was about why we each decided to attend this conference.

I’m not sure I get a tremendous amount of practical knowledge (except for the Ajax talk). It’s more important for me that I emerge from my cocoon of my work environment and interact with other UI/UX folks and discuss ideas. I think teams can sometimes create echo chambers. I work with a bunch of great creative folks but it’s nice to share and discuss ideas outside that environment.

Some people attend for networking, learning or just to get out of the office. I go to soak up ideas I can take back with me in creative battery form for future use. Now if they weren’t so damn expensive it would be nice

Day one ended at 5:30. A great start to a conference. Learning how to use Ajax as a tool and progressive enhancement to ensure your product degrades gracefully was well worth the time. I may pick up Jeremy’s book today. Tomorrow is a full day of talks. I’m looking forward to Jeff Patton’s UCD/Agile talk.

Practicing UCD in an Agile development environment can be daunting, frustrating and scary for the traditional user experience designer. After all, we like to design, research, survey, ask questions and create informed designs which get passed to development. UCD naturally fits better in a waterfall methodology.

Here’s the problem: It’s too damn slow. All that work takes time and unless you have great project management who can effectively stack concurrent activities you become the bottleneck. The designer is seen as the obstacle and not the problem solver. Agile development relies on everyone on the team working together in an iterative fashion to complete the work. But wait! what about my research? How can I influence the design if code is being written on day one? How can I survey users? How can I do my job?

You need to change mediums. You need to get closer to your product. You need to transition your skills and you need to get more involved. User’s don’t use your wireframes and photoshop mocks, they use your product. You need to learn the skills necessary to influence change within that product’s interface layer. For webapps you’ll need to bone up on your XHTML/CSS and JavaScript chops. You’ll need to get your hands dirty and work along side your engineers.

It may take some time to gain the skills and the trust to allow you into the codebase for a lot of organizations but that is where you need to be. It’s where the decisions are made it’s where you can have the greatest control it’s where you can influence change.

Since Agile is iterative you maintain the option to make changes during the development cycle. You don’t need to get everything “right” from the start. Let’s face it, we can survey, interview, test and design until we’re blue in the face but we’re not always going to hit a home run. Agile allows you to chip away at the large chunks and create the fine lines later in the cycle. You have the opportunity to test during development and make changes on the fly. It’s faster and more liberating since you are in control of the layer you and your users care most about, the UI.

I’m feeling a little left out of the iphone, ipod, idog phenomenon going on. So I decided to take a look at some common items and see if I can add “i” to it and see how they would look/interact. The first design is a simple thermostat. I’ll take a look at it’s UI and basic functions and see if I can make it into an ithermostat. The first time experience is below. I’ll create some of the additional screens later. Let me know what you think.

Default Interface

Unlocked

So Microsoft has a new “viral” site out that hopes to dispel the myths around Windows Vista. They conducted several focus groups and asked participants their opinion about Windows Vista of which most were negative. Then they showed the participants the new Microsoft OS called “Mojave”. They see, and love the new version.

For full disclosure, I upgraded to Vista and have several likes and dislikes but overall am happy with the upgrade. But I’m more interested in the psychology at play.

There are several factors influencing the perceptions of the participants:

Negative press and full assault from Apple from day one.
The launch of Vista seemed to be mismanaged from the start. I remember the lines at the store when Windows 95 came out. This was nothing like that.

Past experience using Windows products (good or bad)
Windows has been such a strong part of our day-to-day lives. We expect really big things from upgrades.

The luxury of having someone explain all the new features to them
This is a big one. Users rarely every dig through documentation to figure out how all the features work. They slowly learn only the ones that are relevant to them.

The opportunity to see a “new product” before anyone else
Users who are asked to participate in “new” designs are more optimistic than those who are asked to provide feedback on a product they already know.

Overall I think it’s a great case study on perception versus reality.

One last point of criticism for Microsoft: If you are building a product called SilverLight to go head to head with Flash why in the world would you put this together in Flash?

Update: Looks like the whole project has been upgraded to use SilverLight.

According to several sources the mirror has been around since the 13th century (give or take). Just about everyone is familiar with it. You know, that shinny thing that looks back at you in the bathroom.

But leave it to the product designers at LG to turn it into a “feature”. I think we’ve officially run out of new features for the phone.

See commercial below:

Now if you’re really into cutting edge check out the Jitterbug:

Imagine that. All it does is make calls and keep track of your contacts! No games, no facebook, oh yea and no mirror.

If you use browser tabs as much as I do you’ll love this tip. Clicking the scroll wheel on your mouse will open a link in a new tab. I’ve been right-clicking > Open in new tab for years. This is a single action that does the same thing. Works in FireFox and IE7. Enjoy!

Give it a try!

If you’re like me, you’ve got some version of iTunes running on your computer. And if you’re like me, you see a prompt to download a newer version of the software just about every time you launch the application.

I guess since all the other upgrades were pretty seamless, I pretty much just agree to upgrade. I click on the “Yes” button on go on my merry way.

But not so fast… I recently noticed a new icon on my desktop

Hmmm. I don’t remember installing Safari. I did a little searching and it turns out my latest agreement to install iTunes came with an addendum (Safari). I guess I missed the news on this but I found it a bit intrusive.

I’m going to keep Safari installed (I like to check my webapps in several browsers). But, I’ll be sure to read the Terms of Use a little more carefully before clicking “Yes” in the future.