Travel and visualization

I used to fly a lot. When I was growing up on an island in the pacific, I'd travel between islands, often riding along with my dad, a pilot, on his flights. In college I'd travel home on holidays and traveled to Europe for study abroad terms and a Eurail trip. My travel peaked a few years ago when I was doing technical sales for a software company and flying most weeks, often cross-country and sometimes across oceans. Along the way, it's been interesting for me to see how things have changed.

From my younger days, I remember talking to airline people at counters or over the phone, talking to travel agents, and looking up paper and building-posted timetables and fares. It's notable to me that all these options still exist, but some of them involve itemized extra fees. The only old school method that I used to use that seems to have essentially disappeared is printed timetables for airlines. Even a few years ago I would pick them up from the airlines I flew most often because they were easier to keep handy until I could get an electronic schedule on my Palm.

Also from my younger days hanging out with my dad at the airport, I looked over the other airline counter agents as they typed complicated keyboard commands and deciphered cryptic displays. It made sense to me that that had lots of information to show and lots of different things that they needed to do, but it seemed pretty awkward. Now thirty years later when I look over the shoulders of counter agents, I generally see what look like the same displays, but this time multiple text terminals in different windows in a GUI with a bunch of reminders taped to or printed on monitors and keyboards to remind people of the arcane commands. It's seems as anachronistic as driving by a grain field and seeing people harvesting with scythes.

In the mid-nineties (or "in the late twentieth century" as I think I remember Alexis Ohanian say at MIT's Startup Bootcamp), I started using web-based travel sites more and more. I liked that I could explore lots of options and make trade-offs with information myself more quickly than I could, even with a skilled travel agent I'd worked with for more than ten years. (Often I would find what I wanted online and then call my travel agent to book it.)

On one of my flights across the Pacific, I was struck by an idea for how to make an interactive travel information display that would make the understanding of options and making of trade-offs in complicated or very flexible itineraries much easier than the tables, lists and grids of existing web sites. I was busy with my day job, so I filed it away. I also realized that it was probably over-engineered for almost everyone. But every couple months I'd revisit the problem and my approach, hoping for some new insight to make more power available without as much complication.

Meanwhile, with the exception of the matrix display that I first saw on Orbitz, not much seems to have changed in the last fifteen years in travel planning sites. Lots of tables, lists and grids. They got better visual design and some handy interactive features, but fundamentally they were alphanumeric displays.

Just a few weeks ago, when I returned to thinking about my years-old fancy travel planning approach, a new idea came to me. I realized I was on to something and proceeded to elaborate on it to deal with more and more of its implications and possibilities. I was excited, but working on other stuff, too, so it stayed on the back burner.

Then I read about Hipmunk. I was both excited and disappointed -- they were doing the core of the insight that came to me a couple weeks before: a Gantt-chart-like display of flight times. I was excited because someone else thought it was useful and had actually made it real; disappointed because I wasn't one of the first. I told one of my colleagues about this and he mentioned that this had been around in another form for years. (He had already posted about it on Hacker News. Commenters on his post pointed out that similar things had been implemented other places, too.)

So as I've been thinking about this, three things seem clear to me:

1. Lots of interactions and technologies hang on for a long time: there are still travel agents and character terminals, bumping along side-by-side with Hipmunk's and others' much newer and richer interactions.
2. When an insight comes it may be the first time in the world, or it may not be. I'm often surprised to think of something that seems completely new and a breakthrough and look around and find other people have done it for years. Other times I think of some humdrum little thing that seems obvious and find that no one has done it but it would be useful.
3. Even when I don't invest something, I'm glad it's around so I can use it. I've already been using Hipmunk, and while I'd love to help them with elaborating and improving it, I'm more glad it exists than jealous that I didn't get there first.

Interaction Design "moves the pain up", and worth it

I was talking with an interaction design consulting client last week. After a few weeks of working on this project, I asked him about his experience of it -- was it proving valuable enough to keep working together. He answered in an interesting way: he said that the work was painful, and more specifically that it moved pain to the front of the design and build process.

Some context:

Our engagement roughly amounts to a selective teaching and coaching relationship where I try to understand what he needs to get done and I teach him how to do appropriate interaction design activities. Between his budget and his wanting to "learn to fish", he's planning to do the interaction design work itself.

The outcome that he's aiming for is that the system that he is programming and wants to offer as a commercial product has the appropriate relationship with the users of the system, particularly around teaching concepts in the work and an appropriate division of work between person and system.

He knows a good deal about users and their domain, having previously worked with a couple of user on consulting engagements and an early incarnation of the system he's developing. So he's calling the user and domain research work done enough for now and wants to work on the interaction and technical design of the software system. In particular

So, guided by the approach described by Kim Goodwin in Designing for the Digital Age, we started with context scenarios. At a high level, these were pretty straightforward for him to describe and me to outline on a whiteboard. After doing some work on his own to get done at a high level (like "user X reconciles information"), I suggested going to a fairly fine level of detail along these lines:

user X: sees 71 transactions in account CAT in system 1 and checks that against account CAT in system 2 and approves" 

system: records approval of account CAT and updates totals

note: need to check algorithm for updating to avoid double counting 

My client said this was painful. We talked about it a bit more. He said it was uncomfortable, even painful but also seemed worthwhile. I asked: what seems makes it worthwhile?

He said that all these details were going to be addressed anyway sooner or later (they were inherent in the work), and he knows that once code starts to be written, it carries momentum. Thinking through these issues in a text document, rather than in code and data, gets them addressed flexibly, without worrying about code that's already been written and how to adapt it or replace it. Since he knows something about finance, I suggested that there might be something like a "net present pain" that he's dealing with. Postponing the pain often makes it more costly to deal with, but just like large up-front payments rather than variable interest later, there can be savings and confidence.

He also explained that finding challenges in a scenario early gives time for inspiration for how to deal with them to come to him. (Since our discussion, it occurred to me that another way to put this is that finding challenges earlier gives you more showers for inspiration to strike before the challenge needs to be addressed.)

In The Simplicity Shift by Scott Jensen, one chapter begins with a pithy statement along these lines: "Months of programming effort can save days of critical thinking." Agreed.

Zoho Office/Business/CRM

I'm working on setting up Zoho Office/Business/CRM for my interaction design work.

The first impressions I have are:

They have a long list of applications available, many free, which is appealing.

Some of the offerings appear pretty basic, and some of the edges are rough, including awkward language.

Once started setup, I had to do some digging/poking around to find out what to do next. Without an understanding of how these things work generally, I suspect I'd be lost and frustrated. As it is, I'm just a little frustrated having to poke around for the next thing I need to do, rather than just have the next setup steps listed for me to follow.

As I poke around, I also notice that almost every different app or help request results in a new window appearing. That leaves me to manage a lot of windows, which is a pain.

The Media Equation and Wired for Speech

I just finished reading The Media Equation by Reeves and Nass and Wired for Speech by Nass and Brave.

Fascinating! And probably useful whenever I get to doing some voice, animation and/or video-including interfaces.

From the Media Equation: Have some people watch news and entertainment programs on a TV with a sign on top of it "News Television" and news and entertainment programs on an identical TV right next to it with a sign on top of it labeled "Entertainment Television". Mix up which people see which programs on which TV. Ask people to rate the programs they watched, and they rated the news programs shown on the "News" TV more enjoyable, trustworthy, etc. than the ones shown on the "Entertainment" TV and vice versa. Stunning to me.

From Wired for Speech: Have some people listen to the same five positive book reviews read either by a single voice or by five different voices. The people who hear the same reviews read by five different people rate the books as more appealing, etc. than the people who hear the identical content read by a single voice. Again, stunning.

What follows are some of my notes to myself to remind me of the findings in brief.

From The Media Equation. (Generally, substitute "computer" for "person" in social psychology findings and get essentially the same results, hence 'equation'.)

Manners

Politeness: People give more positive and homogenous answers when a computer asks the person to evaluate the computer than when another computer asks to evaluate the first computer. Grice's Maxims for politeness: quality, quantity, relevance and clarity.

Interpersonal distance: Pictures of people presented closer will have more intense evaluations, pay more attention to them and remember them better.

Flattery: People flattered by a computer will believe they performed better and like the computer more, whether or not the praise is warranted. People will think they did better when a computer criticizes them baselessly than with cause. People will like a computer better when it praises them than when it criticizes them.

Judging: Performance praised by a computer will be judged better than criticized performance. Computer self-praise will be judged less valid than when praise comes from another computer. A computer than praises another computer will be liked more than a computer that praises itself. A computer that criticizes another computer will be liked less than a computer that criticizes itself; it will also be judged more intelligent.

Personality

Personality of characters: Most important are dominance/submissiveness and friendliness/unfriendliness, and they are readily identified by people.

Personality of interfaces: From text, people will be able to differentiate dominant from submissive interfaces and judge how similar or different they are from themselves and correspondingly like more or less the interface.

Imitating personality: People like a compuer that starts out opposite them in the dominant/submissive range and becomes more like them than one that is like them consistently.

Emotion

Negativity: People don't like negative media, but they pay more attention to it and remember it better. They remember material better when presented after negative media and worse when presented before negative media.

Social Roles

Specialists: Content from a source labeled "specialist" will be judged superior than from a "generalist" source.

Teammates: People teamed with a computer will feel more similar to the computer, judge it better, cooperate and agree more than people not teamed with it. (Teaming is as simple as a colored wrist band matching a colored bezel on the screen. Teaming can be peer, superior, inferior.)

Conferences

Some upcoming IxD-related conferences

Creativity and Cognition 2007 http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CC2007/
UIST2007 http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2007/
RecSys '07: Recommender Systems 2007 http://recsys.acm.org/
VRST: ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology http://www.vrst.org/vrst2007/
ICMI 2007: International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces http://www.acm.org/icmi/2007/
MobileHCI 2007 http://www.mobilehci.org
DIS 2008: Designing Interactive Systems http://www.sigchi.org/dis2008/
CSCW 2008: Computer Supported Cooperative Work http://www.cscw2008.org/
HCI 2007 http://www.hci2007.org
Ubicomp 2007 http://www.ubicomp2007.org/
SIGCHI 2008 http://www.chi2008.org/

IxD blogs

www.designthinkingdigest.com
www.odannyboy.com/blog
http://www.graphpaper.com/

IxD books, articles

From postings to the IxDN Discuss list:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=IXDAreads

http://www.graphpaper.com/2007/04-01_interaction-design-style-my-ia-summit-2007-presentation

Designing for Interaction - Dan Saffer

Designing the Obvious - Robert Hoekman

Ambient Findability - Peter Morville

Digital Ground by Malcolm McCullough

Designing Interfaces by Jennifer Tidwell

Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko

Sketching User Experience by Bill Buxton

Managing the Design Factory

Designing the Mobile User Experience - Mobile Interaction Design
Mobile Interaction Design - Jones and Marsden

Designing Interfaces - Tidwell

How Buildings Learn

The Architecture of Happiness

“Style is Not a Four Letter Word”, Emigre #62 by Mr. Keedy (magazine article)

Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald Norman

The Elements of Typograhic Style - Bringhurst

Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design

What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, And Design

Ajax Design Patterns - Mahemoff

Critical Mass, How One Thing Leads to Another - Ball

Ajax and REST Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach - Gross

Massively Multiplayer Game Development - Alexander (This book is awesome
when considering how to build persistent world community driven
applications, social networks, etc.)

1) Made to Stick - the Heath brothers (if I had to pick one ABSOLUTE
MUST READ book, this would be it)

2) The Long Tail - Anderson

3) The Paradox of Choice - Schwartz

4) Flow - Csikszentmihalyi

5) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Cialdini

\Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The
Principles of Screenwriting - McKee.

Catching the Big Fish

What Things Do

The Creating Brain -Andreasen

The Laws of Simplicity -Maeda

In the Bubble -Thakara

Designing Interactions -Moggridge

Managing as Designing - Boland/Callopy (even better the second time)

Unstuck by Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro http://www.unstuck.com/

Imitation of Life How Biology is Inspiring Computing, Nancy Forbes (2005)

The Human Use of Human Beings - Cybernetics and Society, Norbert Wiener (1956)

The Meaning of Art, Herbert Read (1949)

The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time - Hall

Learning from Stangers - Weiss

Making Comics - McCloud

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team - Lencioni

The Natue of Order: The Phenomenon of Life - Alexander

Basic Visual Concepts And Principles For Artists, Architects And Designers - Wallschlaeger & Busic-Snyder

Universal Principles of Design - Holden, Litwell, Butler

"Information Interaction Design: A unified field theory of design" byNathan Shedroff:* http://www.nathan.com/thoughts/unified/

"All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelinesfor user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings" by AdamGreenfield (Boxes and Arrows)* http://tinyurl.com/nw3mx

TurboTax 2006

I just finished using TurboTax Deluxe 2006 on my Windows machine.

Overall, seemed about as easy as the tax code allows. Kudos.

However, there were a number of bugs and one noticeable inconsistency.

There were bugs that froze the app (adding a charity in It's Deductible), got me stuck with incorrect information getting stored (repeatedly asking for prior year's state tax paid with return, each retry adding another line and more dollars to the total amount of supposed tax paid), and some data entry flakiness (after adding a charity, the one before it alphabetically is selected in It's Deductable, after tabbing to the donation amount in It's Deductible the field would accept one digit until navigating away and back or clicking in the field's box).

All of these were surmountable (but the repeated tax entry could have really stung me if I hadn't figured out what was going on by looking at the tax form, making the correction manually, and concluding there was nothing more in that category that I needed to do so I could just stop there).

The inconsistency I noticed is how "none of these apply to me" is handled. In some cases, you have to check a box and continue, in other cases the topic is phrased "do any of these apply to you" and you click yes or no. The second way works out quicker, and I prefer it (I tend to read closely with the app... I can see how "none of these apply" as an option is a way to increase the likelihood that people read the options, but I don't imagine it takes much for people who don't want to read to learn to look at the last option if they don't think something applies to them).

Overall, pleased with an overall nicely done tool. If only the tax code were simpler...

TomTom navigator

Last summer I got a TomTom navigator system for my Palm Treo 650 phone -- map and software runs on the phone and there's an external BlueTooth GPS receiver.

It's been pretty excellent. Not perfect, but excellent.

On the plus side, it basically works the way it needs to. It gives directions well, shows maps and other useful information at the right time and right way, and helps me get where I'm going without much fuss.

Downsides on the interaction are few. It doesn't remember many recent destinations at all (just five), even though there is screen real estate for twice that many. It forgets if you've asked for a walking or no-freeway route if you quit the Navigator and restart it. It doesn't give any indication that it's about to say something -- it just blurts it out, which often interrupts conversations in the car. Small-time stuff.

Actually, the worst things are not so much about how the interaction works but the fact that it seems to expose Palm problems.

The consistently worst thing has been when navigating, I can't answer an incoming call with the button on my BlueTooth headset. I haven't actually figured out how to reliably answer in any way. Generally I end up having to return the call by leaving the Navigator app and listening to voice mail and calling back.

It fairly often crashes my phone and causes it to restart (fortunately never when driving or on the phone as I recall).

The map data is quite good, but new development and no left turn rules or map data have inconvenienced me a few times.

I'm not sure whether it's map data or navigator design, but there are a number of times (usually Ys -- merges or splits in roadways) that the direction given is different than what makes sense to me (I'd say go straight when it says to bear left), or doesn't give a direction when I think I need one. Fortunately, the visual display shows what I need to know.

There's some combination of turning the phone off and on and going in and out of the GPS BlueTooth range that causes the software to not be able to get the GPS signal. Relaunching the software generally fixes it.

A few nice notes:

Jane's voice is excellent. Clear and authoritative, but not pushy.

Other systems I've seen have said out loud things like "Off Route!" or "Recalculating" when you don't follow their directions. TomTom is silent while recalculating and shows a progress bar as it does so. As soon as it figures out what to do, it starts telling you.

Who is Carl and what is an Interaction Designer?

I've been interested for decades now in how things work when people use or interact with them, and how to make them work better so that people are more successful with less effort, and, ultimately, happier as they use technology in their life.

I was curious about these things in school and could tell that there were some things that were a pleasure to use and make me feel productive and successful and there were other things that made me angry and sometimes completely kept me from getting done what I wanted to. Around the time I finished college, I read Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things and I started down the path towards taking on interaction design as my craft.

Over the intervening years, I've seen new technology while working in MIT's patent and licensing office, worked at IT help desks, evaluated, designed, managed and sold (pretty much everything but wrote code for) technology projects including help desk software, accounting software, lobby touch-screen kiosks to enterprise system management software.

As an interaction designer, I believe my talents and responsibilities are to:
- understand existing and potential users of a system (device, web site, beaurocracy, or whatever), how they think, what their goals are, and what constraints they live under,
- design how a system should work in order to meet users' goals, collaborating with engineers, graphic designers, product managers and marketers to ensure that the system is an all-around success, and
- evaluate existing or proposed systems for their usefulness and usability.

I am fortunate to have worked on a large clean-slate project with excellent designers and teachers from Cooper Software (founded by Alan Cooper of The Inmates are Running the Asylum). I have also had the good fortune to work on smaller, agile development projects to hone my skills at collaborating with teams of people developing incremental improvements to a production system.