Designing for Experience

While reading a fine article over at BrandWeek I noticed this:

Similarly,  Tim Leberecht, vp of marketing and communications at Frog Design, San Francisco, said he believed there was nothing new about DT. “Doing in-depth research, that’s what marketers have done for decades,” he said. Leberecht conceded that having customers along for the ride during the creative process  is new, but is more the result of the craze over crowdsourcing than for DT, per se.

DT in this context is Design Thinking of course.  This is an interesting concept.  Predictably I don’t have enough time to go back and do the historical research and say whether he Tim is right or not, I don’t think, however that what he refers to as having customers along for the the ride is as trivial a difference as he seems to think.  He attributes this to the craze over crowdsourcing.  I assume he means that this is a fad, just one that will go away like any other fad.

I do not think that the human-centered ethos that design thinking brings with it is a mere triviality.  I think it is important, and will in fact prove to be the key differentiator in terms of results and value both economic and human.

Economic value: Market research HAS been around for ages and best practices are widely available and are usually instituted leaving little differentiation.  DT can differentiate an organization that uses it internally by creating a better working environment, and can differentiate products and services by creating things that fit with human needs and that are beautiful.

Human Value: Market research is oriented towards seeing a hole in a marketplace, see where opportunity is, and to use the most common parlance “make people want to buy stuff” perhaps stuff they don’t even really need.  Design Thinking on the other hand is steeped in a human-centered ethos that creates stuff that fits a need, and in my opinion, fits the needs of humanity/society.  Many designers are creating products, services, and accompanying systems that are green or sustainable (no I’m not going to unpack that loaded term) so that while they make things that are great for individuals, they are also making things that are good for everyone too.  This is a great example of a human value that DT can bring to the marketplace, not because it’s popular, but because it’s the right thing to do and people want to do, they just don’t have good ways to do it.

OK so maybe I got a little bit on my soap box, but I think my point came through.

I am amazed at how much my research interests have changed over the course of the last year. I was dead set on serious games as the area of my research. I wanted to study them and design them, understand the philosophy behind them, and create and test design principles of them. I guess though, in some ways they have not changed that much, what I am still interested in is critical thinking about technology, and its design.

I am interested not just in the technologies themselves, but how people use them, where they use them, and what the experience of using them means to those people. We could talk about it in terms of the User Experience (UX) of technology.

So I’m moving forward with my capstone on the UX of so-called casual games.

Where will I go from there? I don’t know, but I need to write a thesis proposal for applications to PhD programs in Europe, and I’m torn on which direction to head. I still have energy around writing a philosophical perspective on the community of practice that centers around SIGCHI, but have not as of yet found a supervisor for such research, let alone open positions. So the search goes on.

 From UXMatters

This is an interview from a new publisher who is printing books in the UX and Usability area.  They conducted a Usability study on a book, yes a printed book.  It just goes to show what you think you know about how people use and own things is not usually true.  User studies of all kinds will give you valuable data on all these kinds of things.  Does anyone think Amazon did this with the Kindle? Some maybe, clearly not a lot.

Dear Conference Organizers:

First of all, thank you for all your hard work and dedication. I know you don’t have to volunteer and put on a conference for all your peers and those aspiring to be your peers. I also know that your taking time to do so will distract from your regular work, whether it be research, teaching, or what have you, so again thanks. I am not writing this to just say thank you though, I have a few complaints.

Website URL:

It is actually much easier to find the conference if there is one website for the organizing organization that puts on the conference that then links and or hosts the conference pages for each year. I have often seen that a department, faculty, school, or univeristy will organize a conference and then not too long afterwards the site gets taken down, or I will find the 1998 conference site for the conference I am looking for. I like the historical aspect of seeing old websites, I really do, but unless it point to current resources as well it’s fairly useless in the longrun. What I propose is this, coolconference.org as the main website and then do 2007.coolconference.org or coolconference.org/2007. This is a good idea if the conference does not spring out of a strong organizing group, but if you have one where the website is active I would say do this: groupsite.org/conferencename/2008, and you could make groupsite.org/conference default to the current year but have all the other years accessible.

Website Design:

Please, oh please, grab as volunteer who knows website design and have them use a nice CSS template. So many are free and many more are $50-100. It’s so worth it. CSS makes it awfully easy to make webpages look consistent, and it’s easy for anyone to create new pages with new content in something like dreamweaver or contribute. Even better, choose a template that works with WordPress and do the whole thing in wordpress, it works amazingly well.

Expect further additions, but for now that is all I have to say. Thank you very much.

Sincereley,

Aaron Houssian