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Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

Being a preferred candidate

February 16th, 2009, posted in Games, Grad School, Internal Stuff

Here’s the position I just got notice that I’m the preferred candidate for: (complete details on the entire project here)

Description: In recent years, the paradigm for industrial research and innovation has shifted from a ‘technology push’ model towards a ‘user centred’ model so that industrial research and innovation is now more than ever focusing on application development that addresses end-user needs. Although techniques such as Contextual Design also aim towards a contextualized understanding of user needs, they do not meet the current needs of the industry, i.e., limited focus on a specific class of products, and limited understanding of user needs. What is needed is a better understanding of the contextual settings in which innovation occurs. By positioning user insights between problem states and desired states, consumer insights are formulated and further exploited for creating innovations by means of techniques such as a value propositions. This project will develop methods to enhance the market relevance of existing user centred creative processes, as these apply to industrial research by steering user centred innovation practices with marketing data. The proposed method will be refined through its application in creative problem-solving practices within Philips Research.

Outcomes: Methodology development, towards an integrated approach for a user insight driven creative process, will focus on: (i) ethnographic methods for collecting rich contextual data from which user insights can be derived; (ii) techniques for translating user insights into consumer insights that can be validated in terms of their market relevance; (iii) methods for deploying consumer insights into the creative phase of formulating innovative propositions.

In more simple terms it is this: today companies realize that technology alone cannot be the driver in creating and innovating on products or services, we need a user-centered perspective. What makes this project fairly unique is that they want to fuse user-centered design methods to create a concept, and then use marketing research and business ideas to validate that concept.

In the simplest terms we want to let all the qualitative goodness of design driven research and add in quantitative marketing data and business values.

So what does it mean that I’m the preferred candidate?

It means that the project head and local committee have given me the thumbs up, and that the head of the overall proect committee have to say yes as well, but it would be fairly unlikely that they wouldn’t have the same decision as the people who are heading the project, interviewed me, and will be working with me directly. We are VERY excited about the prospect of it, and as long as the final offer comes back close to the numbers they gave me initally with some decent benefits (which is likely given the difference of health coverage in the EU) then we will undoubtedly say yes.

They initially wanted an April 1 start date, but of course I’m planning on attending CHI in Boston so it will have to be after that. We are thinking of having me go directly after CHI and getting things all set up and then Vanessa and the boys following after the school year ends and Vanessa has her performance with Indy Opera in late May.

Some thoughts on the research

Of course it’s interesting that design and user research is positioned between problem states and solutions. Of course that is a huge step forward from letting design and user research just be a final step, but as per some of the conversations over at NextD that I’ve been participating in, it seems that design is moving and changing and moving even farther upstream towards the problem framing stage. My thought however is that even when design moves farther upstream and it’s not as if we should then let technology or engineering be the driver from there on out.

The two things I am very excited about are these: adding in some vast amounts of marketing data, and the fact that I’ll be workign directly at Phillips research. I won’t be simply coming up with some theoretical business process, but starting with what is currently going on at the User Reseach group at Phillips and then moving forward, putting the methods and theories directly into practice.

Does Design Thinking=Market Research?

November 20th, 2008, posted in Design, Research

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.

Facebook gets groups, when will twitter?

September 10th, 2008, posted in HCI, Twitter, User Experience

It wasn’t part of the new facebook, but recently facebook enabled you to group your friends into different lists. This is a natural part of someone with a growing list of friends that they may want to keep track of.

Now I don’t even have that many people I follow on twitter just 150 (nice round number, shame to have to add more) but still I wouldn’t mind being able to sort them, and in theory I may want to just message some of them about some events, say some local stuff that is happening here in Bloomington.

This is a natural progression and something that users are expecting, but how does one implement this given the complete fragmentation of the user experience given the tremendous number of clients that have sprung up around the great open API that Twitter has supported from Day 1? This presents a very different set of problems than a more closed network. I suppose though that in the larger scheme of things as featuers are added to the service and API that because of the huge numer of developers and clients that good uses will catch on quickly as they have in the past.

Comments?

Usability Challenge 2008 Solution

August 1st, 2008, posted in HCI, New Media, Usability, User Experience

It’s true, today is the Usability Challenge 2008. I have chosen this page:

Higher Education Resources

This is part of an ongoing project I am working on with the Lumina Foundation for education. This page is a new way of visualizing and finding a large amount of information.

Lumina has amassed a large amount of publications over the last several years that all are related to their mission which is helping people achieve their potential though education. People who work in this area directly with youth and adults who want to go back to college are called college access professionals, and my hat is off to these hard working people. Of course there are plenty of researchers who also work in this are, usually in education departments. I have met many in both groups. What all these people including Lumina’s staff members rely on is high quality resources like the ones that have been gathered, but how does one search through these?

Instead of search all of the resources have been tagged (with multiple tags for each item, usually including the year of publication). These tags have been presented in a tag cloud, where larger text means more things with that tag. The really new thing is that if you click on one item, it shows you how many things are in that tag, and you may keep on clicking on tags to narrow your results. The total number is shown at the top on view results tab. When you are ready you can click on that tab and see all the items. It is a very cool way of browsing, and the reaction of people once they understand how to use it is very positive. The problem here is that it is a new convention, with very few affordances. There is a “view demo” but most users don’t see it, and many users often have the volume down on their computer even when the video comes up.

The solution I am proposing for this particular page is a short lightbox popup that shows the user to click on a tag, then a second and then click view results, showing it graphically, textually and then quickly fading to a point on the screen with a question mark on it. Clicking on the question mark will replay it slower and have the option for sound as well as givign a link for an even lengthier explanation (which would be around the length of the current demo).

It will be important to use cookies so that once a user has successfully clicked on the view results tab the lightboxed pop-up will no longer show, and that the whole strategy be evaluated regularly to see if it can be improved and when people understand it well enough we can eliminate the lightbox, but keep a pulsing question mark or something like that.

I am also emailing the results of this to Lumina so that it can be implemented. Usability Challenge 2008 is in the can.

Designing for experience vs experience design

July 17th, 2008, posted in Conferences, Design, Internal Stuff, Philosophy of Technology, User Experience

I recently got a nice little email from someone who said they liked the title of the blog. I want to make sure and blog a few times a week, if not more, so I’m using that as my blogging fodder.

The title of the blog is designing for experience, and I often used to talk about being an experience designer, naively thinking that I could, in fact, design an experience and then a person would in fact have the experience I designed. Then the cognitive dissonance started to come… what about when you have an excellently crafted experience, like say Disney World, and people fail to have the experience that was designed. I know my wife didn’t exactly love it. What about the person who’s brother is in the hospital thousands of miles away, but yet they aren’t going home until tomorrow, will they have the same experience as the person without such worries? What about the person who has never seen a disney movie and then arrives to the wonderful world of Disney?

The last example is unlikely in today’s world admittedly, but still the fundamental issue stands: as designers we cannot control someone’s felt experience. The notion of experience involves both a person’s external surroundings as well as internal states of all kinds. McCarthy & Wright talk about the “Threads of Experience” they are the aesthetic, the emotional, the spatio-temporal, and the compositional, and these are but the threads they chose to pick out and explain. Felt, or lived experience is something that is ultimately constructed by the self. I freely acknowledge that we socially construct many different aspects of our lives and even our self concepts, but in the end our experience is uniquely our own and dependent on our previous experiences.

All these thoughts ultimately gelled and came together while at CHI this year and was at the SIG on towards a shared definition of user experience. Throughout the discussion this idea had been developing in my mind. Yes it’s rather elementary after you lay it out, but before then I hadn’t known it. I finally understood why Ian McClelland of Phillips Design calls himself an experience architect, not an experience designer. I was speaking with him after the session and asked him exactly that question, and he looked at me as if I was a little daft. Of course that’s why his title is what it is, because he recognizes that the locus of control is not with him, but rather the person who has the experience. We construct something that is then to be experienced by someone else (or by ourselves in a different role).

So as a designer I am here to say that while I strive to design for experiences that will inform, transform, delight, and even amuse people, I recognize that each individual will have their own experience with what is designed, and that experience is. It is reminiscent of Kant’s categorical imperative, not treating other as merely a means to an end, but rather being a member of a kingdom of ends (to paraphrase it as I remember it).

In conclusion I design for experience, a holistic, iterative, people-centered approach where I recognize that ultimately each what people do with what is designed is up to them. Different uses will emerge, and ultimately what I help co-create in this world is not mine, and never will be.

Designing for Experience