Hallo! This microblog is an easy way for me to post media online. I've got a mix of personal and professional stuff here that I like to share with friends & family as well as the larger world sometimes. Enjoy!
UX sundial, iteration 3
Yea verily, iteration is a core tenet of design practice! This is the third iteration of this model with some visual improvements; after this one I'll probably stop postering it. Refer to earlier in this blog for explanations of how these models explicate the disciplines of UX and the activities of IxD on a spectrum of Understanding --> Definition --> Communication.
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3 pages of graphic novel I started in 1996
This here's a weird one...three draft pages from a graphic novel concept that I started way back in 1996. It was going to be called "In the Tree" or maybe "The Wrench The Frown and the Smile", and featured various views of and around a central tree. Twittering birds were doubtless implicated.... This work never got very far, as I only even inked the first page, and today I find it cathartic to post this unfinished work, letting me archive it and move on. Onwards and upwards, hopefully!
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The UX sundial model iterated -- now including an IxD sundial
The fields of user experience (UX) and now the skills of interaction design (IxD) are arranged on a circular path (as before) reflecting the spectrum of product development activities, which range from:
Understanding --> Definition --> Communication.
Thanks to all who gave feedback on the previous UX sundial; I've iterated it here based on a variety of comments. "Marketing" is adjusted to "Branding". "Software Engineering" departs the dial, but this area reappears in the IxD sundial under "Interactive prototyping".
I've also added an IxD sundial, as if one were to zoom in on the "Interaction Design" wedge of the UX model. Here I explore its spectrum of skills revolving around Understanding, Definition and Communication activities. To capture the breadth of activities and methods I've abstracted them into twelve wedges. Not every IxD practitioner has to perform all of these activities. However, if someone isn't using scenarios somewhere in the interaction design process, I would contend that person is not doing IxD at all.
I remain delighted to get your comments! You can let me know if I've got it all figured out. ;) I'd love to see your models!
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Report on first field use of LiveScribe pen & journal
These are some new tools o' my trade -- a LiveScribe pen & journal! For conducting field interviews and ethnographic research, they were a great combo that made subsequent research data analysis a relative snap.
If you're not familiar with it, LiveScribe is a remarkable hybrid analog-digital system. And you can buy it at Target! The pen records good-quality audio, and syncs its audio recording to the marks made in a LiveScribe notebook. Thusly, you can jump back to specific points in the audio recording by touching the pen to specific written marks in the notebook. To do this, the pen uses an embedded camera in concert with custom notebook paper which has a very tiny, non-repeating pattern printed on it. The pen also interacts with controls printed on the notebook pages, like volume up/down, play/pause, skip back/forward, etc. The LiveScribe pen gets synced to a computer, which imports both the audio recording file AND re-creates the written notebook pages on your computer. Then, you can either tap the physical paper to hear the audio, or tap the digital representation of the paper to hear the audio.
While I don't always use a highly-scripted discussion guide, I did this time in order to facilitate data analysis for a large number of research subjects (13 households). I printed out a small-format version of the discussion guide and kept it clipped to the inside front cover of the journal. In the journal, I wrote the number of each question down as I conducted the interview. The great thing about syncing to a computer is that the LiveScribe desktop software has excellent character recognition, so searching for "3.1", for example, pulled up all 13 pages of my journal where this number had been written (one response for each interview participant).
I learned a few things from my first foray into the field with the LiveScribe system. Here they are, in case they help you out:
1) I should have written the number coding down earlier; waiting until I'd asked the question and the person had started to respond meant that tapping the number later wasn't spot-on; I frequently had to "skip back" to catch the start of the person's reply.
2) I wrote way too much on paper! I've always been a heavy note-taker since I learn both kinesthetically & visually, and I fell into old habits during this field work. For greatest efficiency, all I really needed to do was mark the number coding and stop writing. Doing so would have allowed me to maintain even more eye contact with interview participants; however, I do wonder whether it might have created the impression that I was not finding their remarks interesting. I will be testing out the right balance of writing & not writing in subsequent field work.
3) I should have used the "bookmark" feature more than zero times. The bookmark feature is a star icon printed on the notebook pages; when you tap it with the pen during recording,
it inserts a special marker. Coincidentally (or not!), I've always used a star icon in my hand-written notes to indicate a very interesting data point, so this should have been a natural thing to employ. I look forward to trying it out.
4) Unfortunately, I encountered a major bug (and/or usage issue) during data analysis. Although searching for "3.1" successfully brought up each journal page with that text on it, when I attempted to listen to the audio recording on the computer, the screen display kept jumping to show a different page of the journal. I have been in contact with the friendly, helpful developers of this remarkable system and there could be two issues. The Mac version of the LiveScribe software is in its first release; release 1.1 just came out and I haven't tested it yet to see if the update resolved the problem. The other possible issue is that flipping back and forth between the page I was writing on & reviewing the discussion guide for my next question could have confused the system as to which page was associated with the audio stream. I have been informed that waving the pen about in the air causes no such confusion, but that if the pen was being pressed into the page then the behavior I see might result. As far as I can recall, I did a combination of holding the pen in my hand while flipping to the guide & leaving the pen lying inside the notebook along the internal spine while flipping to the guide. So, I probably caused the problem myself and need to be more careful about what I do with the pen while I refer to any external tools. This bug meant that I ended up putting tape flags into the journal indicate the start of each interview; then I simply sat down with the notebook & pen in front of a whiteboard to analyze the data, manually moving from page to page in the journal. Otherwise, I had planned to have my laptop near the whiteboard and digitally move from page to page within a set of search results for "3.1", for example.
5) A couple times the pen rolled off a surface and fell onto the floor, causing me to gasp with horror as it clattered. The pen body could use some sort of protruding element so that it does not have a smooth cylindrical shape that enables such rolling.
Despite the software hiccup and my other learnings, the out-of-box experience with the LiveScribe pen and my whole first field experience was a rousing success. At one point, about five minutes into my first use, I triggered an absolutely delightful and rather surreal animated movie which displayed on the small screen that lives in the body of the pen. It made me think that the creators of this system must be some genius-cool people. I'm certainly a fan and highly recommend this tool for people who do field research!
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Fields of user experience - sundial model
For those just arriving, please see my freshly updated UX & IxD models at:
http://ebacon.posterous.com/the-ux-sundial-model-iterated-now-including-a-0
In this sundial model, the fields of user experience (UX) are arranged on a circular path reflecting the spectrum of product development activities, which range from:
Understanding --> Definition --> Communication --> development --> analysis --> Understanding.
These fields are all reasonably well-accepted members of the UX rubric. Each is a stand-alone discipline. However, experienced UX practitioners will be thoroughly versed in more than one field, and it is recommended for any UX practitioner to have skills across one or more disciplines. The image with orange sections reflects my own personal areas of expertise, following ten years of work experience self-identifying as an interaction designer.
More nuances, naturally, can be defined inside each of the fields. "Communication Design" is a new-fangled term for Visual Design. (UI Design is contained in there.) "Marketing" is included primarily for a small piece of the field, namely Branding. "Usability" spans a range of evaluative and analysis activities.
"Interaction Design" and "Information Architecture" are close kin, as many recent conversations attest. For me, information architecture focuses on defining structure, space, and meaningful content; interaction design focuses on defining behavior, form across time, and purposeful goals. The two seem to me virtually inseparable practices for digital product design. Within the field of interaction design, the Cooper methodology defines various interaction designers as IxDG (interaction design generators) and IxDS (interaction design synthesizers) types, which in my mind is similar to the difference between an IxD and an IA in more common parlance.
This model struck me as a positive way of representing how the fields of UX are related across a spectrum of activities. Also, this model allows an individual practitioner to illustrate their particular skill sets. Perhaps it's an entry point to allow the world at large to better comprehend our skills. Glad for feedback!
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