Category Archives: UX

What isn’t a prototype? Even a finished product is a prototype of the next iteration or version.

The key takeaway from the Le Bricolage section was how the designers cobbled things together to make a brilliant prototype of an innovative technology that doesn’t actually exist. At the end he also noted that in his view, it’s a classic prototype and that the whole process they undertook should be studied and replicated. But reading about the Virtual Whiteboard I began to think about the looming future of the virtual reality fully immersive meeting and how might that impact the design process? I bet for many, there would still be something missing in collaborative efforts. I also wonder if these people might benefit from haptic feedback to replicate that feeling you get when you’re in the presence of other people.

One thing I wanted to make sure I correct in the Buxton chapter, is when he mentions how hunting and gathering research material borders on mania with good designers. That’s all well and good, but these days we say foraging. Hunting and gathering invokes an image of the “noble savage” whose way of life is reduced to a simple binary.

Speaking of prototyping tools, there’s a really lo-fi one called Marvel app, I have it on my phone. You can take photos of your hand drawn sketches and insert hotspots on the buttons you drew to link your frames together for a fully clickable paper prototype. As far as the Warfel chapter, Fireworks has been reincarnated into XD. Axure was still really popular up until a few years ago, but I don’t hear much about it lately. I heard that designers used to use PowerPoint for prototyping, I think with some of the other tools like XD, Sketch, etc., PP has been relegated back to presentations, but I thought it was really neat when I saw Kentaro earlier today in 501 using PP to interact with and cluster affinity notes.

It seems to me that one of the first things many a young UX designer thinks about when they survey the field of technology is how they can improve upon to various tools we use. And then of course many of them seek to profit off of these tools by selling them to the other UXers in the field. Personally, I’m sticking with XD for as far as it will take me, because one of the things that XD offers that none of the competitors can match is the resources and experience of Adobe, with its array of industry standard design tools which have a deeply integrated compatibility across the entire Creative Cloud. I am going to miss my student discount when it’s gone but I shouldn’t be too hard up to afford a personal CC account. Even so, XD is currently still free which is a big bonus over Sketch. I think one of the biggest assets for Sketch is still the incredible plugins it offers through its platform.

However, I’m a PC, and Sketch is Mac only. Although there is a free compatible version on Windows called Lunacy. Interestingly, I do have Lunacy, Figma, and I picked up the free Invision student license, so that’s on my laptop as well. There’s also Marvel app as mentioned previously, which has a really cool mobile app that you can photograph your hand drawn frames and overlay hotspots to create a fully functioning lo-fi prototype for people to test on a real screen! Really neat stuff there.

Unsurprised by the findings in Dow as it’s easy to see how people may look at us playing our little games and brainstorming through the iterative process, they may think it looks easy, or that it’s silly. It’s actually pretty difficult to come up with a bunch of ideas, and people who aren’t experienced in understanding how important a variety is will quickly find that they just settle on one idea because it’s easier.  This is similar to the difference between a trained researcher and a lay person. Lay people tend to assume that the first thing they think of is sufficient and seek ways to prove it. But in research, a person establishes a hypothesis and then goes out of their way to disprove it and refine it until they can’t disprove it anymore. Only after all of that, in addition to peers finding they can’t disprove it either, does it then become theory. 

In a nutshell, this is the method and philosophy of design thinking.

References

Chapters 6 – 11 in Warfel, T. Z. (2009). Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide. Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media.

Chameleon: From Wizardry to Smoke and Mirrors, Bill Buxton

The Efficacy of Prototyping Under Time Constraints. Steven P. Dow, Kate Heddleston, Scott R. Klemmer. Creativity & Cognition, 2009  

GUI Prototyping Tools: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GuiPrototypingTools

“Chapter 5: Picking the Right Tool” in Warfel, T. Z. (2009). Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide. Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media. 

I don’t think we can have ethics without feminist ethics. However, let me preface this by saying that I mean intersectional feminism. Intersectional feminism asserts that all aspects of socio-political identities overlap.

I was glad to see Alison Adam and Jacqueline Ofori-Amanfo dragging questionnaires and surveys just a little bit, while also advocating for ethnography and participant observation. And I also want to mention their criticism of the Kreie and Cronan paper because it highlights an issue that’s kind of been a recurring theme in my reading responses.

Outside of anthropology, social sciences like psychology and economics have a replicability problem. Much of psychological literature is based on studies conducted on Psych 101 undergrads at universities in N. America and Europe during a period of time when the student body was almost exclusively comprised of young white men. Many psychologists believe that they can study human behavior as something distinct from socio-cultural environmental habituation. But if you happen to have read my humans as cake, culture as eggs analogy from a few weeks ago you’ll know that in my view, you can’t distinguish between the two, the eggs (culture) is baked in and part of the cake (human).

In Emily Chang’s, “Brotopia” she talks about how women face barriers into the tech industry because of rampant misogyny and toxic masculinity. It’s somewhat similar throughout the business world. A lot of relationships and business deals are forged through social gatherings. And when these techbros grow up as introverted incels and then are suddenly billionaires, they host these extravagant gatherings, making deals in the hot tub surrounded by the kind of beautiful women that rejected them all their lives previously. Female entrepreneurs don’t usually get invited to these events and when they do, they tend to find it problematic as they often get propositioned by the men or treated as just another one of the women at the party.

There’s a software company in the UK that recently announced they developed an anti-shoplifting AI that is 99% effective at identifying shoplifters before they shoplift. They trained the ML algorithm by hiring actors to pretend like they were shoplifters. So these actors perpetuated the stereotypes that were given to them by a veteran security guard, and I think it was even like just 2 criteria. Trayvon Martin was murdered because of a stereotype that existed in the head of George Zimmerman. How do we know that these stereotypes passed to the actors from the security guard don’t hold a similar bias?

The problem with statistics is that it deals in probability, so all you can ever say to some degree, is probably. We have to remember that correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation. P-hacking is a big issue in science, where we can use software to find correlations that achieve that p-value. In a rush to publish or perish, in a profit driven system where academic journals don’t value failure, in a research culture that seeks to reduce everything to occam’s razor, weak behavioral correlations are rampant and often reinforce racial and gender stereotypes promoted by white supremacists. Because if you already believe the stereotype, then a p-hacked correlation can easily fit the narrative you’re trying to promote.

I found myself particularly interested in the probing method described in Boehner et al., especially the camera. As mentioned in the readings, surveys, questionnaires and even interviews can be problematic in regard to acquiring good data. Self-reporting is something, to be certain, but it’s of limited value because the person can lie or even unintentionally misrepresent their own reality. What people do, what they say, what they think they do, and what they say they do can all vary dramatically. And often times the more a person wants to be helpful, the more inaccurate the information they provide!

I think probes can be very useful in giving the subject opportunities to contribute within their own time and space. I neglected to mention as I ripped psychology in my response above, that a lot of studies are done in a lab setting. While this lends an air of credibility to the researcher, it removes the subject from the context of their own lives. I think it was the Harvard psychologist, Timothy Leary, famous for popularizing LSD in the 60’s, who noted that lab settings and sterile white coats make people nervous, and it primes them for a reaction to the environment rather than the stimulus, the people he tested had bad trips until he made his lab more like a living room.

I have a hard time opening up to an interviewer, but if you gave me a camera and told me to take a picture of the spiritual center of my house, that’s another story, and something you could really gain useful information from, especially from a design point of view. Similar to how when conducting a contextual interview, it’s important to see the workspace as the subject sees it, without them cleaning up first.

I also just want to take a moment to reference The Triumph of the Default. Although I alluded to it previously, we have these tech people deciding what the default is in many cases. And because of that choice overload, many people conform to it even though it may not be adequate for them. Kind of like in Don Norman’s DOET, where he discusses how users think it’s their fault if they aren’t good with technology. Instead Norman says, blame the designer. Just before the semester started, Kentaro published this article  about holding moratoriums on technology until it can be fully vetted for things like bias. As they say, hindsight is 20/20. We often can’t see the ramifications of our actions until we look back in reflection. A better approach is to take our time and carefully scrutinize technological innovation with diverse perspectives. Without research and training, I can’t imagine how some invention I come up with can adversely impact a disabled person living on the other side of the country, or even in my own neighborhood, because their experience is not my own.

Default states, in general can be very useful in combating choice paralysis, because believe it or not, there is a threshold to which choice is useful. But default states can also reward bias. For example, earlier I mentioned an anti-shoplifting AI trained by actors pretending to be shoplifters. If they were just acting out stereotypes from the security guard who happens to mostly catch young black men because that’s who he’s most suspicious of, then the actors just trained the AI to be suspicious of young black men by default. And if we believe that this AI is actually 99% accurate, then it would provide statistical evidence to support the racist notion that young black men are more likely to be criminals. But this doesn’t even touch on the fact that black men don’t have the same opportunities to participate in the formal economy. When you aren’t allowed to participate in the formal economy, you participate in the informal economy to survive. That’s what most theft is. Never mind that due to wealth and income inequality, the police were formed to prioritize and protect the property of the haves over the lives of the have-nots.

Featured Photo by Duncan Shaffer on Unsplash

References

Boehner, Kirsten, Bill Gaver and Andy Boucher. Probes. Chapter 14 in Inventive methods: The happening of the social. Lury, Celia, and Nina Wakeford, eds. Routledge, 2012.

Kelly, K (2009) “Triumph of the Default” http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/06/triumph_of_the.php

Bennett, Cynthia L., and Daniela K. Rosner. “The Promise of Empathy: Design, Disability, and Knowing the “Other.” (2019)

Shinohara, Kristen, et al. “Tenets for Social Accessibility: Towards Humanizing Disabled People in Design.” ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) 11.1 (2018): 6.

Adam, Alison, and Jacqueline Ofori-Amanfo. “Does gender matter in computer ethics?.” Ethics and Information Technology 2.1 (2000): 37-47.

Winner, L. (1986). Do artifacts have politics? In The whale and the reactor, pp. 19-39. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nissenbaum, H. 2001. How Computer Systems Embody Values.

Hi everyone,

I’ve sampled a variety of MOOCs, industry publications, and organizations. I’ve scoured the internet for resources related to UX. In this post, I review one of my most trusted sources of information for UX courses and materials – the Interaction Design Foundation. The Interaction Design Foundation is one of my favorite websites and often the first place I go to when I turn to the internet to look up information about the user experience and interaction design. From courses, to articles, to template bundles on everything from Design Thinking and UX Design, to Front-End Development and Visual Design, the Interaction Design Foundation is at the cutting edge of human-centered research and innovative design.

When I initially began my journey toward UX, I was more interested in UX Design. Only after I got into my graduate program where we were encouraged to specialize, did I start leaning more towards User Research. Given IDF’s variety of learning paths, the ease with which I was able to switch in order to find courses most relevant to my goals and interests was almost effortless. Of course, because of the overlap, I already had a head start.

Since becoming a member, I’ve attended a few masterclasses. I mean, why wouldn’t I? It’s only $1 for members! Then I get an on-demand copy I can access from my profile.

Over the course of this pandemic with working from home, self-isolation, and other social distancing measures, every time you open up your browser there’s a new webinar or masterclass being shared around Linkedin or elsewhere. That’s great to see new faces, hopefully not rehashing the same old topics, but a lot of these webinars end up just being thrown together without the sort of upfront planning or thoughtfulness in regard to the audience and their experience.

Everything about the Interaction Design Foundation experience has been meticulously curated by industry leaders and thinkers.

The Interaction Design Foundation also has a large collection of literature, both classic and cutting edge. This material is a great resource to introduce people to core concepts and methods used in Human-Computer Interaction, with more advanced material to challenge the user at any stage in their career. Of course, there are many other websites offering articles, books, and lessons. I don’t know what materials every academic HCI program is using, but I do know that here at the University of Michigan School of Information, ranked the #1 school for Information Systems several years running, there are required graduate courses that rely in part on open source materials from IDF. These materials are used to fast track students from a broad array of undergraduate majors and professional experiences to master Human-Computer Interaction and UX Design.

I have said more than once that while I’m thriving in my graduate program at UMSI, I believe a lot of the credit for this is owed to the Interaction Design Foundation. In my first year of the program, I quickly rose to become a leader among my cohort.

A large part of this is because of the resources I have access to through the IDF. The courses, literature, and social media posts are some examples of this. But in reality, the resources I make use of most often in my professional work, consulting, and user research internship, are the template bundles.

I’ve used them help prepare for stakeholder interviews, contextual inquiry, affinity wall diagramming, facilitating group Design Thinking activities, heuristic evaluations, and even picked up an AR/VR/MR template bundle to inform my work with the Collaborative Lab Advancing Work in Space (CLAWS) on the AR Toolkit for Lunar Astronauts and Scientists (ATLAS) for the NASA SUITS Challenge.

At every step of the way, the Interaction Design Foundation has been helping me reach my goals. I’ve completed four courses so far, obtaining the Best in Class distinction in Design Thinking, and will be completing User Research – Methods and Best Practices shortly, and working on UX Management: Strategy and Tactics.

One last thing I’d like to mention before I end, the IDF is a community. I’m a member of IDF Detroit and IDF Ann Arbor. Of course we’re not particularly active right now, but I have been to meetups and have leveraged IDF, not only for their educational materials, but also for the networking opportunities. As you grow your skills and advance in your career, UX professionals start to become like a big family. Being a part of that community and taking advantage of networking opportunities are essential, and the Interaction Design Foundation goes out of its way to nurture that need. There are discussion forums, opportunities to interact with your classmates, and almost 500 IDF local chapters, hosting meetups and events, networking opportunities, workshops, and other opportunities.

Honestly, I can’t recommend the Interaction Design Foundation enough. It’s the first and last place I go to for information related to UX. Anytime I hear someone say something about UX or read an article discussing the topic, I cross-reference with IDF to see what they have to say. They are the industry leaders, and the organization is made up of great people who are a core part of the community that they’ve helped build. I’m a part of that community too!

I hope to see you there,

-Matt