Brad Lauster .com

I finished Don Norman's book, "The Invisible Computer", a few weeks ago. I figured I should recommend it, since I thought it was so good.

A large portion of the book is focused on an issue that I've been working on lately. Namely, changing the culture of our organization, such that our Management recognizes that while Marketing may "know" the user, they do not necessarily know about software design.

Making this change is difficult to do, as Norman highlights on page seventeen, "Technological Change is Simple; Cultural, and Organizational Change Is Hard." This is especially true at Intel!

I made my first steps towards enacting this change during the work I did on the Intel® E-mail Effectiveness Coach.

With so many things for an interaction designer to think about, it's easy to forget about good ol' Fitts' Law!

What's Fitts' Law, you ask?
In a nutshell, it states that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. The shorter the distance and the bigger the target, the shorter the time it takes to, say, click on it.

For more information, check out this great (and fun) introduction to Fitts' law, written by prolific software designer, Bruce Tognazzini.

You know, I've been meaning to read Csikszentmihalyi's book, "Flow : The Psychology of Optimal Experience."

I just haven't gotten around to it. The topic seems interesting enough, though I'm aware that some people think Csikszentmihalyi is an idiot. See: The Flow Experience: The Summa Cum Lousy of Bad Psychology.

Still, I'm curious...and today I found an interesting set of papers written by Thomas Novak and Donna Hoffman, of Vanderbilt University, concerned with providing a conceptual model of how flow works on the Web. You can get the lot of them at their Research on Flow page.

I recommend taking a look at all the papers available there (not just the final draft). The beginning of the first abstract, for example, is a great two minute introduction to the concept of flow.

...got together with the TI Crew and watched the Super Bowl yesterday. Forget about the game and the adverts, EyeVision was clearly the crowd favorite at our gathering!

The bradlauster.com redesign is coming along. In addition to looking better and being easier to manage, my 'blog entries are going to be date based as opposed to title based - so I don't have to make up a meaningless title every time I want to let you all hear about my fabulous life.

Intel Architecture Labs is hosting its second annual Human Centered Product Innovation Conference (sorry, no external web site). If any of you are interested, let me know and I can get you on the invite list (It doesn't cost anything, but you'll have to pay for transportation to Oregon and lodging). The list of speakers is pretty impressive, including Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, known for his "archetype research" process, Sarah Susanka of Not So Big House fame, Bill Moggridge and Jane Fulton Suri from IDEO, Red Burns from NYU's ITP, Rick Robinson from Sapient, Nokia phone designer Frank Nuovo and others. I can't wait!

Oops...almost forgot to mention: the conference is from April 30th to May 2nd. Registration ends February 15th.

Well, the Practicing Information Architecture conference was great! I hope to reflect on it more in a later post. For now, you can enjoy a couple pics I took:

By the way: I added a new book to the wish list: It hasn't been published yet, but sounds quite interesting. A Pattern Approach to Interaction Design is the title. The author, Jan Borchers, will be presenting at the February meeting of BayCHI. Let me know if you'd like to join me?

One last thing...my sister gets into town tonight. Woo Hoo! Expect updates to be infrequent, at best.

(Note from Dec. 2001: Some of the links in this post were no longer valid, so I removed them and italicized the words that used to be linked, for reference.)

I've scrapped the pending bradlauster.com re-design. I think the design of a bio-blog really ought to reflect the 'blogger's personality. Me, I'm a pretty simple guy. That design was NOT me. In terms of what the design will finally look like, who knows...on my mind right now is MegNut's new ultra-minimalist approach. Bravo Miss. Hourihan!

Speaking of re-designs, while writing this, I noticed something on useit.com that needs a re-design: the arrow Jakob uses to build his bread crumb trails. Has anyone else noticed how crappy that thing looks? On his "Why This Site Has Almost No Graphics" page, he makes mention of the glyph and states that "Download times rule the Web." If that's the case, then maybe Jakob should skip the ugly anti-aliased arrow, and go with my slimmer, trimmer, copyright free version:

	Jakob's arrow, 116 bytes
	Brad's arrow, 59 bytes

(Note from Dec. 2001: The links in this post were no longer valid, so I removed them and italicized the words that used to be linked, for reference.)

Selena got a job at One Media today. Congratulations!

Speaking of One Media: So, I'm playing around with this interesting interface on onemedia.com (flash required). At first I thought, "Wow this is so cool! What a great way to sync up the words with the pictures."

Then I started thinking that it would have been a lot more accessible if they had just put all the pictures on the page with the words next to them, like this:

Well, it turns out that to put those pictures top to bottom would take a page at least 770 pixels wide and 1035 pixels tall - and that's without any branding or site navigation. Yipes!

...turns out that the "designy" solution is probably better in this case. What do you think?

Input a URL and the Vischeck Color Vision Simulator will show what that site would look like to someone with Deuteranope color-blindness. Very Useful!

[Update from July 30, 2002: The Open Country domain name seems to owned by some software company now, so I've removed the link. Raskin now has the project out on SourceForge.]

I went to the BayCHI East meeting Tuesday night. Jef Raskin is a fascinating person, if not an engaging speaker. He's obviously a very intelligent guy, but seems to lack the ability to distill his thoughts in to bite-sized chunks.

I like the fact that he's all about design based on quantifiable measurements. He talked about how more design needs to based on factors that are common to all people. He calls it "Population Independent Design."

He also has no reservations about bashing designers who aren't familiar with what he considers the basics: Fitts' Law, GOMS & Hick's Law, specifically.

Another thing he mentioned: "People can only pay attention to one thing at a time." This idea seems to be working its way into the pool of popular knowledge (for example, in The Cluetrain Manifesto, linked in a related post on Evhead).

The thing that surprised me the most was how many people in the audience didn't accept that the system Raskin describes in The Humane Interface would be better than the current systems built on WIMP. This seems obvious to me - maybe they just hadn't read his book?

I spoke with him after his talk (got my copy of The Humane Interface signed too). He mentioned that he's working with the open source community at Open Country to develop a spec for the system described in The Humane Interface. I looked, but couldn't find anything of the sort on that site.

Please post a comment with your thoughts - especially if you find that spec on Open Country.

Here's a great little design truism, gleaned from a paper by cognitive scientist Kyle Cave:

"In our visual system, attention is distributed in the sequence:
1. location
2. color
3. shape"

...from a post to the CHI-web mailing list by Rummel Bernard. Here is the paper: Cave, K.R. (1999) The FeatureGate model of visual selection. Psychological Research 62, 182-194.

Hi! I'm leaving for Portland, Oregon in about an hour to attend the Intel Human Centered Product Innovation 2 Conference. They've got a lot of wonderful designers, researchers and industry bigwigs (some of whom I've mentioned before) lined up to speak, so it should be great! I'll keep you updated.

Hi! I'm back from the conference and have had a day to consider some of the things I heard and saw. I had a really good time and met some super interesting people...Hi Valerie, Trevor, Scott & Debbie!

I'm going to start posting my notes on the speakers who presented. Some of them will be terse documents of the things the speakers said and others will be full of my own commentary. I'll make individual posts for each speaker, so each will have its own separate set of comments.

(Note from Dec. 2001: The links in this post were no longer valid, so I removed them and italicized the words that used to be linked, for reference.)

While you wait, here are a few pictures from the trip:

(These are my notes from Scott's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Scott Mainwaring - Intel Corp.
Types of collections:
1. Pack rats
2. Set collections (stamps, Franklin mint)
3. Obsessive collections - satisfies a craving (Pokémon, N*Sync)
4. Pragmatic collections - put away or discarded after use (music)
5. Sentimental collections - about reminiscence (kids trophies)

Interesting question: What happens when collections are no longer physical, when CD collections become mp3's on a hard drive, for example?

(These are my notes from Clotaire's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Dr. Clotaire Rapaille - Archetype Discoveries Worldwide

His book: "7 Secrets of Marketing in a Multicultural World"

He made a lot of statements, but didn't present enough, or in some cases any, data to support his claims. Some of them were:
1. Many people have data that answers the wrong questions
2. Reptillian products are those that people want, but don't know why. They are products that are not targeted at a specific market segment.
3. The structure is more important than the content of the message.
4. Homebase - an important concept for Americans

He closed with this request: "Help me to become more human."

(These are my notes from the Student Design Competition at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Student Design CompetitionWork is on-line at Artmuseum.net.

Judges Results:
1. Stanford Product Design Program (USA) - Heart 2 Heart
2. NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (USA) - Topo.Opticon
3. Tama Art University (Japan) - Mobilogue

Crowd Favorites:
1. NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (USA) - Topo.Opticon
2. Stanford Product Design Program (USA) - Heart 2 Heart
3. Tama Art University (Japan) - Mobilogue

(These are my notes from Sarah's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Sarah Susanka - The Not So Big House

The "away room" - a quiet, separated place with a visual connection (glass doors, for example) to where things are happening (the family room, for example).

A place of one's own - Concept presented in "A Pattern Language" by Christopher Alexander

She described several new principles of design and expressed a need for new language for describing those principles.

(These are my notes from Bill's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Bill Moggridge - IDEO

I expected more from this presentation. I thought it would be about the IDEO design process, but it was mainly just a review of products IDEO had worked on.

Here are some of videos / products he showcased:
Steelcase Leap Chair
Eyemodule
Steelcase Huddleboard
Amtrak Acela

(These are my notes from Ayse's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Ayse Birsel - Olive 1:1

The two sides of products: Design=Mother, Manufacturing=Father.

Designed the Toto Zoe toilet seat, with bidet. Also designed the Herman Miller Resolve product line.

(These are my notes from Rick's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Rick Robinson - Sapient

Worries for Algernon

Wrong arguments to have:
1. Focus / Approach
2. Techniques / Methods
3. Concepts
4. Organization

Questions for Rick's long-term projects:
1. Will he find anything interesting?
2. Will the arc overcome entropy?

(These are my notes from Bill's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Bill Gaver - Royal College of Art

Ludic values - curiosities, hobbies, etc.

(These are my notes from Rachel's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Rachel Strickland
Gave an exceptionally boring talk, but showed off her Portable Effects project, which was pretty interesting.

Portable Effects is a series of videos - nomadic portraits, as she called them - of what people put in the bags they carry (purses, back packs, etc.) The videos were indexed and connected through a software program that gave an interesting visual representation of the shape of the bags and their contents.

You may want to read the paper she wrote about Portable Effects.

Like I said, the talk she gave was so boring that I hard time paying attention, but this is what I wrote down about the point she was trying to make:
Invitation of interpretation presented by cinema vérité is easier to create with emerging digital video technology.That doesn't make any sense, does it? :^)

(These are my notes from Frank's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Frank Nuovo - Nokia

Interaction is a relationship.

History of communication:
Essential -> Celebrated -> Styled

(These are my notes from Jane's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Jane Fulton Suri - IDEO

"Designing for the other"

This was a theme that came up in several of the talks. Several people identified that, all too often, designers design for themselves, rather than for the people who will be using their products.

One note I took was: Empathy Tools.
Anyone remember what that could have been in reference to?

"Understanding the universal through uniqueness.

(These are my notes from Uri's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Uri Cohen - University of Wisconsin
Designing for Older Persons with Cognitive Impairments

Considerations that should be made when designing for the elderly:
1. Security & Safety
2. Functional Competence
3. Awareness & Orientation
4. Privacy
5. Meaningful Activities
6. Stimulation
7. Autonomy
8. Social Contact & Affiliation
9. Individuality & Continuity of Self

(These are my notes from Roger's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Roger Coleman - Helen Hamlyn Research Centre
Designing for our Future Selves

I didn't take any notes, but his presentation was very interesting. It was about the emerging market of elderly people and taking into consideration the elderly's needs when designing products.

You may want to check out the winners of the Design for Our Future Selves Competition .

(These are my notes from Genevieve's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Genevieve Bell - Intel Corp
Making Sense of India and China

Franz Boas - cultural taxonomy (collecting all cultural material, such as recipes and curios, as part of anthropological research)

You may want to see Genevieve speak at the May 2001 BayCHI meeting. It sounds like she'll be giving a different talk than the one she gave at the conference. I'll be there...join me!

(These are my notes from Red's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Red Burns - NYU ITP
Gave an overview of the work that was going on at NYU.

Mentioned that there was an article about the work called Electronic Realism in IEEE Spectrum.

(These are my notes from John's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

John Grimes - IIT
Buried Assumptions and Borrowed Problems

Hands down, the best talk of the conference.

Here are my notes:
Q: If everything can do everything, then what should do what (meaning that the computer chips in every product today make it difficult to decide what functionality to include)?
A: Learn how people live their lives.

For designers to hold their own against finance, marketing and engineering, we must have our own, independent base of knowledge about the user.

"We only observe to change"

Design:
1. Surveillance
2. Behavior modification

We don't have to be right, only useful.

John is developing a DTD for developing a compelling story.

Tangible Knowledge - an industry consortium for user research (Can anyone find a URL for this? I can't.)

(These are my notes from Andrew's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Andrew Davidson - Art Center College of Design
Designing Media Experiences at Art Center

The Mok Institute (immersive studio) - featured in the AIGA Journal of Interaction Design Education

Andrew discussed the Art Center's Media Design Program, through which they offer an MFA degree in "Transmedia experience design." I just love the words that film makers come up with...the two film makers at the conference came up with some real classics in what I would call, experimental vocabulary. I wonder if it's because they find they can't communicate in words as expressively as they can with their films?

As part of the presentation, Andrew showed a video of Brenda Laurel, who's on staff at the Art Center. The video was just some off-the-cuff footage shot by someone sitting in the room. I noticed that the camera swayed back and forth as Brenda swayed while she spoke. I wonder if I follow people that way while I'm listening to them?

(These are my notes from Joy's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Joy Mountford - idbias
How Best to Work with Universities to Design Future Interfaces

This talk didn't seem to have much to do with the title (above).

Maybe I missed the point...anyone have any notes on her talk?

(These are my notes from Paul's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Paul McGroary - Phillips Design
Experience Design in Context of Research and Development and Philips Design

Experience Design: People, Space & Enablers

I was interested to hear what Paul had to say, in part because I think Philips Design comes up with some truly thought provoking product ideas and also in part because the CHI-web community recently ripped apart the Phillips Design web site in this thread entitled, "Candidate for worst web site of the year".

One of the questions Philips Design has been asking is: Can you sell experience?
Their nebula project resulted in a product designed to create an experience by projecting images on your bedroom ceiling. It sounds stupid, but it was actually pretty neat.

Paul said he'd send you a book about the Philips Design "Noah's Arc" projects if you send him an e-mail.

(These are my notes from Mary and Andrew's talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

Mary Jones / Andrew Gower - British Telecom (BTexact)
Digital Living - Visions of the Future Inspired by Social Science Research

This is was a very interesting presentation by a team that actually had used research to inform the design of products for "the future." Unfortunately, I can't find ANY of the wonderful examples they showed on the web. Please post if you find anything.

Wow! InCA is a great electronic newsletter.

The latest issue (the first of 2001) has articles by people from GVO, Philips Design and Cooper Interaction Design, among others. The topic of this issue is Design Research. Great stuff!

I just found out that Scott Klemmer, whom I met at the Intel Human-Centered Product Innovation 2 Conference, is teaching Inventing the Future: User Interface Design, Prototyping and Evaluation along with James Landay and Jason Hong, this June at Berkeley.

I really want to go, but I don't think I can get my employer to foot the bill considering all the budget tightening that's been going on recently. Check it out if you can...Scott struck me as a very knowledgeable guy, so I'm sure the class will be great!

The CHI community is such an incestuous little group...
Last Friday, I started a post on CHI-web entitled, "PDF web (WAS: designers?)." On Saturday, Jakob Nielsen published his latest Alertbox column, "Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading." Coincidence? I think not!

Visiting, John Rhodes' webword.com today, I followed a link to computergripes.com, a great site for the usability cynic in all of us.

Robert Reimann defines what it is to be an Interaction Designer in his article, "So You Want To Be An Interaction Designer," part of this month's Cooper Interaction Design newsletter. For those of you who don't really know what I do, you might want to check it out.

FINALLY! A usability study done on GNOME...and the related discussion on Slashdot.

Just thought I'd let you know that I added three books to my wishlist today: IDEO: Masters of Innovation, Design Secrets: Products: 50 Real-Life Projects Uncovered and The New American Cheese.

YaY! The new issue of InCA (4.2 Mb) is out.

In related news, several design firms in the Bay Area are having open houses the weekend of September 15th. The festivities are tied to the content in the new issue of InCA. Trés exciting!

The whole open house fest' ends with a party in Palto Alto that Sunday evening. Who's coming with me?

Well, I'll be damned! The ACM's magazine on HCI, Interactions, is available online!

Lots of Bay-CHI meetings coming up this month:

Bay-CHI:
An Interactive Virtual Fish Tank and Visualization For All
September 11, @ 7:00 p.m.

Bay-CHI Kids' Media:
Handheld Computing In Education
September 13, @ 7:00 p.m.

Bay-CHI Usability Engineering:
Group Task Analysis & A walkthrough early-stage usability evaluation, Oracle style
September 18, @ 7:30 p.m.

Canceled because of Sept. 11 Bay-CHI East Bay, featuring Jared Spool:
Designing for Revenue:Using Research to Fulfill Business Goals
September 19th, @ 7:00 p.m.

Bay-CHI North Bay:
Promoting and Facilitating User-Centered Design and Usability in a Fast-Paced Corporate Environment: Techniques and Tips
September 25, @ 7:00 p.m.

Bay-CHI Web:
Using Task Analysis to Improve the Structure of Your Web Product
September 27, @ 7:30 p.m.

Also, the North Bay Multimedia Association is having a talk given by Christyne Sisk of Foundry 360°, entitled Human Centered Interface Design.

Jef Raskin is giving a talk entitiled, "Prolegomena to future interface design" on Friday at Stanford. The talk is open to the public. Follow the link for the details. I hope you can make it!

Christina Wodtke, Peter Merholz & Jesse James Garrett are speaking at BayCHI-East next Tuesday evening.

Fredo Durand, of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science - Graphics Group, will be giving a talk next Tuesday afternoon, about his course, "The Art and Science of Depiction."

It occurred to me today that "password" is now an entirely inappropriate name for the secret code that people use to access computer systems.

It shouldn't be news to you that most system administrators actually prevent users from setting a secret code that can be looked up in a dictionary.

I've seen "pass phrase" and "passphrase" used in a number of places. It seems to me that this term is not only more appropriate, but sufficiently similar to the more common "password" as to not cause confusion.

Ok, now go out and change the wording on all your systems. I'll wait here.   ;-)

I've volunteered to do some usability testing on Movable Type, next week, with Chad and Christina.

I'm excited because I've known them both for a while now, but we've never really worked together. It should be a good learning experience...they both have a lot more usability testing experience than I.

As for me: I think I'll be doing observation - which is my strong suit. I've always had a proclivity for people watching.

I'm not sure how we'll present the results, but if they end up online, I'll be sure to post a link.

This Friday, Kristen Nygaard, from the University of Oslo, will give a talk entitled, "A process-oriented conceptual platform for informatics." Click MORE... for details.

Sweeeet...Apple's new iPod.

The most interesting thing to me is the method of interaction. On the front on the iPod, there is a jog dial which affords continuous interaction (bear with me, I'm making up terminology here).

To navigate around the iPod's menu system, you roll the dial with your thumb. It looks like rolling it clockwise moves the menu down, while rolling the dial counter-clockwise moves the menu up. Selecting an item is done with a large button in the center of the jog dial. You can see how it's done in this iPod commercial.

Here's my definition of continuous interaction: A single fluid human motion which achieves the same result as multiple discreet interactions.

For example: while reading a long web page, you could either scroll by dragging the scroll bar (continuous interaction) or you could press the down arrow over and over and over and over (discreet interaction).

Including an interface for continuous interaction in your product seems like an easy way to improve a user's experience with your product - if for no ther reason than discreet interactions are tedious.

My mobile phone suffers from overly discreet interaction. It takes way too many clicks to get anything done.

Obviously, this isn't a new idea, but is it new terminology? Please post your thoughts.

Though Tim Gasperak's user interface guidelines lack a review of quantifiable interaction design methologies, they are a good, easy-to-digest reminder of the things we interaction designers ought to know instinctually.
Via LucDesk.

Just needed to bookmark this:
A presentation given by Robert Reimann, of Cooper Interaction Design, on personas.

The fine folks at Adaptive Path have released the materials from their two-day presentation, "Designing the Complete User Experience." Nice!

There are also other presentations available on the Adaptive Path Presentations page.

I went to see Karim Rashid speak at Stanford this evening. All I can say is WOW!

Ok, that's not all I can say:
I had a few preconceptions about the person I thought Karim Rashid was going to be - they were all wrong.

Looking at his designs I expected him to be loud, boisterous, obnoxious. It turns out that he's a soft-spoken, rational, caring individual. He seems to care genuinely about his work and the people who are effected by it. He cares about the people who have to produce his designs, the people who use them and the affect they have on the environment.

He's got a huge body of work (check out the website and his book for samples). Of all the things he showed and spoke about this evening, he seemed most proud of a simple chair he designed using 100% recyclable polypropylene.

He's one of those people who is able to turn the obvious into thoughtful observations. One of those thoughtful observations was, "the digital world is starting to have an effect on the expectations we place on the real world."

The talk this evening left me asking this question (which will seem completely out of context given what I've written so far, but whatever): How do we create formality without ornament?

Also, Rashid's relentless drive to leave his mark on the world has left me wanting this: A good set of tools for creating complete, end-to-end interactive systems. I want to be able to build a system of my own design, controlling the entire user experience, from bootstrap to user interaction, in a really short time - like a couple weeks.

What's that you say? I'm dreaming? Well, I've got a feeling, this evening, that it's the dreamers who change the world.