Bill Buxton has very kindly offered to make a presentation on, "Performance by Design: The Role of Design in Software Product Development" whilst he is still around in April. Thanks Bill!
Bill recently made an excellent presentation to a packed audience at a meeting of The Cambridge Network, so expect this to be a cracker!
Date: Wednesday 20th April 2005
Time: 6.30 for 6.45pm
Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge [Map & address]
Cost:It is essential that anyone wishing to attend reserves a place. To do this, please email cambridge.usability@gmail.com. The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UKUPA member to attend but it would be great if you could join up! Future events may not be free for non-members.
Here's the introduction...
Performance by Design: The Role of Design in Software Product Development
This talk could just as well be titled "What I have learned about software product design in 8 1/2 years of working with some of the best industrial designers and film makers in the world." The underlying premise is that filmmakers and industrial designers approach the design of new products in a fundamentally different way than the software industry. More often than not, software products are green-lighted, and then work begins. With films and product design, green-lighting comes at the end of a front-end process, not the beginning. Stated another way, software projects tend to go directly to development/engineering, leapfrogging over anything that an industrial designer, for example, would recognize as a design process.
Our argument is that our industry’s bypassing such an explicit and formal front-end design (or in film terms, pre-production) process lies at the root of many of our problems of quality, cost over-runs, and late delivery. Furthermore, I would argue that the absence of this front-end process lies at the root of the software industry’s abysmal track record in bringing out successful new (as opposed to n+1) products. To put my argument into perspective, I will briefly summarize the process followed in film and product design, and discuss how it can apply to software product design.
Bill Buxton is an interaction designer and researcher, and Principal of the Toronto-based design and consulting firm, Buxton Design. During the spring of 2005, he is a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, England.
Bill is one of the pioneers in computer music, and has played an important role in the development of computer-based tools for film, industrial design, graphics and animation. As a researcher, he has had a long history with Xerox’ Palo Alto Research Center and the University of Toronto (where he is still an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Visiting Professor at the Knowledge Media Design Institute). As well, during the fall of 2004, he was a lecturer in the Department of Industrial Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design.
From 1994 until December 2002, he was Chief Scientist of Alias|Wavefront, and from 1995, its parent company SGI Inc. In 2001, the Hollywood Reporter named him one of the 10 most influential innovators in Hollywood. In 2002 Time Magazine named him one of the top 5 designers in Canada, and he was elected to the ACM’s CHI Academy.
More information on Buxton and his work can be found at: http://www.billbuxton.com
Before getting started Louise Ferguson, VP of the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) in the UK, did a straw poll of the audience to assess what groups were represented.
Rough Statistics, around 45 attendees made up of:
Academic – 6
Public Sector – 2
Design Agency – 6
User Centred Designers (UCD) – 25+ (approx.)
An excellent turnout, among them some eminent members of the global usability community.
Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) Global Watch Project on User Centred Design – “Innovation through people-centred design”
Rachel quickly explained that the title of her talk was not very appropriate but that she had come to report the findings of DTI Global Watch Project with a mission to,
“investigate the impact of user-centred research in the design process, with a particular focus on new technology including computer hardware and software, mobile phones, and technology services. The group was interested in the ways in which user-centred research becomes integrated into both the product design and development process as well as embedded within organisational culture and long-term strategic thinking.”
Full DTI Global Watch User Centred Design Report
The project involved the team visiting a number of global organisations including Volvo, BMW, Intel, IBM, IDEO, PARC, Microsoft and Nike to help understand the impact of user-centred research in the design process.
The Talk
The first striking thing about Rachel’s talk was the absence of PowerPoint slides and emphasis on having a discussion (Tufte would be impressed!). Rachel talked through the findings of each of the mission team members.
Taking thorough notes is not why I was there but the following rougly-recorded points struck me from the talk and the discussion:
• UCD folks are seeing a need to be made accountable for the designs. Current organisational structures do not make UCDers accountable and this is a problem. Rachel explained that Microsoft has a system of using Smilee faces (and the opposite) to mark up various User Interfaces (UI) to show how popular aspects are. Just one way to begin to be accountable.
• UCD folks are very concerned about showing ROI and their contribution to the business.
• Several UCD specialists are increasing involving executives in their projects since they believe it critical to have a champion at that level (ie CEO level). For some, this is seen as a necessary dimension of a project, eg IDEO I believe.
• There is a belief that UCD activities can play a part in mitigating the risk of new technology innovation
• Companies like Intel are making very impressive use of UCD. They recognise that the future of their business is not through making ever faster chips, because chips have got fast enough for most people’s purposes now. Intel are reinventing themselves and are using UCD to help do that.
• BMW Design works is another company that have clearly impressed Rachel in their use of UCD
• Rachel talked about the lengths that e-bay goes to in order to remain “user driven”, numerous user conferences throughout the year and much discussion with expert users on new features and what they want. This is how companies like this stay ahead.
• The organisational structure of businesses trying to do UCD came up. It was felt that things only really start to happen for UCD when a company has a director of design on the board. Apple is the best example of this but sadly they would not open their doors to the DTI project.
• Microsoft now take UCD more seriously. We were told that Longhorn has 20 UCD professionals working on it.
• Rachel cited some success with simple ‘experience models’, ‘experience frameworks’ and photo stories used in some companies. Some of those are new ideas to me, would be good to see some examples!
• A document describing the redesign of the BBC website came up in conversation but it seems that it is no longer available – anyone know where to get a copy?
Huge thanks to our speaker for the evening, Rachel Jones of Instrata in Cambridge, and also to all those who turned up to make this a most excellent and interesting first Cambridge UPA event.
Just a quick reminder that our first ever UPA event in Cambridge is tomorrow, 16th March! More details in the blog below. Look forward to seeing you there!
Whilst at the Design Museum at the weekend I picked up a copy of "Touching the State" a document about what it means to be a citizen in the 21st Century.
I was thrilled to discover this well presented work apparently commissioned by the government to explore why the general public are disengaged from the political process and the State. The project explores: jury service, the new citizenship ceremony, and voting.
From a 'User Experience Design' perspective this is a great resource, and it's on the web too in its final form but also in much more detail. This is a great example on a number of levels. It shows how User Research may be carried out in a very thorough and practical way but also how this data can then be presented in a very communicative and powerful fashion.
People involved in design processes, like Cooper's Goal-Directed Design, often spend time writing up Personas as representive users of the products they are designing for. This report describes real people, so the emphasis is very slightly different, but the art used to communicate what these people are like is the same.
This is an excellent read, highly recommended.
YOU ARE HERE - THE DESIGN OF INFORMATION Ends May 15th
"How can we communicate without words? At a time when we have to absorb more and more visual information to navigate our increasingly complex daily lives, the Design Museum is exploring the history of information design. From 18th century orreries and Florence Nightingale's pioneering use of diagrams to relay information during the Crimean War, to the work of modernist heroes, such as Herbert Bayer and Buckminster Fuller, and totems of daily life like the London Underground map, AtoZ and 1960s British motorway sign system, You Are Here - described as "a wondrous exhibition" by The Times - decodes the ingenious use of visual information that guides us through daily life."
I originally heard about this on Radio 4, the panel didn't like it much and found the exhibit quite badly designed but for people with a particular interest in Information Architecture I thought it might be be interesting.
I actually visited the 'You are Here' exhibition on Saturday. Even though I work in the field of Information Design and the field of Geographic Information Systems I found the exhibition quite disappointing.
The exhibition contains quite a lot of interesting stuff, from early sketches of the London tube map design to funky clocks (which seemed more art than information design and of questionable relevance to the exhibition). There was quite a lot of old stuff there, like old maps of the world, and some of the clever and expressive information design examples Tufte uses such as the diagram showing the troop losses during the Napoleonic Russian Campaign. I was very surprised to see examples of Florence Nightingale's Information Design exploits and to discover she was a pioneer in this field too.
However, on balance I was quite disappointed not to see a chronology of how information design has evolved, right up to modern techniques for visualising information. In particular, I was very surprised to see a severe lack of coverage of the state of the art, for example, the excellent work of Ben Shneiderman'sgroup's work on Visualization of huge amounts of data in novel ways.
No trip to the design museum is complete without noticing how little thought is put into designing the User Experience for the customers! This always surprises me about an organisation devoted to design. The first problem is finding the place from the instructions on the website - not very obvious at all, even though I've been several times before. Another example was the exhibition of the shortlisted "Designers of the year". People were encouraged to vote on which of the four designers they thought best. We really couldn't quickly figure out where the different designers works were in the exhibition nor how to vote for them (though re-reading our ticket on the train later revealed a map). One of those shortlsted was apparently for a multi-media based exhibit, though this was multimedia running on Windows (which I noticed from the error message sitting displayed on one of the terminals which some 'customer' had tried to add a print driver for and failed). Quite ironic to witness such crude errors left on the screen of an exhibit of the works of the shortlisted "Designer of the Year" in the Design Museum. If this is the best it gets, I'm thinking we are not there yet with this User Experience thing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not really seeking to point fingers and sling mud, I'm in this profession too and feel partly responsible and embarassed that this is as good as it gets.