Now, if you happen to fall into the neighborhood of people that form a persona, that still doesn’t give you the right to say, “I like blue, and I shop this way, so everyone else shops this way, so everything should be blue, and we’ll design it so that it accommodates my individual prefs, since I am, after all, this persona.”

Um no. We can use our experiences as a springboard sure, but, a far more rigorous practice is to assume nothing and remove one’s self from the pool of data so that we can truly have a representative idea of what user behaviors are like in the aggregate.

Again, I happen to agree. Packaging. Disposable goods. Built-in obsolescence instead of modular designs that can be replaced and recycled. We’re choking to death on our own trash. We send our people back and forth on business trips on planes and in hotels and cars. We burn megawatts on our computers and data connections. The endless prototyping. Our carbon footprint grows ever broader. We not only consume, but we produce. Designers have become an integral part of the problem. Surely we can do better as a civilization, as a species. But then too if we are problem solvers as we claim to be, was it an accident that we went to the moon, or can see into the edge of time? This too was design. If we have created the problem, we can uncreate it.

If you read this blog, you likely also believe that design will save the world. You can be start being part of the solution. I’m going to quote the guy’s email now:

“This research stems from the impression that there has been a lot of academic research telling designers what they should be doing with regards to the environment during their work, but much less research that explores the reality of product design to understand the perspectives of those actually doing it. This work aims to be neutral (we are not necessarily promoting environmentalism in design) and completely anonymous (no participant or their organization will be identified in published work).

“I am seeking feedback from anybody associated with commercial product design, whether designers, product managers, executives, or academics. I would appreciate your help in publicizing the following survey:

Environmentalism in Product Design - http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=GX2eBbTIjDNKVSo09T3bBQ_3d_3d

“Participants will be entered to win a 100$ gift certificate to Amazon.com.

“The project tries to get a snapshot of the current use of environmental tools in product design. What tools are designers using? At what stage of the design process are these tools being used? Is the purpose to reduce material use? Toxicity? Energy consumption during product use? None of the above? What are the business drivers and barriers for environmentalism in product design?

“For more information visit http://www.ginkgoproject.com/“

Back in ‘06 we looked at Montauk Sofa site, but it’s been redesigned since then. The Montauk Sofa brand, which is ostensibly an luxury furniture brand, was being represented by a simply bad website. It seems, given the fairly high position of this site’s review on the Google search results, that someone finally listened. We’re gonna take a look over the next week at the parts that changed.

• #21 on the Internet Retailer Top 100,
• $1.1 billion worth of stuff sold online last year, up 19% from the previous year,
• 7.1 million visitors a month,
• 6% conversion rate,
• Average ticket of $200,
• Six brands online: Williams-Sonoma.com, PotteryBarn.com, PotteryBarnKids.com, PBTeen.com, WestElm.com, WSHome.com, and HoldEverything.com.

We are all trying to get this right. Yes yes. Oftentimes we make decisions to get us down the road towards where we are trying to go even if they seem like detours away from the customer-centered path. It’s easy to criticize if you’re not working in that environment: I understand all that. And anyone who has worked in online retail for any amount of time should know that too. So with that disclosure, purely in the interest of competitive spirit, let’s look at what they’ve done across their brands, since they too, like the Gap, share code across the different web properties:

Ginormous hero image. What’s so special about this image that it has to take up 2/3rds the height of the screen (which is still accommodating 800 x 600, by the way) and flush left, not centered at that? Trying to get a piece of the Crate & Barrel pie, eh? They need to get in line with everyone else. Sometimes I’m not even sure if the pie’s already been et, as they say in certain parts of this country.

Ah. As you can see here, they have hidden links within the hero image that present themselves on mouseover. But there are no affordances (little hints that things, like door or faucet handles, can be acted upon and how to act upon them) on the hero image and no expectation that the mouseover would show that the user can take action on the target. Perhaps that is why the designer or their stakeholders decided to make the image 2/3rds of the height of the screen. You know — subtly hint something could be done here. Ha. Let’s click.

This would seem to be a detail page on first glance. But actually it is a kind of detail page that is a bit wonky since it is both master and detail, subcat and product page. There are actually different kinds of pillows that are on this page. I learned that by scrolling down the page by the way cos I was looking for an add to cart button and a quantity field. Instead all I see are swatches, which we could use further down the page when you are trying to make the comparison, and there’s the shopping info, which isn’t helping me right now either. Where is the compare function anyway?

So this is helpful, but the image that gets fired up when I hit the button to view the swatches (and view shipping info should be worded so as to maintain consistency for action buttons) doesn’t entirely fit inside the darn window and you have to scroll to see the detail. It’s nice they have different contexts, sure, but couldn’t this be more appropriate to the context?

We march on, inexorably, to the colors. Again, I am thinking that these could be more contextual.

As could the shipping info. You all did see the PayPal ComScore survey that said people really get turned off at checkout by high shipping costs, right? On eBay, a common seller tactic is to lowball the price but then stick it to you on the shipping. People really pay attention to the shipping costs, which really can only go up as the days of cheap gas are officially over. More so than taxes. But you could move this information elsewhere to be more contextual.

Advancing down the page, we come to the product details. Here’s where the problems really begin. We saw at the top that the price for the pillows is $25. This is fine for just one — the 18″ pillow — but for the 12″x15″s it’s used to show $25 for each color, unless not available. So this appears to be a code issue where because of the way the page is coded, the iterator pattern is used to write $25 as the price for each color unless it’s not available, in which case no price, but “no longer available.”

There’s a number of lost opportunities here, not the least of which is that here is where you want to show the colors. Is it really necessary to show $25.00 for each pillow? And maybe the only reason why I would show No Longer Available would be to use it as an opportunity to check other PB stores in my area to see if they have any, or email me when this comes back into stock, or some way to get the user to convert.

By the way, those bright swatches we saw waaaaay up top? We could really use them here. Did I mention the color swatches already? Avoids bouncing back and forth to the top. Kind of mini-pogosticking.

Here’s something interesting. If you select You for the Shipping Options, all the other shipping options change in turn. So there is no ship these pillows here and then ship those pillows there.

So what happens if we ship these to Other?

I’ve been taken to what looks to be a page in the Checkout path to give my Ship To information. Unexpected. Seems odd and out of place here, since it still seems that I’m in the Rugs, Pillows & Windows Page. Wouldn’t this be best in the Shipping Info page for the Checkout instead of interrupting my shopping experience?

What happens when I click Add to Cart?

Actually all the items get added to cart with one add to cart button push (unexpected, but okay) if you have set quantities for each item on the collection page, and add to cart then fires off a lightbox, which is modal (no real reason for it) instead of pogosticking you to the first page in the checkout path.

A good thing working here is that the cart indeed, when fired off, does not have to be pinned top right. Only the affordance for the cart — meaning the cart icon, the word “cart”, the checkout button — needs to be at top right where people expect to find it. Here it is not exactly clear, hidden in plain sight as it is as a kind of link which will take you to the checkout path. But the action of adding to cart is correct, and it shows what has just been added and allows the user to close the thing to acknowledge the action, which, I don’t think is necessary here — it should acknowledge the action and then go away.

Paraphrasing Krug, this stuff is hard to get right. People always make these assumptions that the people behind websites are just crazy, simply irrational, they don’t know what they’re doing. But in reality often times people do have rationales about doing things, even if they don’t wind up doing things right for the consumer online. Maybe someone with more authority leaned on them or made a unilateral call without any data. Maybe it was IT related and the effort to change a process or data was ridiculously expensive. Everyday we deal with highly political environments where we are trying to deal with multiple inputs, from merchants, from business unit owners, from the IT side: this is what it is to work in large corporate settings with lots of people. The important thing is that as a discipline, businesses are starting to understand that their profitability online is inextricably linked to the quality of their user experiences. Now having said all that, because business leaders are still trying to grasp this concept, progress is measured oftentimes by baby steps, and not by the quantum leap that Gap Inc took with its user experience back in ‘05, which even that likely required months of planning in advance.

Edit: Hmm. (Forgot how expensive Borders can be.) I also forgot we designed a flow in there for Ship to Store. Free shipping, 3-8 days! I can wait. Works good. There are some weird interactions with the site remembering me though. Did I sign in during the beta period? Must have. Thought we designed a flow in there so that when you continued as guest, you would be given a chance to save info to your account after checkout. Oh well. R6 perhaps. . . . Did we knock out gifting? Need to review the screen grabs.

The epilogue: Ordered on a Tuesday. Received ship notice Thursday. Said it would arrive by the Tuesday after. No phone call, no email. So was I to assume that one just calls the store? I could have handled that better. Instead I drifted over on Friday. The young lady working the counter seemed unfamiliar with the procedure but produced a ship-to-store binder which I signed duly, without needing to produce info, but I did anyway. And then I had my books. Done done-done done DONE. Couldn’t I use this system to send books to myself  or someone else at a Borders location somewhere else? But of course.

Regrettably the event itself turned quickly into a support group for IAs Anonymous. Given that the topic was about who controls the design process, which itself is a loaded question to begin with — does one design in a vacuum? isn’t that the same as being an artist? does one design with the inputs of others? if so then what is a designer, etc? — I suppose it was to be expected. But not in the lengthy painful drawn out manner that it evinced to be.

I hate that.

For over 10 years I have listened to whiny designers kvetch about their situation. I myself have been part of the whinge. The buck stops here. Whiny designers, start figuring out a way to get to where you need to go, either by leaving and joining somewhere else, or doing like my boss said that Don Norman said back in ‘98: stop whining, start doing something about it. Just do something about what your situation is.

One last thing before I pass out tonight: one of the developers on a team working adjacent to ours has this screensaver on his laptop and it’s been catching my eye for a few months now, but, have silently admired it from, uh, five feet away. I need no longer do so because of my mad Google skillz. The loverly creative efforts of the creative label SCR have produced two screensavers, “Kaze to Desktop” (”Wind and Desktop”) and the aforementioned “Dropclock.” Both are totemo kirei na, honto ni. Viddy well the zammechat veschch, o my brothers.

If I were to assign such a problem to students, I think calendaring would be among the more difficult but satisfying assignments to work on. When you think about it there are really some fairly complex algorithms to get into code: how to calculate a calendar, for instance, how to display information in a calendar. Then there are the human things, such as how to schedule for events, once, repeating, what if there are multiple events in a day, so on. Then, of course, how to accommodate all the different ways that people have of describing repeating events. I suppose the calendaring could be broken down into small problems since it is such a large project. It is an ideal project of course: there hardly comes a day that we do not encounter some form of calendaring and of course, once designed, you can continuously improve upon it, making it an investment that keeps on giving.

1) Social science methodologies. Much much of our work revolves around the observation and analysis of human behavior. I’d say a background in psychology or social psych would be best, particularly around environmental or industrial psych, possibly human factors, although I think it is a little too quant heavy for our work, some sociology, anthro, so on. I’d want students to be good quantitative and qualitative people and to have tools at their disposal. You must be able to understand how to observe people and collect data, either narratives or numbers, accurately describe where the data came from, who they represent, how that data was collected, cognizant of threats to validity, sampling methodologies, how to phrase questions without injecting bias, so on.

2) Library and info science. A good deal of our work involves the categorization of information and information seeking needs and how users are served thereby. It is interesting to note that LIS tries to claim information architecture but I feel they focus too much on the categorization and labelling than they do on fundamental interaction design, which is really taught nowhere, unfortunately, and not at the undergraduate level where it really should be fundamental to. . .

3) Computer science. A lot of our work involves dealing with technology. So I would have to say that you should have at least built one website and maybe no less than three to five. You should have learned how to gather requirements, which is of course what no one teaches. You should have learned how to program and interface with databases and know your way around SQL. It would not hurt to understand Java or another object oriented language. You should have learned how to work with different types of scripting, like HTML, Flash, Javascript, so on. In other words you should know how to work with developers and speak the language of development. Wouldn’t hurt if you had deep chops with HTML, CSS, XML, and Javascript. Here is where comp sci could be useful but isn’t. Requirements and methodologies would be great to know here, but that would require students to actually work in teams on projects that simulate real world problems. In addition, a lot of what passes for information architecture really is in fact interaction design, which is only emerging as a discipline of its own now, but has deep deep roots in comp sci.

4) Visual communications. Now we get to the softer side of things. A lot of things we do involve designers. So a few courses on type, color, composition, grids, branding, being subject to the sometimes brutal and subjective cycle of ideation and critique, and actually doing the work of design on real world projects wouldn’t hurt you in the least. Primarily I would avoid the whole stylistic track — you will inevitably gravitate towards your own unique style — but I think I would focus a student towards information design, such as newspaper infographic designers do: how to make complex information understandable at a glance. Layout for reading comprehension and how to grab people’s attention really also helps.

5) Interaction design. Most importantly and least often presented in the curriculum, I would say, this is the most important skill. You should be able to talk in the language of decision making of choices made in the design of interfaces. Unfortunately, not very well or broadly taught and not deeply enough. Maybe it is time to actually start doing so. There is quite a deep reading list to go through actually.

6) Business courses, particularly around marketing and operations.

It will be noted drily that few people have done all of the above and that most of us working in UX now do not come from such backgrounds. Zannen da kedo! Fortunately, the tools that give a good liberal arts graduate a good head start in the world can also be applied towards catching up with the other disciplines in this list.

What about you all? What would you think would be useful for a user experience professional to know?

Similarly there was a story about the evolution of video game music. As technology has advanced, so too has the ability to create much richer experiences: few elements have advanced so much as the capability to enrich the experience of immersive play than music.

Of course there is design produced by Chinese, either Americans of Chinese descent or Chinese in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taiwan, or Singapore. That is Chinese design after a fashion. But is there a vernacular we can call Chinese design? What makes it so?

I would aver, as the exhibit or rather, its curation seems to indicate, that Chinese design is Chinese only to the extent that it “speaks” to and is “understood by” Chinese.

Thus, in viewing the exhibit, I was struck by how graphic design, being a communications medium, is given over to the same impulses, traces, and gaps that spoken and written communications are prone to. In short, design is really a language and with it is imbued all the frailities and strengths that humanity is prone to. Its relevance and power thereby is only carried forward by visual “utterances” and references to the everyday cultures that produce it. However, density of East Asian urban population did not seem to be one of those influences.

So what is it we’re seeing here? Are we seeing traces of top designers, who were educated in the city’s polytechnics, or in western universities, and thereby were taught how to see through western eyes and how to draw with western hands? Or are we seeing something else, in how the exhibit was itself curated, the pieces carefully culled from many which were excluded? What is it that I am looking for amidst all these artifacts?

In examining the traces of the designs, I realize that in my own search for a “pure” Chinese design vernacular, free of influences from, and references to, the Soviet-style romanticism of Communist state art, or from the western colonialist commercial romanticism in Shanghai and Hong Kong design vernaculars, I myself harbor hidden western metaphysics, unspoken logocentric notions, and a longing for a pure language. It is likely impossible to refer to a period when design ever was composed of signs without referent, if only because design itself is not only a language, whose power depends precisely on its ability to link meaning with images and type, but it is an artifact of history as well, produced by modernity, shaped by capital, and so it is inflected with the traces and references that produced it. Such a search for a realm of pure ideas, a search for a language of ideas without referents is ahistorical and exists only as a dream.

Chinese Design Everyday runs until the 13th at the Design Exchange in Toronto. I have a small collection of photos from the exhibit.