illustration by Jon Turner

Some of you expressed some interest in what I learned from my experience interviewing, so I’m going to take a stab at that here. Sorry about the delay, but starting this new job has been both time- and mind-consuming, and has necessitated lots of other changes in my and my family’s lives that have kept me busy hustling around while the dust settles. But now that I’m a few months in I can say that I am 100% glad I made the move. The job is interesting, educational and fun, I work with great people who both appreciate and challenge me, and I see an excitingly long road of potential and possibilities ahead.

In order to get to this great new job I had many, many interviews over the course of a few months, which was quite an educational process. I learned (or re-learned) many things.

• I learned that connections are great but not everything. I got this job at Belkin through a cold drop of my resume into Belkin’s online resume submission system.
• I learned that you shouldn’t count on having internet access during your interview. That seems obvious now, but I made that mistake until I was without it in an interview—one that definitely could have gone better.
• I learned that you should always offer a copy of your resume. If your interviewers feel awkward asking for one and you don’t offer, you could leave them with the impression that you didn’t come prepared. This one I also learned the hard way.
• Most importantly, I learned that an online portfolio of shiny designs and documents is good to get you in the door, but not that great after that.

illustration by Jon Turner

Presenting Past Work
Learning how to tell a compelling story about my past work was my biggest challenge over the course of my interviews. I had read Whitney Hess‘s excellent article about telling the story of your process in interviews, and thought I was prepared to do just. But I found that without specific preparation, talk would always circle back to the documents, and I would have trouble making that story as focused and clear as I wanted it to be.

What worked the best for me in the end was to create a Keynote presentation around a few specific projects. Preparing my “portfolio review” as a presentation made it easier for me to plan the arc and pacing of the story I wanted to tell. The slides provided visual anchor-points to the story for both me and my interviewers, and gave me a clear place to show mid-process artifacts like sketches, storyboards, and photos of testing. I tried to follow presentation best practices and keep the slides text-light and as support rather than the focus of my story. I was surprised how little detail about the final solutions was necessary in this context. Of course, I also had final designs and documents on my hard drive to show in case my interviewers asked to see them.

I told my project stories with the product as the protagonist and myself as a supporting character. There was exposition, action, conflict, resolution, and dénouement. Although this sounds kind of formal, everyone likes to listen to a story, and a good presentation is a fun experience. It helped me be more confident in my material and it gave ample openings for questions and discussion about the process, which is preferable to the dreaded, “Why did you choose yellow?” It also allowed my interviewers a chance to assess my presentation abilities, which are an important part of a UX design skill set.

Finding a Good Match
I also learned that the job market is pretty darn good right now for experience designers. Most companies that design interactive products not only know what “interaction design,” “UX,” and “IA” mean, they also feel an urgency to integrate these practices into their process. Although many places are still working out the best way to do this, the fact that they see it as vital to their success is a big change from 5 or 10 years ago. So it seems that there are more openings for seasoned UXers than there are seasoned UXers as the recession begins to turn around.

This means that employers need to pay close attention to how they are performing in the interview process, because it is a two-way sale. The current economy might tempt interviewers to feel they hold all the power, but waiting to begin the sales pitch until a candidate has been fully vetted would be a mistake. I know that it was important to me to feel wanted, to be excited about the role, the company, the team, and the projects—and some interviewers had given more thought to this than others. So for anyone out there looking to hire, I recommend evaluating your interview process from the candidate’s perspective and discovering what story it is telling about your company. After all, job candidates are doing their best to showcase awesome experience design; I think it’s fair for them to expect hiring UX departments to do the same. And when both parties get it right, it can feel like a match made in heaven.

Unless you’ve been deep in a cave for all of last week, you probably heard that Apple announced their new product yesterday, the iPad. Opinions about the device, including mine, have been somewhat split. I’m going to leave the general pros/cons discussions for somewhere else, but I wanted to discuss one aspect I find particularly interesting: In a world where devices and services are more and more socially connected, the iPad is strangely ANTIsocial.

the Apple iPad floating in its humanless world (© Apple)

By leaving out two features—multiple concurrent apps and any kind of camera—the iPad opted out of any competitive social connectedness. It is far less social than the iPhone (or any smartphone), any netbook, and any console gaming system. The iPad is supposed to be a consumption device, but isn’t consuming entertainment a social activity?

The inability to run multiple or background apps means there’s no peripheral sociability. Many of us run IM, Skype, and/or Twitter in the background on our computer (or netbook), especially when we’re more casually engaged. The iPad, on the other hand, is strictly modal. There’s no way to IM with a friend while watching a TV show, or keep an eye on Twitter while cruising around on the web.

The iPhone doesn’t run background apps either, but the iPhone is a PHONE, which is inherently social. It also does SMS. In a world where Twitter sends you texts and email and Facebook have push notifications, even if you are not directly calling someone, the phone is in constant peripheral communication. And it’s doing all of that while in your pocket.

It's all communication

It’s possible the iPad will allow apps to have push notifications with audible alerts, although right now there’s no indication that it will. But that interaction model seems more suited to a phone in your pocket than a device you are directly engaged with for hours at a time.

A web camera on the iPad could have made up for the lack of peripheral connectedness by enabling an extraordinarily deep social connection in the form of face-to-face video chat. I kept waiting during the presentation yesterday for Jobs to announce there was “one more thing,” a webcam embedded behind the screen, enabling direct eye-contact during video chat. THAT would be magical. (Also, I would bet that baby-boomers, a theorized target for this device, would adore such a feature.)

Imagining video-chatting with my son

A standard camera could also have helped. On the iPhone, photos and videos are social objects because you can digitally share them instantly. Quick poll: which would you say you share more—photos taken with your phone or photos taken with a nicer camera (especially per photo)? The iPad regards photos and videos as media for consumption only. This is made even clearer by the absence of an SD card slot, which is most useful for making photos digitally sharable in the first place.

You can use the iPad to share photos with someone standing next to you—the photos are larger and the screen is nicer than on your iPhone. But… you always have the phone on you. When you run into an old friend and want to show them pictures of your kids, what are the chances you will you pull your iPad out of your backpack?

Did Apple realize they were ruling out so much social activity? It seems strange if they truly want to compete with netbooks. Or perhaps Apple is attempting to influence society and encourage us to take time away from the constant buzz of Twitter and social networks. What do you think?

P.S. I also have to chime on the name. My guess is that Apple chose iPad, despite its U.S. cultural connotations, because it transfers more easily to other regions and languages. Regardless, I wish they’d instead named it the iPage: a name that evokes their iBooks design (see below), and if the iBook is a computer, then this isn’t this like is a thin, light slice of that?

This is the LCD info display in the dashboard of my mom’s 2002 Toyota Avalon. (Please excuse the blurry iPhone photo.)

During my last visit, I think I spent too much time in the car, because that display really started to bug me. I just cannot for the life of me imagine a designer could look at it and think, “Yep, that’s finished. Put it into production!” Maybe no designers were involved or empowered, but that display makes no sense to me. Here’s a clearer recreation:

NOTHING in it aligns with anything else! It’s like someone just dropped things in and pushed them around until they filled up the space, leaving them tantalizingly close to lined-up, but not quite. Why on earth isn’t the temperature either left- or right-aligned with the clock? And why is the date so enormous, but yet not the same size as the time? And after dedicating so much space to the date (which only changes once a day, after all), five other features are jammed into the bottom right corner, and then not right-aligned with the date. Looking at all these odd gaps and edges makes my brain itch.

And on top of all that, the odometer is in a teensy tiny, non-backlit LCD area below this large display, which means, among other things, that you can’t read it at night. (My mom really hates that.)

So I decided to take a take a crack at fixing the large LCD display layout. This is not a true redesign. I’m giving Toyota the benefit of the doubt on the relative importance of items (except the date). Also, it doesn’t seem fair to say, “Use a better screen technology!” which would allow me to do things very differently. Not that a drastic redesign isn’t called for—as you can see here the whole dash really needs (and has probably since gotten) a ground-up rethinking. I just wanted to try to work within my understanding of the original designer’s constraints—technology, size, and (mostly) data—and bring some order to it. Here is my take:

I aligned the elements as best I could. I made the date significantly smaller and added in the odometer. This meant removing a few of the display toggle options, but I felt this was a reasonable trade-off for the increase in odometer usability and general cleanliness. Also, following Tufte’s principle of maximizing data-ink, I removed the heavy outline around the compass.

I’m sure it’s not perfect—I only worked on it for one evening. But at least it doesn’t make my brain itch.

Do you have more suggestions? A better solution? Or do you love the original? Let me know!

In one month I will head off to Interaction 2010, a fantastic UX conference put together by IxDA. I was fortunate enough to go last year, and had an overwhelmingly educational and inspiring time. One of my favorite aspects, and something I am really looking forward to again this year, was simply being surrounded by so many like-minded people. It was a treat to chat, learn, and party with hundreds of UXers—whether they called themselves interaction designers, UX designers, IAs, usability professionals, or whatever else.

I think there’s something really interesting about this group of people who felt a calling to a profession that doesn’t even have an official name. For one thing, for most of us working now, there was no UX design track in school, no standard way to progress into the profession. (This is of course changing now with great new undergraduate and graduate programs starting all the time, like the ones at SVA and CIID.) For another thing, you can pretty much guarantee that everyone in this job has a strong desire to be here. Certainly none of us were pressured to continue a family legacy of UX design. Also, a career as amorphous as ours can be rather hard to find and follow, which tends to mean that only the dedicated arrive.

I was thinking about my path to UX and wondering how similar it was to others’, so I put this question out to Twitter: “What first drew you to UX design, what were you doing before, and how did you make the switch?” I got many great responses, and saw a few themes emerge.

First, we are obsessed with helping and understanding people.

Second, we love to live in the middle between art and tech. For some it was the accessibility of web development that facilitated finding a path to that middle ground, for others it was the aforementioned desire to help the humans who have to use things we design and build.

Third, many of us discovered the field (and its various names) after we were already doing the work.

I went off on my own and built a functional prototype of an app we were working on at s&p, when a UX spot opened up, they asked me to move into that role. eventually took over UX of project. but i was originally hired as a developer.
- Jonathan Knoll (@Yoni)

… I just sort of naturally started being the “UX” person on all my projects, and became more and more interested in proper UX and IxD practice. Once I started learning more about IxD I quickly realized that it was closely related to a lot of what I did in art school, and was the first time I had seen real design practice in relation to technology and “new” media. At that point I was sold, and have dedicated myself to IxD.
- Matthew Nish-Lapidus (@emenel)

The last common thread I noticed is that for many of us it feels like a calling, that there was some click of recognition, some “aha moment” when we discovered that the field was out there, or that what we were doing had a name. I love how many people used some variation of the phrase, “and the rest is history.”

I didn’t feel that I had earned the right to call myself a User Experience Designer until I saw that what I had been doing all along was. I guess I felt that research, personas, prototyping, testing was all part of being a web designer. I think that aha came when I started participating more in PhilyCHI and realized that I “am” a UX designer and I don’t want to do anything else than what I am doing.
- Lori W. Cavallucci (@lwcavallucci)

All of these themes are echoed in my story. I majored in Product Design at Stanford, which is a major that combines mechanical engineering with industrial design. I loved my major, and know that I am lucky to have gone to a school that could give both my techie and artsy sides a welcoming home. But much of the coursework was still focused on “the product” and I didn’t even realize that I was missing something until we had a lecture by some human factors specialists. I remember that lecture vividly—they spoke about their work designing the cockpits of helicopters and airport signage, and focusing not just on the “things” but on how people interact with them. It was like an epiphany to me. I was hooked.

I graduated in ’99 when internet companies were hiring everything that moved. There were no UX designer/IA/Interaction Designer job descriptions listed then, but I knew what I wanted to do, so I got hired as a designer, developer, project manager, and created whatever path I could towards UX work. And the rest, as they say, is history.

What about you? Please feel free to share your path to UX in the comments, or find me at Interaction ’10 and tell me your story!

A huge thanks again to everyone who contributed answers via twitter or email. I got so many great responses that I couldn’t include them all!

Two weekends ago I flew up to the Bay Area on Virgin America. I’ve flown VA quite a few times in the past, but I guess it had been a while since the last flight because I had no idea they had started charging baggage fees. At the airport my family was suddenly hit with a $20 fee per bag. When we questioned the employee working at the baggage check-in about the change, he said that VA had decided to lower the ticket price but make up the difference through baggage fees.

I’m sure I don’t know all the factors involved in making a decision like that. I would guess that having lower ticket fees sells more tickets, and that’s what matters most. But to me it seems like an odd decision from a company that has otherwise been very focused on the customer experience. Everything, from the design of the planes’ interior features to the check-in terminals to the website were all carefully designed to craft a specific customer experience in the spirit of the long wow.

Baggage fees are a negativity grenade thrown into the middle of Virgin America’s carefully constructed experience. According to the Peak-End Rule, people judge a past experience almost entirely based on how it was at its peak (either pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended. And the loss aversion behavioral bias says that losses are about twice as powerful psychologically than gains. So when you combine those two things with baggage fees, what do you get?

You bought a cheap ticket, and the experience is off to a good start. Then some long-ish amount of time later—during which the deal euphoria fades—you go to the airport and get hit with a baggage fee that you probably had forgotten about, or as in my case, never realized you were going to be charged. You packed that bottle of shampoo so you’re at their mercy. You’re still annoyed about the bag fees as you go through the never-pleasant security screening. Then when you get on the plane, there’s little to no overhead bin space because everyone else avoided checking their bags. Stress levels go up as the flight attendants desperately try to fit in all the bags and then tell the late boarders that they’ll have to gate check. Hopefully all of this doesn’t delay departure.

Once the plane takes off, all of VA’s previous hard work on the plane’s interior and in-flight experience does some to counter the negativity. In fact, I would bet customers on longer flights report better experiences than those on short flights. For me on my short flight from LA to SF, the peak emotion of my experience was definitely the strong aversion I felt suddenly realizing I was out a bunch of money with no added benefit. And reuniting with my bags at the end of the flight only reminded me of the fees yet again.

Now, I’m mostly extrapolating from my own experience (bad UX designer!). Maybe if I were able to do some research, I would see that the benefit of the cheap ticket outweighs the shock of the baggage fees. Maybe most people aren’t shocked by it. Or maybe the flight experience separates people from the fee enough that it doesn’t impact the overall experience too much.

But what if Virgin America instead added the cost back into the ticket and then gave a rebate to those customers who check zero bags? Just imagine going to the airport and finding out that you get money back. Raising ticket prices is tricky, but wouldn’t that transform the experience of bag fees from horrible shock to wonderful, loyalty-inspiring wow?

Further reading:

• More on Loss Aversion
• More on the Peak-End Rule
• Peak-End Rule illustrated
• Design Ethnography and Mood Maps by Will Evans

Or, What Wolfram Alpha Does Completely Wrong

In my last post, Three Types of Searches, I proposed that there are three distinct behaviors of search, and that each behavior has its own optimal results formatting. Understanding these different search behaviors and thinking specifically about existing search tools and implementations of search suggestions has led me to this thesis:

Your site search should offer rich search suggestions if any of your users are using it for shortcut searches—and they probably are. This means not only should you make sure that you implement search suggest/assist in the first place (search suggest is the auto-complete drop-down that appears as you type in the search box), but it should also be more than just a basic text list. In fact, it should take formatting cues from the best practices of targeted search results. Does your site have entities—products, people, classes, etc.—that people might be searching for or returning to? Your search logs should confirm whether or not people are ever entering specific entity names into search. If yes, then you are doing your site a disservice if you have not implemented well thought-out search suggestions. Four points have led me to this conclusion.

First, search suggestions steer people away from the dreaded “No Results Found” page by helping users avoid typos or terms that differ from the site’s terminology. In addition, they may surface options the user didn’t even know were available. In this way, a search assist increases findability of items. (Side note: I think search assists could also be enhanced to improve re-finding. I like the way Firefox puts my previously entered search terms above the matching Google suggestions, for example. What if clicking inside the search box immediately opened the suggestions area—before I start typing—with the last five entities I viewed on the site?)

Second, if the user finds a match in the suggestions, clicking on it eliminates at least one page from the navigation process and gets the user to the optimal experience faster. Even if you’ve designed a nice shortcut search result module for every item, I would bet that your product or entity pages are a better experience. As long as your business isn’t in search advertising, skipping the search results page benefits everyone. In addition, it’s unlikely that your site has navigation pointing directly to entity pages. In order to browse to an item, a user would probably have to first choose the correct category from the nav and then find the desired item from there. Displaying entities in the search suggest gets around that problem by essentially enhancing your search box with an item-level navigation dropdown.

Hulu search suggestions

A good example of this is Hulu. Say I wanted to watch the most recent episode of The Office. If the episode isn’t linked directly on the homepage, I could try to see if I could find it under any of the main navigation items: Channels (which is really more like genres), Most Popular, Recently Added, Collections, Labs, Trailers, and Spotlight. Or, since none of those immediately screams, “Half hour NBC sitcom,” I could just search for the title. As I type ‘the office’ into the search box, I get the search suggestions shown above, which gives me the choice to jump not only to the show page, but also to immediately begin watching the latest episode. This search suggest allows me to bypass all browsing pages, the search results page, and even the show overview page if I want.

Third, rich formatting helps users distinguish between options. This is an accepted practice in targeted search results that makes sense to carry through here. In fact, I think it is a good rule of thumb to carry some of the formatting choices you’ve already made on comparison results through to the search suggest. Apple.com and Facebook both provide images and other information to make the options in their suggestions easily identifiable.

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Apple.com and Facebook search suggestions with images

The Hulu example above also shows that multiple link destinations, when used carefully, can be very effective. Jakob Nielsen’s research findings support the use of larger dropdowns when they help users better see and understand the options. Let’s take another look at Hulu. Their current suggest drop-down is very svelte, but I’d be able to make sense of the options much more quickly if it had images.

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Current Hulu search suggestions and a proposed enhancement (click for full size)

My proposed design includes the show images Hulu already produces, and changes the display to show the top 5 matches by popularity, rather than alphabetically. (I’m curious, did you know which show The Riches was without the image?) I am not saying every search suggestion must include an image, however. I’m simply encouraging you to consider displaying information in addition to the entity’s name (like price, for example) that would significantly help people recognize options.

And lastly, you have nothing to lose. As long as it doesn’t make the page unbearably slow, it is all just an added bonus to the search you already have. I am in NO way advocating removing any of your standard (or enhanced) search functionality. Obviously, plenty of the searches on your site won’t be for shortcuts, they’ll be open-ended searches that are more exploratory. Adding rich search suggestions won’t help those people, but it won’t hurt them either—hitting enter or clicking the search button is always an option.

And now for Wolfram Alpha. The thing about Wolfram Alpha is that it is ONLY a shortcut search. Each search results page is actually an entity page.  Look at the search result for ‘health care,’ and you’ll see that there were actually three matches—health care as an industry sector, as a financial entity, and as a word—and Wolfram Alpha simply defaults you to one of the entity pages, allowing you to see and select the other options at the top of the page. Wouldn’t it be nice to see those options before landing on results page? Especially since the thing that is so cool about Wolfram Alpha is that it provides very different pages for each result type. But for some strange reason, Wolfram Alpha offers no search suggestions at all. They have a whole section of the site with sample search terms – why not populate the search assist with popular terms matching what I’ve begun typing? It would surface so many more potential opportunities to explore.

Currently there are no suggestions—just keep typing, hit enter and hope you get something good!

A proposal for search suggestions—popular matching results with clarification of result type

The suggestions don’t need to match against every possible result. If it pulled even from the top thousand popular terms, it would be a vast improvement. It would also be a clear differentiation from Google. Google was hesitant to widely implement search suggestions because they were afraid they might lose traffic volume from their search results pages. They clearly have no incentive to help you bypass them. (Google has however implemented a very nice search suggest feature within Gmail that you can enable in the Labs area.)

So to re-state: if anyone is using your site’s search as a shortcut mechanism, and they probably are, you should offer rich search suggestions. Of course, all of this assumes that you understand what people are looking for and that their search terms are already well-matched to your data. So spend some time with your search logs and definitely do a little bit of testing on your search suggestions design.  I am looking forward to seeing and using a lot more rich search assists in the future!

Further reading:

• IxDA discussion of search-centric navigation
• 4 Modes of Info Seeking and How to Design for Them – Boxes & Arrows
• Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision – A List Apart
• Search Suggestions Come to Gmail – TechCrunch
• Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well – Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox

I seem to have had the same discussion over and over lately here at Yahoo about site search. Yahoo has (or had, anyway) a high-profile web search technology and design team. So when we discuss these site-specific searches, talk always seems to circle back to the question, “How much should this site’s search resemble—or maybe even be—the Yahoo web search?”

On one hand, consistency and efficiency across the company are good, and the web search team has spent a lot of money and time optimizing their experience. On the other hand, sites such as Y! Music and Y! Sports have the luxury of knowing more context behind the user’s search requests than Yahoo.com does, and so more content-specific results seem like an easy win for users.

These conversations got me thinking quite a bit about search. Although search has only one user action—typing terms into a search box and submitting it to get results—the motivations behind that action can differ. As such, I think it’s wrong to try to find a single pattern for all search results. I propose that there are three distinct categories of search, and that each deserves its own set of patterns.

1 – Web/Exploratory Search
The first and most familiar type of search is the web or exploratory search. The user goals for this kind of search are “I’m looking for something/anything about [search term]” or “I’m looking for a specific [search term] and think [search engine] can find it.” The available data set (usually the entire known web) is vast and largely undefined. The user’s query is general, usually because s/he didn’t know what exactly to look for or didn’t think the search engine needed any more detail. The large number of results that are returned are formatted as web pages, mostly agnostic of the content those pages contain.

Google, Yahoo and others have spent a LOT of money and time optimizing the pattern for this type of search result. This is the reason why these companies’ search results all look virtually identical—compare searches for ‘UX’ on Yahoo!, Google, Bing, and AOL.

In the Google search results for ‘health care’ you can find pages containing articles, videos, local care centers, books, a web utility, the term definition, and more. Google changes the standard document result display, however, when they understand the content contained within the pages, such as local results, news, videos, books, etc., which leads me to the next category of search.

2 – Targeted Search
The second type of search is the Targeted search. The user goals for this type of search would be, “I’m looking for a specific subset of information on [search term]” or “I’m trying to find the optimal one of [search term].” This kind of search is possible when there is a single overall structure to the data because the user has explicitly selected a data type, e.g. books, flights, images, etc. There is usually a large set of results that are formatted to help users scan and compare the content on the resulting pages without pogo-sticking to and from detail pages. Good examples of this are Kayak, Amazon, New Egg, and sub-domain searches of the main search engines such as images.yahoo.com and shopping.google.com.

Obviously these results experiences should differ depending on the content they are searching. Much has been studied and written about optimizing these types of results, but it appears that even for the most popular data types, definitive patterns haven’t yet emerged (see video on Google vs. video on Bing). However, one widely adopted best practice is to surface important data facets (price, size, departure time, etc., often to the left of the results) and provide easy filtering of results based on those facets.

   

Google and Bing Video Results

3 – Shortcut search
The third type of search is the Shortcut search. The user goal in this instance is “I’m trying to find [search term] on this site.” Examples of shortcut searches are searching for a specific movie title on IMDb or a team name on ESPN. The data has a defined structure and the results set is very small—hopefully one exact match and fewer than 10 partial matches.

Interestingly, there is also overlap with the user goal I mentioned above for web searches, “I’m looking for a specific [search term] and think [search engine] can find it.” The user is searching for a single known or remembered entity, and is essentially counting on the search engine to produce it faster than browsing or even than using bookmarks.

Currently, most search experiences—both top-tier search engines and single-site searches—try to meet this search need by adding a custom result module at or near the top of the page. Notice the large Lakers module at the top of the ESPN results, for example. Or if you search for ‘Prius’ on the Toyota website you get a big module above the results with a nice picture and some price information. Similarly, the first Google result on a search for ‘Golden Gate Bridge Photos’ is a module that features and links to results from Google’s image search. In all of these cases the full results page contains a mix of either shortcut or targeted results and more general page results.

   

Shortcut results above the standard results on ESPN and Toyota

Additionally, many sites provide auto-complete functionality that is especially helpful for shortcut searches. This drop-down that appears as you type, containing matching popular or available terms, is called “search assist” by Yahoo and “search suggestions” by Google. Search assists help people avoid typos, discover possible terms, and sometimes allow them to jump directly to an item while completely bypassing the search results page, which makes them a true shortcut.

Where This Leads Me…
Understanding these three distinct types of search—web/exploratory search, targeted search, and shortcut search—has clarified my understanding of how results in different contexts should be formatted. It has also given me a framework for clarifying and making progress on our internal site-search discussions.

Additionally, I think that there is an opportunity to extend this differentiation into the design and implementation of search assists. In my next post, I will propose a new best practice for search assists, based on this understanding of the different types of searches. In the mean time, what are your thoughts on this? Is there a whole category of search that I’ve forgotten? I look forward to your comments and seeing you back here for part 2!

Back in April I took a business trip to the fascinating Indian city of Bengaluru, which is both very like and very unlike big cities in the US. One of the many things I found interesting was the empty decorative fountains littered around the central city — carcasses of a British city aesthetic that did not survive its transplantation. In a place where water is a limited resource and the temperature hovers all summer in the high 80s (°F), evaporation makes public fountains very high-maintenance and expensive. Their empty shells seemed like warnings about the folly of globalizing design without research and cultural awareness.

Trash can at the Lalbagh Gardens in Bengaluru

I also noticed the very common practice of public (or semi-public) wall urination. I was especially struck by the juxtaposition of the overall dryness and this constant but small-scale “watering” of the streets after seeing John Thackara’s keynote address at Interaction ’09. He spoke some about global water conservation, and had one slide showing a spindly plant that had been watered with tap water next to a much larger and more vibrant plant that had been watered with urine. (Here is a video of his talk, Designing for Business as Usual, and the slide I mention is at 41 minutes.)

Then just last week I saw this article on the Wall Street Journal about the Paris police writing tickets and upping their effort to curb wall urination, and I remembered something Robert Fabricant said in his Interaction ’09 keynote, Behavior Is Our Medium*.  He encouraged designers to avoid trying to change learned behavior, but to focus instead on changing the non-human parts of the system.

Laws against public urination (as far as I can tell it’s against the law almost everywhere) are intended to change an entrenched, global behavior. But police enforcement, infraction processing and court time, and installing and maintaining plentiful public bathrooms are all expensive efforts, not to mention the extra water used for every urinal flush. Surely there is room for a more elegant solution that doesn’t try to change the human part of the system? Inspired by this question, I sat down and quickly mind-mapped around the idea of a public wall-urination capture and re-purpose system.

click to see full-size

I enjoyed the exercise immensely, and I got pretty excited by some of the possibilities. I think there is a real opportunity for a low-cost, low-effort solution that would harness that wasted water and simultaneously reduce the mess and stigma of wall urination, without requiring people to substantially change their current behavior. I would really love to drop a prototype or two into a corner of downtown LA and see what happens. Unfortunately, it would still be illegal.

This is obviously not a minor consideration. A facet of this project, if it ever were to become a project, would need to address society’s perception of public urination. But product demos and PR campaigns can’t help if the product is, by definition, both public and completely illegal. And hoping laws change before public perception changes seems pretty unlikely.

So what do you think: am I crazy? Is there NO WAY people would ever accept sanctioned semi-public urination? What about outside the US? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this.

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*Bonus: Sketchnotes on Flickr of the first half of Fabricant’s keynote that I did when practicing sketchnoting at home.

This red switch used to be a great feature of the elevator in my condo building. You used to be able to flip it to “Stop” once the doors were open, and it would hold the elevator stopped and the doors open until you flipped it back to “Run.” I used this switch a lot. Not every day, or even every week, but probably once a month I have a big batch of groceries or some other reason to make multiple trips in and out of the elevator doors before my loading or unloading is complete. I used to witness my neighbors using it frequently, too.

I say “used to” because about a week ago the behavior of the switch suddenly changed. Now suddenly, since its last maintenance, when you flip the switch to “Stop” the elevator alarm starts ringing, and rings constantly until you flip it back to “Run.” It never behaved like that before in the six years I’ve lived here, so I was very surprised the first time the deafening alarm kicked in.

Our elevator broke down yesterday, so I took the opportunity to email a request to the repair man to change the switch back to its old behavior. I thought it must be a mix-up, or maybe an optional configuration. After all, being able to hold the elevator doors open is very useful, but not if you’re freaking out everyone in the building with the alarm.

This morning when I got in the freshly repaired elevator, I found the repairman had left me a note.

An admonishing note that clearly read, “Silly user. The way you were using the switch was not what the engineers or designers intended. Furthermore, your imagined need for this feature is invalid.”

Ok, I might have paraphrased a little. But the note made me pretty annoyed. First of all, nowhere on the switch does it say “Emergency.” Second of all, the technician (or whoever makes the repair guidelines) CLEARLY thinks they know all of the valid use cases of elevator door operation, and just as clearly, they are wrong. In a residential elevator there are many scenarios beyond “loading and unloading of passengers.”

Everyone in the building used that switch regularly because there was a real need for it. A single person transporting twelve bags of groceries to their unit can’t also be holding down the “door open” button. Not to mention the electricity savings of not opening and closing the elevator door between schleps, or having someone call the elevator to another floor while your back is turned and having to call it back just to retrieve the rest of your stuff. I remember when we moved in we used the switch to hold the doors open while we crammed as much stuff into the elevator as would fit for each trip upstairs.

But enough about my elevator. This experience, especially the condescending tone of the note, immediately reminded me of discussions with coworkers or clients who bemoaned the stupidity of their users. It also reminded me of the old stories about computer warranty calls for the broken “cup holders” on PCs, usually told with chuckles and shaking heads. But if we design something that looks and acts (or almost acts) like a feature users would like to have, and that thing somehow breaks when they use it that way, have the users done something dumb or have we?

I let this elevator experience be another good lesson to me that NO ONE knows the users’ needs, perspective, and situation better than the users themselves. And if I ever notice the urge to shake my head and say, “Silly user,” it probably means I’m doing something silly, and I just need to get to know my user a little better.

The Problem
About two months ago my team got relocated to a new building. My desk is in a great spot, we have fun new neighbors, and the new building is pretty comparable to the old one, with one big exception.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to remember where the conference rooms are.

Contributing Factors
The floor plan seems to have been designed by military strategists intent on confusing hostile invaders. There is a central atrium with windows that are indistinguishable from outside windows, and the interior spaces are configured to restrict any view to a relatively small area. This means the office feels more intimate and light, but it also means that it is very difficult to orient oneself. Views in every direction look pretty much the same.

To illustrate, the first photo below is of a main hallway just off the main entrance, and the second is of the view just inside the employee-only door adjacent to the main entrance:

      
Can you tell that these views are looking in exactly opposite directions?

By the way, none of the doors you can see in those photos are conference rooms. Adding to the degree of difficulty, our conference rooms are named like a particularly challenging game of Memory. The theme for our floor is vegetables, so here are a few of our conference room names: Tomato, Avocado, Potato, Turnip, Parsnip, Asparagus, and Tomato Sauce. They are not laid out alphabetically, they are not grouped in any meaningful way, and the big rooms are not even named after big vegetables.

After two months and a lot of meetings, I still get Parsnip and Turnip confused (among others), and when someone says we have a meeting in Carrot, I have NO CHANCE of finding it if I don’t look at the map. Nor am I alone – wander the hallways on any day (like, say, if you’re lost) and you’ll likely hear someone say, “Wait, where am I?” or “Which one was Cucumber?” or “Can I follow you there?”

My Process
For kicks, I decided to see if I could come find a way to make this situation better. I spent some time studying the map of our floor, which you can see below with all of the conference rooms highlighted in yellow.I saw that they exist in much more predictable locations than I had realized. Every one lies either on the center atrium or along one of the four outside walls, which despite appearances from the inside are basically square. I then determined three main attributes that define a conference room–size, location in the building, and available equipment–and tried to come up with a new naming convention that would convey as much of that information as possible.

After a few iterations of names like ‘South 10 Teleconference,’ I realized that another key component is the ease of saying/typing the room name to another person. I re-focused on finding short, memorable names that somehow reference the rooms’ location in the building.

My Solution
Here is my proposal:I named the rooms with some reference to the compass direction of the outside wall, or to the word “center” for the rooms on the atrium. In addition, I thought we could use this compass reference to help people orient themselves and build their own mental map of the interior. Perhaps we could hang signs from the ceiling:

Or we could try something more subtle:

I’m pretty sure these changes would drastically reduce the number of times I feel lost, and the few coworkers I’ve shared this with were excited enough that they asked me to take it to our facilities manager. But I wanted to share it with you and more of my coworkers to get some feedback first. So please let me know if you have any ideas, questions, or comments!