This Thursday will be my last day at Yahoo! After three and a half years, I’ll be packing up my design books, dismantling my forest-cube, and turning in my purple badge. And then, after a very short break I’ll be joining the small but formidable UX team at Belkin.

I’m really excited about this new job. I’m excited to get my hands on the UX and interaction design of physical products, something I’ve been passionate about since my product design days at Stanford. I’m excited to work for a company that understands the value of UX, that wants to build products whose enjoyment and ease of use is a core differentiating feature. I’m excited to work for a company that is going to be a part of the future of green technology. And I’m excited to work for an innovative company that digs design.

My time at Yahoo has given me invaluable experience, inspiration, and friendships over the last three years. I’ve learned so many things, like how to design for global audiences, what it’s like to launch a product to millions of customers, the difference between designing for entertaining diversion versus specific tasks, and so much more. I will miss all of the incredibly smart and talented people I met there, and sincerely hope I’ll get the chance to work with them again in the future.

Hopefully once I get into the swing of things at the new job, I’ll be able to resume posting here on a reasonable schedule, now that I’m done with all of the time and effort of interviewing. (By the way, I have a lot of ideas for posts based on my experience interviewing as a UXer, so let me know if you might be interested in hearing about the things I’ve learned.) In the mean time I’ll be packing boxes, spending a few days outdoors away from the computer, and generally getting myself psyched up and ready to dive in to my new adventure. Here’s to new beginnings!

It’s been almost two weeks now since I returned from Interaction ’10 in Savannah, which was a fantastic conference packed with phenomenal people and content. Now that I’ve had some time to reflect (and recover from post-conference illness), here are some of my takeaways.

Meaning
Finding and providing meaning in the products and services we create was one of the repeated themes of the conference. Jon Kolko discussed the emergence of this theme in his post reflecting on the conference, as did IxDA board member Matt Nash-Lapidus.

This year the discussion moved from designing to affect behavior to designing to inspire. ‘Meaning’ was presented as the apex of design resonance, more central than aesthetics or emotion, and connected to a greater societal sense of ‘good.’ Nathan Shedroff said, “All design is the process of evoking meaning,” and Jon Kolko named ‘meaning’ as one of the four pillars of our profession and offered this quote from Yves Behar, “If it’s not ethical, it can’t be beautiful.”

Design as Collaboration with End-Users
Aside from debates about what to call ourselves, it seemed to me that the community has accepted the idea that we don’t design ‘experiences,’ because each person’s experience of an interaction is personal and individual. Many of the talks this year encouraged embracing the users as active participants in design. Cindy Chastain related interaction design to storytelling and made a clear point that a central component of every story is the context and expectations of the audience. Liz Danzico spoke about designing “frames” within which users can successfully improvise interactions. Allan Chochinov (in his standout presentation) said, “It’s not what you make, it’s what you facilitate.” Ezio Manzini encouraged us to “enhance people’s capabilities.”

From Screens to Physical Objects
Christopher Fahey had a slide in his talk showed a quoted from Don Norman in 2007 claiming that one of the “next UI breakthroughs” will be “the return to physical devices.” It seems that future is now. Timo Arnall and Matt Cottam both gave thoughtful and thought-provoking presentations of tangible interactions and physical computing, often in devices without a screen. Richard Banks, in his talk titled “The 40 Year Old Tweet,” spoke about the possible need to make digital objects tangible when preserving them as heirlooms.

In his FastCompany piece, Rob Tannen sees this as retrospection, but I saw it more as a sign of the inevitable seamless blending of technology into our surroundings.

Real People Are Compelling
The standout moments of the whole weekend for me were the moments in presentations that showed real-life (non UX) people. Just as our work suffers when it doesn’t have regular exposure to the people we are designing it for, some of the weekend felt a little light on perspective from outside the design world.

One of the reasons Allan Chochinov’s presentation of his students’ work was so outstanding was that most of the student pieces referenced actual people’s stories, such as the supremely touching story of a mom with cancer who wanted to make her baldness less scary to her children. Jon Kolko presented a fascinating student project which designed encouragement for college dudes to use condoms (“Man Shields”), complete with chuckle-inducing quotes and photos. Matt Cottam showed a very funny video of unsuspecting city residents taking an “abandoned” chair off the street and giving it a place in their home. Timo Arnall included captivating video and photos of a young girl delighting in toys and objects embedded with RFID chips. Richard Banks spoke of a man who had inherited a box of rocks from his grandfather, with no note or context to explain why.

These are just a few of the examples of real, non-designer people mentioned in the talks, but to me they clearly illustrate that (in presentations, anyway) people are more interesting than principles.

_______________________________________________

Below is a slide-show of my notes from the conference. For in-depth, thoughtful recaps of all four days of the conference, see the Johnny Holland recaps.

Welcome to These Things Matter, a collection of observations of the sometimes quirky way that people and things interact.

My name is Sarah, and I am an Interaction Designer. I absolutely love the intersection of things and people – the unexpected ways people bend things to their needs and the unexpected impact of a small design element. I hope to showcase experiences that have been obviously “Designed” by a designer who had some perspective on the user, problem, and environment, as well as experiences that have been “designed” or modified in the wild by the realities of the user, problem, and environment.

For more about me, please see the About page.