Agile '09 Call for Submissions

Cooper is a proud co-producer of the User Experience stage at Agile 2009, the annual Agile Alliance conference. We look forward to hearing your stories about how User Experience techniques enhance Agile projects. Visit the User Experience section to learn more, and to submit a proposal. The deadline is February 13th.

The conference will be in Chicago, August 24 to 28, 2009. We hope to see you there!

Thinking outside the inbox

There’s a meme floating around the interWeb called “Inbox Zero, the gist of which is that we should not be slaves to our email. That’s a fabulous sentiment and I agree wholeheartedly.

Merlin Mann, the creator of Inbox Zero, has some truly excellent advice on how to think about your email, your inbox, and yourself. In particular, not feeling guilty about deleting messages or sending terse, one-line-replies are golden rules. Not to put too fine a point on this, but I agree without reservation with the principles and practices of Inbox Zero.

Yes, and.

I believe that Inbox Zero is a human operational method for dealing with fundamental shortcomings in the software we are forced to use. The very fact that we have an “Inbox problem” is prima facie evidence that the software bringing our email to us isn’t really designed with our goals in mind.

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Economizer: A Cooper service concept

People are looking for ways to economize in these uncertain times. We can all see the evidence of environmental crisis brewing alongside the economic downturn, and it's easy to feel powerless in the face of such global forces. With politicians and businesses seeking avenues to a sustainable future, Cooper wondered how design might help individuals cut costs while also encouraging behavior that was environmentally responsible.

This all started when Environmental Defense approached Cooper, asking us to imagine new ways to make it easier for people to save resources. We performed research throughout the Bay Area, then collaborated with Environmental Defense to model our findings and identify design opportunities. From this point of inspiration, we continued on our own, crafting a quick eco-friendly concept: Economizer, a service that helps consumers save money while making sustainable choices. The service consists of a core set of internet-aware services with optional components such as hardware data collectors, social networking applications, and dedicated smart phone interfaces.

Economizer: Scenario 1 on Vimeo
(Watch this video in fullscreen mode by clicking the icon in the lower right of the player.)

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IxDA-SF holiday party. w00t!

We had a blast at last night's very rockin' IxDA holiday party here in San Francisco, featuring the excellent sounds of My First Earthquake (fronted by ex-Cooperista Rebecca Bortman), Nobody from Ipanema, and The Invisible Cities.

This seems like a good occasion to extend some serious props to Dani Malik and Kim Lenox. They've taken IxDA-SF from its fledgling incarnation as a networking happy hour to what it is today — a vibrant community centered around a series of monthly presentations and discussions that span the diverse perspectives and backgrounds that make up the field of interaction design. Big thanks to Dani, Kim, and the IxDA-SF crew for making this happen.

You've got to hear it to believe it

Art house movies always seem to reveal new possibilities. Last week I watched Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle, a deep dive into one of the world's most fascinating athletes &mdash French football god and legendary hothead Zinedine Zidane.

The film spans a single game, and dozens of cameras are trained on Zidane for the game's 90 minutes. Throughout, you're connected to Zidane &mdash pressed up against his face, attached to his hip as he glides through the defense, drifting around him as he scans the field. You're also immersed in the sound of the event &mdash chatter between players, the sound of cleats cutting into the ground, the distant crowd roar, and strange periods of silence.

Zinedine Zidane, from the film Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle, (translation: Zidane, a 21st century portrait)

It's the sound that really did it for me. The gasps for breath, the immediate shifts in the pace of footsteps, the ka-chunk of the foot hitting the ball, the zzzzzip of the ball on top of the grass. If you applied this super hi-fi sound to sports I watch all the time &mdash NBA basketball, for instance &mdash the end result would be incredibly compelling.

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The virtues and perils of the developer/designer

How important is it for interaction designers to be well-versed in the technologies they are designing for? Does good design spring from a firm understanding of the underlying capabilities and limitations of the technology? Or is it helped by an indifferent stance towards how a design is ultimately produced in order to consider the issues from a fresh perspective?

There are good arguments on both sides of this issue, and there’s no one right answer.

Many successful product design models rely on designers being fluent developers. Notably, 37signals can rapidly develop and iterate their products because the design thinking is intertwined with its technological manifestation. A firm like Stamen delivers such compelling visualizations because they can ingest and process data like developers then exploit their tools to consider and present the information and interactions like designers.

Other models feature greater role specialization. At Cooper, we have designers with varying levels of technical expertise, from ex-programmers to design-school grads with no development experience. We work to keep the consideration of technological possibility or constraint at arm’s length early in the design process in order to envision the best experience for our personas. As our designs progress, we work closely with the client’s development organization to vet feasibility and adjust the design in response to developer and business stakeholder feedback.

Several factors have made the question of this design/develop relationship more complicated than ever:

• Agile devlopment methods that stress iteration and feedback
• Development tools that make it possible for non-programmers to build prototypes, demos, even shipping code
• Increasingly dynamic interactions that are difficult to design and communicate without experiencing
• Increased awareness of goal-directed design methodology by software developers

Where do you and your team fall on this spectrum, and how are you dealing with these issues?

Nothing is special

Numbers abound in interfaces, hopefully delivering a great deal of information. Bigger numbers usually indicate more activity (like when you're looking at comment threads), or more work to do (like when you're looking at your inbox); smaller numbers generally indicate low activity. However, when the number zero must be represented in an interface, it should be treated differently than other values. Why? As I'll show below, "zero" can actually imply a variety of things, depending on its context.

Search results

Zero results can mean either that the term isn’t represented in the searched data set, or that the user mis-keyed the term. Each possibility would suggest a different recourse.

• Correct term, but no results? You need to find another term or look elsewhere.
• Bad term mis-keyed? You need to supply the correct term.

When the search results are zero, help the user notice the error with attention getting graphic design, and provide options about alternate terms or places to look.

Google provides helpful “Did you mean?” suggestions when a search produces no results.

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Designing time to think

I was busy with production work last week, and in the background I listened to the Google TechTalk by David Levy, "No time to think." In spite of the title (and my partial attention), it really got me thinking. Levy suggests that we are in an information environmental crisis, that we need silence and sanctuary for creative reflection and engagement. He explains that Nobel Laureate Barbara McKlintock was able to see further and deeper into genetics than anyone had before because she took the time to look and to hear what the material had to say to her. At Harvard, students asked her "where does one get the time to look and think?" They argued that the pace of current research seems to preclude such a contemplative stance.

This is a pressure we can all relate to. I struggle to find the time to think deep thoughts. Every time I try, I interrupt myself to check my email or text messages, or track the latest news headlines. Randall Munroe over at xkcd.com seems to have the same problem. It seems that my attention span is inversely proportional to the number of "productivity" tools and toys I have. As much as I love it, my iPhone has been the worst thing I could have done for my ability to focus.

These days we rarely focus clearly on one thing at a time, multi-tasking from the moment we read the paper on the bus with headphones and coffee en route to work, until we get home and check email in front of the TV while eating dinner. We are constantly interacting with technology devices and information.

Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, As We May Think, expressed the hope that more powerful tools will automate the routine aspects of information processing, and would thereby leave researchers and other professionals more time for creative thought. But as Levy points out, more than sixty years later, it seems clear that the opposite has happened, that the use of the new technologies has contributed to an accelerated mode of working and living that leaves us less time to think, not more. Levy asks where in our culture we are making time to think, since thinking takes time.

At the end of the talk an interesting comment came from fellow who observed that, in contrast to Sweden, San Francisco has very few public benches where one can just sit down and observe what is. One has to keep moving, and according to the laws if you stay in one place too long, you may be considered to be "loitering." In our culture, there are few opportunities to be calm and sit down in a public space, unless one is consuming something at a coffee shop or a café. This is something that has been built into the culture and the architecture. We need to rediscover the places that will encourage this kind of thinking and reflection - not only in our physical but also in our digital spaces. Creative thought can't be rushed, but it can be nurtured.

So how can we nurture creative thought?

Much of the work we do at Cooper involves designing tools to increase productivity and efficiency; to help people to do more, faster, and keep them moving. But are we in danger of making things too fast and efficient, preventing people from spending enough time with the information they need to consider carefully? There are things that computers are really good at — memory work and calculations, for example. There are also things that they are really bad at — cognitive work, subjective decisions and judgment calls. The latter should be left to people, and as designers we need to ensure they have the right information, as well as the time, to come to a thoughtful decision or judgment.

For example, when designing software for tax professionals, we should ensure that the preparer is enabled to spend most of their time interpreting tax laws, rather than filling in line items one by one. Make the easy stuff easy — let computers do what computers are good at — and allow preparers to focus on what they are good at, and what they actually enjoy about their jobs.

Designing with time

We use scenarios to tell stories of ideal experiences for our users. Any storyteller will tell you that timing is an important part of telling a good story and as designers we need to think carefully about time as a design element — it's just as important as color, type and layout. Dan Boyarski has been thinking about time as a design element for many years. He has been teaching his students to use time for emphasis, clarity or to create new meaning. You can see some examples of the work from his classes here.

Most of these pieces are experimental and entertaining, based on poetry or film dialogs, but the principles at work can be applied to designing enterprise software too. Rather than just making everything faster and more efficient, we need to think about how to get people to focus on the important stuff, without letting minor tasks and busy-work get in the way. We need to design environments where people have the time and space to focus on important decisions. One way to do this is through progressive disclosure; only revealing information when it's relevant to the decision at hand. Other ways to achieve this would involve presenting information in the right sequence, or placing related information in close proximity to help people to see the big picture. All of this is in service of nurturing the balance between ratio (searching and re-searching, abstracting refining and concluding) and intellectus (thinking; reflection; assimilation and contemplation) — which is Levy's concluding slide of the talk.

Photo from Flickr by timparkinson.

It's really important to take the time to look and to think. Let's think about how we can design metaphorical benches in our products to encourage people to stop and reflect where necessary.

Making people think

Software makes us think. Sometimes, it aids productive thinking by pointing us toward the right things to think about. Other times, it gets in our way, poses confusing choices, and generally frustrates us; this unproductive thinking can be seen as the cost of doing business with an ineffective interface.

Christof van Nimwegen's doctoral thesis focuses on the ways in which software can be used as an aid in creative thinking, and it specifically discusses the trade-offs between requiring users to construct an internal understanding of the system, and externalizing that system in the interface, via menus, dialogs, or wizards.
Bill Thompson, a regular commentator on the BBC World Service program Digital Planet, enthusiastically responded to the paper with the following:

It is also the sort of basic psychological research that we desperately need in the Web 2.0 world where major sites like Facebook are constantly being redesigned on the basis of little real understanding of how people engage with their computers.

I was interested to see someone addressing interface design from a strictly psychological perspective, rather than one rooted in interaction design:

We concluded that relieving a user’s memory and making interactions assisted by externalizing information does not have beneficial effects. It makes users count on the interface and gives them (unrightfully so) the feeling that the task and thinking-work is partly done for them, which seduces users in more shallow cognitive behavior.

Wizards can have the effect of seducing users into shallow cognitive behavior. When users are guided through a simple process, they are often shielded from an underlying complexity. While saving the user time and effort in the short term, the wizard may also make them less capable in the long term because they haven't had to deeply consider their actions.

Nimwegen continues:

... Interaction should facilitate or even persuade users to learn what underlies the task they are doing. The same is true in situations where interruptions are commonplace and where in the meanwhile mastery of what is underlying a task or domain is desired, or when operations come with a cost and direct solutions without deviations are the aim. In designing our interfaces we have to be careful with providing interface cues that give away too much, and must design in such a manner that the way users (should) think is optimally supported, which in turn could help the software to achieve its specific goal.

Not every task is important enough to teach users the mechanisms that support it. Many interfaces benefit from a level of abstraction or decoupling from the underlying processes. The spirit of this research is to point out that the effort to dumb down can go too far. Removing some of the obstacles to learning complicated or deep domain applications may actually do more harm than good for a user.

For example, a beginner may struggle to through the myriad complexities of 3D modeling software, and this struggle may in the end produce more competent users. The software shouldn't erect unnecessary obstacles, but a learning curve that is too shallow may actually hinder their ability to really develop competence in program in the long run.

(Via BoingBoing)

Cross Country featured in Google Maps case study

Cross Country, a longtime Cooper client, was recently featured in a Google Maps Success Story. Cross Country Healthcare (CCH) is one of the largest providers of healthcare staffing services in the United States.

In the article, Google reports that “Using the Google Maps for Enterprise API, Cooper collaborated with developers at Cross Country to devise a powerful, visually enriched application that meshed seamlessly with Cross Country’s CRM system. The resulting web portal supplies nurses, allied health professionals, and recruiters with graphically rich location, facility, and housing data. For example, a nurse seeking a position in the Chicago area can specify a 10-mile radius, drill down into the map’s data points for street and vicinity information, and identify nearby assignments.”

CCTC's Job Search for travelers was one of the first enterprise-level Google Maps mash-ups. It has powerful yet simple searching, filtering and flagging capabilities. With the new traveler web portal, customers have:

• Immediate access to rich job information and job application services unlike any other staffing company
• Anytime/anyplace access to the system's web-based tools for seeking jobs and maintaining credentials, which provide ease-of-use and control to travelers while reducing recruiter workload
• Ability to envision the realities of each new locale (such as housing and transportation), thus improving travelers' self-service capabilities
• Personalization based on the traveler's past searches, nursing specialties, and lifestyle preferences

This project resulted in tangible benefits for Cross Country. According to Google, “After its first eight months, the nursing web portal realized a 77 percent increase in job-search activity. Job seekers are networking to make more informed decisions about upcoming assignments, resulting in greater job satisfaction. Additionally, a recruiter looking to place a candidate in a hospital now has sophisticated mapping technology to better match applicants with lifestyle preferences. From an administrative perspective, users can access updated payroll, insurance, and job-certification information - saving countless hours of paperwork, telephone time, and overhead expenses for everyone concerned.”

For more information about this project, please also see Cooper’s case study.