Design Sapling.com

I previously wrote about how taking the time to learn your software can save you loads of time.

Another thing to be aware of is all the great freebies lots of programs throw in. Specifically, I’m talking about templates. Tons of software have template, but it’s not often that we really look to see what those templates have to offer.

Microsoft Word has hundreds of useful template, including legal documents, calendars, agendas, brochures, time management reminders for your team, etc… Really, there’s so much good stuff here, it’s worth it to take a few hours and figure out which ones are useful for your business. Just make sure make a note of it. After all, it’ll do you no good to flip through the templates if you forget to ever use them. I’ve got a word document on my desktop that has a list of templates useful for my team to use on projects. Whenever we get a new project, I’ve already got a huge resource of materials to help us organize, manage, and develop.

The same goes for most products from Adobe, especially InDesign.

Packaged templates are another oft overlooked feature, along with shortcut keys, that can drastically improve your productivity. The trick is taking the time to know what’s there and remember to use them.

The world is changing and book publishers are reacting.

Alternatives to physical books are popping up. E-book readers allow you to carry hundreds of different books with you.
The market isn’t very large right now and the technology certainly has room for improvement. Still, the publishers seem to be creating pioneering a new trail for delivering books.

So what’s the advantage of reading text on a $300 plain black-and-white display like on the Amazon Kindle when I already have a perfectly good laptop? Especially when most book are electronically designed these days. Well, books get leaked as PDF’s. Perhaps publishers are starting to get on board with e-books for DRM reasons. It’s harder to steal a book on proprietary technology.

A book’s PDF is going to be leaked whether or not there’s also an eBook version released. Regardless, not all publishers are keeping the PDF’s from the public. Rosenfeld Media, founded by an interaction designer, sells not only hard copies of books but PDF versions as well. The best part is that the PDFs are designed to be easy to read on a computer. Now there’s some incentive to buy. It’s cheaper than the book, full color, and you can start reading it instantly.

Do you like holding a book and seeing it on your shelf? When you buy the hard copy, the PDF is available to you for free. Start reading immediately while you wait for the actual book to get mailed.

They’re also thinking about releasing a version of the PDF that can be efficiently printed for overseas customers who don’t want to pay for shipping but still like to hold a real book.

That’s embracing technology, instead of coming up with ways to protect yourself from it. That’s evolving your business instead of fighting environmental change.

Interaction Design vs Marketing

Interaction Design (IxD) is the intersection of business and user needs to create a product that fills everyone’s needs. When I was explaining IxD to my dad, he asked if it was like marketing. There are similarities, but IxD is concerned with understanding people at a different phase in their relationship with the product than marketing is.

Marketing is focused on moving the person-product relationship to the purchase point. Convince the person the product is right for them. IxD is concerned with the person-product relationship AFTER the purchase point. Marketing is about designing a message to persuade a person to want a product. Interaction Design is about designing a product that fulfills a persons needs. IxD feeds back into marketing when enthusiastic users spread word of the product through reviews, word-of-mouth, and using it in public.

The key to success in either field is in understanding the customer, but the focus is very different and the way you segment your research participants is different. With marketing, your segments are based on buy habits, with IxD, your segments are based on user goals. People from several different marketing segments might share the same goals in a product, while certain other people from those same marketing segments might have completely different goals.

In order to develop products for goals instead of marketing segments, we do something similar to ethnographic research

Ethographic Research vs Observational Research

Ethnographic research is when you immerse yourself into a society and find out what it’s like to be a part of that society. The idea is that the best way to understand a different culture is to immerse yourself in it.

Observational research does the same thing. For interaction designers, the goal is to understand a corporate environment, a users daily routine, how they use existing tools, etc… With that data, they can figure out how to design a tool that best fits into that environment.

You can’t just ask people what the environment is like. It’s difficult to explain and dynamic. You’ll get different answer from different people.

You can’t just ask people what they want. You need to know WHY they want it. Then, you can develop something they didn’t even think about that could exceed their expectations.

Design = Collaboration

After getting your research, you’ve got to design the product to fit the goals you’ve observed. You don’t get to design whatever you want. The credit for the design lies with the users. They decided how it should work. You are merely implementing their design.

Additionally the business needs are considered. A design ideas that fills both the user needs and the business needs makes for a great design principle.

Conclusion

To be a great designer, you’ve got to be a great researcher and collaborator of ideas.

People are motivated by both avoidance and approach of tasks. Avoidance is when you don’t want to do something, so you’re motivated to NOT do it. Approach is when you want to do something.

Well, use your avoidance mentality to your advantage! Once you decide you really don’t want to do something, you’ve got all the motivation you need to do your less important task. Your reluctance to start the most dreaded task reminds you of everything else you have to do.

“Hmm, I need to do that, but I’ve got all these other things I need to do. I’ll do them first.”

-Johnny Procrastinator

That’s why lists are important:

1. They give you something productive to do when you procrastinate
2. You get a sense of accomplishment when you check them off the list, adding fuel to your motivation

Another key to motivation is to make your goals public. It’s harder to procrastinate when you’re being held accountable.

I sometimes find I have a lot of things going on in my head. When I don’t want to do something, I suddenly become interested in everything. It’s hard to get started. Surfing the web and doodling take over. Taking a minute to meditate calms me down and then I break my goals down into shorter tasks and write them down. Once I’m calm and start that first simple task, getting focused is a lot easier.

As Leonardo da Vinci said, “It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”

If you’re interested in becoming an entrepreneur, you may be interested in a show called Start-up Junkies. Educational and entertaining.

Imagine you’re an engineer. A client’s marketing team has discovered many of their customers are looking for a new mode of transportation. It could be a car, a bus, an airplane, a teleportation device, a giant robot, etc…

You must do the research and design; they don’t know what the customers need. But they do know that no matter how it works, it should have red stripes because they really like red stripes.

The Problem

That sounds completely backwards and ridiculous…and yet it is how the majority of software are designed. The client has no idea how the site will work, no idea what the visitors will prefer, and yet they nitpick about the colors and logo.

And why do the clients do this? Because the software designer showed them concept art for the damn thing without first showing them how it will be structured. If you show a client a mock-up of anything before you have the functionality down, the client will start nitpicking the visuals and the critique of functionality gets pushed to the side.

The Solution

Don’t show the client what it will look like until they’ve checked off on the functionality! Do your best to make your concept art rough and sketchy. You don’t WANT them to see it. Don’t distract them with irrelevant details because they will focus on the irrelevant details. Pencil drawings are much better than Photoshop drawing when your starting out on a project.

Once they check off on the structure and functionality, THEN you can start showing them examples of the visual user interface design. Now that they user’s goals will be met, the client can nitpick the colors.

You see it more and more. Products are getting better and people are getting used to it. There is a demand for well designed products. And new business owners are going to be designers.

Interaction Design

Interaction Design (IxD) is here to show us a new way of doing business.

1. IxD practitioners do research on people and businesses.
2. Then, they design things in an efficient and effective way based on the results of the research.

So of course they will have some insights into how a business should be organized to meet user expectations. Interaction Designers are concerned with technology, psychology, and design. They are experts in understanding a user’s motivations in order to design a technology to meet the users goals. It’s tied to marketing and business operations.

TED

IxD is similar to the idea behind TED, which is an conference of the most successful and brilliant minds around the world present their works and methods to each other. It stands for Technology Entertainment Design.

• Technology are the tools used to do research and create products.
• Entertainment (loosely) parallels psychology in that to meet a users needs and goals, you’ve got to create engaging applications.
• Design is at the root of a company. The organization must be designed (from a business plan, perhaps?) and the services and products should all be designed.

The successful presenters at TED “get” Interaction Design. They may not call it by name, but they all practice it.
If you want to become a business owner or a better businessman, then start researching Interaction Design.

I recently saw Grand Canyon Adventure 3D at an IMAX 3D. At one point, they show a bar chart. The producers probably felt obligated to add some 3-D elements, so the chart’s x-axis and y-axis axes labels popped out. That’s nice. Have stereoscopic video or images ever been used to convey important information?

We display all kinds of charts on 2D paper and monitors. It’s easy to add flourishes and grid lines that don’t really help convey the information. Edward Tufte calls that chartjunk. Chartjunk distracts you from the information.

I’ll call the 3D labels of the Grand Canyon Adventure chart “z-junk” since it pops out in the z-axis and didn’t add any helpful information to the chart. I found myself thinking about how it was cool instead of looking at the chart.

Eventually, we may have 3D displays that don’t require glasses and when that day comes, expect a lot of z-junk from software designers.

Here are some possibilities for using 3D without it being z-junk:

• Showing which tool is selected in a menu
• Showing which categories of news site you usually click on
• Display the actual structure of molecules
• Displaying depth in an isometric drawing

Some of these might be more accurately conveyed using color or change in contrast, but the point is that you can convey useful information using 3D or you can just add z-junk. Let’s get it right when the technology gets here.

Knowing the tools of the trade isn’t the same as being skilled in your trade, but without understanding the tools, you can’t apply your discipline’s services. Thoroughly understanding your tools well will help you become a more efficient and effective practitioner.

When working on a computer, pick an important software package to you and learn all it’s shortcut keys. For instance, choose your favorite browser, learn the shortcuts, and use the mouse as little as possible.
Be amazed at how expertly and swiftly you surf!

Do you use magnifying glass in Photoshop to zoom in? Waste of time.

Do you make the paintbrush bigger by dragging a slider? Way too slow.

Both mice and keyboards can be slow input devices, but mice have a particular handicap: You can only move your arm so fast without overshooting the item you intended to click on (the click-target). You’d have to do intense speed and reflex training to improve that. You might be surprised at how long it takes to move the mouse around.

Fitts’ Law says that making the click-target bigger will you reduce the speed it takes to click it. Icon-size something you usually can’t control, at least not without those larger icons taking up valuable screen pixels. If you learn the short-cuts, you won’t even need the icons. Some programs (like Photoshop and InDesign) even allow you to hide all the icons and buttons and just work on your content.

In order to become more effective, you will of course have to spend some time memorizing the short-cuts. Using a mouse has the advantage of not having to memorize anything; you can figure everything out from the context of the user interface. You don’t have to remember the command to delete a file; you just drag the file to the trash bin. Poof! It’s deleted.

However, the time spent memorizing the keyboard shortcuts is relatively small next to the time wasted moving the mouse.
You may not need to do it for every program, but for those that you use a lot, do yourself a favor and learn the shortcuts.

In October, I wrote about getting a free college education if you know where to look.

Here’s one of the resources I’ve used in the past. MIT offers free lectures online with Open Course Ware.

Yale has also made some of it’s lectures available to the public.

Here’s an U.S. News article about one of the MIT professors who’s free online lectures are really good. Check it out.