It's always been funny to me that we feel a sense of something ending as the calendar changes from one year to another. Out of all the things we do customarily that are time-limited, such as projects or pay periods or monthly services, the year-end/new year markings always seems the most artificial to me and yet we treat it with the most emotion. Oh well, holiday-weariness musings aside, I hope this time of year does have plenty of good things to remember and to anticipate.
I will be posting new thoughts soon on trends I see in user interface and interaction, why IVR might have peaked and be in decline, and why bad design is immoral.
For now, for all you designers, I leave you with the strongest possible recommendation to put this book on your Q1 2009 reading list: Sketching User Experiences. It is a great treatise on the need for the design process as well as enlightening concerning what sketching is and why it is so important, which helps me understand why some of us push so hard on doing sample dialogs early in the design process.
Design well!!
-pnl
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Let's try to catch up sometime
One of my favorite things to pick on about the little speech reco world we play in is how often we seem to let it slip our mind that there is a much larger world of interaction design for software and its users out there. It's not that some haven't tried to show us over the past decade, but somehow our entire focus keeps turning back inward to our industry and our practice. I believe this is unhealthy for multiple reasons and said so most publicly in my talk at SpeechTek 2007.
Though it is understandable, to a certain degree, one of my little missions is to change that as I can. So, occasionally, I will link to older content on the web that I think provides valuable input to our efforts from outside our normal ping-pong ball sphere of operation.
These will be in no order other than when I think of them and/or run across them. The first is from a respected and multi-facted web designer, Cameron Moll, and is a presentation he gave in the fall of 2006, Nine skills that separate good and great designers.
While some of this is about visual interfaces specifically, most addresses thinking about and creating great design in general. Enjoy. Please.
Though it is understandable, to a certain degree, one of my little missions is to change that as I can. So, occasionally, I will link to older content on the web that I think provides valuable input to our efforts from outside our normal ping-pong ball sphere of operation.
These will be in no order other than when I think of them and/or run across them. The first is from a respected and multi-facted web designer, Cameron Moll, and is a presentation he gave in the fall of 2006, Nine skills that separate good and great designers.
While some of this is about visual interfaces specifically, most addresses thinking about and creating great design in general. Enjoy. Please.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Published - VUI - Art with Science
The column I referred to a few weeks ago is out now. Thanks TMA Associates! Read it!
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Rules and instructions - People behave like water
In a nice Speech Technology mag article from Dr. Susan, she highlights that people, in this case callers to automated systems, frequently behave like water (my interpretation, not hers). That is, they try to find the easiest way to get what they want most of the time. Other times, they barrel over any seemingly arbitrary obstacles when they perceive that there is a way to accomplish what they want.
She rightly points out the fine details of how to deal with these issues in a couple of specific situations. The larger lessons are: a) if you make rules (right or wrong) for customers, make sure they know them and make sure they are consistent across the board; b) to maximize success all the way around, facilitate the fastest, easiest way (according to the customer!) to get where the person wants to go.
Too often, our designs provide interaction that is more like dams and channel locks and less like soothing mountain streams.
She rightly points out the fine details of how to deal with these issues in a couple of specific situations. The larger lessons are: a) if you make rules (right or wrong) for customers, make sure they know them and make sure they are consistent across the board; b) to maximize success all the way around, facilitate the fastest, easiest way (according to the customer!) to get where the person wants to go.
Too often, our designs provide interaction that is more like dams and channel locks and less like soothing mountain streams.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Hope for now
With high-gear, "what recession?", season-sanctioned consumption officially with us for another year, I hope you are able to find experiences that you can cherish, that make you smile, that give you peace, and make you glad to be living here and now.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Numbers are hard to argue with
I like backing up design decisions, or in this case, customer strategy approaches, with numbers. Data can be hard to argue with. So, when I saw this, had to share: Apple's Customer Service Kick Dell's A$$, Empirical Evidence Shows
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
"the art of vui"
From a column to be published soon.
The view (we have) of the art of VUI does not parallel the applied education and craft found among the professional practitioners of the classic arts. In those fields, science is as much a tool as instrument, chisel, and brush. The expert composer deftly manipulates the mathematical intricacies of sound over time. The learned sculptor understands how to wield force against the limits of steel and stone. The master painter possesses the insight to blend and bend hue and light, oil and pigment. All three, though, along with the other arts, have a singular, common, and nearly unknowable component in the final product: the emotional result produced in those that experience their work. Yet that causes the artists to know and master their tools and domain even more.
The view (we have) of the art of VUI does not parallel the applied education and craft found among the professional practitioners of the classic arts. In those fields, science is as much a tool as instrument, chisel, and brush. The expert composer deftly manipulates the mathematical intricacies of sound over time. The learned sculptor understands how to wield force against the limits of steel and stone. The master painter possesses the insight to blend and bend hue and light, oil and pigment. All three, though, along with the other arts, have a singular, common, and nearly unknowable component in the final product: the emotional result produced in those that experience their work. Yet that causes the artists to know and master their tools and domain even more.
did i tell you
about the wonderful name of this blog? i created designoutloud back in 2003 when i left intervoice and went solo as a voice interaction designer. well, we all called it vui then, but vixd really fits better. but other sites address topics like that. so, i had this name, a crude website, and a logo, and we were in love. but, through the years and a cruel twist of events, i have lost that url. makes me sick. and it i can conveniently blame it on the user experience provided by the hosting service at the time, hostway. i have since switched due to that problem. and getting through it was awful, too. techs basically accused me of causing the issue. live and move the hell on. now someone else has the url and wants $1500 for it. sentiment isn't that strong. we'll see...
Monday, September 29, 2008
User (Fan) Experience
Q. What better time to start yakking into the blogosphere than after an inspirational event like the Austin City Limits music festival?
A. None.
Why? More important than it being an itch to be scratched, it's relevance. In this day and age when experience and design are buzzwords and sometimes actually paid attention to, attending the ACL fest gave me a clear example of the power of user desire.
If you've never attended an outdoor festival, then, if you can, think of a sweltering summer camp and add 60,000 people in the area of a golf course and dust in biblical proportions. And for those of you of a certain age, add more walking than your knees are happy with and those "crazy kids" that don't seem to give a damn about stepping on your toes or blocking your view. Sound miserable? Until Thursday, I would have agreed with you.
Oh, but what an experience! Acts I never had gotten to see, acts I hadn't known I wanted to see, the energy of 40,000 people singing the same song, a dragonfly buzzing through a milling crowd, crying from the sheer joy of a song sprung heartfelt from two people playing simple instruments. Oh, what an experience!
The man rambles, you might say. But here is the matter. We weigh what we are willing to tolerate for a desired experience. Sometimes a great deal of hardship, of many kinds, is worth what we gain. For me, three days of heat and dust and rudeness disappears in the revel of three days of transcendent music, old and new. And I thank my wife for it. And the artists and festival organizers, too. They all offered me a gain far greater than the cost.
So here is the lesson. In my area of telephone interaction (particularly speech recognition-based), we wonder why callers don't embrace our offering more eagerly. It's because what we are offering, or enabling, is frequently a lesser gain than the cost. The pain of dealing with the interfaces we often create is much larger than the reward of reaching the goal of their call. Why would they want to deal with navigation and frustration and wasted time? Not only are we not giving them what they think is their preferred method, but we give them an avenue that they can't figure out. What's not to hate?
If the festival had offered mediocre bands, or didn't have every little detail well-organized, and my presence hadn't been organized by my wife, then today I would be a very unhappy man. But instead I revel in the memory of Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, and Alison Kraus harmonizing and finding a new (to me) band like Delta Spirit, heat, dust, jerks, be damned. And I am a happy fan, a happy customer, a happy user.
Someday, we and our direct customers, in this field, will learn how to make gain bigger than the cost.
- pnl
A. None.
Why? More important than it being an itch to be scratched, it's relevance. In this day and age when experience and design are buzzwords and sometimes actually paid attention to, attending the ACL fest gave me a clear example of the power of user desire.
If you've never attended an outdoor festival, then, if you can, think of a sweltering summer camp and add 60,000 people in the area of a golf course and dust in biblical proportions. And for those of you of a certain age, add more walking than your knees are happy with and those "crazy kids" that don't seem to give a damn about stepping on your toes or blocking your view. Sound miserable? Until Thursday, I would have agreed with you.
Oh, but what an experience! Acts I never had gotten to see, acts I hadn't known I wanted to see, the energy of 40,000 people singing the same song, a dragonfly buzzing through a milling crowd, crying from the sheer joy of a song sprung heartfelt from two people playing simple instruments. Oh, what an experience!
The man rambles, you might say. But here is the matter. We weigh what we are willing to tolerate for a desired experience. Sometimes a great deal of hardship, of many kinds, is worth what we gain. For me, three days of heat and dust and rudeness disappears in the revel of three days of transcendent music, old and new. And I thank my wife for it. And the artists and festival organizers, too. They all offered me a gain far greater than the cost.
So here is the lesson. In my area of telephone interaction (particularly speech recognition-based), we wonder why callers don't embrace our offering more eagerly. It's because what we are offering, or enabling, is frequently a lesser gain than the cost. The pain of dealing with the interfaces we often create is much larger than the reward of reaching the goal of their call. Why would they want to deal with navigation and frustration and wasted time? Not only are we not giving them what they think is their preferred method, but we give them an avenue that they can't figure out. What's not to hate?
If the festival had offered mediocre bands, or didn't have every little detail well-organized, and my presence hadn't been organized by my wife, then today I would be a very unhappy man. But instead I revel in the memory of Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, and Alison Kraus harmonizing and finding a new (to me) band like Delta Spirit, heat, dust, jerks, be damned. And I am a happy fan, a happy customer, a happy user.
Someday, we and our direct customers, in this field, will learn how to make gain bigger than the cost.
- pnl
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