You’re on your way to pick up some fast food because you’re so amazingly hungry for a new quadruple-decker bacon angus cheeseburger. Your mind is just telling you to go out and get this new meat wad delight, which sits precariously between two deep-fried grilled cheese sandwiches. Hard to imagine, I know, since you’ve been using a mobile app to count your calories, but you’ve got a serious hankering (and no one needs to know about your caloric careen off course now anyway, right?).

However, instead of ordering at the counter or over the loud speaker at the local drive-thru window, you decide to check the “My Locations” folder on your mobile phone–or better yet, the iPad mounted to your dashboard. Once you come to a stop at the restaurant, an icon with the unmistakable red pigtails of a certain girl appears. You click on it. She starts talking to you by name and tells you what’s new on the menu. With a few swipes of your finger, you glance over the succulent selections and tap on the value meal that’s going to soon spark a conversation between you and your family physician (we’ll save the details of that encounter for another daydream).

At the end of your order, you’re asked to repeat their fast food slogan, or some other perfunctory gibberish thought up by the marketing hacks. This allows you to pass the voice recognition process, which instantly purchases the order using your pre-saved payment information. You feel so good about the experience that you somehow forget that a factually correct account of the caloric intake you’re about to consume was just instantly uploaded to a data-cloud. Guess you’ll come to terms with the slowly declining line graph that represents your ever-diminishing dietary goals the next time you’re faced with your personal apps at home.

For not only does the future mean that mobile applications will be served to you at the moment you need them without downloading apps or typing in web addresses (this was served to you when you came in proximity of the restaurant), it also means that your information will be sent to other applications and services uninterrupted by device or network specific barriers. Think of the possibilities of using the same premise at retail stores, hospitals, airports, or classrooms.

So, while you once downloaded applications to your mobile devices anticipating to use them with the world at large, the experiences of the future will most likely be finding you instead–and with that, changing the way you interact with the world.

In fact, this is all quite possible now and could certainly be used for more worthwhile things than ordering cheeseburgers.

Or maybe I’ve just got my head in the clouds.

In truth, it’s more of a construct than a theory, and it’s not at all original at that–all the parts are derived from the well-established principles of design management. I just applied different components of that application into a visual model that made sense with the way I’ve been seeing and working with design every day for the past couple of years.

The shape, like a lot of theoretical models, is composed of three equal circles that converge at the center. What’s important to know about this model, though, is that it starts broadly at the top and funnels its way down to a more narrowly focused endpoint. This purposely suggests that design problems in need of a solution, regardless of individual design practices and organizational structures, optimally start with a large overall strategic objective, which eventually or simultaneously merges with operational practicalities, and becomes something real through iterative tactical execution.

All of the relevant parts are equal and overlap at multiple points, suggesting that each are far from estranged from one another, but rather remain integral to a higher working order which requires constant communication and coordination throughout a design life cycle. At its core, I believe, lies the heart of real design thinking, which independently can be used to develop the mythical “shared brain” among design practitioners and business thinkers alike.

While this model certainly needs a lot more substantial examination, if not explanation, I’ve found that it’s been adequate enough to allow me to organize where disciplines, people, and ideas fit into a given design context. I think it also sets my expectations for what design is, and where I think it needs to go–for the time being anyways.

I’ll be interested to see how it holds up, myself, in the future.

In psychology, emotional reactions to stimuli are called affective responses. Affective responses happen very fast, and are governed in an automatic, unconscious way by the lower centers of the brain that also govern basic instincts (food, fear, sex, breathing, blinking, etc.). Think of affective responses as the brain’s bottom-up reaction to what you see and feel. Cognitive responses are your brain’s slower, top-down, more considered responses. They’re governed by your personal cultural views, learning, experiences, and personal preferences that you are aware of and can easily articulate. Affective reactions assign value to your experiences; cognitive reactions assign meaning to what you see and use.

He even offers a measurable application of this viewpoint:

Research confirms that users make aesthetic decisions about the overall visual impression of web pages in as little as 50 milliseconds (1/20th of a second). These instant visceral reactions to web pages happen in virtually all users, are consistent over visit length, and strongly influence the user’s sense of trust in the information. In short, users have made fundamental, consistent, and lasting aesthetic decisions about the credibility and authority of sites before major eyetracking events begin.

While I think any designer worth his salt instinctually knows this, there’s an important truth to consider — any site with an objective to establish trust in users and confidence in doing business should execute on multiple levels — and at the visceral level it happens nearly instantaneously with users.

In his goodbye post, he offers a glimpse of the design culture at the now monolithic corporate giant — a rant which has so far caught a lot of traction on the blogosphere.

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

This statement, assuming again it’s true, reminded me of the analogy that Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO and author of Designing Interactions, came up with for design, comparing it to an iceberg. Basically, if we can imagine that the smaller, exposed part of the iceberg, contains the quantitative, the objective, and the analytical, it only goes to follow that the much larger underwater part contains the qualitative, the subjective, and the aesthetic.

The bottom part, Moggridge argues, is the playground for unconscious, intuitive design.

Clearly, Google is a company that only wants to operate at the top of the iceberg. I wonder, though, how long it can continue to thrive when so much unmined territory goes waiting for others to explore.

Good luck to you, Douglas.

Somebody recently shared with me an article from Fast Company magazine about a winery that’s replaced their traditional glass bottles with more forward-thinking recyclable carton packages. The resultant environmental affect claims to produce a carbon footprint ten times smaller than traditional glass bottles once the savings for weight, shipping, and disposal are all tallied in (the cartons can be placed in ordinary recycle bins). Additionally, the new solution offers 33% more wine, making it the smart choice for the ever-demanding train-hitching vagrant segment.

If I were to peg the purpose of this concept on my design chart, I’d say it fits squarely in between desire and utility. In hindsight, these relationships do seem to flow into one another without much conflict. Then again, I’m beginning to think that desire is the herald for all other design purposes, so maybe it shouldn’t be such a surprise. The greatest undrelying tension I can see, and the one that I would venture to say can significantly affect adoption on a wide scale, seems to be a matter of well-known convention. The practice of using glass cylinders to hold wine spans throughout time for, oh… a millennium. So why the packaging doesn’t incorporate more natural “winey” gold and red colors or nudge to the time-honored affordance factor of a more crafted container is beyond me. It’s possible this was a conscious design decision borne out of feedback from customers or the product of some other synthetic analysis of environmental factors. At first blush (pardon the pun), it really does read more like a carton of O.J. then a fine French wine.

Regardless of my two-cent visceral reaction to a couple of screenshots for a product I’ve never used, volumes of discussion could yet be had concerning the practical long-term benefits of re-thinking wasteful, yet culturally entrenched design conventions like the glass bottle. The part design will play in revealing these shortcomings, and in conjuring entirely new solutions, will surely be significant.

The patent for this invention takes 65 paragraphs to explain a design that’s utterly, if not painfully, obvious in hindsight–the square taco.

The self-standing taco shell makes it easier to prepare multiple tacos at the same time. This advantage is especially desirable in fast food, cafeteria and party environments where multiple tacos are being prepared at one time.

Still another advantage of the present tacos is that even if taco breakage occurs along either connection between flat base and sidewall, the flat base and remaining sidewall forms a ledge minimizing loss of the added fillings to allow for consumption completion with reduced mess.

Also, another advantage of a taco made using the taco shell of the present invention may be presented for consumption in an upright and filled orientation.

Some low-level testing at dinner validated this premise. Soon afterward, Mrs. Usability was heard saying in a self-satisfied tone, “It’s about time.”

Eventually, I would like to share with you the design theory I’m working on (I may even have settled on a name for it), but for now allow me to explain a small part of it which at one point served as the theory’s main catalyst.

During my work as a user experience designer, I’ve become increasingly convinced that an interesting parallel exists between the two cerebral hemispheres of the human brain and two common deliverables associated with interaction design practices–specifically the development of low-fidelity wireframes into highly detailed visual designs (sometimes also referred to as visual comps or mock-ups).

This observation pronounces a fact that is usually assumed as a common goal among practitioners looking to build a strong user experience design team; find candidates who are well-rounded and possess strengths in analytical know-how and creative conceptualization.

It could be argued, as I’ll start doing now, that the need for this specialization is never more apparent during the life cycle of a design then at the transition point from wireframe (when the design is defined by boxes and mostly black and white text) to visual design (when the design is alive with color, graphics, and seductively shiny buttons, or other aesthetic elements). At this critical turning point, while the fundamental design goals still underly similar tensions, the designer(s) involved in defining and resolving these different artifacts often–although not always–derive their solutions from opposite ends of the cognitive playing field.

So, presumably then, if one is to design user experiences (or any product, such as cars, clothing, or computer animations, for that matter) by focusing wireframes into some other creatively articulated end result, it makes sense to be cognizant of how different operations get started within the brain.

Consider the widely known and somewhat diametrically opposed functions of the left and right brain hemispheres.

While these attributes may not have a one-to-one relationship with each deliverable on any design project, there should be enough cause to consider a somewhat clinical hypothesis–sensitivity to and explicit focus on left and right brain functions during the design process can serve to optimize certain aspects, if not design decisions, in a predictable fashion. After all, these elements are digested by a consumer in the same cognitive way once the design has become a product.

As best I can tell from my own experience and from working with others in the design industry, specific attributes which determine the ultimate success or failure of these deliverables fall along similarly opposite sides of the fence.

There are, of course, many other deliverables such as storyboards, as well as offshoots of other design methodologies that muddy the water of this split. Adaptive Path’s advocation of sketchboards is a good recent example. I’m not suggesting practitioners follow a rigid form of design by any means. I think communication formed in any artifact which tries to engage both sides of the brain simultaneously is a good practice and probably very necessary for certain kinds of problem solving or even within the confines of a given project.

I’m only observing that certain results are highly predictable and can serve to enhance design decision-making or touchpoints, if you will, within their optimal spaces because the very nature of human brain chemistry supports it.

By isolating functions performed almost exclusively within each of these deliverables a more relevant definition of design becomes apparent. It first takes on a rational form, which is adapted and synthesized into a final product. Examining this structure overall can amplify design decisions and help further delineate touchpoints within that assumed structure.

It’s a sickness I can’t escape these days.

One system that I find particularly offensive–and I say that with my “user” hat on, not necessarily as a designer, although it should be fairly difficult to separate the two–is the implementation I’ve seen and used at Wal-mart.

As an entity representing nearly 90% of household shoppers across the U.S., Wal-mart owes its customers the best possible experience–not just the best possible prices. And as a corporate leader in the area of maximizing efficiencies, it’s somewhat surprising to see the ball dropped so closely to the end of an otherwise successful conversion funnel.

I should disclaim here that this evaluation may only apply to the Wal-mart in my area. I know it’s fairly common for a national store to pilot systems at different locations across the country, so if you’ve had a different experience, I only hope that yours has been better.

So, with that, here are my main areas of concern.

What’s That Throbbing Pain?
Large shiny sculpted buttons are practically a requirement for any touch-screen sale system, especially touch-screens that interface with the consumer during checkout. Why is this, you ask? Because, and forgive the umpteenth explanation of this word on this site, they need to have the right affordance. That is–in this context, anyway, they should ideally look like physical objects which exist in space and time. So much so, that they should visually seduce one into use.

In a word, tangibility.

Actually, in the past I’ve designed touch-screen systems with buttons so shiny and so full of color contrast, that I thought they might actually induce seizures. Well, maybe not so much, but you get the idea.

“Big shiny object. Must press.”

And in its original state, Wal-mart gets the button right. But they end up losing points on two counts for their buttons–one I’ll get to in a minute. The part I’d like to point out now is the unexplainable throbbing gradient animation which eventually takes over the entire area of the main button components. This cell phone picture was taken as the pulsating action reached its fullest point of gradient saturation.

As you can see, the light color of the gradient practically makes the white text contained within it disappear. At this state, the buttons are no longer readable. And considering that the timing of the animation is slow and lumbering, the resultant affect is that the primary means of interaction effectively becomes usable only half of the time. This is really unacceptable, as the device should have been designed to be legible by users with vision impairments. As a highly segmented culture with demographics all across the board, why isn’t Wal-mart thinking about their users with disabilities?

But even as a user with normal vision, I found myself standing in line, possibly holding up other shoppers, waiting for the gradient to come back into a readable state. This drawback creates obvious inefficiencies for a checkout system that’s supposed to be fast and easy and begs the world’s largest company to re-evaluate the design. Why does this animation need to take place at all?

In the absence of any real reason, one only wishes that the buttons were simply given enough visual contrast to carry through the task at hand–that is, reading the labels to understand the possible actions and moving on with the rest of the checkout.

Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah!
Unfortunately, the buttons aren’t only limited by their visual appearance. Perhaps my biggest pet peeve of all is the fact that the buttons do not return any feedback once they’re pushed. I don’t know if I’ve hit a button on the screen because other than the screen changing eventually, nothing indicates that I’ve operated on a button successfully. This seemingly small point is so important to the design of a touch-screen point of sale system, that it cannot be stressed it enough.

Because touch-screen displays rely on a very specific type of spatial interaction, the overhead for stimulus-response is inordinately more necessary then if one were simply using a keyboard. Some ideas to repair the response path, which I do consider imperative to any good touch-screen design, are actually quite simple:

1. Give the interface an audible sound once a button is clicked. Any simple sound, even a chicken squawk, is better than no sound at all. It should be brief and immediate and leave no question that the screen was actually touched.
2. Create a “pressed” state for the button after it is clicked. Render it so it looks like it’s been pushed it into the interface. This hasn’t actually happened, of course, but the perception that it’s happened will certainly reinforce that an action’s taken place.

These suggestions together create an optimal feedback return for the user. Unfortunately, both are missing from Wal-mart’s implementation. Audibly and visually, the interface should demonstrate that it’s actively responding to the user’s activity. Failing to do so creates an impression that things may not be working, or not working in the way that I, the user, want it to happen.

The Devil’s In the Details
Slightly less offensive but no less a wonder is the attention to detail the system’s designers have put into 3D animation. This kind of unsolicited help appears to be a unique feature to Wal-mart’s self-checkout and one that appears to have its own pitfalls too. While I’m certain this on-the-fly training was started with the best of intentions, I have to wonder if it’s actually more of a hindrance to the user than anything else.

It seems to be trying to communicate spatial relationships. After I was done checking out my items, I decided to pay using my debit card, which requires me to use the credit card terminal located at the far right end of the checkout station (not ideal in itself, but that’s beyond the scope of this post). While the animation appears to be telling me to swipe my card, it’s implicitly also trying to orient me into where to perform this step on the station.

The problem is twofold:

1. Showing me how to swipe my card is putting the cart before the horse. Those instructions are already displayed on the credit card station as a separate subtask. By focusing on the how, and only indirectly instructing the where, the sequence of events becomes out of sorts and doesn’t necessarily match up to my goal. I, as a user, now have to deduce the next step from an illustration with layered meaning. That can be time-consuming and frustrating for a user.
2. There’s another problem in that the 3D images on the screen don’t necessarily match up to the station I’m using. There are similarities, yes, but the rendered station and the actual station appear different enough that a one-to-one comparison of the machines seems a necessary adjunct to understanding the message of the 3D animation. It isn’t. All that’s needed is a directional cue towards the credit card terminal, perhaps a color-coded sign on the screen that could be repeated on the physical display itself.

Actually there’s another problem, the 3D simulation uses a slow panning effect to suggest areas of focus. This invariably increases the cognitive burden on the user, as the picture moves around suggesting different locations at each turn, while it simultaneously increases the wait time for the overall process. So not only do the 3D animations fail to do what they’ve more than likely been designed to do, they increase the frustration level for both the user and for everyone else waiting at the checkout counter.

I can’t say that this is the worst self service experience I’ve ever encountered, or ever will encounter as a customer, but I do see it as having the most jaw-dropping impact. Wal-mart, both as America’s #1 retailer and as an international model for business, should be setting the bar much, much higher. Self check-out could be made so much more efficient and less burdensome to the user, which would ultimately streamline the process as a whole and increase ease-of-use, among other benefits, for the consumer.

Eventually, I’m certain Wal-mart and the other stores will get it right. But until then, a lot of design analysis, observation, and empirical research needs to be collected for self-checkout systems to make their way down the express lane.

Wife: You really did a number on this envelope. That’s not how you’re supposed to open it. We have to mail this movie back, you know.

Mr. Usability: Oh, yeah. I did that without even thinking. I don’t think I read it correctly.

Wife: Read it correctly? It doesn’t look like you read it at all. Otherwise you’d know how to open it.

Mr. Usability: Well, by read I meant interpret. I interpreted the affordance of the envelope to have a certain kind of use. Studies show that people don’t read instructions. That package design definitely has some usability issues. I should write those people a letter.

Wife: Yeah, well, you’re head has usability issues. I’m going to write you letter.

End scene.

Throughout his academic career, he consistently maintained that the best representation of his thesis on Simulacra and Simulation was Disneyland.

Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that aufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. [...] By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade.

Now, I’ll take it a step into the present and say that the last time I was at Universal Studios, the hyperreality Baudrillard helped to coin was simply off the hook. Everything about the place, from the restaurants to the bathrooms, was an exercise in some other virtual experience.

Waiting in line for the Spider-man ride, itself a masterpiece of cutting edge simulation technology, was not just the experience of waiting in line. Instead, the entrance to the ride was transformed into the Daily Bugle — complete with desk cubicles, ringing phones, and pictures of J. Jonah Jameson and news clips of the villains who would soon appear in 3-D to scare the socks off of my mother-in-law. Every sight and every sound was manufactured to shepherd the masses into a pre-conceived psychological experience.

And the ride hadn’t even started yet.

Clearly, since every ride at Universal Studios, and in fact, every surrounding place of business in Orlando, utilizes the same techniques to transform cognitive awareness into heightened sensation, the park designers are hip to what Baudrillard spent much of his life arguing, albeit to a lesser degree of pessimism.

Indeed, his life’s consternation has become, what I would argue, is simply good Customer Experience Design. Since perception is so much a part of measuring success in that discipline, it only makes sense that postmodern concepts such as hyperreality and simulation make up a few of its parts.

In fact, what caused me to make this connection was hearing the news of Baudrillard’s death while I was working out a design-related issue in my head. I had been discussing a screen I designed with some software engineers. Without getting into the details too much, I was arguing that there needed to be a “transitional” page between one screen and next. Since the two layouts were so similar, I wanted to reinforce to the user that a separate event was about to happen. The solution I proposed was to use a sub-modal dialogue usually reserved for communicating system updates. The developers didn’t see the point of this. They argued vehemently that “slowing down” the application for a static screen which updated nothing didn’t make any sense.

Well, of course, as a Customer Experience Designer, I’m not always interested in making programmable sense. I sometimes have to go beyond logic and even reality to fashion a good design. We are talking about an experience after all.

And so I realized, as I thought and listened to the news on my car radio, that those same observations had already been articulated, more or less, by Jean Baudrillard. In a way, I believe his heavy-handed scrutiny and social criticism ironically paved a clearer way for people like me to do our jobs more effectively.

That is, if we can resist the urge to harvest the human population into our own source of energy.

And down the rabbit hole we all go hopping.

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