A while back I decided it would be helpful to organize a list of design heuristics (call them principles, truisms, or generalities) some other folks had written. The original list I worked from mostly came from well-known practitioners in usability and user centered design — people like Jakob Nielsen (who’s pedagogic style I usually find as easy to digest as sandpaper), as well as some other folks who were able to encapsulate meaningful guidelines and methodologies from the empirical work they were doing at the time.

This research-based approach subsequently created huge in-roads for experience design, as we now know it today — so much, that it’s allowed designers such as myself to transition from designing applications and web products using seemingly blind intuition, to practicing complex observational thinking, ideation, and blink-of-an-eye doing. By problem solving heuristically, rather than prescriptively, we can now apply holistic solutions rather quickly, instead of laboring through seemingly arbitrary and disparate ones.

Large organizations, in particular, have benefited greatly by treating design as an opportunity to apply appropriate objective rationale, while eschewing the usual subjective wants and whimsy so common in design critique and approval processes. Because it’s not just the duty of the designers to think in terms of principle, it’s up to all decision makers.

This kind of thinking isn’t without its problems, though. Often times, it’s easy to slip into an absolute mentality using such broad-based guidelines, when in fact design is often about resolving volitile tensions that lay deep within the problem space. For instance, a particular design might need to be both simple and predictable (a very common expectation), which are many times diametrically opposed to each other when you think about them in terms of principle. This isn’t always easy to resolve and may require a deeper understanding of the business needs or more rigorous analysis of available data points. Ultimately, though, appropriate solutions can be found and balanced through a rational design synthesis. That’s the goal, anyway.

Now, I’d like to make the list of 25 design heuristics available for download, but I’m afraid publishing it wouldn’t be prudent, given that I can’t cite the original authors with 100% accuracy. However, if you contact me, I’ll gladly send it to you.

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.

Given the semantic nature of the argument, I’ve tried to avoid splitting this hair. But I’m started to see an important distinction between two very similar words which are often used to describe a user’s potential behavioral motivation–desire and intent.

While these two words appear to have the same meaning in certain contexts, I think they probably have very different origins. It may be anecdotal and even difficult to demonstrate, but I believe there is an argument that while the two concepts may lead to the same end result (i.e. behavior), they’re really two separate devices which often facilitate a user’s decision making in combination with each other, like two spinning cogs.

Let’s take a look at the definitions.

According to New Oxford the word desire means, “a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen.”

The word intent, on the other hand, means, “resolved or determined to do (something).” And according to Merriam Webster this something is “usually clearly formulated or planned [...]”

So, intent then seems to require some level of forethought, whereas desire requires nothing but a longing. I’ll take it a step further and say that within interaction design intent usually takes a specific action. This action is usually rooted in a basic need (i.e. to do something),

Meanwhile, desire has more to do with a thought process rooted in a basic want (usually to know something). Perhaps this is oversimplifying a bit, but I think the two ideas are isolated enough for closer examination.

This distinction can manifest itself in many ways within a typical human-centered design. The easiest example I can think of are the everyday links found on many e-commerce sites to either “Learn more” or “Buy now.” While it could be argued that both are intents (or desires), the link to learn more is usually designed to precede any decision-making by a user. Therefore, if we accept that intent requires forethought or planning, the learn more link becomes much more about the fulfillment of the user’s on-demand desire (and if I’m honest, to instill enough confidence into the user for them to ultimately have the intent to purchase).

Of course, desire can lead to other decisions, insights, or navigational paths, while intent is usually more directed and orchestrated by a specific design or process. Again, I may be simplifying an already gray area, but I think this contrast may reflect a basic design tension in and of itself and can be used to resolve designs that require various levels of decision making by an end user.

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.

CNN’s Election Center 2008 delivers not only a monumental amount of well thought out data-driven design, information architecture and Flash/AJAX wizardry, but the site itself may quite possibly represents the largest lesson in politics that’s ever been delivered to the American public in one full sitting.

Think about it.

Newspapers have tried in the past, but they’ve always been a day late and a dollar too much–not to mention totally degradable. Television, at the risk of being cliché, just reduces everything into meaningless sound bites. And radio can’t even come close to the the level of granularity needed to compare data as contained in multiple charts, graphs, and interactive widgets. While I’ve taken issue with the way CNN has egregiously presented visual data in the past, I think the job they’re doing with Election Center is for the most part exceptional.

Where else can you learn that Tom Hanks gave Barack Obama‘s campaign $4,600, while only giving Hilary Clinton $2,300? Or that the process of using delegates is completely different between parties. After digesting a good chunk of the visualized information on CNN, it’s become apparent to me that I still have a lot to learn about things I just assumed to know.

This kind of instructional reach should be especially encouraging to future generations. Ultimately, it’s their gain should they continue to consume and expand upon the Internet as it’s being used today. Because as they become more informed about the government through simple methods of user interaction and experience, they might also become inspired, if not empowered, into changing it one day.

Already it feels like the new thing, making the way things were seem like such an ancient memory (if not ethically questionable). In minutes I had downloaded and purchased my first album…

At the time, it was only available for folks with Macs and not-so-secretly targeted for iPod owners. This may be one of the more revealing outtakes I’ve jotted down here for posterity’s sake, given how much the iTunes and iPod combination have affected not only my perspective, but certain paths I’ve taken over the years.

In many ways, what Apple has been able to do with the iPod, and the main reason I believe they’re so highly regarded in the Ux community, gives ultimate testament to the power of user experience itself.

I’m not exactly sure how to lay down the plot lines, but I’m fairly convinced that the total sum of the iTunes user experience has changed my outlook on music, making me behave in surprisingly new ways.

For instance, I’ve been spending the better part of the last month–finding precious and rare time in between work and child rearing–organizing my increasingly obsolete CD collection. Actually, organizing isn’t the right word at all. I’m archiving them. I’m doing this because iTunes has altered the orginal value of the CD for me as a media. Since I’ve digitized and transported all of my music into my iPod, I have little need to port around plastic discs anymore. If anything, they’re only useful to me as a burn-and-forget back up. So, in an effort to trim down to what’s only essential, I’ve been pain stakingly tossing out my plastic jewel cases (which I hope to recycle) and loading up my collection into a more compact, transportable box.

Actually, even the way I categorize my collection into this box is being influenced by iTunes. Instead of my usual last name alpha-chronological order, I’ve succumbed to the iTunes way of things, as sterile and anti-historical as it may be–first name alpha, no exceptions. Even my Bowie’s are getting filed under D, eschewing the natural order for which they’ve been mapped to my brain over the last twenty years.

It’s the kind of thing that would kick John Cusak’s character in the movie High Fidelity square in the balls and make him cry out loud.

iTunes has also pointedly contributed to changing my appearance–or at least where I shop for T-shirts these days. But before we go there, let’s understand something. Back in 2003, I had for the most part decided that my taste in music had been more or less permanently set. Sure, I’d hear some artists on XPN and I’d buy an occasional new album, but for a time I believed that I had already heard all of the magic I could from music. Then I bought my first iPod and began to seriously create a computer music library. The experience of importing my old CD collection, combined with the convenience of listening to numerous songs on my iPod, allowed me to re-experience much of that original magic. In relatively short order, I had renewed a waning interest and began opening up my eyes to new artists and new possibilities.

Not surprisingly, my attitude changed and I’ve recently found myself buying my favorite rock T-shirts at Hot Topic. This is only worth mentioning because in my wildest 30-something dreams I would never even dare enter a store like that on a whim. But after examining my relationship with music via the iTunes user experience, I’ve opened up and allowed myself to feel just a little bit younger.

For this, you can totally blame Steve Jobs. No, really. You can send the letters telling me to cut my hair directly to him.

All joking aside, there’s a huge reminder I should begin taking note of here, whenever circumstances provoke me to question my faith in user experience design. Because the fact of the matter is, if a product designed by Apple can encourage me to change my deeply ingrained habits, the possibility exists that other user experience practitioners, such as myself, can take similar strides–changing user behavior in outlying areas and making people feel a little bit better about themselves in the process.

You can’t put a price tag on that.