I’m not really sure what I’ve got myself into. Feeling a little pressured by the fact tickets were being reserved for both girl geeks and those who hadn’t attended a BarCamp before, I haphazardly signed up to attend BarCamp Brighton 3, which is being held at Sussex University on the 6th–7th September. (It is just after dConstruct, which I’m also attending – I’m hoping to glean some presentation skills from the excellent speakers.) Tickets for BarCamp Brighton 3 sold out within 10 minutes, which, of course, made me feel lucky and compelled to actually go.

I know it’s “just” a BarCamp, but I can’t help wondering what the hell I’m doing. Public speaking was something I despised at school and university, and generally I tried my utmost to avoid it. In fact, public speaking and exercise were my two least favourite things. In some grand twist of irony, I now visit a gym three times a week (paying an obscene fee to do so), and I’m attending a BarCamp – voluntarily!

So, I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to talk about. Typography was my specialism at university, and I know a fair amount about how typography works (mainly in print), and, of course, the history of typography. What interests me most about typography is printing. There are obvious parallels with printing and with the web: both deal with the dissemination of information, with literacy, and the flow and sharing of ideas. I wrote my dissertation on the history of the broadside ballad, which was the first low-level way of communicating thought through cheap print. I can’t imagine having written about anything that is more meaningful to me.

I’m going to use a blog post I wrote a few months ago on ‘Twitter and the Crystal Goblet’ as a starting point, and come up with a twenty-minute presentation on transparency in mobile experience design. That way, I’ll usefully combine my three loves: typography, experience design, and mobile. Oh: and Twitter. (I’m also contemplating calling the presentation what dead typographers can teach us about designing for delightful mobile experiences.)

Thoughts welcome. Presentation tips very welcome.

Apparently 81 of you subscribe to my blog. My goodness! Even if you subscribed by accident, or can’t find the button to unsubscribe… thanks.

It’s now over a year since I graduated. I quickly learned getting a job in graphic design is hard. I really need to update this post, Tips for Young Graphic Designers, which I wrote back in March. The advice is still applicable. But I’ve learned even more since, so I’d write things differently, and probably write more.

Graphic Design. Most exciting to me is that I’ve learned I can drop the first word. I’m not really a graphic designer. I much prefer the term experience designer. In the last few months I’ve become a huge fan of Don Norman. I’m also fascinated by the approach towards design by places like IDEO, who embrace design as a whole (I’m working my way through Designing Interactions, an excellent book written by co-founder Bill Moggridge).

Similar, but not the same, Adaptive Path has a very interesting view on experience design. (Tragically I’m missing their UXWeek, which is next week.) I think their philosophy towards experience design is summed up in this blog post about Starbucks: Starbucks is not about the coffee, by Peter Merholz:

“[...] I don’t think it’s about The Coffee. Starbucks has to deliver a basically good product, but they don’t need to deliver a superlative product. [...]

What they need to do is make the store experience inviting, not so much about pushing product, but about being that Third Place (not home or work) where people can get a respite.”

Merholz’s advice to Starbucks is that they focus on the whole experience engendered by the coffeehouse visit. Coffee is predictable and nice to have, but Starbucks is really about having negative space where you can stay as long as you want without the pressures of home or work. It’s the whole experience that has made Starbucks successful… not (just) the coffee.

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Working for a software company is great: as well as designing graphic elements, I work with wireframes and think about how people interact with interfaces and devices. I get to use all of my brain. It’s the focus on people and interactions that makes this kind of design work utterly compelling. (And it’s removed all guilt about getting an iPhone. It’s work, right.)

My advice to the new generation of graphic designers: educate yourselves! Take your degree as a starting point, but really: don’t pigeonhole your interests too quickly, because the industry is changing.

I’d like to direct you to this really excellent post on Design Observer: Michael McDonough’s Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School. I’d recommend anybody and everybody read this, as it’s excellent advice and applicable to life in general.

I’ve just started reading Adaptive Path’s book, Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World. Here are some thoughts it’s provoked so far.

People / consumers / users / fool-proof
Ugh, the problem with words! This sentence stood out:

“Once you stop thinking of your customers as consumers and begin approaching them as people, you’ll find a whole new world of opportunities to meet their needs and desires.”

As I interpret the sentence above, the word “consumer” risks rendering an anaemic, flat, or mono-faceted view of a person, who should be considered as not just a consumer, but – well – a whole person. So if products should be considered in a wider context, so should people.

Still, you could argue that this is all silly pedantry – holding little to no value for designing a product or a service – and that the word “consumer” doesn’t imply a limit, per se, but usefully demarcates a single activity.

Inconclusive, and possibly over-analysed.

That said, words matter.

Don Norman wrote that we shouldn’t use the phrase “fool-proof” when talking about making a product simple. Why would you want to insult your users by calling them fools? He also wrote that if the product is difficult to use, you can only blame the product.

Empathy with users (user is my preferred term) is necessary for creating a good product experience.

Brand strategy versus experience design
Peter Merholz draws attention to an article on experience design by the UK’s Design Council, which confuses brand strategy with experience design. According to the Design Council, “experience design concentrates on moments of engagement between people and brands, and the memories these moments create”.

Merholz wrote a succinct and clear response to Ardill’s article. Merholz’s view is that brands work “inside-out”: brand is how the company projects how it wants to be perceived. Experience design works the other way, or “outside-in”: an “appreciation of customers’ motivations, behaviours, and context leads to the development of a product, service, or system that can satisfy them”.

In Merholz’s definition, brand strategy and experience design are totally different things.

I really like the clear definition of brand strategy and experience design as Adaptive Path explains it. The confusion is there because experience design is still formative, and there is no universal, solid framework established, and perhaps there shouldn’t ever be a universal, solid framework. After all, everything is subject to change.

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It’s a very thought-provoking read so far. I’ll write up other ideas and thoughts I deem worthy of sharing…

In the last few decades, thousands of products have entered our lives with the intention to make them simpler. So, why does so much modern technology confuse and trap us?

“Technology changes rapidly; people change slowly”, writes Donald Norman, in ‘The Design of Everyday Things’. Interaction with things is governed by our biology, psychology, society, and culture. Human biology and psychology do not change much with time, and society and culture change slowly. The rate of new product creation is so high that some features aren’t tested thoroughly, or aren’t tested at all.

Bad design affects the super-complex to the dead simple: for instance, bad design is a door with a raised bar across it. The door only opens if you apply pressure on the right side of the bar, but there is no visual indication of this.

And what about a phone interface with a mysterious button ‘R’? Nobody knows what the button does, but the button remains for as long as a designer can provide a reason for its existence. Likewise, bad design is a door that has a handle which suggests twisting and pulling, but slides open.

I have been toying with the idea of modern (in)conveniences for a while before I read Norman’s book. The supermarket and the washing machine were subjects of a brief post.

Bad design, I’ve since learned, is used to confuse users intentionally. Why would a designer want to do this?

The Supermarket Maze

Supermarkets are complex, distracting, confusing. They are also exotic, amorphous and evolving ecosystems of products. The products displayed in the supermarket largely sell themselves with their packaging. Graphic design is key here – how can one peanut butter stand out from another peanut butter?

To do our shopping in the twenty-first century, we no longer need to visit individual shops. Products are gathered together within a single building. We enter a shop, pick up a basket of pre-determined size, and working from a mental or physical list, walk around the shop selecting items to put in a basket, before taking the basket to the check-out. The products are checked out by a human or a machine, or perhaps both. We exit the shop.

How can we design a supermarket to make it easy to find a desired item? Thinking in terms of pure design, I would use a clear supermarket layout, with low shelves so you can see over them, and make use of clear signposting. A shopper could, with clear layout and signposting, be sent from A to B.

A businessperson, however, would think in terms of both design and profit. It’s good business to send your shopper on a longer route from A before they reach B, so they pick up more things to take to check-out. Most shoppers are sent into a maze of distraction and advertising. In other words, supermarkets are deliberately confusing.

The Space-age Washing Machine

It shouldn’t be more complicated than putting your dirty clothes in the machine, putting in the washing powder, and pressing a button. But washing machines have become needlessly complicated, with some interfaces looking like spaceship dashboards. Norman suggests this is because ‘complicated’ looking products actually hold consumer appeal. Apparent complexity, at least in Korea, suggests status. More features, Norman argues, defies simplicity. More features sell products. A more complex washing machine is more attractive than one that appears simple. How many people try to understand how products work before they buy them?

A wonderful experience should be able to overrule these poor business tactics. Driving sales via confusion and advertising exposure is far from ideal, but it seems to work – at least in some places. Apparent complexity may always sell. The iPhone and iPod Touch, though, are examples of wonderful apparent simplicity when the device itself is complex: the good design masks the complexity of the functions.

Supermarkets rely on products selling themselves off the shelf. That’s interesting, if you combine this with the fact that product packaging is on its way out. Sainsbury’s in the UK is trying out the milk bag, which may eventually replace the plastic bottle. The milk bag is already popular in Canada (according to the article, 60% of fresh milk in Canada is sold in bags). Supermarkets are bending to the pressure of environmental awareness, but as the Times article points out, it’s down to whether consumers will want it.

It’s worth bearing in mind a scenario where packaging is severely limited, or where we simply no longer can afford to spend our resources on disposable packaging. Without products selling themselves with their packaging, will the current supermarket model work? If products can no longer sell themselves individually with their packaging, the model for advertising products in stock will have to change.

What makes design so compelling is how it emerges from seemingly conflicting motives: in these cases, the aims of the designer are at odds with the aims of business. Business itself is at odds with environmental pressure, availability of resources, the ideal of how they would advertise their product, and ultimately, what consumers want.