Call it an art installation if you want...

Call it an art installation if you want—I call it Experience Design.

I didn’t create it, Chris Cobb Did. He convinced Adobe Books (no, not the Adobe you’re thinking, this is a used bookstore) in San Francisco to let him and a team of friends rearrange all the books by color. And then he named it “There Is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World.”

The pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/heather/sets/39617/ give you some idea what it must have been like. At first glance it looks like a photography trick or filter. But then you realize, no, it really looked like that.

And it must have been delightful. It must have been magical. It makes me want to roll around on the floor in there. And, yes, it even makes me want to buy books.

I’m not a trained designer. My Photoshop skills are pretty pathetic. My coworkers still correct me every time I call a typeface a font. I studied English Literature for far longer than was practical, and then somehow became a project manager at a web development company. After realizing what project managing was really like, I convinced the higher ups to let me try out the new-fangled role of Information Architecture. And then I got to learn on my feet when I found myself leading up the IA team on a low-profile little project called Orbitz.

Information Architecture tends to emphasize ease-of-use as a design goal above all others. Things should be easy to find, easy to use, easy to buy, easy, easy, easy. A good Information Architect would never recommend rearranging all the books by color. Because they wouldn’t be easy to find!

But a good Experience Designer would. Which is why I’m trying to be a good Experience Designer these days. Because I don’t want to just make things easy. I want to make people feel joy, or laugh, or even roll around on the floor. I don’t have all the answers yet, and I probably never will, but I’m having a lot of fun learning.

Jane Jacobs

The ever sensible, down to earth and totally on target Jane Jacobs passed away April 25. I love this excerpt, when instead of taking the opportunity to engage in a little America-bashing, she just says very simply & sensibly "So we are lucky."

http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=1934

JHK: The Europeans seem to have a higher regard for city life than we do, and to do better with it. How do you account for that?

Jane Jacobs: Well, you have to go back to something I don't understand and can't explain, which are these planning hysterias that went over America. I guess different kinds of hysterias swept over Europe.

JHK: They get Adolf Hitler, and we get Ed Logue.

JJ: So we are lucky. But something else amazes me about the United States versus Europe. When we are faced with the task of fixing up a riverbank--and many American cities are on rivers--we have to put in theme parks, ballparks, aquariums, all this stuff. In Europe they make granite embankments with a ramp or stairs down to the water, and it's beautiful.

One Easy Solution to Traffic Congestion

We were driving home from the mountains on Sunday and it occured to me, again, that a lot of driving stress & probably congestion, could be saved if brake lights had a visual indicator (intensity?) corresponding to the force with which the driver is mashing the brake.

Maybe it's just me, since I'm a bit of a nervous nelly driver, but when someone brakes ahead of me I think they're probably just slowing down, but *maybe* they have actually slammed on the brakes. From directly behind you can't tell. So I tend to slow down a bit more than I generally need to, on the off chance they've actually slammed on the brakes. Of course, any traffic planner knows that my slow down causes a ripple effect which can take hours to clear, in congested traffic. Even if most people are not like me--they just assume the car hasn't slammed on its brakes until they practically touch its bumper--just a few people like me can cause major slow downs in traffic.

It would be such a simple solution--really red means you'd better brake hard, a little red means you don't need to. Think of that next time you're behind someone who is ever so gently riding the brakes all the down a long mountain.

Polar Bears Rool!

So, Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld picked me to be the Editorial Assitant on the next edition of the polar bear book (Information Architecture for the World Wide Web). I'm very excited! I've never worked on a book before, this should be a lot of fun.

Most entertaining moment so far: Survey results came in and one person's comment was just "Polar Bears Rool!" (yes, spelled like that). Hey survey-answering person, I like your enthusiasm!

Thank you, Michael Bierut

I couldn't agree more. http://www.designobserver.com/archives/011848.html

But the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can't get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you're interested in, the better your work will be.

Jane Jacobs Knows Web 2.0

What I think is most interesting about Web 2.0 isn't so much the AJAX-y, interface stuff (though that's interesting too) but the much, much larger cultural shift taking place as web tools have allowed the web to become more participatory. The social web. And the struggle those of us engaged in 'web design' are currently going through as we try to shift our thinking from "I design a lovely, usable web site, and you will come, complete your tasks, and go away happy" to the far messier, more complex system in which we are challeneged to facilitate experiences, but admit that we cannot control them. It's a huge shift, and many of us are at a bit of a loss as to how we fit in.

It all reminds me of my friend Jane Jacobs. I don't actually know Jane. If you're not familiar, she's he author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, among other things. Basically, Jnae invented the way of thinking about cities and how they function that has become today's new urbanism.

Here's an example: "Eyes on the street." Jacobs recognized that isolating people (in this case, she argued specifically against the Robert Moses style towers for housing low income people) away from the activity taking place at street level created a environment which encouraged crime. Low building, porches, stoops, windows with balconies, a mix of commerical and residential spaces--all of these allow people to see what's going on at street leve, and crime is deterred.

Robert Moses, on the other hand, took a much different approach. Moses wasn't too interested in how his projects affected people. He loved 'moderness' -- efficiency and order. He wanted wide rivers of asphalt carrying people speedily to their destinations. He wanted poor people neatly organized into their giant boxes and then forgotten. He didn't want to encourage people to interact. He wanted to control people with his grand design vision.

Today of course, much of what Moses designed is considered a failure. His housing projects and
the cross bronx expressway, in particular, generally serve as examples of how to destroy communities and encourage crime. And remind me of exactly the kind of online design many of us are accustomed to creating.

Jane Jacobs = Web 2.0, MySpace, flickr, and the messy, ugly, undesigned, seemingly disorganized mass of human conversation and expression that makes many of us trained in consistency cringe
Robert Moses = Web 1.0, Nielsen, efficiency trumps all, and 'I know better than you' control.

Now I just wish someone would write the book which explains all the subtle ways to harness good online, just like Jane did for cities. Any takers?

Toolkit for Fun/Sexy/Cool User Experiences

I read a lot of information architectecture and user experience design blogs, articles, books and subscribe to every related mailing list I can find, but I still can't recall a good discussion about this topic.

As our little discipline has evolved, we've developed a fairly common toolkit for creating useful and usable experiences. We have a delightful collection of things like ethnographic research (and other various flavors of research), card sorting, site maps, wireframes, usability testing, and all the rest.

Where I work we've suddenly gone from producing task-oriented, content rich, fairly conservative corporate sites over 3 month to one year timeframes, to producing small, nearly task-free, content light, visual design heavy sites over a two to six week timeframe. All of these newer sites have been Flash-based.

Suddenly I find myself somewhat outside the process. My tools and methods don't offer enough return on the investment they take. But I want to play too.

Now, I'm not looking for what not to do, or looking to just add to the usability of these sites. I realize there are plenty of usability guidelines, dire warnings and no-no's out there regarding Flash. They are useful and important. I also realize there are still tasks to perform on these sites; content to be located, things to sign up for--and am comfortable using familiar methods--wireframes, sitemaps, standing behind the designer and asking if the text could be just a bit bigger--to accomplish those.

But the main point of these sites is not to be easy to use. It's to let the user forge some sort of emotional connection with the (young, hip, cool) brand.

So, what I want to know is:

- What are the methods or deliverables that allow us to create a compelling experience for the site's users?
- How do I go beyond usability to surprise and delight and fun and humor?
- How make sure our very talented designers go beyond what 'looks cool' to them, and really make something that really is 'cool' for the user?
- What methods, tools and techniques allow us to produce fun, sexy, cool, delightful, as well as still easy to use?
- And how to do this when the timeframe on these projects is literally a few weeks?

If I had the answers I'd love to write the article! But I need some help from all of you first. I've been poking around game design theory for starters, but am along way from a useful set of tools or methods. Do I look to how advertisers do their work? Are my current tools still useful, I'm just thinking about them wrong?

I always enjoy Nathan Shedroff's thoughts--he's been thinking well beyond usable for a good long time, it seems to me. Check out his article here. Not a lot of actionable methods here though. I also suspect IDEO may have a handle on this, and am curious about their Method Cards, but still need some 'on the cheap' type approaches.