HUMAN Experience Design

The man pushing the button to open the elevator door and cursing that the doors didn’t close shrugged it off to being Monday morning. The truth is, that I have done the same thing in the same elevator. The icons under the buttons are the little triangles pointing in for close and out for open.

When you’re in a rush, or not thinking about it, the icons look essentially the same. There isn’t enough contrast in the design and position of the buttons. If, besides the icons, the elevator company had place the words “open” and “close” under the buttons - the problem might be solved.

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I have a secret… I am a hypnosis junkie. I love to read everything I can get my hands on about hypnosis and trance. At one point I even studied to become a certified hypnotherapist. The truth is that I have always found myself absolutely fascinated with how the human mind works. And while I don’t want to hang up a shingle and become a therapist, learning about the unconscious mind helps me to create great human experiences.

Ericsonian hypnosis takes its name from an MD named Milton Ericson who used hypnosis to cure many of his patients, back when it was illegal to do so. He was so good at inducing useful trances in his subjects that, when the AMA tried to pull his license for using hypnosis, he hypnotized the review board and they legalized the practice.

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As of today, this site is the #1 result (out of 89,000,000) for the words - human experience design. I noticed an uptick in my Google traffic, and behold - Google heaven.

Not bad for a non-commercial site where I just spout my own opinions about web design and such. I have actually had a couple of my web sites get fairly high rankings in the search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO), ultimately is a user experience issue - provided you deliver the goods.

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Adobe has just announced the release of Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), the project formerly codenamed Apollo. I normally don’t get excited about new software development kit releases, but this is an exception.

AIR promises the ability to take Web 2.0 to the desktop (maybe that’s web 3.0). One of the really fantastic things about AIR is that it allows developers to create applications that run exactly the same way on Mac and PC - HooRah.

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Personas are all the rage in human experience design. What are they, and how do you use them? What are the advantages of using personas in the design process?

Think of a persona as an archetypical character in a play. In fact the word persona comes from the masks used in ancient Greek plays. The settings of the play are the environments in which your design will be used. Your design is an important prop which helps the character achieve his or her goals in the play.

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There’s a big push today for web sites to adopt web standards and use semantic markup. This is a good idea generally, but on the web absolutes need to be tempered.

First, there really is no such thing as a web standard. There are web best practices, but the word “standard” implies that everyone agrees and has adopted the practice. While the browsers of today are become more standards compliant (which is like being a little pregnant) they still differ in how they interpret the standards.

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Ajax - originally shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML has now come to mean flashy DHTML effects and sometimes refresh-less page updates. This is not a new technology, but the new name and focus on RIA’s (Rich Internet Applications) has many companies saying ‘me too’ to cramming Ajax features into their page.

A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of seeing the guys from Ajaxian.com speak. When consulting with companies that are having AJAX problems, they said they usually wind up ripping out 80% of their stuff - making their web sites more usable. How could it be that less of a good thing could actually be better?

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One of the things I discovered with my own children, and other people’s kids is that they rarely play with their toys the way they were designed. I’ve seen my niece cram a Barbie doll into a toy baby stroller. I have seen boys turn toy hammers into toy pistols.

Adults are the same, otherwise we wouldn’t need warning labels. Somebody obviously tried to use a hair dryer in the shower once to necessitate having a warning about it. It’s the same with web user interfaces, tools, and electronics. While you can’t plan for every possible crazy thing a person could do with your interface - you need to escape the expert user bias.

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OH boy, have you seen this thing? This little logo, just unveiled for the London 2012 Olympic Games is causing quite a stir across the pond. In fact over 80% of people surveyed over there disapprove. There’s an online petition to scrap the thing.

I have to say that I personally don’t like it. The colors are too retro and I don’t get the design at all. My taste is not the question though. Will a brand that is so disliked provide the revenue (through product sales and sponsorship) that London needs to foot the bill for the games? Maybe.

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We all know that we should strive to make our systems as usable by humans as possible right? Just slick and easy to use is always the right way to go? Well, there are some design and systems issues that pull us away from usability. Understanding these tensions can help us create better human experience design.

The first tension I’ll mention is between usability and security. Generally the more secure we make a system, the more inconvenient it is to use. Most financial transactions on the web, for example, are multi-step processes that may involve user-id and password, anti-phishing technology, and perhaps CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). These inconveniences are necessary to protect users personal data and to prevent electronic thieves from stealing their data.

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