After waiting six months on a pre-order waiting list, I finally got my Fitbit two months ago. I was really looking forward to it — as a big fan of the Nike+ running tracking system, I was excited about Fitbit’s promise to not only track my running and walking, but to track my sleep patterns as well. And the design was extremely seductive — small in size, elegantly combining form and function (it doesn’t have a clip, it is a clip), and with a magical blue led screen that is invisible when the device is off. How could I resist?

And I was right: I love the Fitbit!

But I don’t want to use it any more. How is that possible?

First, though, you may be asking “What is Fitbit?” Fitbit is a personal health tracking system consisting of a small electronic device that you clip to your body to track your movements and a web site that uses the data from those movements to give you detailed reports and analysis of your fitness and health. The Fitbit device contains an accelerometer to detect anything from a single running stride to tossing and turning in your sleep, and it wirelessly syncs to your computer via a small radio transmitter. The Fitbit has a small digital display indicating the number of steps you’ve taken, how far you’ve walked or run, and how many calories you’ve burned.

Basically, you clip the Fitbit on your waist all day long, and to a wristband at night, to collect 24/7 data about your body’s movements. The Fitbit web site then slices and dices that data to present some pretty fascinating insights into your personal health.

Sounds simple? It’s supposed to. There is an emerging trend in personal electronics and software to stop bothering users with long explanations of “how it works”, and to instead keep the interactions simple and just make sure the damn things work.  Fitbit is right on that wave. The documentation doesn’t say much about how it works, the web site doesn’t have a big “how it works” page. You’re just supposed to start using it.

So Fitbit cuts to the chase in most of their user experience designs. In fact, I can’t find anything on the Fitbit home page that says “Fitbit is …”. Fitbit is what it does, which is count your movements and interpret that information.

I think that’s part of Fitbit’s strategy: to experiment with giving users a minimal level of explanation to get people focused on changing their behavior and thus their health, and not on requiring users to constantly be manipulating the technology.

Getting Fitbit

Let’s first discuss the centerpiece of the Fitbit system, the Fitbit device itself. It’s about the size of a money clip or a small pack of gum, clips easily to clothing and fits easily in a pocket. Some users complain that it is easy to lose, and while I managed to hold on to it for two months, I can only attribute that to luck. I am really impressed by the “clip” form factor (versus a wristband, a strap, a card, a keyfob). Given the required size, it’s a clever solution.

The digital display is incredibly nice to look at. When it’s off, it’s just a detail-less smooth black surface. When you press the Fitbit’s single button, however, the display shines through the now-translucent plastic like shining a flashlight through your fingertip.

When you bring the device near the charging/base station, it automatically uploads the latest data from the device. The base station is clever, but I think it over-fetishizes the Fitbit itself by literally placing it on a pedestal, as many upright docking stations do for the iPhone. And its 18″ cord is overkill. While it is quite clever to allow the device to sync automatically, you still have to turn your computer on in the first place, and if you’ve got a laptop you have to plug in the base station anyway. So syncing isn’t invisible for most people, I suspect, but is rather a conscientious and deliberate daily act.

A syncing solution like the original iPod Shuffle’s, where the device itself had a USB plug built-in, would permit charging and syncing without an additional base station device and, as I contend, without adding an additional sync action for most users. A Bluetooth version to sync with high-end laptops without charging would be even better.

The web site is fantastic. The data displays are lovely, and it’s easy to get around and play with your data. I do have problems with many of the specific information design and charting decisions, but I am not going to complain because the Fitbit folks are constantly evolving and improving the site, tweaking features, responding to user feedback, adding new stuff.

Interestingly, you can use the Fitbit web dashboard without owning a Fitbit. First of all, the site lets you manually enter your food consumption information in order to establish your caloric intake each day. Also, it lets you manually enter your exercise activities as well.

I actually suspect the designers must have conscientiously kept the site device-agnostic, to support future Fitbit devices and to invite non-Fitbit users to join the web community.

Using the device as a pedometer, which is by far Fitbit’s core function, is simple. I can see the distance I’ve walked at any time during the day, and when I get home I can see a day-by-day report on the web of how far I’ve walked, and how far I walk each day on average. The device’s step-counting accuracy is astonishingly accurate: I did a test, walking and counting up to 1000 steps in my head, then checked the Fitbit and saw it counted 1004. That’s plenty accurate for me.

For running, Fitbit detects the nuances of difference between a running and walking motion, and then recalculates your distance traveled (based on longer stride length) and calories burned accordingly. There is simply need to tell Fitbit that you’re running and not walking. It’s smart enough to tell, based only on the nature of the data it’s collecting. As for running accuracy, I wasn’t able to do a counting test, but the distances Fitbit reported on several over-5-mile runs were 10-20% different from the distances reported in Google Maps. Far from ideal, but on par with the similar inaccuracy of Nike+.

Where Fitbit gets really clever, however, is with sleeping. Obviously a motion sensor isn’t able to tell if you are sleeping or just lying on your ass watching TV. Fitbit requires you to press and hold the devices’s single button for a few seconds, putting the device into a kind of “special activity” mode. Fitbit comes with a surprisingly non-obtrusive wristband that holds the Fitbit device while you sleep. As you sleep, the Fitbit detects your body’s movements and uses these cues to determine how long it took you to actually fall asleep, how many times, and precisely when, you moved around in the middle of the night, and when you woke up. In the morning, you press and hold the button again to indicate that you’re awake and walking around again.

The sleep data collected is fascinating, and this alone is worth the price of admission. You probably have no idea about how long it takes you to fall asleep, or how often you toss and turn. I certainly didn’t, and was delighted to see the results. I found it incredibly interesting to see the day-by-day durations of my sleeps for an entire month (little more 2 hours more than a few times, around 6 hours most of the time, and 12 hours on one blessed Friday night).

For other activities, such as cycling or weightlifting, Fitbit isn’t so smart. For such things, Fitbit literally requires you to manually manipulate the data. Again, for people in highly-structured weight loss programs where counting calories in and out is important, Fitbit’s web dashboard offers the ability to manually enter your non-walking or running activities to make sure your overall caloric burn rate is kept accurate.

An amusingly large number of people in the forums ask about the fitbit’s ability to measure calories burnt during sex, some with a measure of sexual bravado (”wear on my hip?”), others innocently but rather seriously dedicated to counting every calorie burned. While I admire the free spirited nature of these inquirers, I cannot offer any additional insight into this matter as I, perhaps overly romantically, still beleive that some things remain well beyond quantification.

The Fitbit Ecosystem

The Fitbit web site is constantly changing, and they keep adding features to the site, extending the functionality of the fixed hardware system. This is part of the clever concept that the features entirely lie in the interpretation of data. It’s a radical simplification of what software is all about: Fitbit’s one motion sensor and one binary button (ternary if you count the long 2-second press, and potentially more if you add longer presses, or even double and triple presses as on the iPhone earbud controller) have the potential to enable a lot more interaction and communication than one might think at first blush.

In a way, they are squeezing as much functionality out of the tech as possible. Fitbit is a small embodyment of Don Norman’s recent claim that technology leads and design follows. For Fitbit, it’s an inspired design response to the question “how many things can we do with just this one bit of technology”?

To contrast this with Nike+ for a moment, Fitbit feels far more like a living thing, run by engaged people dedicated to incremental changes in response to the actual usage by their community and feedback in their incredibly active and helpful forums. It’s a Web 2.0 product. Nike+, however, is a more traditional product, with huge and infrequent X.0 product launches. Nike+ stagnated with the same beautiful and innovative — but buggy and slow — web site for years, only to upgrade this year to a new, buggier, and unfortunately even more awkward user interface. Nike+ still never remembers users passwords, for example. I wish Nike+ would follow Flitbit’s lead when it comes to incremental, simple improvements. Focus on a UI that can scale and evolve, and not on one that is sexy and “bold”.

Product Conclusions

There are probably two kinds of Fitbit customers. First, casual users: people who want to know more about what they do with their bodies, people who are curious about their health and the potential to use technology to keep closer tabs on how well they’re doing. This describes my interest in Fitbit.

The second group is serious users: people who are actively trying to change their personal health behaviors and want a way to measure those changes. If you’re trying to change an overly-sedentary lifestyle, to lose weight through careful monitoring of calories burned versus consumed, Fitbit might be a huge help. For people involved in a structured weight loss program, a device that adds to that regime is perfectly normal. But I walk plenty each day (4-5 miles every day). I am an athlete and run often, but I don’t count calories. I’m not trying to lose weight. I use Nike+ to measure my special activities (running), but I don’t want a new device attached to me all the time just to give me data about my normal activities, just to satisfy my curiosity.

So while I found Fitbit useful and delightful, it was only temporarily. But that’s okay. It’s a fantastic tool for self-analysis, to get to know your sleep patterns, your typical daily walking distance. Great information. But once you have that information, if you’re not engaged in a program to change those things, you’re done with Fitbit. I know everything Fitbit can tell me. Maybe I’ll try it again in six months or a year, to see if I’ve changed. I’m a casual user.

The Fitbit is not what I and other casual users might have hoped it would be. It’s not going to be a permanent part of your life, a constant and consistent way to monitor your health. The biggest obstacle to this, I think, is unfortunately still technological. It’s just too big to carry with you in every possible context, so you end up taking it on and off over and over again all day. When you change clothes, you have to move it from one garment to another. At night, you have to strap on a wristband and clip it to that. You have to take it off in the shower.

Inevitably, I ended up forgetting to bring it to work occasionally. Or I’d have it unclipped for part of a day. Which is far worse than it sounds: If you miss a day of walking in a week, it completely ruins the accuracy of your weekly average. Miss a few days in a month, and your monthly average is shot to hell. Fitbit lets you manually enter your information, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to do Fitbit’s job for it! You’ve got have your Fitbit on your person almost 90% of the time for it to produce accurate trends and summary results, the kind of results that justify integrating it into your life in such a serious and committed way.

If the Fitbit was the size of a fingernail, attached with waterproof glue or embedded under my skin, well, then we’re talking. But because of its size, it becomes one more thing to inhabit my intimate attention space, something I have to remember to never leave home without, like my phone, my wallet, and my pants. It’s like having a little adopted pet you have to take care of all day.

In short, you just can’t lead a normal life with Fitbit. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Fitbit experience, a lesson about the future of personal informatics, it’s that we simply won’t have accurate and reliable personal systems until the devices themselves are immune to these everyday emergencies and accidents and inconveniences. Until they’re virtually invisible and forgettable, probably embedded under the skin, we will be forced to consider personal informatic hardware as intrusive medical devices rather than as the ethereal, ambient data sources I think many people envision.

If you want an informatically-based weight loss program, with increased walking as a core element, and if you want to count calories in and out, Fitbit is for you and might help you with your program over the months and years.

If you are interested in just finding out about your body and how you use it, it’s great for that, too. Give it a spin, then hand it off to another person. Want mine?

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A few weeks ago, I got an email from a young undergrad interested in SVA’s Interaction Design MFA program (where I teach a class in the fundamentals of interaction design).

The student, a talented web designer, was curious about the relationship between “web design” and “interaction design” and “user experience”, and what the future holds for UX and IxD. I thought it would be nice to share some of my response:

It’s hard for any IxD program to avoid the overwhelming presence of the web as the epicenter of most people’s (technological) interactive experiences. And the faculty of the program at SVA certainly draws deeply from the web design world. But the meaning of “the web” itself is blurring — when you use an app on your iPhone, or get a DVD from Netflix (or view a streaming NetFlix movie via your DVR), or read a book on a Kindle, are you not, to some degree, interacting with the web? My point is that “interactive systems” are bigger than just the web even if the web is a big part of them: that they involve so much more in terms of physical processes (Netflix had to invent a warehousing system), business models (should Kindle books cost the same, less, or more than physical books?), and that they’re always incorporating new technologies (touchscreen UIs fundamentally change how web design is done, and imagine how Apple’s tablet will shake up “web” design). Interaction design is influenced by entertainment, games… and global concerns like sustainability and digital accessibility.

In my class, we’ve worked on web sites, mobile apps, physical devices, and even just social system design (for example, how does a taxi driver “work” as a planned interactive system?). I think I am typical of SVA’s faculty in my attitude that great web design is just a flavor of great interaction design, which in turn is a flavor of experience design. So we don’t teach web design specifically, but students who want to focus on web design are absolutely free to do so, and we are happy to evaluate, guide, and teach ideas and concepts that advance web-based experiences. But I’d be lying if I told you that the web as we know it now is going to be the dominant interaction design paradigm of 2020. The fundamentals of interaction design aren’t about HTML and CSS, nor even about hard drives and keyboards. It’s about human beings, our relationships with each other (socially, business, culturally), with media, and with technology.

There is definitely a lot of demand for people who can bring this higher and broader thinking to projects. What I like about the SVA program is the dialogue students have access to — with each other and with the faculty. It’s something you can’t get in most workplaces, and especially not so rapidly and intensely. You are required to talk not just about what you did, but how and most importantly WHY. It’s one thing to design something, it’s another thing to justify why in the world the world needs what you designed. Hopefully, that’s what the program gets students to think about and know how to express.

Finally: I wouldn’t be in this field, or teaching in the program, if I didn’t think that UX was *the* most important factor in creating beauty and happiness in the coming decades. Making stuff that people like to use, well, I’ve wanted to do this since I was a kid making stuff out of paper and legos.

I hope that gives a little more insight into the program and perhaps even into my thoughts about IxD and UX overall. Good luck, and let me know if I can help any further.

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Whenever news of an earthquake hits, we are told that the quake had a magnitude of, say, 3.2 or 5.0. Or 7.0, as was the case yesterday in Haiti. We all understand that 7 is worse than 5, of course, but I fear that few of us really understand or appreciate the degree of that difference.

Popularly (but inacurately) called the Richter scale, today’s seismologists measure an earthquake’s energy according to what is technically called the moment magnitude scale.

The magnitude scale is logarithmic: Each increase in the magnitude number actually represents more than 30 times the magnitude of energy released. A 7.0 magnitude quake is 32 megatons of seismic energy, where a 6.0 is only 1 megaton of seismic energy.

I imagine Mr. Richter and his successors prefer to use such a logarithmic scale because it permits them to communicate a quake’s magnitude extremely efficiently. They’re mathematicians, they intuitively understand that 5.4 is actually 5 times bigger than 5.0.

But for the rest of us, even those of us who are numerically literate, the logarithmic scale isn’t something we use every day. To most of us, 5.4 is only a little more than 5. Indeed, 7 isn’t that much more than 5 for us, either — yet in earthquake terms, 7.0 is one thousand times as destructive as 5.0.

I appreciate that the media thinks enough of us, the public, to report using the same technical jargon that scientists use. But in this case, I suspect they are doing the public — and the victims — a disservice. What if, instead of simply calling Haiti the victim of a “7.0 earthquake”, they called it a “32 megaton earthquake”? Or a “32,000 kiloton earthquake”? This would permit people who understand what a 4.0 earthquake feels like (and lots of people do understand this) understand that Haiti is today the victim of an experience thirty-two thousand times worse.

Some ideas on how to help the victims in Haiti:

• Help Haiti with your mobile phone: text “HAITI” to 90999 and a $10 donation to the American Red Cross will be charged to your phone bill. It takes no time at all.
• Nearly half of Haiti is under the age of 18. Make a donation to UNICEF to help.
• Donate to Doctors Without Borders

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What is interesting about Wikipedia? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not how it it is made.

A “wiki” is a content source powered (in general, completely powered) by social software technology, with people collectively creating and refining the content. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the quintessential wiki — while there are other major wikis, from the addictive TV fan site Lostpedia to the new and astoundingly-awesome online typography reference Typedia, Wikipedia is still the mother of all wikis. Wikipedia has so thoroughly conquered our mental model of what an information reference is supposed to be that its most salient concept (social editing) has become inseparable from its fundamental purpose (complete information).

(In fact, I’ve started to notice people using the wordlet “pedia”, rather than “wiki”, to indicate “socially-powered content”. It seems that, for some people, a “wiki” and a “pedia” are the same thing, which to me is tantamount to thinking the “hi” in “hijack” means “airplane”, justifying “carjack” as a legitimate word.)

The “pedia” in Wikipedia is a nod to the “encyclopedia”. The wikipedia, we are supposed to infer, is an encyclopedia powered by a wiki. It’s beyond encyclo, it’s wiki!

The word encyclopedia means “complete or well-rounded” (i.e., encyclo) + “knowledge or learning” (i.e., pedia). So, interpreted one way, “Wikipedia” can mean “People getting together to record knowledge”, which of course is exactly what Wikipedia is.

But Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales could just as well have called it “Encyclowiki”, meaning “people getting together to describe everything”, which in many ways is what Wikipedia, in its blossoming omniscience, has ultimately and more resonantly become.

For it is no longer impressive, at least to me, that Wikipedia is community-generated. Big deal, I get it, I agree with it. I buy into the Here Comes Everybody premise. I take the wisdom of crowds for granted. Like millions of others, I am thoroughly sold on Wikipedia, especially after seeing topics I thought I knew everything about described in informative, passionate, and sometimes astonishing detail. It’s the content that draws me, not the phenomenon that caused the content to get there (if anything, the phenomenon has, and continues to be, Wikipedia’s biggest perceived weakness).

This is why I am glad that Typedia is Typedia and not Wikitype or Typewiki. Typedia is, above all, a compendium of knowledge about type. The fact that it is socially-powered is something we can and should take for granted (and, of course, participate in). This kind of comprehensive one-stop collection of esoteric knowledge simply isn’t going to happen, ever, without social participation.

Basically, we’re all wiki now. We already work together. It’s the pedia part, the knowledge itself, we’ll always be striving for.

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I’ve submitted two talks for the 2010 SXSW Interactive conference. As you might know, SXSW’s selection process includes a period of public review to gauge general interest in the panels submitted (they call them “panels” even though many of the submissions, including my own, are single-speaker sessions).

I would be deeply grateful if you, gentle Graphpaper reader, would put in a vote for my sessions. If you want to comment on my ideas — and I’d love it if you would — please do so at the SXSW site. (You have to register to vote, but it’s an easy and painless sign up.)

Here are my proposals (click the title to see the voting page):

• The Human Interface (or: Products are People, Too!)
  More and more, users are interacting with web sites and software on a conversational, physical, psychological, and emotional level — just like we’ve always interacted with other people. UX designers, then, must stop thinking about interfaces as dumb control panels and begin using technology to envision interfaces (literally!) as human beings.
  .

• Re-Invent the Wheel!: Redesigning your Design Process
  It’s the start of a new project. You’ve got requirements, guidelines, data, research. Now what? Like an artist staring at a blank canvas, designers of interactive products often don’t know where to start. Instead of following a rigid methodology or waiting for the perfect idea to appear out of the blue, designers must invent new tools and tricks to foster real UX innovation.

I’m particularly excited about the first one, as it ties together so much of what I love and/or things I know a lot about: interaction design, science fiction, culture and literature in design, artificial intelligence, human behavior and emotional design. It’s kind of like “The Graphpaper.com Experience, Live!”

Sharing the love

There are a few other talks I think you ought to consider voting for, as well, from people I like and think people should be listening to: MORE…

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The graphic novel Persepolis, in addition to being a gripping emotional story and the only comic book to ever bring me to tears, is a masterpiece of comic art and a testimony to what you can accomplish through repetition of basic forms. What Persepolis writer/artist Marjane Satrapi can accomplish with a few simple pen strokes is simply astonishing. When the comic was made into an animated movie, Satrapi’s graphic virtuosity survived and indeed thrived in the translation.

Look at these nine faces of girls listening to a political speech from their schoolteacher in Iran, shortly after the 1979 revolution. All of these faces use exactly the same set of design elements: four curved lines (eyebrows, nose, mouth), a pair of football-shaped ovals and dots (eyes), and an amorphous black shape (hairline). And yet each of these girls doesn’t just look completely unique, each has a unique and distinctive personality — earnest, distracted, doubtful.

I was reminded of a book currently on my desk, Bruno Munari’s Design as Art.

In the book’s second section, Munari argues that images can and should have a deliberate “character” in order to be meaningful and memorable to viewers, and that that character is encapsulated in the subtle and not-so-subtle details of a design’s implementation. The design’s style, if you will. What’s more, it doesn’t take much to achieve this character.

To illustrate this, he includes almost 150 simple pen drawings of faces, each one radically different from the last, and each one clearly drawn in only a matter of a few seconds. The illustrator (or illustrators — it doesn’t matter, really) draws on many cultural drawing styles, but even when those seem exhausted new ideas seem to emerge between the stylizations.

It’s a remarkable illustration of the power of small multiples to help push the boundaries of how one thinks about even the simplest design challenge.

It doesn’t take much to make something unique and different. As Munari’s collection of faces shows, simply focusing on variety at the expense of detail and perfection can give rise to some small but powerful and unexpected new ideas.

This is the point of sketching, of course: ingenuity is an emergent property that is more easily produced by turning your attention away from perfecting a single vision.

Satrapi’s faces, of course, are not sketches — their uniqueness is carefully and tenderly crafted through economy of form and the subtlest lines. But they compellingly illustrate that both character and diversity can be found among things whose basic ingredients are essentially identical, whether by accident and spontaneity or through deliberate craft.

As designers, we should be inspired by Munari’s demonstration of how the same question has a thousand solutions, and Satrapi’s revelation that almost the same solution can solve a thousand different problems.

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Someone recently pointed me to an interesting book, Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places, by Toby Israel. The book’s thesis is that a designers’ childhood environment profoundly affects their professional and adult design choices. The environments and objects children see and touch in their formative years will, according to Israel, have a deep and lasting effect on how they perceive and how they create the designed environments around them later in life.

I haven’t read the book, but the basic premise as far as I understand it strikes me as very likely. Childhood experiences drove me to become a designer in the first place, why should it not also shape my day-to-day decisions as a designer?

And wouldn’t childhood experiences with interactive things be especially emotionally powerful, whether positive or negative?

I was really curious if this idea rang true for other people in the UX design world, too. So I asked the twitterverse:

chrisfahey: UX people: Which interactive experiences from your childhood shape your decisions as a designer of interactive experiences today? #uxorigins

I got a few dozen delightful responses (most of them using my suggested hashtag #uxorigins). It’s interesting how many of them share common themes: video games, science fiction, dashboards, doors and light switches.

chrisfahey: I remember 2 light switches that controlled the same light. Each switch also reversed the on/off orientation of the other (bad!).

peterme: Simon, Merlin, Mattel Electronic Football, Intellivsion, the cable box where you pressed a button for each channel

strottrot: I remember my mom’s thrill at the development of school desks & scissors designed for people who are left-handed.

soldierant: great idea . I learned narrative, flow balance & symmetry from the modeling diorama books of François Verlinden.

martinpolley: Auto-reverse Walkman — Which side is it playing? Which button do I press for FF and which for RW?

jarango: Videogames, Legos, Disney World, Chris Crawford’s “Art of Computer Game Design”.

gielow: Mine was: Being 1stborn = lots of early individual open-play. Growing up w/Apple II & living near Smithsonian

Braindonut: Acknowledging great game UIs help me to focus on the challenges I actually CARE about and seeing bad UIs obstruct fun

odannyboy: Making robots and spaceships out of cardboard boxes and figuring out the controls. Playing detective.

octothorpe: When I was young, I made siege weaponry (trebuchet, catapults, etc) out of common household items (hangars, mousetraps, etc)

ladylynnet: Pull-doors that look like they should be pushed, can openers, lots of SciFi, and growing up as the Internet grew up

mjbroadbent: @octothorpe Good fun! I’m curious: were your foes real or imaginary? Or perhaps the creative joy was simply in the making.

ConeTrees: reading Enid Blytons & watching cartoons where all things/ interfaces just work and everything is simplified

davin: . Speak & Spell, Merlin, text adventures on Vic-20, 20-sided dice, Lego/Star Wars mash-ups

mikeym: Hammond organs, analog Buchla synthesizers, backlit toggle switches (love!), tube amps, aircraft flight controls.

daveixd: I think it was the Odessy game console. I LOVED that game controller more than anything! The circular disc w/ the 12key punch.

mjbroadbent: Baking, cooking, and serving food were formative for me. Planning everything to yield a fabulous end result was (is) great fun!

nikkirmz: Light switches located on walls behind doors. You must walk in, partially close the door to turn on the light.

jeanphony: Helping my dad design and build a custom family camper from a former delivery van

rayraydel: It’s always been about sketching for me. Both figuring stuff out and communicating it with pencil & paper. The best.

strottrot: Another : My dad cursing through toys with “some assembly required”

noahmittman: As a kid, pirating software without any manuals or help, using only the software’s end design to learn its features.

cchastain: Putting on a carnival in the back yard.

jspahr: Devouring Isaac Azimov’s SciFi stories; building/re-building lego houses/cities; hypercard.

mjbroadbent: Oh yeah! My brother and I created spooky fun houses in our basement. RT @cchastain: Putting on a carnival in the back yard.

jeffpiazza: - Drawing dashboards of real (space shuttle) and futuristic aircraft.

austingovella: Magic: tell a story, misdirect their attention to what they want to see, and delight them.

It’s interesting that about half of these are about experiencing frustration and wanting to fix the experience, and the other half are about being inspired with wonder and delight — precisely the dichotomy that UX designers seem to perpetually wrestle with today

Do you have any childhood experiences that you are convinced still influence you as a designer today?

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Have you ever thought of design as an opportunity to be kind to someone?

User experience designer Jeff Howard wonders if service design (a way of thinking about design in which the user experience has many “touchpoints” across many channels and contexts) isn’t ultimately a frustrating and Sisyphean task, where customers and users are always going to be disappointed simply because no system or experience can ever be perfect. He observes that no matter what the designer does right, users will always remember when and how a system let them down, even if it only fails them in a small way.

He offers an interesting alternative way of thinking about the design of service experiences:

Maybe the answer itself is counterintuitive. Rather than offering reliably excellent service, what about unpredictability? What if the answer lies in random acts of kindness? The bits of business that add value to a service, but that aren’t part of its core offering. Something we can’t anticipate, something that captures our attention — randomly exceeding our expectations. A foil to the capriciousness of human perception.

I totally agree, and not just about service design. In all forms of design, practicing random acts of design kindness is a great way to improve a user experience without radically overhauling your design process or revisiting the core strategy of your product.

A fun approach I like to use (sometimes unconsciously, sometimes deliberately) is to have an unofficial objective of having three delightful details in a design — a humorous error message, a helpful hint at a difficult juncture, a way to skip a step in a process, etc. The important thing here, as Jeff suggests, is to do it at an unexpected time, almost as a kind of surprise, just so it has an extra emotional impact on the user.

Of course we all want to make everything perfect, but it’s amazing how one delightful detail will stick out in a user’s mind.

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There are two ways of writing nouns in the English language: you capitalize proper nouns and you don’t capitalize common nouns. There is an unfortunate tendency, however, for people to think that you can elevate the importance and even the definition of any old common noun simply by capitalizing it. To me, this is the typographical equivalent of using “unnecessary” quotation marks to indicate emphasis.

There are some words, of course, that legitimately have this quality, for example God with a capital G is different from god with a lowercase g. Brand names often co-opt common nouns, too, and create new proper nouns: There is a difference between “facebook” and “Facebook“, for example.

But we can’t just make new proper nouns up for no good reason. I am thinking specifically about the increasingly common use of the phrase “Design with a capital D”, or even the unqualified casual use of the capitalized “Design”, whenever a writer seeks to discuss the broader category of all design disciplines from the many smaller, more focused design fields which also use the one-word “design” to describe themselves (fashion design, interior design, graphic design).

Even at a purely grammatical level, this is wrong: you simply cannot capitalize the word “design” because it is not a proper noun. There is no grammatical rule that says that you can use capitalization to indicate the importance or scope of a word — I can’t capitalize “Sports”, for example, and say it means the philosophy and values of sportsmanship as opposed to the lowly playing of games. If you found a company or wrote a book or named your dog “Design” you might have a case for the capital D. But the concept of “design” is already in the dictionary as a common noun, with a lowercase d.

But, more importantly, I don’t think we need to be making this kind of in-your-face overt distinction in the first place. The concept that design has several layers of meaning and scope is quite valid and useful, but the word itself is perfectly capable of encompassing both meanings.

The English language, like many others, has some lovely ambiguities and idiosyncrasies in it. These gaps and imperfections may sometimes frustrate us, but they also make us think about words more, what they mean and where they come from. They force us to pay more attention to context, which we really ought to be doing anyway.

When it comes to the various disciplines of design, I want to be frequently reminded that making a flowchart for a user interface and making a fabric pattern for a dress are closely related disciplines. I want to know that my own design discipline can learn from all of the others.

I would rather have readers assume that the word “design” by default means all of the diverse design practices — unless the author or speaker indicates otherwise, implicitly or explicitly. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, though: most designers think of their own niche design discipline whenever they hear the word “design”. Still, capitalizing “design” is a crutch for both writers and readers, a short cut that excuses writers from explaining the interconnectedness of design, and excuses readers from embracing design more broadly.

Instead, let’s just write and read more carefully, and let’s keep talking about design as a family of practices. And let’s also begin assuming the broader definition by default, unless told otherwise. Writers and readers will have to do a little extra thinking sometimes to figure out the meaning in any given context. But eventually the concept of design as a general way of thinking with many specific ways of practicing will take hold.

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