Will Wright’s cryptic, clip-art crazy PowerPoint slides make sense when he’s right there talking about them.

Microsoft’s PowerPoint is frequently blamed for the poor quality of many presentations and for a supposedly- disastrous state of communication in both the private and the public spheres. Public speakers are lambasted for their wooden stage presence, crippled by their over-reliance on projected slide shows and meaningless bullet-points. The slides themselves, too, are often rife with design crimes ranging from clip-art diarrhea to impenetrable verbosity.

And because of the ubiquity of the tool and the technique, because public speakers from Al Gore to members of Australia’s Parliament use slideshows to support their speeches, the software itself has become the de facto target of criticism. I don’t think this is quite fair.

[For the purpose of this argument, Keynote on the Mac is basically the same animal as PowerPoint, so with apologies to both Microsoft and Apple I’ll just use the term “PowerPoint” to mean any slideshow method or tool.] MORE…

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The word “experience” comes from the Latin word “experīrī”, or to try.

It’s strange, then, that in modern English the two words, “experience” and “try”, have such different meanings: when we try something we tend to take a sip or a nibble, get our toes wet, or go for a test drive around the block. But when we experience something, we allow it to overtake and engulf us, we admit it fully into our spaces, our lives. A deeper and more lasting understanding is achieved, something fundamentally different than what we get from merely trying something.

The purpose of user experience design, or UXD, is to understand that user behavior can be seen as part of a holistic experiential model instead of as a shallow, temporary hit-and-run encounter. In the domain of user experience, then, we must not mistake trying something for experiencing it.

The most revolutionary products, the things you “never knew you wanted but can’t live without”, only catch on when people are able to move quickly from trying to experiencing.

Some of the ramifications of this distinction include:

Product Reviewing: When testing a new product to see what it’s all about, consider adopting it thoroughly instead of just tinkering around with it. As you explore the product, ask yourself if you are using it like someone who actually bought it with the intention of using it, or if you are merely sweeping through it for a quick overview. At a wine tasting you aren’t supposed to swallow the stuff, but sometimes if you want to understand what it’s really all about you simply have to drink the Kool Aid.

Restaurant reviewers will visit the same establishment five or six times, on different days of the week and at different times of the day. When exploring a new product, consider taking the same approach — how differently would you use it on a busy day versus a slow day, at home versus at work, in a good mood or in a bad mood?

Trying new Social Apps: This is particularly important with social apps, where this phenomenon is exponentially true. You cannot experience a social app unless you are part of a group of people who are all experiencing it together. You cannot, for example, understand what Twitter really is until 20+ people (people who you actually care about) are connected to you as friends and all 20+ of you are using Twitter in your own idiosyncratic ways. A social networking app does not even really exist until there are groups of users trying it out.

Usability Testing: The purpose of usability testing is to simulate the planned user experience as closely as possible. By being conscious of the fact that some experiences involve long commitments and/or large numbers of participants, a usability test may need to be structured very differently than they are today. A prototype for testing may need to be pre-populated with legacy cruft and clutter, as if the test subject had been using it for years. And again, for social apps, this is even more pronounced: Public Betas are, in fact, the best way we currently have to test social apps, but maybe someone will devise a way of simulating the cruft and clutter by simulating real people in a network where few real people actually exist.

Product (or Website!) Design: Allow your users to rapidly transition from trying your product to experiencing it, by making the initial stages of the interaction with the product as seductive and addictive as possible. Apple’s “out of the box” seduction is the gold standard for this, but the tradition goes back to the simpler arts: James Bond movies always open with a high-voltage action sequence. And the most basic rule of journalism is to catch the reader’s attention in the first paragraph.

In Dont Make Me Think, Steve Krug posits that the first question a web site should answer for a user is “what is this?” It’s surprising how many sites fail utterly at this. If your web page cannot tell a user immediately what the hell it is, why it’s useful, etc., you’re already putting up a major obstacle between trying and experiencing. Krug’s book, in fact, can easily be seen as a concise manual on how to smooth the path from try to experience.

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My IA Summit presentation was an experiment in what is a new presentation style for me. I have long admired the rapid-fire presentation style of Lawrence Lessig (aka the “Lessig method“) and in particular the example of Dick Hardt’s keynote at Identity 2.0. Also, I’ve always wanted to achieve the same aesthetic and pedagogical dazzle that my freshman art history teacher managed to lay down every Friday morning at 9:30 to a room full of overworked and/or hung-over art students.

I knew from the start that I would have a lot of slides – that was part of my basic concept, to show style in action across a broad variety of professional disciplines, as a quick barrage of images to drive home the point. In most of my day-to-day business or academic presentations, “1-minute-per-slide” is a pretty good rule of thumb, but for this presentation I ended up with 239 slides to show in 40 minutes. That’s one slide every ten seconds!

I was shocked that it actually worked – quite frankly I was bracing myself for a train wreck. The biggest reason for my surprise is that although I worked extraordinarily hard on the talk, I didn’t manage to get even one chance to rehearse it to see if it even came remotely close to fitting in at under 40 minutes. But in the end, thanks only I suppose to my intuition about my speaking skills, I managed to get to the final slide with five minutes to spare and without losing too much momentum along the way, even as I had to disappointingly breeze through a couple of segments.

About the Topic

After doing all the research and all the thinking, after diving so deeply into the subject of style, I still feel there’s a LOT to say about it. In fact, I feel like my 239 slides barely scratched the surface. Due to time constraints, I glossed over my discussion of three fascinating topics:

Functionalist Modernism

The first was a more in-depth discussion – a refutation, in fact – of what I call “functionalist modernism”. I touched on it briefly with one example, showing that Charles and Ray Eames were not at all the form-follows-function minimalists contemporary design catalogues would have us believe, but that, rather, they loved ornament, kitsch, bric-a-brac, patterns, and all of the decorative crimes that the true modernist eschews. In other words, they were immersed in an ocean of style.

But my primary target was Le Corbusier, an icon of functionalist modernism whose posture as a scientifically-based designer was, in fact, a self-deceptive sham – in much the same way that I think that much of today’s “lab coat” information architecture (and indeed a certain subset of the broader design world) is, sadly, a self-deceptive sham in which style exists but is deliberately obscured.

I also wanted to heap more praise on Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, a book that I think not only puts the lie to so-called functionalist modernism, but exposes the deeply poetic and humane nature of good architecture – a way of thinking about architecture that, I think, has yet to be explored adequately in the world of information architecture (a connection that, I think, Donald Norman attempted to make in his under-appreciated Emotional Design).

Abductive Reasoning

The second topic I had to skip over was my discussion of “adbductive reasononing”, a type of semi-logical thinking that envisions not what is (as with inductive and deductive reasoning) but what might be or what could be, a type of thinking more common among artists and designers. I wanted to connect this with the concept of “design thinking”, a methodology that is the inverse of the business-based risk-averse process of building products to precisely fill carefully-measured needs… but after reading Dan Saffer’s lament on the topic, I’m reluctant to use that term any more (a post on this is to come) so in a way I’m glad I didn’t go into it too much.

Christopher Alexander’s Design Patterns

Finally, I sadly had to skip over my take on Christopher Alexander’s concept of design patterns. Alexander’s name is dropped frequently these days, especially in the interaction design field, but I see his work very differently than I think most people are currently interpreting it. I consider Alexander’s design patterns to be highly idiosyncratric, deeply creative, overtly political, a wee bit spiritual, and ultimately poetic in nature – which is to say that they are not at all the scientifically-based proven best practices they are too-often presented as. I would even say that Alexander was advocating a certain style of architectural theory.

For Future Development

After all the research and writing, my appetite for this topic is only just beginning. I’m not even entirely sure if the concept of “style” covers the full breadth of what I am seeing here – perhaps it’s more about aesthetics or the re-emergence of the formal and decorative, even the idiosyncratic and poetic, as key drivers of good design.

I have uncovered surprising connections between truly fascinating subjects. I’ve found remarkable authors and designers whose work I was previously unfamiliar with (who on earth is Mr. Keedy and how did he get to be so clever?). It’s clear to me that there is an incredible amount of additional material here, and a lot more for me to think about and say. I would love a chance to continue developing this topic, whether as a longer presentation, more formal articles, or even, heavens, a book.

In the Sausage Factory

If you can stomach it, I wanted to share a little insight into the development of my presentation (or, if you will, the magnitude of my procrastination).

I was working on the speech and the slideshow all night right up to my Friday morning flight, on the plane, off and on throughout the conference, and all night long leading right into my Monday morning session. While in Vegas, however, I did manage to squeeze in a stunning dinner at Bouchon, a drive-in showing of 300 with a few six packs and some excellent soul food, and, on the final night before speaking, a rapid-series of thematic drinks at Quark’s Bar at the Star Trek Experience (including a massive “Warp Core Breach”).

Yes, that’s right, I had too many drinks and absolutely no sleep in the 24 hours before speaking. While the drinking didn’t help any, I do kind of thrive in no-sleep circumstances, actually, as long as a quart of coffee is consumed immediately prior to the moment when top-performance is required (this does not, however, apply to athletic performance, however).

Lou Dorfsman, the great advertising and design luminary, once told my partner Jeff Piazza that his secret to giving a great presentation was to gulp down a shot of Scotch immediately before speaking. I have immense respect for that, I really do, but I guess I’m just made of somewhat different stuff than Mr. Dorfsman.

My work process can be divided into five very distinct phases:

1. Topic Generation (two weeks of occasional work): The topic and the presentation format came to me in the most clichéd of contexts – in the shower. I was a last-minute addition to the Summit schedule after another speaker had to withdraw, so I was already a month or two behind when I was asked to participate (and the fact that I was permitted to skip the judging process only put more pressure on me to do a kick-ass presentation). It took about two weeks from having the initial ten-word concept before I got to the point where I could write a coherent three paragraphs about the topic, and by that point it was too late to get my description into any of the printed materials for the conference.
2. Idea Collection/Research (four weeks of occasional work): Idly and intermittently thumbing through my bookshelf, browsing the web, bookmarking links, jotting down random thoughts in my sketchbook, and writing jumbled blog drafts. At no point in this timeframe did I have an overall outline of the final presentation – I was letting the research and my own unpredictable inspirations shape my thinking.
3. Formal Preparation (five semi-intense evenings): This is where I picked up a few new books and consumed them rapidly, and where I formed the bulk of the overarching concept. During this time I mostly focused on switching back and forth between gathering raw materials (copying or transcribing text snippets into my outline, structuring the outline, and collecting/scanning/photographing images for use in the PowerPoint show) and actually writing my original commentary. I had the final outline 50% done in this timeframe, and had probably written down about 30% of the actual words I wanted to say, but only about 10 slides were actually in the PowerPoint deck at this point. It’s three days before showtime.
4. Frenzy! (four intense days and nights): This was the most schizophrenic part. I was quite literally doing a little of everything during the final four days. I would spend an hour fine-tuning individual slides, aligning images and normalizing fonts, only to spend the next hour completely re-ordering the thematic flow of the whole presentation and writing the final script. Intense and completely random alternation between micro and macro.
5. Purge! (2-3 hours): Only in the final hours before showtime did I actually throw in the towel on some sections of the presentation that I knew I would not be able to discuss adequately. I deleted about 10 pages of what would ultimately be a 33-page script, and maybe 50 slides to bring the total PowerPoint page count to 239. I’ve saved all the deleted material, so they’ll probably come up again in a longer-format version of this topic.

I’m very happy to note that my process was entirely consistent with the basic premise of my talk: I had my final delivery style decided very early on, my fundamental outline was never really final until nearly the last minute, and in any event it didn’t completely dictate the content anyway but rather the concept was as much influenced by the content itself – in the same way, I think, that a product’s style shapes that product’s basic premise as much as the premise sets the framework for the product’s ultimate style.

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It’s been a little less than a week since my IA Summit presentation. To my great surprise, it went really well. I mean really well. In the next day or so I will be posting a summary of my experiences preparing and discussing my topic, which was, in a word, style.

Many people came to me after my presentation asking me not only to post the slides themselves, but also to post the reading list since I did discuss a lot of books and sites that deeply influenced my thinking. So here’s all the stuff:

Slideshow

• Slideshow as PDF (19mb PDF)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 1 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 2 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 3 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 4 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 5 of 5)

Reading List

These readings are in roughly the same pedagogical sequence that the concepts appeared in my presentation. Note that not all of these were actually cited in the talk, but I did have all of them either at hand or in mind as I wrote.

MORE…

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I am speaking next Monday at the 2007 ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas.

My topic will be “Interaction Design Style“. It will be a highly visual romp through a variety of topic having to do with the concept of style and how it fits into the design of interactive systems:

• The definition of style.
• The history and meaning of the concept of “style”, across many disciplines including art, architecture, music, design, writing, and more. Style is not not just fashion!
• How a consciousness of style can and should fit into a user-centered design process.
• How style constrains the design process, through both the anxiety of influence and through the availability of overly easy solutions.
• How style inspires the design process, opening us to new ideas we might never have thought of.
• How style guides the design process through pattern libraries, best practices, and more.

I was inspired in part by Stewart Brand’s 2003 IA keynote speech, in which he dismissed style (and fashion, and art) as an ephemeral, superficial, and ultimately flimsy basis for design strategies, an assertion that rubbed me a little wrong. Lately this has come back to me because style, broadly defined, is not brushed aside at all in so many other worlds of design and development. It’s not a dirty word.

Maybe, I thought, there are in fact major stylistic drivers behind much of what interaction designers and information architects do, in the same way that style drives much of architecture, music, etc. Maybe we shouldn’t reject stylistic influences, but should instead embrace them.

I’m working feverishly to make the most thought-provoking and interesting 45 minutes I can craft. It’s not going to be a research paper nor will it be a case study — it will be something I hope will be at least a little entertaining and educational, but most importantly a little eye-opening and inspiring. There will be lots and lots of pretty pictures!

Monday at 9:30 in the “Mesquite Room”. I hope to see you there!

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Illustration from a 1940’s Bell Labs project investigating human speech synthesis and recognition

I recently signed up for SimulScribe, a new service which replaces your existing voicemail system with one that:

1. Transcribes the voice message into text (using a speech-to-text (STT) engine)…
2. wraps the voicemail message into a WAV file…
3. and then emails the raw text and the WAV file (as an attachment) to your email address.

Setting up SimulScribe couldn’t be easier: The free trial doesn’t even require a credit card to start using right away, and they provide you with explicit and shockingly simple instructions for configuring your voicemail for your particular carrier. You can be set up with the SimulScribe service in literally under 3 minutes.

After setting it up (and this may come has a shock to those of you who still think STT is not ready for prime time), the system has performed almost flawlessly.

Below I’ll present some example transcriptions, followed by some ideas on how this technology might be extended in the future. MORE…

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Not me.

I’ve had enough of the term “surfing” when talking about “what we do when we use the web”. It was a terrible metaphor when it was first invented, and it’s only gotten worse. This morning on the radio I heard a journalist describe a terrorist using a computer to view terror videos with the word “surfing”.

Surfing implies a kind of un-seriousness to using the web, as if it was just playing around. But in my experience at least half of my web usage is pretty serious, not goofing off at all. Like many people over the age of 18, I use my computer for work-related activities like research, productivity. It’s hardly surfing when I am posting a wireframe deck to my company extranet. It’s not surfing when I am checking my web-based email, researching a content management system, or searching via Google. It’s not even surfing when I’m blogging, as I am doing right now.

Surfing also implies moving around from place to place quickly, but much of my web usage consists of spending a long time on a single page (reading or entering information), or interacting with web-based applications.

What would be a suitable replacement for the term? “Browsing” doesn’t cut it — browsing implies a particular kind of action, such as using a directory to find a book on amazon.com. “Using”?

Do we even need a cute jargony term for this? Can’t we just use the specific term for what we’re actually doing with the web browser? You know, reading, writing, researching, reporting, shopping, viewing, playing. But please, no more surfing.

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On election night last week, we were channel surfing and comparing the coverage by the various networks. We ended up for a spell at Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert exchanged snappy banter with each other in a kind of parody of network news coverage.

Surprisingly, there was a part of me that found it a little tiresome, and I thought to myself “Why don’t these guys just talk like normal people and tell us about the election results, instead of all this rehearsed repartee?”. They were acting out scripted set-peices and skits, or riffing on the results by digging into a selection of pre-planned gags and jokes.

Of course, this is Comedy Central, so the scripted quality of the “reportage” is to be expected. Still, despite our deep appreciation for CC’s two “anchors”, we grew impatient and craved the hard news coverage that only a real network can offer. So we resumed by surfing on over to Oppositeland: Fox News.

I immediately noticed that the narrative and theatrical quality and structure of Fox’s coverage was really no different from Comedy Central’s. Each pundit was talking to the other pundits as if the other person didn’t already know what they were going to say, and yet it was clear that everyone knew exactly what everyone else was going to say. Their conversations were fake in every way — not quite scripted, exactly, but so incredibly contrived as to be basically a kind of vaudeville act. MORE…

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