The search is over. Many have heroically tried. But a decisive winner has emerged.

Behold! the most elegant and usable conference badge design ever:

This badge is from The Web and Beyond 2010, held in Amsterdam two weeks ago, where I spoke and saw many excellent sessions.

Let me explain the mechanics of this great design:

Lanyard: The lanyard is nothing special — a branded ribbon with a simple clasp at the end. As far as I’m concerned, the lanyard is interchangeable. Irrelevant, in fact: you could use a metal chain, a hemp rope, whatever. That’s part of the awesomeness of this design.

Graphics: The first name is big so you can say “Hi Christopher”, and the last name and company/affiliation is a little smaller. The same information is printed on both sides. I imagine the text could be a little bigger all around for readability’s sake.

Booklet: Here’s where it gets really clever: The “name tag” is actually the cover of a little booklet. The booklet’s cover, as you can see in the picture, is printed upside-down from the contents of the booklet itself, so that the badge wearer can flip the book up to read the contents. The lanyard attaches to the booklet using “loop staples“, the same staples that hold the book together, thus requiring no additional hardware and, even better, no plastic sleeve. I’ve seen plenty of attempts to make badges with little pockets for holding a conference booklet, but this unified solution blows those ideas away.
It doesn’t hurt that the 35-page booklet contained great facilities maps, a full schedule, and biographies and photos of all the speakers. The covers were color-coded, too, with different colors for attendees, speakers, and staff.

Of course, not every conference can afford all of the bells and whistles on display with this badge design, but it’s easy to see how the basic principle — a book on a hook — can work for smaller budgets. For example, the custom-printed attendee-name covers could simply be blanks on which stickers are affixed. The booklets could be briefer, focusing on just the schedule, for example.

Conference organizers: Please steal this idea!

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I just finished reading Lolita; it was my first time reading it, but it was not my first Nabokov novel (having already enjoyed Pale Fire and Ada or Ardor). It was a 1955 American hardback edition, the first year Americans got their hands on the book. I don’t understand why anyone buys new classic books in any format — paperback, hardback, or ebook — when beautiful and historic hardback copies can be easily purchased online for a fraction of the cost of buying a new copy.

Nabokov is a staggeringly good writer, in both style and substance. Every sentence feels like a gift from the author to the reader. In the delivery of a gut-wrenching and thrilling plot, he draws you in, deeper and deeper, with his beautiful and astonishing use of language and dramatic structure. I flew through the final 100 pages of Lolita on a flight back from Amsterdam, and it must have been amusing, or perhaps disconcerting, to my fellow passengers to see my face, enrapt, my expressions shifting repeatedly from intense concentration, to a state of near-tears, to knowing giggles, repeat, repeat, in a determined sprint to the conclusion.

(It may strike you as crass for me to consider running a race a suitable metaphor for reading a great book, but please understand that for me, as an athlete, finishing a race is not the end of an ordeal but a supreme pleasure.)

And what delight as, finishing the third to last, right-side-facing page, I turned to the final spread, one-and-one-half pages of text, and unexpectedly found some of the most heartbreaking words of the whole novel, right at the top of the penultimate page, the finish line within sight: an experience that was both textual and physical in its manifestation. Was it the author, the typesetter, both, or neither, who constructed — designed — this neat, sublime, perfectly-timed emotional jolt?

Throughout the final terrifying third act of the book, Nabokov knew that the reader would be constantly, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, seeking (or deliberately avoiding seeking) a single word, a word whose distinctive typographical form would light up like a flare in the reader’s peripheral vision, paragraphs in advance, impossible to miss. Every time you turn a page, even if you avoid it, your eyes will, in an instant, claw through the one-thousand characters in every new two-page spread to find it, the word, the single characteristic letter. He plays with this visual expectation so thoroughly — torments the reader, in fact — that it’s inconceivable that he wasn’t always thinking about printed words, words on pages being turned in a reader’s hands.

Oh, how glad am I that I was unable to find Lolita in any sort of eBook format.

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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. MORE…

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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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Yours truly in 1989.

This week is my 20th anniversary as a resident of New York City. I moved here in September 1989 at the tender age of 18, excited to begin studying art at Cooper Union but largely ignorant of how much New York itself would teach me for the next two decades.

What I love most about New York is that it keeps surprising me. New York today is simply not the same place it was ten or twenty years ago. Things keep changing, disappearing and emerging (for better and for worse) and in more dramatic and exaggerated ways than I’d ever imagined.

By “things”, I mean everything: The skyline, the demographics, the mood, the culture. The rules of the road for cyclists, the accents and music on the streets in the summers, the gossip and the conventional wisdom, the businesses and industries. Every few years, it’s like a whole new city with all new people doing totally different things.

And yet so much seems to endure as well. Not just because Coney Island is doggedly resisting the onslaught of misbegotten development, and not just because Brooklyn’s warehouses are just as good to have an illegal dance party in as Manhattan’s were 20 years ago. It’s because New York is, functionally, the same place it has been for almost century. New York City is an interestingness machine. It’s precisely the churn of new people, cultures, attitudes, and ideas that makes NYC what it is.

I’ve traveled a bit and know that of course New York isn’t the only place in the world with a vibrant and surprising culture and history. In fact, I have in recent years thought a lot about picking up stakes and living somewhere else. But it would be at best a sabbatical, an experiment: even if I left for a decade, I’d still think of New York City, and indeed Brooklyn, as my home.

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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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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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Where’s Chris been? Why, I’ve been working, swimming, biking, and running.

The latter three were all brought together two weeks ago in the Philadelphia Triathlon (my second triathlon ever — my first was the New York Triathlon which I finished last summer), for which I have been cramming in a lot of training in recent months (to the obvious expense of blogging). On July 28th, it all paid off. It’s like working for a year on a major web site and finally launching it, only better.

I grew up in Philadelphia, but I don’t think I remember it ever being as beautiful as it was during my race. It had been raining all week, but by the time Sunday rolled around the sky was clear and sunny.

The swim was in the Schuylkill River, which for my entire childhood was synonymous with pollution and filth. But to my great delight the river was clear and clean, an absolute joy to swim in. It was, in fact, my first open-water swim in fresh water since I began serious swim training. The 1-mile swim began at the St. Joseph’s Boathouse (my father’s alma mater) and passed under a bridge, finally finishing on the other side of the river.

The bike and run were all though Fairmount Park, including two loops on the bike passing right in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (known in Philly as “The Art Museum”). It was hard not to have the Rocky Theme in my head every time I passed by those step. I’ll confess that I actually downloaded the song a few weeks before in a fit of Philadelphia nostalgia.

Most of the bike course was through shady woods or country roads or grassy hills. The run was along the bank of the river. You’d hardly know you were in a city park. Again, I don’t remember Fairmount Park being so tranquil and lovely in the 1970s.

The Philly Triathlon is about half the size of the New York version (2000 vs. 5000 people), which makes it sooo much more intimate and manageable. After doing both, I am reluctant to want to ever do New York again when I can always do Philly instead. I am, of course, now trying to find one even smaller to do, maybe even before this season is through.

In the New York Triathlon last year I didn’t do as well as I’d hoped, but this time around I managed to reduce my overall time by almost 20%. My final, official time: Swim (1 mile): 30:02; Bike (25 mile): 1:17; Run (10k): 58:06. Total, with transitions: 2:53:26! I worked my way through the swim, kicked ass on the bike, but I petered out a little on the run, I guess, running what I think is my slowest 10k ever.

In the end I came in 844th of 1306 men. Next time I know I’ll crack the top 50%!

Maybe I’m not as verbose as I was last year, but there’s more to see in my Flickr photo set, and my Mom even put up a video on YouTube!

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