Ideas in the Making

At a recent TriUXPA meeting, we listened to a recorded webinar by Stephen Anderson (thanks UIE) about Designing for Micro-moments.

One of his themes was that interactions (as in user interaction with a web site or web application) is a conversation and so should be treated as such when we design interfaces. What does the user need? Consider how they want it and not just what they want. Consider when they need information for continuing the conversation. Conversations are a good way of treating these micromoments as he calls them – little steps in the course of interaction. Of course these atomic actions add up to a task or a larger interaction. And these are done by humans, which is what his design emphasis is about. He somewhat sidestepped the question about localization/translation – once you make it a conversation, then you have to worry about framing and all that sociolinguistic stuff that we take for granted when we are having a conversation with someone, all that context stuff so no one is offended or confused, as happens in ordinary conversations.

But it was a good, thought-provoking webinar, and a bunch of us stayed after to talk about it. There were not many of us at this meeting, which surprised me because I thought the topic was very relevant to our work and the time of the event was not unreasonable. But those of us who did attend enjoyed the chance to share with each other. By the way, thanks, Capstrat for hosting – the food was delicious and the meeting room was very accommodating.

I have a few criticisms of Stephen’s approach but mainly he’s trying to figure out Web design as we all are; it’s still a young discipline. So I’m only mentioning these in as much as he’s setting himself up as a role model with a successful methodological approach to design. When he says ‘No Lorem Ipsum’ I think what he’s saying is you can’t predict the layout because you need to put in the actual words – but I also think he’s saying don’t use any long paragraphs of text. That seems to go along with the instant response expected by the latest generation of users – no wasted time, no long conversations. He says he doesn’t do requirements up front; he likes the agile or lean approach, but then he tells us he asks a list of questions first, which sounds like a list of requirements to me. When he says that he likes the lean and agile or bottom-up approach (attacking one small part of the user interface and working out from there) the reason he can be so successful is that the unit of task or amount of design is so small and atomic. Of course that works at the small scale. And of course he can do it by himself, so he has complete control. The challenge of course is for the larger conversation – the entire web site or web application that requires a collaborative (and cooperative) effort. For big projects, things get messy and you have to employ some aspects that are not so lean or agile as when one person has control. You need more than just a little micromomentum to get the user through it all. But he’s doing a great job and has a great level or professionalism and design sense, so I applaud his work and am glad he shares what he’s doing on webinars such as this. I wish all of the professionals at the meeting were given time to present their ideas – I think we all have a lot to learn and can learn a lot from each other.

I recently went to Richmond, Virginia, for the weekend to see my niece’s graduation and to be a part of the celebration. I went a day early and toured the city a bit. My hotel was downtown, amidst one way streets and road construction, but close to the convention center where the graduation ceremony was. The old and new buildings mix and match in interesting juxtaposition. My niece’s apartment (and several thrift stores I wanted to visit) were further west in the Fan district. My plan was to have supper at the cafe in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA). I underestimated the size of that facility – it’s an entire campus. There is so much visual art there – inside and out.

There is so much visual art in the entire city. Painted buildings, monuments everywhere, art in and on buildings. Even under the interstate overpass there are artworks hanging for public view. Art is part of the personality of Richmond.

Getting along is also part of the personality of Richmond. From its confederate-centric past, it is a city of the twenty first century. I visited the Confederate War Memorial Chapel (or Pelham Chapel) – it was a home for wounded soldiers in the Civil War and after the war was a place where reunions were held for soldiers on both sides. While the confederacy is a part of the legacy of Richmond, it certainly isn’t front and center. I didn’t see a single confederate flag while I was there. All I saw were students graduating and parents and siblings flowing around like ants.

There are some key features to instructional design that are not in, say, documentation or support, and that’s what makes it interesting. I’m not a full-time instructional designer, but I have this idea that there is something fundamental that separates instructional design from other interfaces with the customer. A crucial aspect of instructional design is the development of interactivity. That is what is missing from traditional documentation or support. Training material must allow an instructor and student working together during a process. It is easy to see this with in-person training; often we take for granted these interactions. But with online instruction, the interactivity between student and teacher, between student and material, and between students, is no less important. With any instruction, whether in person or online, there is always a need for engagement of the student and feedback from the student (as in Formative Feedback). The interaction helps inform the instructor that the student is learning or at least using the material or product or service. Just as the student must be given opportunities to interact with the instructor, the interaction with other students and with the material can be just as important.

This adds a level of complexity to online instruction because that interaction must be designed in. Designers must provide a way to measure that interaction, too. Instructional design must include feedback and instructor-student interaction; it must facilitate this interactivity and make it seem effortless and natural. It requires seeing instruction more as a process than as a product. This interaction (or feedback) must happen in multiple directions:

• Between student and material
• Between student and instructor
• Between instructor and student
• Between students (where possible)

I’m not alone. Others think we should structure the learning activities to foster student-instructor, student-student, and student-content interactions.

In a way it is almost as if you are documenting a process (of learning how to use something or how to achieve results using the product or service being trained on) as opposed to documenting a static product (like a piece of hardware). Whether you provide that interaction at the end of a module or during it will depend on your situation and what model of learning you espouse. But promoting that interaction and providing ways to measure its effectiveness is the ultimate goal. The actual content of the material may only be one third of the job. The interaction, in all these dimensions, is the key.

The following article has two Best Practices that touch on interactivity but don’t focus on it. This the ‘Ten Best Practices for Teaching Online (Quick Guide for New Online Faculty)’ by Dr. Judith V. Boettcher. This list has these two:

• Best Practice 6: Early in the term…, ask for informal feedback on “How is the course going?” and “Do you have any suggestions?”
• Best Practice 7: Prepare Discussion Posts that Invite Questions, Discussions, Reflections and Responses

And the ‘Best Practices in Designing Online Courses from Las Positas College’ has one about interaction. See number 6 in their list for ‘interactivity’. Finally, the ‘Online Course Design Guidelines from the University of Vermont’ has number 4, which calls it Social Presence and Interaction. This is just a smattering of what’s out there. I’m sure you can find more – feel free to leave a comment with more links.

Instructional design is certainly a dynamic profession – as technology changes, as corporations expand and contract, as more content and learning is outsourced and socialized, this interface with the customer is going through some drastic changes. But there is one key element that does not change – the interactivity that must be part of instruction. This element of interactivity is always essential, despite the changes, despite the numerous models and theories, and despite the extreme need to train professionals more quickly and more cheaply. Professionals doing instructional design can share what is successful, what works in the trenches, not just what looks like a coherent model or theoretical construct. I hope my ranting about the importance of interactivity has touched a nerve. Be aware of interactivity while designing instructional material and online courses; it is the key element that makes instructional design unique and valuable.

In keeping with what he has written in Mobile First, Luke Wroblewski, alias @LukeW, presented some great ideas about web interface design. He is a proponent of considering mobile devices and considering them first when designing web sites. At the TriUXPA meeting in Raleigh, NC, a bunch of (16 in all) watched his webinar over a catered supper. Good food and food for thought. (Thanks Capstrat for hosting the event.)

By working within the constraints of the size of mobile devices (of whatever shape and size), you can improve the design of a web site (and maybe a web app?) for all types of devices. Going mobile is the right way to go; Luke gave a whole new meaning to “movable type”. People are accessing more information on smaller devices at more locations and at more times. Where to put navigation on smaller screens, how to consider content first (since that’s the value that users seek), and putting mobile thinking above desktop thinking are all ideas flowing from Luke’s brain. His great use of examples made it easy to understand his points. Quoting from Rachel Hinman’s The Mobile Frontier and showing the value of Responsive Web Design (along with responsive multi-level navigation), his presentation covered a range of ideas.

Here are two ideas that Luke did not cover: voice control and multi-layered web design.

Voice Control
As screens shrink and navigation becomes a challenge, the lack of screen space might not be a problem as more voice activation comes into general use. If I can simply say a command or request an action by voice, it doesn’t matter whether there is a navigation menu with that command on it and space is no longer an issue. Whether you are searching on a site or taking action, a verbal command might be all you need to accomplish your goal.

I find it interesting that I am not alone in thinking about this:
Are voice controlled interfaces a new form of interaction design or a replacement for interaction design?.

Multi-Layer Interface
I am using my crystal ball here and foreseeing a time when, just as desktop interfaces went from command line to graphical to multiple windows, the mobile device will offer multiple layers of screens, similar to tabs in a browser, so the user does not have to sacrifice context for content or navigation. Just as layers in graphical design programs let you work on multiple levels, so the designers of mobile devices will create a way for users to layer their screens, whether menus on top of content or multiple layers of content. It’s coming; I’m telling you.

Stay tuned for other ideas on web design. Thanks, Luke for getting the creative juices going.

Joe Welinski has done it again: produced a great tools survey and published the results. Here it is:

• 2013 User Assistance Tools Survey

While the cynical among us might think this is self serving, drawing viewers to his site to drum up more business for his conferences, I think he’s doing a great job and a offering a great service to the professional community. I applaud his effort and want him to know that it’s a great thing that he offers his results for free. He offers caveats, but I grant him those. I think the sampling is representative and I think it does represent the interests of technical writers involved in software user assistance. No problem there. But…

But, I still don’t know if it’s relevant when all the numbers are tallied. Or at least not as relevant as it used to be. Here is some food for thought.

• There is a much bigger field and wider spread of user assistance people than those from a tech writing background and from who call themselves UA professionals.
• User assistance and technical support and online training – the boundaries of these previously separate and silo-ed disciplines are blurring.
• Technology is changing so rapidly, the tool might be obsolete in one generation of technology (which may be less than a year). (Maybe he needs an ongoing survey and results.)
• Tools are proliferating; look at the list of tools that are used by only one or two – that’s a long tail if I ever saw it.

I’m just saying.

Another thought I had is that it might help to distinguish between utilities (screen capture tools or PDF viewers) and full-blown authoring environments – they’re not both “tools”, are they? Utilities are like hand tools; authorizing environments are the entire workshop. There are add-ons to my browser that offer more productivity than some of the tools listed. Now that I think about it, I forgot to list those in my “Other” option. Maybe many of you did, too.

I really appreciated that he listed all the comments. It’s not necessarily easy to read, the way they are all strung together, but at least he included all of them, and I applaud him for it.

The problem with a tools survey is that it assumes that tools are desktop applications, or at least there is a bias in that direction. But are we really only using desktop applications? This survey didn’t even mention social media – does that count as a tool? Certainly we all use search engines and YouTube now when we need info on how to do something new; aren’t some of us using social media for distributing content? I think it’s time to widen the survey to match the diversity of tools and diversity of platforms.

Good job and thanks for sharing your results, Joe! Keep up the good work.

For a day of intense technical communication, comes the event of the year – STC Carolina Chapter Competition Judging. Last year, the chapter did a great job of taking a long drawn-out process of providing feedback on competition entries – both hard copy publications and electronic media of every kind – and compressing it into a single one-day event. Yesterday’s judging event followed that pattern successfully. More than 35 professionals met at the training center on the SAS Campus in Cary, North Carolina for a rousing day of reviewing and evaluating over 70 entries submitted by chapter members from around the Triangle area.

This was as close to real-time as the chapter has accomplished thus far. Short of WebEx-ing with the contributors, this form of judging – with training in the morning and award nominations in the afternoon, and all the evaluations done in between – there is nothing faster, more intense, more extreme than this. The training was led by Jennifer Raisig, the organization by Betsy Kent, and the recruiting by Sheila Loring. Other notables were Larry Kunz, Andrea Wenger, Terry Smith, and Ann-Marie Grissino. In some ways this was a very retro event – bringing together the old timers and looking at good old user manuals – and in other ways it was very up-to-date with new faces and excitement reviewing online videos and multimedia presentations. The organizers did a great job of dividing up the work into small teams; the teams were great at finding a consensus about which works deserved real praise. The little gifts given out during the day kept the event from taking itself too seriously – the split playing cards was a good way to handle a raffle.

Thanks to all the technical communicators who did a great job and gave up a good portion of a Saturday to do this. Thanks to the folks at SAS for making the wonderful facility available. Thanks to the STC Carolina Chapter for having such a cool and innovative and productive event.

A bunch of us met at Capstrat in Raleigh to see the latest webinar sponsored locally by TriUXPA. The webinar speaker, Nathan Curtis, from EightShapes, talked about building HTML prototypes. His talk was titled “Start Full Screen: Organize, Communicate, & Annotate HTML Prototypes”. It was pretty long (an hour and a half) but informative. Many of us agreed that this type of approach and its related framework, would be useful for larger groups devoted to prototyping in HTML, but many of us in the room are working for smaller companies, so we are weighing the usefulness of using EightShape’s product.

The ten of us sat around a conference table and stopped the webinar during the Question-and-Answer time and asked our own questions of each other. Thanks to Evan Carroll from Capstrat for hosting (and for showing me the cool office space he works in) and to Adam Rogers for running the show. Thanks to Bruce Mehrenbloom for kicking off some great discussion and for Michael and others for joining right in.

You can’t argue with Nathan’s approach to modularizing, organizing, and annotating prototypes. With his purist approach to using only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, he is afforded some freedom from the constraints of other technologies and allowing his prototypes to run on any machine (practically). If you buy his approach to doing HTML/CSS/JavaScript-only prototyping, then the framework that EightShapes offers seems like an intelligent way to work collaboratively and simply. He gets the “truthiness” award for making “doneness” a word. His mentioning of the Transform element in CSS3 and of the IPEVO document camera for collaborative sketching got some additional tangential discussion going. All in all, it was another great TriUXPA meeting and I’m glad I went.

P.S. Some additional podcast discussion is at UIE Brainsparks.

When we have a great event, such as the TriUXPA meeting tonight, we realize what great things collaboration can accomplish! Richard Phelps, the president of the chapter; the speakers, Rex Hartson from Virginia Tech and Pardha Pyla from Bloomberg; Lulu for hosting the event; and the 20 plus members who came out. Thanks to all!

This was fun and informative. “Affordances and their Importance to UX Practitioners” was the title of the presentation. Rex and Pardha, joint authors of The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience, gave a great introduction to “affordances”, those aspects of the user experience that help, aid, or guide the user. This is such an important part of the user experience; it’s amazing that it is not covered sooner is their book. (It’s in chapter 20.) A few lucky members won free copies of the book – I know who I’m borrowing a copy from. Here’s an invitation to anyone who reads the book (or has read the book) – if you want to post your opinion of it or comments about it, I’ll post a blog entry here on my site – just submit it to me.

Lulu has a great facility on Hillsborough near the campus of NC State University. With the Irregardless Cafe providing the food, you couldn’t have a better hosted event!

During the question and answer period, there was talk about “Save” being a dying metaphor – why should the user have to click a button to perform a Save action, when the application should just take care of that? (as Google Docs handles edits of a page.) There was mention of Metro but this is new to me, so I’ll have to read up on this before I talk more about it. Since most of their examples of ‘affordances’ in the user interface were about buttons and levers and things to start an action or a task, I asked about affordances that indicate whether a task is complete or the status of the progress if something is loading or the user has to wait. Rex answered that this is covered in the book. He also mentioned that affordances can indicate what the next step should be for a user, if tasks are dependent or must be performed sequentially. This is definitely something I’m going to work on with the designers/developers at Paragon, where I work.

Bloomberg is also now hiring for multiple UX positions. See open positions here: www.bloomberg.com/ux/. If anyone is looking to hire a talented new grad, contact Mercedes Gosby and tell her Bill Albing sent you.

Offline to All-line
Once upon a time we talked about working “offline” as a way of saying that we were working on paper or in person, away from and apart from a computer. As more of our work moved to the computer (and we weren’t doing work if it wasn’t on the computer), “offline” began to mean working on your computer specifically, but disconnected from the rest of the Internet. We worked for years using the computer as an appliance that allowed us to work disconnected from everyone else and disconnected in silos of information.
I honestly can’t remember the last time anyone used the word “offline”. I don’t think people use that word much anymore. Not long ago you couldn’t work off your computer; now you can’t work without being connected.

Together We Work
Everyone’s work is collaborative these days; it all requires a connection to the Internet. More of my time is spent Web conferencing with others, Skyping with colleagues, doing Google searches, and doing other cloud activities. It seems only a short while ago we were talking about the day when we would be doing this at work. Now I don’t have time to catch my breath between online activities, work flowing from one collaborative engagement after another. I don’t know if we are in teams or knots. Sometimes it is one-on-one, sometimes it the entire team, sometimes it is open-ended and different people come and go.

Service or Infrastructure?
It was not that long ago that if you needed to upload a picture or have some service, you needed an account at that web site. You used to do most of your work in desktop applications and occasionally went to the Web for some information. Now I can upload pictures or get a Web address (URL) shortened without even logging in. No questions asked. I can get map information, I can find content at the most granular level, all without paying anyone or registering. I’m spending more of my time at Web sites and Web apps – and I don’t even know if there is a difference. Is it site (a place) or an application (a tool)? It’s both.
And it’s not just computers that are connected and allowing us to collaborate. We have phones and other mobile devices that allow us to stay connected in more places and more ways than we thought possible only a few years ago.

Distance is Gone
My brother gave me access to a document on Google; my colleagues at work used a spreadsheet in the cloud. Whether family or work, we are all moving into the cloud. No one asks ‘Should we work in the cloud?'; we are just in it. We are all working collaboratively. We are all working in the cloud.
Add to that the reach of collaboration – the fact that I’m Web conferencing with people all over the world and not even thinking about it; that we sometimes don’t even say where we are; that a gal from down the hall may be visiting a remote office and connecting in as if she’s at her desk; that half our company is not only remote but distributed geographically. I am connecting with more people in other c