In which an artist, a farmer, a she-geek and an editor show how differently people use social media tools and how their lives really depend on them.

It’s easy to pigeonhole social media users as feckless, hormonal teenagers on the pull, or rabidly blogging armchair iconoclasts (hmmm … now I’ve written it, maybe I’ll use these as personas one day). In preparation for a recent presentation on social media I asked friends and contacts what and why they used social media. Not the most scientific method, but it did reveal four very different uses and attitudes to social media, which again reminded me that it’s not the tool (Facebook, Twitter etc), but the purpose that’s the real deal. With social media, you can’t just build it and they will come, but need to think about the intended audiences and their needs.

What’s really interesting is the different purposes people have: recreation, religion, work, education and life skills.

The names have been changed to protect the innocent – but otherwise, these profiles haven’t been edited. I’m not sure what conclusions one can draw, but I was surprised that the first four people I asked had such different uses:

Name: Jamie
Age: 37
Gender: Male
Relationships: Married, one child
Location: Surrey, southern England
Occupation: Editor
Tools used: Facebook, Linked In, Flickr, Yahoo! Groups, Twitter
Quote: “I access Social Media mostly when I’m at work, a quick glance at Facebook or Twitter every hour makes me feel like I’m at an informal friendly gathering rather than the reality of chipping away at the coal face”

Name: Hilda
Age: 49
Gender: Female
Relationships: Married with 2 children
Location: Southern England
Occupation: Homeschooling mum, veg grower, part time farm hand, peasant
Tools used: Facebook, blogs & forums (www.homesteadblogger.com, www.homechoolblogger.com, http://christianhomesteadwomen.wordpress.com, http://unltdworld.com, http://www.gentlechristianmothers.com, http://creativeliving.10.forumer.com )
Quote: ““Homeschooling, especially Christian homeschooling, is a far flung thing. To organise social events, educational events etc, I don’t think we could do it without the net.”

Name: David
Age: 55
Gender: Male
Relationships: Living with girlfriend and their 2 children
Location: Northern Ireland
Occupation: Artist and writer
Tools used: Facebook, multiple blogs
Quote: “ My blog is a kind of calling card, cv [résumé – US English] and portfolio that in a sense presents me to a marketplace. It also exists as an archive for posterity.

“I use FaceBook as a means for disseminating images which I consider to be within the real [sic] of my ‘art’ images and it also provides a platform for a certain kind of play with ideas. It offers material on which to ‘riff’ (improvise) and collaborators available to play.”

Name: Alice
Age: 26
Gender: Female
Relationships: Cohabiting with boyrfriend
Location: London, England
Occupation: Web front end developer
Tools used: Facebook, Twitter (2 accounts), Flickr, iTunes ( podcasts as well as music), RSS, Googlemail, calendars, addresses, World of Warcraft, Evernote, Things [sic], Dropbox
Quote: “People are tribal by nature. Now our tribe is global, we need better ways of storytelling”

Funny old world, innit?
The Long Dog

Question: I’ve heard a lot about User Experience Design (UXD) recently, so in 3 words define the role of a User Experience Designer

Jason: Sure … just after some initial waffle first.

I still suffer under other people’s misapprehension that I’m the IT guy who’s come to sort out their technical solution. Of course, if you happen to be one of the IT guys or gals who really HAVE come to sort out the technical solution, I’m the woolly-brained consultant who doesn’t know how to deliver and implement a technical solution.

So, apart from sitting on my sofa and churning out ranty blog posts, what actually do I do as a UXD – a User Experience Designer?

I’m going to answer this in two ways – firstly as a analogy, and then in the true spirit of online social sharing, I’m going to send you to someone else’s blog – rather than just rip it off and try and claim the glory, before being inevitably found out, and my reputation, what little there is left, dragged through the digital streets and be pelted with virtual fruit for my plagiarism.

Building a digital presence (that’s websites, mobile sites and intranets, to thee and me) is like building a house and the UXD is the architect. Graphic designers may be the interior designers and the IT crowd can be thought of as the skilled builders, plumbers, electricians.

I, the UXD/architect am responsible for understanding the needs of the business and its users / future home owners, creating concepts and designs based on these and translating those designs into plans that the IT crowd/builders can comment on and ultimately make happen, with the graphic designers / interior designers creating beautiful visual metaphors … and other lovely stuff.

The real skill of the UXD comes in finding creative and valuable answers to questions and being able to communicate these concepts and plans to the other ‘construction’ parties, and being able to articulate the benefits of their ideas to influence their stakeholders.

So … it’s analyst, inventor and promoter (hmmm … must use this again), but what are the actual outputs?

For this, I hand you over to author and UXD extraordinaire, Peter Morville, and his excellent article User Experience Deliverables.

Ba-dee-ba-dee-ba-dee-ba-dee-ba-dee-ba-dee-ba-dee-ba … That’s all folks.

The Long Dog (with thanks to Mel Blanc)

Clare Munday has been a User-Centred Design (UCD) specialist since 1994, and her credits include Agency.com, Ask Jeeves, British Airways, Cambridge University and running the Interaction Design Team for the BBC.

Clare has run four of the largest UCD digital design teams in the UK and worked with clients all over the world in physical and space design, web, WAP, interactive TV and mobile. Despite her charisma and energetic personality, she’s focussed on getting her designs right and not ‘being precious’ about her work’.

Long Dog: How did you start out in this biz?
CM: Trained in HCI [Human-Computer Interaction] human factors and system ergonomics. Started on factory floor doing ice without knowing what it was

Long Dog: How would you describe User Experience Design (UXD) and User-Centre Design (UCD), for those who’ve never heard of it?
CM: I make online experiences lovely, and the benefits are customer [user] loyalty, pleasure, risk mitigation/ROI. Think apple products, they work exquisitely.

Long Dog: What do your friends and family think you do for a job?
CM: Pole dancer

Long Dog: What’s the difference between these roles: web designer, UXD, information architects (IA) and interaction designers (IXD)?
CM: Web designer: generalist including visual design; UXD: bit if everything but less visual design; IA: übergeeks – classifications, domain modelling, taxonomies and architectural design; IXD: detailing online interactions and articulating concepts.

Long Dog: Jakob Nielsen or Jacob’s Cream Crackers?
CM: Useful for starters but no imagination and a megalomaniacal loon [presume she means Nielsen, not the biscuits - Long Dog]

Long Dog: What’s your favourite exercise for gathering information for or about users?
CM: Being with them, watching, listening, talking.

Long Dog: Are you a geek?
CM: Unreservedly yes

Long Dog: Give us 3 techniques that anyone creating a website should use
CM: Participatory design – getting the users and stakeholders involved in ever aspect of design, drawing and prototyping/ testing.

Long Dog: Best or worst UXD story?
CM: Factory floor – Men who have run their machines for twenty years, redesigning the shop floor with Engineers. Glorious.

Long Dog: Any tips for people starting out in the biz?
CM: This is not pixie dust. Check your ego at the door. It’s not about you. You are just a translator for clients and users.

Long Dog: Can we see any sites you’ve designed?
CM: Four week standard ecommerce rapid redesign- 83% sales uptake. Nothing showy, just simple effective and fast www.Homebase.co.uk

Long Dog: Thanks Clare.
CM: Can I get back to drawing things, with fat felt-tip pens now please?

Long Dog: Yes.

More about Clare on her profile: www.linkedin.com/in/claremunday

The Long Dog

“A picture is worth a thousand words – and thousands in avoided costs for messy rebuilds” – the Long Dog

Getting safely from concept to the design of your web site or intranet is as easy as scribbling on bits of paper. No, really … it is. This is meant as a beginner’s guide, so old pros, look away now – newbies … come on in, the water’s lovely…

What is a wireframe?
It’s an illustrative plan of a web page, showing elements such as placing for text, images, search boxes and is often annotated to give an understanding of functionality. E.g. What happens when a button is clicked. In the initial stages, they don’ have any design elements, colours and are filled with dummy content. Sound complicated? It’s not – check out the  wireframe image.

What are they used for:

- Testing: Before you waste time and money have confusing conversation between design and technical teams, or just with your own stakeholders you can use simple print offs for sense checking before creating more elaborate wireframes. In the biz we give this fancy terms like ‘paper prototyping’ or ‘low fidelity testing’.

When the wireframe becomes more developed, you can add functionality so that things do stuff when you click on them. Again, this helps in user testing, before committing to, or being distracted by colours and design elements. Again, while from different clients, the wireframe image shows the how a wireframe starts simply and becomes more complex.

- Design plans: Once you’ve tested and you’re sure what you’re doing is right, you’re left with fine architectural plans that show creative designers or development teams exactly what you expect to be built. Save them time, you money and you’ve both got something to work from.

When should use them:

AFTER your preliminary work is done:

- Understand your brief and do your research
- Define your audience
- Work out what you’re going to have on your site and how it’s arranged
- Build your sitemap

Oh … and as a freelancer you might be employed just to produce wireframes for agencies: potentially interesting, but can eat away at your sanity after a while, unless you see something actually launch.

I always start by drawing them on big bits of paper, whiteboards (or my windows) and only later use somethig like MS Visio, but you can use whatever floats your boat, inncluding PowerPoint, so long as you can do boxes and arrows and turn concepts and requirements intoa clear illustration.

Go on then … what’s stopping you?

The Long Dog.

In some industries usability can mean the difference between life and death. In ‘Everyday usability: Why people don’t use things’ I looked at why some products are a success (the printed book) and why some fail (Edison’s phonograph), but what has usability got to do with tanks, helicopters and fighter jets?

Preparing for the first gulf war, American troops ran war games in the deserts of their homeland. To add to the realism, as well as combatants role-playing enemy soldiers, US helicopters were ‘dressed up’ to resemble Iraqi vehicles. This simulation was later blamed for some of the ‘friendly fire’ among American forces: The troops had been trained to recognise their own helicopters, albeit ‘dressed up’, as enemy craft. While it was the exercise that was flawed, the soldiers did exactly what they were trained to do and destroyed helicopters that looked like the ones they recognised as enemy craft.

Usability is concerned with understanding human behaviour and psychology and ensuring that websites, processes, products – whatever a human has to interact with – is usable to its highest degree. We can tweak websites and improve on them as we go, but when someone’s life depends on usability, some serious research needs to be done.

If you can understand the how people work, fit what you’re creating to how people can best use it. Bodge it and there will always be mistakes – thankfully for most of us, these mistakes are usually only minor irritations.

Recently I went to Tankfest 2009 at the UK’s Tank Museum, next to Bovingdon Camp, where British soldiers are taught how to drive tracked vehicles. Apart from the sheer boyish enjoyment of seeing massive rumbly trundly things and indulge my four year old son in the pleasure sitting in the tank driver’s seat, there was one tiny almost overlooked feature that caught my professional eye.

In old style tanks, the Commander would kick the driver in the back of his chair in different positions depending on whether he wanted him to start, stop, turn left or right. A nice little bit of non-verbal communication, but hardly what you’d expect from Her Majesty’s Finest in the 21st century. 

These days the Commander of a Challenger 2 tank now communicates with his crew (driver, gunner and loader) by computer. Instead of a clunky keyboard and mouse combo, the Commander instead uses a handset almost identical to the Xbox 360 game console handset. Why? Games companies have spent a lot of time and money finding the most ergonomically designed controllers and the military have borrowed this learning to make their systems as usable as possible. As ‘the Nintendo generation goes to war’ (thanks @Haydens30), these interfaces are also familiar to the incoming recruits, so why make them learn something new and less usable?

@fulnic also tells me that this handset interface is also being use in unmanned spy planes.

Anyone remember the Robin Williams film ‘Toys’?

If this looks like playing to a degenerated generation, I disagree. It’s about understanding human strengths and weaknesses and working with and around them. The US Air Force found that under combat stress, fighter pilots ignored alarms alerting them to an incoming missile. They tried sounds and flashing lights, but again the pilots learned to ignore these in the same was we ignore gaudy advertising banners on webpages (banner blindness). The only thing that got the pilots attention every single time was a child’s voice in their earphones saying “Help me Daddy! Help me Daddy!” – a story that still gives me goose bumps.

Understand the machine, play to its strengths and not to its weaknesses.

The Long Dog