UX Book Club - Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton

Last month we had our first UX Book Club meeting. Apparently, as I'm told, it was the first ever professional book club meeting in Maine. Really? - I thought.

After having read the book and listened to other people's thoughts about the book, it actually improved the experience of the book itself. It wasn't just me reflecting (in my head) upon what was written, and that was a fresh change. Now I'm finding that the book and the thoughts by everyone else who had attended the meeting, is starting to reform my thinking, burning new neural paths and creating new behaviors. In that respect, the UX Book Club did the job as much as the book itself.

And now, after having seen Bill Buxton in a great video at MIX'10, I understand him more and where he comes from, beginning to model how he thinks.

One of the biggest takeaways from the book (hence Bill) is the fact that:

"Design is a compromise."

I had known that for quite some time but really couldn't articulate that feeling about what Design was about in that aspect, until now. It also occurred to me that "design not being a compromise" might have been the old artisan-based way of thinking. There is no longer the genius designer that we used to think existed and much of that came from Industrial Design even though I'm certain some people don't want to admit it.

So where does this leave the UX professional? Since design is a compromise because the designer is working with all different kinds of people in different disciplines (from marketing, to engineering to sales, etc.) it requires someone who is especially empathetic to not just the users/humans using the product/application/building but also to people he is working with.

I'd like to continue on with the discussion we had from the book club. But for now, I'm going to send you to the Maine IxDA thread where there's a list of topics covered in the book.

Design Decisions by the Percentages

I've learned a long time ago in hockey about the concept of "playing the percentages". What this means is that a certain action or play will have a particular success factor over others given the situation. For instance, in a power play when a team is shorthanded one person, one of the best (high percentage) ways to get the puck into the neutral zone and out of your zone is to shoot it off the boards or the glass. The only risk here is having an unpredictable bounce off the glass and the puck stays in the zone. The alternative is to shoot it out in the center through a gap and risk the puck staying in the zone with the opponent quickly covering any gap. One last alternative is to actually carry the puck out of the zone in risk of shorthanding your defense further if the puck-carrier makes a mistake.

So how does this apply to the field of UX?

Well, if a certain play has a specific percentage of success, something that can be measured, it can also be applied to making design decisions - could it not?

The reason why I'm exploring this concept is because we're currently developing a U.I. Pattern Library. (Here's a case study.) And because we're rapidly developing these patterns, there will be some that need to be used immediately and thus cannot be tested right away. So we need to explore all options for a solution to a pattern. There are indeed some patterns that are "straightforward" but then there are those requiring a little more work. And with this work, we need to figure out the best solution. How better to do this than by design by the percentages?

The fact is, most UX designers and analysts have basic knowledge to design based on past data and experiences. (e.g. We know when to use radio buttons instead of checkboxes.) The caveat is that an untested pattern may be completely wrong, especially if after testing, we find out the user behavior and expectations are mismatched. By designing by percentages, we mitigate enough of the unpredictable and also keep cognoscente of our decisions and how they came to be. (This also means that there needs to be documentation that will log these decisions.)

So how can this be used immediately? To me, it's more of a concept I keep in the back of my mind. I think of alternatives and go through a cognitive walkthrough to anticipate what the user may interpret and thus behave when interfacing with the product. However, doing just that may not be as rigorous as some might like. To make is rigorous and more apparent, documentation can accompany each decision made along with alternatives and why they were not chosen. While it can take long to do, at least when the patterns are tested afterwards, the assumptions can be referenced and validated/invalidated.

In the end, this concept is not 100% correct though it does give you progress because you're spending time worthy on exploring the pattern probabilities. To adopt Bill Buxton's axiom that you can only design the framework and not the user behavior, design by percentages can at least get you one step closer to designing an effective framework that gets you eventually closer to influence user behavior.