Adaptive Path's Brandon Schauer recently shared a bit of insight with me in a short email interview. Those of you coming to CanUX will have a chance to ask him some questions of your own.
Dennis: At CanUX you're going to be talking about sketchboarding, a really interesting technique that enables fast, collaborative iterations of design ideas. You and Adaptive Path colleague Leah Buley designed this as a pen and paper, analogue activity. How important is it to get away from the computer screen?
Brandon: Well, on a scale of 1 to 10, can I say 23? It's important to step away from the computer and head back to our old friends pen and paper. We've all inherited a human toolkit that's generations old, made for solving problems by drawing, pointing, thinking, and talking. The digital world is great, but it's super detailed. We haven't yet fully figured out how to enable those same human ways of "fuzzy working" in bits and bytes.
One human element that sketchboards draw on is our incredible ability to work with incomplete information and generate possible solutions. We can come up with many possible solutions before we have to settle on the right one. In most design processes it's valuable for us to spend time sketching many alternatives for WHAT a solution is the right one be before we define the details of HOW it should be design. Sketchboards are one tool that help you and your team spend time finding the best solution before being dragged down into the near-pixel-perfect details of layout, standards, and interaction.
Dennis: You talk quite a bit about design strategy. Why do designers, who are often up to their elbows in wireframes, layout, and the optimal placement of a submit button, need to know about strategy?
Brandon: Being up to one's elbows in wireframes and buttons is exactly why a designer needs to know about strategy. Strategy is about being able to make smart choices and tradeoffs when you're swamped by decisions. At Adaptive Path, we talk about strategy being a north star. A clear path forward that makes the decisions of scope, structure, and layout much more obvious and more powerful.
One of the challenges for designers is that we're not often provided with the straight-story, or the time to understand an organization's strategy. Instead, we have to be adept at quickly sensing strategy. What does the organization do differently from it's competitors? What does it purposefully elect not to do? How are these differences made evident in the customer experience and how that customer experience is managed? With the answers to these questions your design decisions can connect to strategy, not simply standards or styles.
Dennis: Adaptive Path has been doing some very cool concept work lately – things like Aurora and Charmr. These are projects that attempt to see the future to some extent. How does the design process change when you are not entirely constrained by reality?
Brandon: I believe that constraints are a key component of good design. As Charles Eames said in the Design Q&A interview, "Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem... the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible... his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints." So for future-facing projects like those mentioned, the process changes to seek out the project-shaping constraints that might normally be more evident.
In the cases of concepts like Charmr and Aurora, we had to reach out to find the interesting new constraints to drive the design. For Charmr we performed many in-home research interviews with diabetics to find the issues of perception, logistics, and emotion that should inform a properly designed pump and monitor for Type 1 Diabetics. Design criteria like "wear it during sex" gave us plenty of constraints to work from. For the concept browser Aurora, we worked with futurist Jamais Cascio to uncover the proper constraints for the design. For example, data storage might become abundant, but our human ability and desire to organize and parse it become very real constraints.
Thanks Brandon. I'm looking forward to hearing more at CanUX.
Posted in Opinions on October 27, 2008
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