Posted by admin | Posted in Industry | Posted on 28-08-2009
You may have noticed a new area in the right-hand navigation pane of this blog: Industry Books.
Karl Kapp’s GGG4L is self explanatory.
As for the others, well, I’m a bit of a User Experience/Interaction Design nerd. Why? Well, two reasons:
1. If I could get into the wayback machine and find 17-year old Phil (17YOP), I’d probably tell him to go study Industrial Design or Mechanical Engineering and spend his youth trying to weasel into one of the superstar companies of Interaction Design like IDEO. Of course, the term “Interaction Design” wasn’t used very often back then, but I have faith in 17YOP. He was industrious, he’d figure it out.
more importantly:
2. User Experience &/or Interaction Design, etc. is critical to what we do and there are so few who do it well. For us Instructional Design geeks, a guy named John Keller talked about four major components of motivation in what is known as the ARCS model. At some point during the design process, all good IDs come back to this model and other greats (like Gagne) as a reference to check their work.
But on the user experience side, we often forget that the learning experience goes beyond content. We can have the most relevant, attention-getting learning project known to man, but if the user has no idea how to navigate through it or if it doesn’t actually meet her goals, she’ll shut it down. If she’s REQUIRED to go through it by her employer, she’ll slog through it, but reluctantly… We’re destroying her confidence in the learning engagement, we’re killing her satisfaction of completing the program… we’ve gotten her attention, but it’s only because her brain is screaming, “I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY WANT ME TO DO!” And the only thing that is making the learning relevant is that her boss won’t let her leave at 5 if she doesn’t finish the program.
Think about it, how many times have you stumbled upon a web site that will solve a problem for you, but it’s completely unusable… How many of those sites are in your bookmarks now?
Too often IDs throw their work “over the wall” to the graphic design and web development folks and don’t participate in the design of the usability of the product. I started my career as a graphic designer / multimedia developer, but when I stopped programming and designing interfaces, I retained a passion for the process. Your creative team likes discussing and debating usability. They DON’T like being TOLD what to do, they want to brainstorm solutions - just like YOU. Some of my favorite times on the job have been spent in a meeting room with whiteboards, dry erase markers and creative minds.
So, to keep my UX senses up to date, I read books and I think about usability every day. In the some of the books I recommend you can learn why doors shouldn’t need instructions, you can feel better about not being able set your hotel alarm clock, and you can be fascinated by all the natural incarnations of the Golden Mean.
17YOP should have read these books, but he was too busy trying to figure out what he wanted to be when he grew up. If you see him, tell him to wait until Amazon opens and pick them up. While you’re on the subject, tell him to take his life savings and invest in the Amazon IPO on May 15, 1997 at $18 a share. Man, I could kick 17YOP for not catching that one.
