UPA 2006 — Breakthrough Design
I attended Larry Constantine‘s tutorial titled Breakthrough Design: Innovation That Works for Users. When learning from the “big names” I always look forward to real stories and insight that only experience brings. Larry didn’t disappoint. He’s also a great speaker.
He touched on innovation and then plunged into design topics such as techniques to break away from preconceptions and frames of reference and using abstraction to your advantage. The remainder of the day covered what makes a good interface and how users learn novel interactions. There was, of course, the obligatory hands-on design exercises. As a refreshing change, we worked on real design problems tutorial participants’ were facing at work.
One example stood out for me:
Bill Buxton innovated on the standard interface for high-end sketch or paint software. High-priced graphic artists were slowed down by standard palettes that are located in a fixed location. It’s a classic Fitt’s Law problem, complicated because the palette is stationary (so the distance between the palette and the spot the brush returns to is not constant). Buxton observed classically trained painters and noticed they also use palettes. They hold their palettes in their non-brush hand and it follows the brush. The distance between the brush and the palette is short and relatively constant, and the artist can efficiently move the brush between the canvas and palette.
The innovative design solution was not what I thought of first. They did not create a palette that automatically followed the brush. That would have been incredibly annoying. Instead, Buxton added a trackball controlled by the non-mousing hand. This device controlled the location of the palette. The graphic artists, who all had classical training, picked this interface innovation up within a minute. A small change, but a big idea rooted in the real world.
Other points I picked up:
Get out of that rut. Innovation is hard because we’re generally working within a frame of reference. It’s cliche, but you have to think outside the box. There are exercises that can help spark creative thinking. One such exercise is to look at a pictorial sign, step out of your frame of reference, and ask yourself what the sign means.
Larry’s a big proponent of collaborative design. I asked him how he prevents “design by committee” and his answer was “consensus”. (Real consensus, not some people’s misinterpretation of the word.) He also caught me when I asked how a facilitator “guides” the larger group towards a good design. That, of course, is the totally wrong way to approach things. You have to go in with the belief that the multi-disciplinary team can create a design together.
I’ll probably update this post with more when I review the notes.