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DRAWING BOARD DIARIES

Thoughts on Design, Technology, and Human Experiences

Opinion: Sustainable Design

4/15/2017

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For anyone involved in the field of product design and engineering, the image of an old TV set discarded on a sidewalk, its functionality notwithstanding, can be a very influential trigger point for technical and philosophical introspection. For an industrial designer, it poses a case study into the evolution of design language and how an older design might run out of fashion. For an anthropologist, it is a visual cue into the science of human tastes and how they change in a world filled with consumable products. For an ergonomics and human factors practitioner, it is an artifact that helps record the physical and cognitive needs of the subject population of a specific time period. And finally, for the engineer, it is  window to the study of the state and the drawbacks of the scientific technology at that point of time.

Hardly a simple and straight forward scenario today, designing products has indeed become an arcane amalgamation of art and science that engages all the aforementioned occupations. This is also a general consequence of the various challenges the product design realm faces. On one hand, there is the burgeoning issue of management of non-degradable wastes and trash generated daily the world over, of which discarded products form a major percentage. This affects environmental and ecological balances the world over. On the other hand, as more and more products get designed and engineered, humanity consistently faces depleting natural resources, the starting points of the process flow that leads to the fruition of these products. Technologically, there is a two-flanked factor impinging on this scenario; on one side, new technologies emerge day in and day out and push products relying on older technologies out of relevance and on the other side, the innate purpose of the products is not met owing to failure or reliability issues and they are replaced with newer ones. This, automatically pushes the search for better technologies. Of course, there is also the conundrum of why certain products tick with humans in terms of the physical and mental interface and better still, emotion, and why only certain others get thrown away with time.

While it would be ambitious to try and provide a solution in this article to the scenario delved upon here, effort can be made to bring to light a direction that the field of product design should explore - Sustainable Design. In the ideal scenario, Sustainable Design would be the one-page document containing the exact checklist needed to design products that would have a valid answer to each of the above mentioned issues. Although it is a long way before that checklist can be drafted, several strands of thought can be invoked to fasten the pace at which we get there.

To begin with, the onus is on designers to explore radical design languages that incorporate longevity and redefine the consumers’ perspective of a product’s functionality. For instance, products designed to achieve one purpose might also serve another. One example is how certain home appliances are also used as home décor items. Furthermore, industrial designers around the world have opened up to the ideas of sustainability and are increasingly using bio-degradable or recyclable materials as they conceptualize their designs.

Here is where anthropologists and, in a more encompassing way, ergonomics practitioners play a crucial role. It’s not a new fact that product design firms consult with anthropologists to take notes and tweak their design ethos to suit customers and general trends better. Sustainable product design does throw forward a very curious complex for anthropologists in the sense of developing philosophies that expound human acceptance of sustainable products. Talking about the ergonomics, post the initial visual and auditory experiences, what draws customers to products is how the product engages with the human body, physically and mentally. Traditionally, one tends to not discard a product that has provided an exceptional user experience and the core of this experience is dictated by the physical and cognitive ergonomic design aspects of that product. The ergonomics practitioner has to be in a directional role and help set the design parameters in collaboration with both the industrial designer and the product development engineers.

Technological research, development and its application through engineering comprise the final yet significant segment of product design. Scientific research has definitely been pushing forward the quest not only for advanced recyclable materials that have the potential of serving multiple purposes in a single product but also for devising design and manufacturing processes that facilitate an increased application of bio-degradable materials in products. Sustainable design needs to feed off this research at the points where design meets engineering, which are packaging and prototyping. Certain specimens where sustainable product design has been prioritized here include highly modular product architectures which allow for heavy customization, practically leading to products that can be morphed from the same structure to satisfy different utilities and meet individual experiential demands.
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One can easily note that there is an evident honeycombed pattern in which all of the aforementioned occupations interact with each other to achieve sustainable product design. This is also one of the reasons why that much-desired checklist of sustainable design might take considerable effort to be conceived. However, product design firms, and now user experience researchers, have woken up vigorously to this philosophy and do sincerely acknowledge the several strands of thought discussed here. Although the move is in a nascent stage, the future hopefully has this philosophy built in intrinsically. And TV sets shall probably never be discarded again.
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Opinion: Nuances in UX Research

4/14/2017

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With several practices of art and science, often, there are two paths to mastery. One is of the theoretical nature, involving reading texts and amassing knowledge. The other is experience, either through professional practice or personal indulgence. If textual knowledge teaches the fundamentals tenets of arts and sciences, experience takes us closer to understanding the various nuances involved within them.

This is no less true with the ever-proliferating universe of UX design and research. Maybe more so, actually. There are emergent tools and methods that have now been conventionally adopted for the several elements of UX, including user research, interaction and interface design, usability testing, and iterative research & design. At the same time, I've come to believe that UX practitioners find a niche of tools and methods that help them find those aforementioned subtler nuances. But why nuances? Because they help add a wealth of detail to the insights that guide user-centered research and design. They also help one tap those much talked-about intangible facets of UX like empathy. 
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There are several nuances to conducting UX research. Photo by David Travis on Unsplash

​In this space, I wanted to explore a few such tools and methods that I've found quite useful and effective in my UX research and design practice. The list of these tools/methods follows -
  • Shadowing - In the user research phase, the value of insights extracted from users needs no introduction, specially given the universal constraints of cost, time, and consent. As such, interviews and focus groups have always been handy tools. But shadowing, I find, has an extra edge. Job shadow programs have traditionally been adopted in industries as a useful training tool to let new employees get quickly into the shoes of their peers and superiors. Shadowing has the advantage of taking researchers into the direct physical space that users occupy when they engage with the product or service of interest. This naturally allows researchers to have a good deal of contextual understanding about their users. Context greatly influences the way users interact with products or services and this is a great way to estimate the limitations and capacities of the user's usual context, if not, the universal context. The researcher might walk away not only learning what the user's needs are but also the whys behind them. 
  • Reactions - Harking back to Sir Newton's age old law of physics, every interaction between the user and a product does invoke a reaction in the user. Of course, the way this is reflected is widely variant among the user population. I've found it a good trick to try and capture these user reactions during shadowing or any other user research and usability testing exercise. Capturing videos or audios of the exercises has always been a traditional tool and so have been tools like heat maps and eye tracking. As part of these, it simply helps to match user interactions with their reactions. This truly helps understand how a user feels when interacting with a product and helps the researcher develop empathy for the user. 
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How a user reacts while using a product is as important as how the product is used. Photo by Ana Tavares on Unsplash
  • Interpretation - I've heard and read from practitioners, in a slight foreboding note, not to take user insights quite literally. I'm sure this opens up a debate with strong contentions from either side. But it does help to keep oneself open to interpretations; for the various inputs that users provide, particularly in the user research phase. A basic way to begin doing this is to translate research findings and user expressed needs into at-least one possible need in each of the different contexts applicable to the user. This is where aforementioned methods like shadowing come in handy as one comes back with a clear estimate of these contexts.
  • Mind-mapping - As the different contexts of a user get established and the notes from research begin to emerge, I've found myself going back to mind-mapping as a consistent tool, irrespective of the research phase. This lets me lay out all the information on a drawing board, and start connecting the different pieces of data. This not only adds weight to each piece of data by giving it presence but also lets the researchers and designers obtain a systemic view of the project's constituent elements with respect to the user. Often one can get too caught up with the details and loose sight of the overall scheme of things and the relative importances of different solutions to the detailed design needs. Besides, mind-maps are beautiful networks that help in detecting patterns of evidence that throw light on a certain design need envisioned by several users; or on certain design elements that need to be retained or discarded for enhanced user experience.
  • Storytelling - Talk of patterns of evidence, networks, and contexts brings me to a method that I'd recently stumbled upon and found great use for. And I think this is definitely a very selective method applicable for a specific type of projects; ones where the users need to interact with software applications while going through a scenario, a story, or a journey. In projects like these, the onus is quite high on design research to come up with strategy, both for the content and the design, in such a way that it evokes this sense of a story, scenario, or journey. One good way to do that, my design team realized recently, would actually be to let the users being researched tell stories. Stories, that in different angles, relate to the core aspect of the need that the software application aims to address. These stories could be elaborate accounts of their journeys. They could also be little vignettes that hint at the need the app is designed for. What we've realized is that these vignettes lead to content that can be, via mind-maps, categorized and analyzed into guiding the content strategy and the interface design.

​Some of these tools might simply aid in understanding the next step during the UX design and research process. And some of them might help in handling the nuances that remain intangible. What I hope, is that these tools/methods lead to a better understanding of some much needed philosophies that UX, as a science and an art, will embrace: like Empathy.
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