Envisioning the Vacuum

David VronayResearch ManagerWindows UI StrategyMicrosoft, Inc.

© 2005 Microsoft, Inc.

Doing design

• How do you feel so far?

• Is it hard?

• Is it easy?

© 2005 Microsoft, Inc.

Challenges to doing design

• Coming in too late– Do it the old comfortable way

• Jumping to a solution– Working backwards to “the design” to prove you

are right

• Committing too early to a solution– Avoiding hard work

• Becoming emotionally involved with a design– Clouds critique

• Not being self-critical– It feels bad

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Observation

• All of these challenges are emotional, not practical

• In doing design, often the biggest obstacle to your work is you

• But how can you get yourself out of the picture?

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Other disciplines can help

• Most problems have already been solved at some point in the past– If you are stuck in your discipline, look to other d

isciplines for an answer

• We already used psychology and story telling

• We talked about aesethics– “The Art of Tea” by Kakuzo Okakura

• Now we can turn to philosophy– “An Enquiry into The Good” (Zen no Kenkyu) by

Nishida Kitaro– “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu

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Envision the Vacuum

• In philosophy, we speak of “being” and “nothingness”

• Nothingness what we are after as a starting point in design

• Negate the self (zen)

• Start with nothingness as your background

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What do we mean by vacuum?

• The nothingness that allows things to exist within it– No nothingness means no something

later

• The vacuum is what is essential about object– The emptiness of the room allows

objects to placed within it– The emptiness of a pitcher allows it to

be filled with tea

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Why Vacuum is important

• With no space, there is nothing to fill

• No room for a proper design

• No room to see the problem

• No room for the solution to materialize

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How do you do it?

• Clear your mind

• Put your emotion towards your users, not your work in progress

• Reject desire

• Instead, Focus on critique

Critique

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The Three “C”s of design

• Critique• Critique• And Critique

• Being able to criticize a design is the most important skill of a designer

• Sadly, there is no way to teach this in a few minutes

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Two Sides of Criticism

• Learning how to criticize others

• Learning how to accept criticism yourself

• The goal: learn to love criticism!

• Develop confidence that strong criticism is the only way you will get better

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Learning how to Critique

• Insist on perfections

• Don’t rest after the obvious

• Use your design tools– Missed emotional moments– Heaven & earth– Personas & scenarios

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Critique starts at home

• Be your own harshest critic– “Is that the best you can do?”

• Go back over your old work– Critic is easier if you have some

emotional distance

• Stop selling yourself on you– Save it for marketing

• Keep a notebook– Excellent way of reviewing your

thoughts

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A story of critique

• “Fear of the Red Pen”

• Moral: the class made students highly motivated to find their own flaws before the instructor

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Critique and the Vacuum

• Critique is like a form of destruction– A negation of bad ideas

• Each bad idea you eliminate opens more space– You create the vacuum

• Then you are free to design

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Critique and Nothingness

• Critique feels bad when you first start doing it

• This is where self-negation comes in handy– Remove your self from the critique

• Think of it in terms of reaching towards enlightenment

Assignment 4 Review

The dating phone!

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Review of Assignments

• Did you create a story?– Characters– Settings– Arcs– Emotional moments

• Was your product desirable?• How much was new technology vs.

repurposing existing technology?• How would you critique your work?

Design & Research

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Careers in design

• Interaction Designers• Visual Designers• Production Folks• Usability Testers• Rapid Prototypers• Production managers

• Research!– HCI (Human Computer Interaction)

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Human-Computer Interaction Research

• As people trained in research, you will most likely be involved in research related to HCI

• There are several broad areas of research– Novel Interaction Techniques– Frameworks– Design solutions– Usability Studies

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Broad types of HCI research

• Novel Interaction Techniques– Camera-based input

• Frameworks– XML/XSL, model/view/controller

• Design solutions– Web browser for a cell phone

• Usability Studies– Do automobile navigation systems help

drivers?

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Some HCI conferences

• ACM SIGCHI– Computer/Human Interaction

• ACM UIST– User Interface and System Technology

• Many others– CSCW– ACM Multimedia– DUX– Mobility– etc

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Incorporating design into your own research

• Most of us will not be focusing on HCI, but are working in another computer research area

• However, it is useful to incorporate design thinking into your work

• You might already be doing an HCI project!

• Are you inventing a new technology or coming up with a new use for an existing technology?– If it is the latter, you are doing HCI

© 2005 Microsoft, Inc.

Design can help your current research

• Design can help direct your solutions– Example: tonguing UI– What is the context where this would be

appropriate?

• Design can help lead you to new solutions– Example: Lazy Snapping– Thinking of the heaven solution actually results

in a design

• Design can change the way you think about your technology, and lead you to new applications– Example: Keyword clustering

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Learning more about design

• Books– Lots of “cookbooks”, not many good bo

oks on design theory

• Web sites– Many good discussion boards & blogs

• Classes• Internships– MSR Asia– MSR Redmond– MSX

Assignment #5

The Critique

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Critiquing User Interface

• Pick an application– Better to start with a small one rather than,

say, all of Windows

• Critique it, finding its flaws• Try to find specific ways in which it

violates the things you have learned in class– Who are the personas?– What is the perfect solution?

• For extra effort, propose new solutions

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Two levels of assignment

• For most students– Short paper, about the length of the past

assignments– Try to focus on one or two significant

design flaws

• For Content Science Students– Longer report– More in-depth analysis– Show your redesign

© 2005 Microsoft, Inc.

© 2005 Microsoft, Inc.