Think Like an Instructional Designer: Structured vs. Discovery Learning Environments
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on March 31st, 2010
In the Diamond Age, Stephenson imagines the ultimate discovery learning environment.
Let’s look to the fictional near-future of Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age in order to set the tone. Nell is the novel’s young protagonist. She is born of limited means to a lower-class single mother named Tequila, but then rises to be a free-thinker and a leader who transcends her class with the help of a nano-technology powered instructional aid, the “The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.” The Primer is state-of-the art interactive technology. A fairy tale book, of sorts, but one with amazing properties. First of all, it talks – and not in that robo-voice of the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech feature, but in an uncannily human neo-Victorian contralto. The Primer not only recognizes the user and the details of her environment, it can actually work those into the narrative flow. When Nell wonders aloud during one story “What’s a Raven?”- the book stops and explains it to her – then it gives her a brief, age-appropriate quiz on how to spell the word. It is, in other words, a rich, engaging, and perfectly scaffolded learning environment sensitive to the needs of the individual learner.
The Myth of Hand-Eye Coordination
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on February 10th, 2010
Teens work on their hand-eye coordination playing Dragon's Lair - circa 1983. Photo credit: The Tribune News
I’m from the earliest generation of gamers. The first, really. I played table-top Pong when I was 7 or 8, even though it was only available in bars (parenting was more relaxed then.) I played Missile Command, despite the fact that it was kinda boring. Robotron was an obsession. I played Zork, with it’s command line interface, on my Apple IIc - drawing my own map. In college I got sucked into Myst, and Super Mario Bro.’s and there were dozens of others along the way. And then, like nearly everybody else of my generation, I quit playing video games. Why? In a word, guilt. Games were considered indulgent, addictive, violent -something for man-boys. Certainly not suitable terrain for serious people. But throughout this entire period of moralization against gaming there was always a bit of pop cognitive science floating around in defense of video games. Games build hand-eye coordination, people would say -everybody would say. After a 7 hour stint on the couch I’d think, well, at least I’ve got that going for me. In graduate school I studied cognitive science and learning theories and even video games- and never once encountered the phrase hand-eye coordination. So I set myself to wondering – what is it? is it important? and does playing video games improve it?
The Design of Traffic Control
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on February 3rd, 2010
How do you know if you are well suited to a career in information architecture? Well, here’s a little test. When you are finished reading this post, follow the link I provide to the US Department of Transportation’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices(MUTCD), which is the definitive, 864 page style guide for the country’s road signs, signals, and traffic markings. If you soon find yourself delightfully lost in the visual minutiae and obscene specificity of the guidance provided, then you are either Rain Man or what I suspect is a natural born IA.
Interaction Design & Sustainability Case Study: Ford SmartGuage with EcoGuide
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews on December 4th, 2009
The dashboard that monitors what the driver is doing, not the machine.
Ok, so I admit that I have a tendency to overvalue the impact of my own profession. I believe Malcom McCullough when he says that interaction design is likely to be one of the great liberal arts of the 21st century. The great American novel, when it finally arrives, will be planned in Omnigraffle. And the fact that most of us deploy our tradecraft in the service of streamlining the movie rental process, selling sunglasses or laminate flooring, facilitating the sharing of snapshots and how-to articles on pumpkin carving does not diminish our greatness. In fact, in my world, interaction designers are likely to be key players in all forms of meaningful societal change from here on in. (Just try and tell me that Obama’s website wasn’t pivotal in his election!) But what role does I.D. have in making the planet greener? Even I struggled with that one.
Anti-pattern: Periphrasis
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on November 19th, 2009
IA's Should Make Aggressive Use of the Red Pen on Wireframes & Designs
Two weeks ago, I wrote about precision in language and presented a strategy to identify competing meanings for words used in UI nomenclature. Today, I’d like to focus on storytelling and the crucial art of editing. If you are an Interaction Designer or a client or teammate of one who has a case of periphrasis, you should order a big, fat red felt marker immediately so you can attack the wireframes you are reviewing with the zeal of a stingy New Yorker editor.
Things I Lose Sleep Over #2 – Demand Media
Posted by Todd Toler in UX-Driven Company on November 2nd, 2009
4:14am, Brooklyn
Demand Media is Profiled in the November Wired: "Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell"
Last week, I tossed and turned over the successful online publishing formula of Smashing Magazine. Simple sounding in principle, Smashing’s approach is to develop enduring, high-quality content and to cultivate an audience with it. Each post is packed with value and is published to a hungry base of Tweeps and RSS subscribers, becoming instantly SEO’d upon publication. If this was easy to do, then Smashing wouldn’t be such an outlier (see table below), and I would be sleeping soundly in a villa on Bequia instead of up right now writing this. Tonight, my insomniac ramblings are focused in another direction, on a profitable online publisher who takes the exact opposite approach: cranking out low-quality content and spending as little as possible on it’s production. Reading the new issue of Wired (November), I was fascinated and disturbed by the story of Richard Rosenblatt and his Demand Media. Quoting Daniel Roth, the author, “Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has discovered. Online content is not worth very much.” The art, therefore, is in cost control – which is done in two ways. 1) Demand channels The Algorithm to tell them precisely what consumers are searching for, where gaps in the existing online content exist, and what advertisers might be willing to pay for. 2) Demand hires a new breed of freelancer who is expert at cranking out passionless, utilitarian content at wages that would make your average Hyderabad call center rep storm out in protest.
Anti-Pattern: Competing Meanings in Website Nomenclature
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on October 29th, 2009
Yes. A love of words makes you a better IA.
Wordnik.com doesn’t jump to mind as an obvious resource for an interaction designer. For a dedicated Sunday puzzle solver? You bet. Or if you have a grandiloquent and sesquipedalian consulting style (pompous and prone to long words), then this is your place – btw, remind me not to hire you. I read Wordnik fairly regularly and am now a self-diagnosed cremnophobic (one who has a morbid fear of being near the edge of a cliff, precipice, or abyss) and I also know the difference between an acronym, like ACORN, and an initialism, like NAACP (one spells out a word and one doesn’t). But geeking out on words sharpens an important instinct for anybody who trades in the design of screens- a fetish for precision in language. Obsessing over language will keep you from repeatedly stumbling into what is perhaps the most common antipattern of all – vagueness and ambiguity. Here’s three main themes to keep in mind when choosing words for your wireframes or designs:
Things I Lose Sleep Over – SmashingMagazine.com
Posted by Todd Toler in UX-Driven Company on October 21st, 2009
3:52am, Brooklyn
There’s not an unusual amount of stress going on right now in either my home or work life. Money’s okay. Health is fine. But I find myself often awake between the hours of 3 and 5 am. I realize it’s always the same things that are keeping me up. There are portentous trends brewing in my work as a user experience professional and a digital publisher, and in those hazy hours of early morning my thoughts are dominated by them. The first one I want to post about is Smashing Magazine.
10 Great Interaction Designs – in Cut & Folded Paper
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews on September 30th, 2009
Experience designers who work in digital media such as RIAs, video games, and DVD menus are already well conditioned to thinking beyond the page as a metaphor for organizing information structures. But paper itself is not the villain. In fact, paper can be transformed into all sorts of interesting interactive possibilities – including graceful and surprising transitions, progressive disclosure of information, impactful visuals, and above all, a compelling and satisfying simplicity.
5 Must-have Books for a Director of User Experience
Posted by Todd Toler in UX-Driven Company on September 24th, 2009
As a client-side Director of User Experience, my job is quite varied. The amount of web development that’s happening in a company of our size is truly staggering – so my role is as much one of providing continuity and thought leadership as it is directly designing or managing designers. The difficult parts of my job are a) giving people in the business the practical tools and methodologies to actually deliver on the promise of being “user centered,” b) finding language that achieves a common understanding of design ideas for a general audience, and c) pushing the expectations for what can be achieved online past the “status quo” state of incremental improvements and a myopic focus on what the competition is doing. These 5 books have been the most influential in providing guidance for my daily challenges:
1. Serious Play
by Michael Schrage
This is a slim book and a quick read – but it’s number one on my list. In fact, it virtually provides me with a grand unifying theory of implementing a UX culture at a large company. My mantra at Wiley is “always put a design deliverable in front of the specification and have it tested in a valid way.” By ‘design deliverable,’ I mean model, or prototype, of the end product -something vivid enough for a potential user of the product to actually imagine the experience of using it. Schrage persuasively explains the value to any organization of becoming a “modeling culture,” one in which every conversation happens around real designs and not in the abstract language of marketing and business plans. If you are in a highly design sensitive environment (I’m imagining Apple, but I don’t really know), maybe your company already is a modeling culture, but most large corporations aren’t even close. This book also conveys an important emphasis on experimentation and tolerance of failure at the institutional level. A Director of User Experience should buy multiple copies of this and give them out to business leaders in their company as holiday gifts.
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