Home Sweet Home

By on April 18, 2012 in Personal


A record I hope I never break.

For the last eleven months I travelled to the North from London for work. I caught the train early every Monday morning, stayed in hotels during the week, came home Thursday.

After work I would return to a hotel. It might have been the same hotel every week, but it would be a different room each week. I would pack up my things on Sunday evening, unpack them on Monday evening, and repack them on Thursday morning. I became very good at packing, and guessing what I would need during the week.

‘Travel’ up until now had been a sexy word. It meant I would get to see and experience different parts of the world, usually within a constrained frame of time, after which I could return home with a bunch of photographs and memories.

This kind of travel is different. It starts to feel, about two months in, as if someone has hit a ‘pause’ button on your life. Five months later, it still felt like that, and I felt surprised when I noticed the date, feeling stuck several months behind. My life felt that it was split in two, going at different speeds, depending on where I was. Someone hit ‘play’ on Thursdays, when I returned home, then ‘pause’ again on Monday morning.

Fast forward to April. Now I’m based in London, I have renewed appreciation for the mundane chores in life.

Groceries: specifically, buying groceries without worrying I won’t be able to finish it all by Sunday. A fresh, full-size loaf of brown bread. An entire two pints of milk. A whole bunch of ripe bananas!

Cooking: I lived on very lavish, delicious meals for a while. Even so, I missed the effort of making things for myself. The satisfaction of frying some fat prawns, cooking pasta, or making simple hot buttered toast and a cup of tea, at home.

Rubbish: I can take my rubbish out whenever it needs to be taken out, any evening in the week!

Laundry: no longer the rush of doing laundry on a Sunday, before travel – I can do laundry and leave clothes lying around my flat to dry, with that fresh laundry smell.

Cleaning: instead of watching shows on my laptop, I can do my dishes before I go to sleep.

Facetious? Only a little bit. All of the above is a privilege of being able to come home after work.

That’s not to say it was all bad. It was a new and interesting lifestyle. I lived in excellent hotels and dined out at fancy places every night. I didn’t have to think about groceries, cooking, rubbish, laundry, or cleaning. If I wanted some food, I could just pick up the phone and dial room service. I could leave my bed unmade, and come back later to find it magically made.

I could write a whole other post about hotels and hotel customer service: when you stay in nice places week in week out, you start to notice the little differences.

So yes, not all bad. But this travel lifestyle is only sustainable for a short time. I’m looking forward to putting some roots down for a while. Perhaps literally, since the flat I’m moving to in London has a communal garden.

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Where visual design fits in a process

By on December 19, 2011 in Work

I’d be surprised if graphic design wasn’t having an identity crisis right now.

The user experience field is reaching a level of maturity, although it’s still quite young. A rough process for defining user experience looks something like this:

User research → Information architecture → Interaction design → Visual design 

As a graphic design graduate, visual design is close to my heart. In my graphic design years I learned about information design, the evolution of printing technology and techniques, the contributions of master typographers and graphic designers. Graphic design as we know it started in the Industrial Revolution, when we started needing things like tickets and timetables.

So one of the weirdest things as a graphic design graduate turned UX designer is hearing variations of the following:

“Visual design means making it pretty!”

Lolwut?

This has led me to think about how visual design fits in with user experience. The point of wireframes is that they’re rough and unfinished. They encourage gradual iteration, and it doesn’t matter if it’s not neat. Wireframing software Balsamiq and Axure have means of adding a rough, unfinished look to designs to reaffirm the fact they’re drafts. The designs are not finished and are subject to change. This can be incredibly helpful.

The rough process, again:

User research (identifying target audience) → Information architecture (defining navigation) → Interaction design (defining wireframes, interaction mechanisms) → Visual design (defining how it looks)

… in this process, visual design is left to the final phase, after the navigation and interaction mechanisms have been worked out.

Left to the final phase, it’s not surprising that visual design is treated like dropping a skin on top of the wireframes. Leaving the visual considerations to late in the design process means we miss out on a great deal of design insight that visual communication could bring. We end up with the superficial application of visual design, so visual design is demeaned as a ‘skin’ or ‘prettiness’ on top of the greater complex stuff going on underneath.

I personally find this view frustrating. We can learn a lot from graphic design as a field. Before user experience, we had printers and graphic designers who had the task of organising the great influx of information available, and making it readable, usable, clear. We can look to Isotype, Die neue typographie, and identity system for the 1972 Munich Olympics as great, successful examples of visual communication.

Basically, I think the distinction between ‘how it works’ and ‘how it looks’ is blurrier than we think.

How long do animals live? From Vintage Visual Language: The Story of Isotype.

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Identity in the browser

By on March 21, 2011 in Identity, Work

I just wrapped up the MSc I’ve been working on since 2009! It feels really good to have it done. I completed the taught part of the HCI-E course from September 2009—June 2010, then took a four month break, then returned in November 2010 to continue with my studies. The final part has been this research project which counts for nearly half of the total degree.

In the end, I really enjoyed the research component. I was worried I would be less motivated to finish it — I lacked the peer support I’d had throughout the rest of the course. But it was fine in the end; research requires you to be independent and self-motivated.

MSc thesis, 16k words
MSc thesis: User-Centred Identity Management: Evaluating the Role of the Browser

To complicate things, I decided to switch from the planned topic (a cognitive science project comparing what people learn from different displays of the same information) to a different topic. I struggled a bit to find something appropriate, settling eventually on identity in the browser. The idea for the project grew out of looking at the problems with OpenID. My entire project was going to focus on improving OpenID, but I ended up looking at the bigger, and much more interesting and complex, problem of web identity.

I decided to design and evaluate a browser that made identity management easier for users.

The basis for my research:

  1. Identity management systems on the web favour service providers and technology over humans. The major model of identity on the web requires users to create a new set of credentials for every service they sign up with. This is scalable and cost-effective for service providers, but not for people. Human memory capacity is not great. People can’t cope with the requirements this model imposes. They take shortcuts: they reuse passwords and identifiers, write passwords down. A great paper explaining identity management is this one: Jøsang and Pope, 2005 [PDF]
  2. Identity should be scalable for humans as well as service providers. So: why not use the browser to support identity management and allow better identity ‘scalability’? This has been raised by a few people in academia and industry, but there has not been a thorough evaluation of a) user perceptions, and b) feasibility of this approach.

I planned a study that explored user perceptions to identity management and, in the second half, evaluated a browser prototype. I designed and mocked up a prototype browser in Flash.

I interviewed 10 people to discover how well they were coping with managing their credentials. In this small sample of fairly technologically-savvy UCL students, people talked about the fairly drastic measures they took to manage their credentials — writing them down on paper and locking them in a physical cabinet, encrypting them in a text file, storing them in pinyin in a spreadsheet. One participant kept PayPal’s password reset phone number in her mobile address book. Despite these drastic measures, participants didn’t seem to think they had a major issue with managing their web identity. :)

The second part of the study evaluated a prototype that allowed a user to do three things:

  1. Sign into an existing account,
  2. Sign up for a new account using a predefined identity,
  3. Manage existing credentials.

Several browser add-ons support identity management in this way already (look at Sxipper and 1Password). These have limited reach and accessibility, requiring people to download extra software. Remember that users follow the path of least resistance.

Perceptions to the prototype were mainly positive — participants thought the browser was a convenient way to manage accounts, sign in, and create new accounts. Yet the convenience of signing in also created concern: users can sign into an account by pressing a button. What if a stranger accessed their account? The browser’s design should provide security mechanisms to reassure users and allow them to be in control.

A browser that integrates identity transforms the browser from being something used quite casually to something directly tied to a user’s identity, making it more like an operating system.

Further research: a working browser prototype could be developed and used in combination with a diary study over a longer period of time. The research should also address the problem of browser data being local on a user’s machine. Google Chrome has addressed this by syncing with the user’s Google account.

I really enjoyed the research project and felt I learned a lot about my topic and how to plan and execute a substantial piece of research.

My own attitude to using a browser to handle web identity was skeptical at first. Browsing the web in retrospect, it’s crazy to suddenly notice all the different login design patterns. I don’t think design patterns and conventions are enough for imposing a level of order. I wonder what web identity will look like in 10, 20, 50 years!

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Google UX internship

By on January 23, 2011 in Google, Interaction design, Mobile, Work

In summer 2010 (June until October) I was an intern at Google. I worked in the mobile user experience team on Android.

A few people have asked me: what was it like to spend a summer working at Google?

A little intimidating, initially … it’s Google! Overall, I had a fantastic experience. I adjusted quickly and met a bunch of other interns (mostly engineering, with one other UX intern). Over the four month period I developed my design skills, technical skills, soft skills. I did a lot of design work, which I really missed in academia. I made mockups and prototypes, and wrote HTML and CSS. That felt really good.

The perks of working for Google are great. I can’t avoid talking about the food. I ate almost all my meals at Google over the summer, so my grocery expenses were low. The food is good, and my favourite meal there was breakfast. The range of breakfast options were amazing: they included typical cooked options (scrambled eggs, omelettes, baked beans, sausages, bacon), waffles, different kinds of bread, cereal, porridge, fresh fruit (raspberries, blueberries, grapes, apple slices, pineapple). Oh, and there’s freshly-made fruit smoothies.

There was a machine that dispensed Minstrels approximately 12 steps from my desk, just outside one of the microkitchens (these are snack bars that also work as chill-out areas, and are furnished with hammocks and objects to sit on). Obviously, proximity to Minstrels can be quite a dangerous thing, and required self moderation!

Perhaps the hardest thing about adjusting back to ‘normal life’ is learning that you can’t walk into a café and just start grazing.

Apart from the food, one of the best things about working at Google is the number of interesting people you get to meet. There are people visiting the London office all the time, and I ended up meeting people from other Google offices around the world.

There are a great number of inspirational role models who can be found in the company: a huge benefit is that the people who work at Google are incredibly passionate about what they do, and it’s hard not to be infected by their enthusiasm. For a relatively junior designer, this is really important: seeing the work other people are producing and discussing it with them is very motivational, and helped me to figure out what skills I want to learn, and what I can work on to get better at.

One of the key things I learned was the value of selling ideas within a company.  Static mocks are helpful at the production stage, but the designs have to get that far; a design idea needs to get traction and interest. Screencasts are a great (and trendy) tool for getting ideas across. These are short videos that demonstrates an app or new idea, which you talk the viewer through. Similarly, a Flash prototype is great for demonstrating how a design should actually work. An interactive demonstration of a design has far more power than static mocks. It helps people to imagine these designs working in reality.

I really enjoyed my internship at Google. I learned a ton, pushed myself as a designer, met fantastic people, and had a lot of fun. If you’re a student and passionately interested in technology, I’d definitely recommend applying for a summer internship at Google.

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