This isn’t about how long it’s been since I made a post, though it easily could be. I’ve heard a lot of talk about “putting in your time” as a designer in order to really excel at experience design. I think this is fairly accurate. I know that the longer I’m at it I feel like I can solve design problems with more efficiency and with better results. But what is this really all about? What are some of the things I’ve learned that might be distilled into giving someone who is fresh a little leg up in this game. Really, this is about going back to basics.
One idea that I have been kicking around recently is that good experience design is about time – but not from the standpoint of doing your time as a designer. Rather, it’s a deliberate focus on time (and the flow of activities over some duration of time) from the user’s standpoint. This seems so basic to many of us, but the criticality is often overlooked by junior experience designers.
I’ll try not to get too philosophical, but time can be thought of as series of activities that flow from one to the next. Activities in the past effect the present, and activities of the present effect future outcomes and choices that might be made.
Experience is the sum total of our activities (consciousness). To understand experience we have to understand context, and a critical component of context is time.
I was consulting recently with a client who has an internal design team that is more used to building traditional brochure-ware web sites. Most of them come from an academic background focused around accessibility and usability. Despite their formal training, I saw a lot of problems with their designs from a usability standpoint. These problems became even more profound as they starting building applications instead of just web pages. There were some logic holes and some decisions being made that were going to really create problems down the road. Through a few working sessions with this team I understood where these problems were coming from.
It had less to do with creativity or design savvy than it did with where they were starting in the timeline of user activities. They weren’t driving back to the beginning and answering some basic questions about who the user is, why they are using this application, what their desired outcomes would be, what would the most important tasks be in their workflows. They were jumping right into the middle of workflows. With a lack of the context of workflow over time, there were some buried and incorrect assumptions guiding their design.
It didn’t take us long to create some very elegant applications once we worked through the more abstract process of understanding the user’s timeline as it would relate to their experience with these applications.
So yeah, it is about time. Time for me to post a bit more often. And time to get back to basics and continue to develop those essential skills of understanding user context through an examination of workflows and timelines.