Sometimes people think there’s one obvious answer to seemingly vexing design questions. Plain and simple: this is wrong. Your gut instinct might be telling you that there’s only one way to go about solving a problem, but this is an incorrect assumption. When you try, and I mean really try, you’ll find many answers to your issues.

When designing a feature for a website, for example, I typically recommend 3-6 options before choosing a “winner.” When designing a whole system of features, it’s helpful to at least think of one alternative. Sometimes the obvious answer wins, most of the time it doesn’t, and all of the time you’re better off for having thought deeply about a problem before jumping to conclusions.

There are a few reasons why you might generate lots of design ideas before settling on one:

1. Generating many ideas forces you to get your ideas out of your head and onto the some paper. At the very least, this will help you understand what you are thinking.
2. If you’re working with others, generating ideas will help to flesh out exactly what the “obvious” answer is. (Hint: it typically isn’t the same for everyone.)
3. You’re bound to think of some really cool solutions when you’re forced to think hard about a design problem. You’ll impress yourself with your creativity. Sure, some of your concepts will be less feasible than others, but that’s ok. Just generate, and worry about implementation later (though not too much later).
4. It’s a fun process, and I’m all for fun at work.

Lots of ideas, on paper

A few tips & tricks

• Just get ideas out, don’t judge them - Trust me, at some point you’ll feel a strong urge to think something like, “naaaw, that idea will never work…”. Get over it, and while you’re at it, stop being so negative. Just get the ideas on paper, and leave all the judgement to your future self.
• Don’t think every idea has to be hugely different, just focus on little changes - Maybe you won’t generate whole new ways of thinking about your topic, but will think of a million little tweaks you could try. That works! Just go with it.
• If it becomes really difficult, stop - This should go without saying in many avenues of life. Seriously though, if you can’t think of any more concepts, you’re done. This does not, however, give you license to quit early. Sometime concept generation takes a little practice.
• Don’t worry if your sketches are more like scratches - As long as you understand them, it doesn’t matter one bit.
• Use a 6-up template to guide your designs (PDF download) - This 6-up is from Leah Buley and it’s straightforward enough. Print one out and give it a try.

Have fun generating!

Sometimes, you just want something to feel right. On the site I help design, that often means adding a lighthearted aesthetic. Implementing this aesthetic comes down to the details. Check out the icon below, taken from Groupon, everybody’s favorite $1.35 billion website:

Taken from Groupon - Who is this?

Who the heck is that woman? And why is she the face of an icon? Answer: Why not? Most people probably never question this image, but it adds a level of “interestingness” to the page. My bet is that it’s just a picture of someone who works at Groupon…or perhaps it’s Rapunzel. We may never know.

This afternoon, I received what one would think is an innocuous email:

Happy Birthday, joshe!

However, there are so many glaring mistakes in this email, it’s hard to choose where to start. How about this, I’ll start with two simple questions:

1. Who sent this email?
2. Why was this email sent?

The first question is relatively hard to answer. I’m not sure I’m aware of a person or group named, “Personal Finance, Personal Budget and Budget Tool Forums - Mint.com.” So, is Mint.com sending me a birthday reminder? Is it from their forum? Is it from an internal group at Intuit (the owners of Mint.com)?

Let’s ignore the first question, and just assume the email came from Mint.com, the entire company. Now we have to deal with the second question: Why was this email sent? There is no content that I couldn’t have lived without in order to continue to have a good relationship with Mint.com. In fact, there’s a bunch of bad content in the email: First, today is not my birthday. This note came a cool 2 weeks early. Actually, this message is post-marked with a 2009 send date…so it’s 50 weeks late. Second, they called me “joshe.” That’s not even my real name. I just can’t think of a single reason I should receive this message.

So now I’m assuming the email was sent in error. And now that I’m thinking that Mint.com has made an error, I’m left to wonder what kind of other errors they could be making with my personal finance data.

Folks, my message here is simple: be careful with the emails you send out on behalf of your company. Email seems cheap, or even free, but every email you send has a cost to your users. Don’t send out birthday reminders. Don’t send value-less messages that have no calls to action. Oh, and please choose a sent-from name that makes sense to people outside your organization.

Thanks.

Here’s some advice you wouldn’t expect. If you really want to know how a person understands something about the world, consider asking a “stupid” question. You know, a question that you surely should know the answer to. For example, if a user says that it would be great if your website were “faster”, you could ask something like, “So, what do you mean by ‘fast’?” I can almost guarantee that the answer will surprise you. First, the person will probably look at you a little silly, but keep a straight face…they’ll give you an answer within a few seconds.

The point here is not to make yourself look stupid, rather, it’s to get at a basic understanding of how the world works from another person’s perspective. With regard to the example above, I’ve heard lots of responses to the “What do you mean by ‘fast’?” question. For some people, especially those with a technical background, “fast” means that pages appear quickly when you’re clicking around on a site. For other people it means that you’ve got some problems with your workflow. These people feel silly clicking all over your site to get things done, especially in comparison to those new cool Web 2.0 sites they’ve used.

So if you have a feeling in your gut that you don’t understand where someone is coming from, don’t be afraid to ask a “stupid” question. Get back to basics, it’ll help you see the world through the eyes of another.

It really is as simple as that. As a software developer, business analyst, or even project manager, you will find yourself tasked with designing user interfaces no matter how hard you try to avoid it. Clients will tell you how they want it to look and act, others on your team will provide input, and at the end of the day you’ll have to come to some decisions. This process may not prove all that difficult, but I want to provide you with a handy trick I use when assessing whether a UI design decision is the right move. Ready for this? Here it is:

Look at each decision you’ve made, and simply ask, ‘Why?’“

Links should be blue, you’ll decide. Next action: Why?

Each time we use the word MagicTouch in a headline, it should be followed by an ® symbol. Next action: Why?

A client will say to you, “I think it will look better if this text is center justified, rather than left aligned.” Next action: Why?

Stopping to ask why? will force you and others to think about the actual intended use of a feature. It will push you to think about user behavior, instead of random decisions. And most of all, it will teach you that you actually believe in what you’ve designed, because you’ll know you’ve thought it through. If at any point you can’t answer the Why? intelligently, you’ll know you have some rethinking and potentially redesigning to do.

This concept should be applied outside the world of design, as well. When you come to a decision, it’s never a bad idea to test it out with a well thought out Why?

In the end, it’s all about finding purpose. In everything, find purpose.

And with that message, I would like to share the news that I have decided to move on from ThoughtWorks. My time here has been tremendous and purposeful, but it is time for me to go try something new. If you read my blog via ThoughtBlogs, I invite you to subscribe to my RSS feed, because it likely won’t be displayed here much longer. Thanks, ThoughtWorks. I’ll miss you.

This weekend as Israelis and Palestinians clashed again in Gaza, and it seemed like everyone had a reaction to the violence.

As I consumed the popular media, I began to think about the more pedestrian views out there. It is important to understand what the everyman thinks, even if one does not agree with him or her (and I certainly do not agree with many of the opinions out there). After all, it is only by understanding others’ points of view that we will ever get ourselves out of these international confrontations. Peace comes when people understand and interact with one another.

A great place to get at peoples’ opinions is the popular new communication tool: Twitter. Twitter allows users to post messages, opinions, and thoughts 140 characters at a time. Each post is a tiny glance at a person’s thought. If you’re not a member yet, you should give Twitter a try. It’s quite fun and addictive.

So, as I set out to glance at what people were saying about the situation in the Middle East via Twitter, I decided to build a tool that would help with this task. And so I did just that, with TwiddleEast.

Here's what TwiddleEast looks like

TwiddleEast allows you to quickly glance at what people on Twitter are saying about a few of the Middle Eastern countries in the news today.

Check it out, and I’d love to hear if it is helpful to you. If there is anything I can do to make TwiddleEast better, don’t hesitate to let me know, and while you’re at it: follow me or TwiddleEast on Twitter.

So the big news on the internets today is Google’s new browser: Chrome. It’s only available for Windows as of today, and since I’m on a Mac I haven’t been able to play with it yet. But that’s ok, because Google hasn’t completely left me out of the loop. I have access to the comic interpretation of their engineering decisions.

Google Chrome Design Comic

Comics have been a topic of discussion in the Interaction Design Community for a while now. With Scott McCloud providing the art for Google’s message, they really couldn’t go wrong. McCloud has quite literally written the book(s) on creating effective comics. (Of course, you can create your own design comics too, thanks to projects like Martin Hardee’s Design Comics.)

One thing that I’d like to applaud Google for with this comic is their use of actual Googlers as the narrators of the story. Naming names like this gives credit to the actual thinkers behind the work. All too often in the business world today, we hide individuals behind a big corporate brand. In this example, these Googlers will feel real ownership and responsibility for their product, and they’ll be motivated to continue working on the project even if (and when) they leave Google. Of course, I’d also like to call out the fact that no User Experience team members were named in this document, even in the section titled “Search and the User Experience.” This is strange, and I hope there was a User Experience team dedicated to this project.

And another thing Google did well here was in not trying to over-engineer their explanations of highly technical processes. They simplified their message down to bare essentials, and I felt enlightened after reading this document. Most technical documentation talks down to people, assuming that all the basics are already understood. Google removed some barriers to entry by explaining their new technologies in a way that almost anyone with a little technical know-how can understand. This is something almost every other open source project out there fails at. Technical documentation is far more than simply documentation…it’s an implicit invitation to take part in the experience.

Browser Threads Vs. Processes

At the end of the day, I’m really impressed at the quality of this documentation. I actually read the entire thing, which is much more than I can say about the technical documentation for any other software I use. Who knew that I could find the difference between multiple threads and multiple processes interesting?

Well done, Google. Now I just have to find a Windows computer…ugh. I swore off those things months ago…

What if we could travel 5 miles in less than 5 minutes?

I hope you noticed that, in fact, we can do all these things today. However, a mere 100 years ago, these questions would have been dismissed as pipe dreams by most people. But dreamers dream, designers design, technologists build, and before you know it, really difficult problems find solutions.

This is why I try to take the long view when thinking about design problems. Today’s technology is ephemeral, it will be gone before you know it. But when you find solutions to the big problems, those interactions can last for centuries. So the next time you start a project, instead of asking, “What would the UI look like to solve this problem?” (or even worse, “What will the architecture of the software look like?”) ask “What if we could ________?” And fill in the blank with a really challenging problem.

After all, if you’re like me, you didn’t get into technology to solve tiny little problems. You got into technology to make lives better & jobs easier. You got into technology because there are challenging problems to be solved. What if you solved them?

Study: Most Children Strongly Opposed To Children’s Healthcare

Thanks, The Onion. Happy Monday everybody.

Jono DiCarlo at Mozilla Labs documented his feelings about user interface design in a great post titled These Things I Believe. While I do not agree with him across the board, he does make some interesting points, and helps guide software developers toward the (great user experience) light. I’ll call out a few of his assertions here:

Software is for humans, not computers

This is the only absolute truth in the world of technology. Software architectures change, programming languages go through cycles of popularity, and code design patterns will be preferred by some over others. At the end of the day, though, the software we build is always being built to help some human be more productive, happy, or both, even if it literally has no user interface. Before building your next piece of software, I implore you to ask yourself how this software will make the world a better place, as Jono suggests.

People use computers to connect with other people

’nuff said. This is the only reason 99% of people use computers at all. (If you’re reading this, you’re probably not part of the 99%. That’s ok though, because you are not your user.)

There’s no such thing as free software

Open Source software is, by and large, really difficult to use. I would never leave my mom alone in a room with Linux, it’s just too cruel. Like Jono says, “Linux is only free if the value of my time is zero.”

The job of the UI Designer is to provide what the users need, not what they say they need

This paradoxical statement succinctly defines what it is that I do for 40+ hours every week. There are various methods that provide clues as to what users really need, other methods that design for those clues, and still other methods that test whether the users’ needs have been fulfilled. What I do at work all day is carry out those methods.

User interface design can be approached scientifically. But usually isn’t.

This is where Jono and I will disagree. He lays out a list of metrics that can bring about statistically significant results when it comes to usability testing software. My clients frequently argue to me that if we drive down the number of clicks in an application it will be easier to use. I don’t care about click counts. I’ve seen well liked software with high click counts, and hated software with low click counts. On top of this, while gathering metrics based on click counts, frequency of use, time on task, error rates, and error frequency may get you some information about your software (which is good), these methods never tell you how to fix the problems. Real world, in-situ usability testing will tell you these problems, and suggest solutions.

It is a sin to waste the user’s time, break the user’s train of thought, or lose the user’s work.

Yup, sin is the right word to use here. Have you sinned lately?

Thanks to Jono for creating this list. Maybe one day I’ll make one of my own.