The occasional light expression

It recently struck me that part of the problem in digital User Experience Design is the paltry vocabularies often used to describe the end state of a design.

Consider the following conversation between a digital designer and his or her CEO:

Designer: Ok, here are the 3 best options i could come up with over the weekend

CEO: Nice, nice, very nice. But dont you think they’re missing something, a little something

Designer: How do you mean? Are the designs not solving the problem well? I’ve used a very different navigation model in all the designs. Plus i think the purple-gray and red-black color options have a lot of potential.

CEO: Oh, of course. This is great effort. I’m just saying that it could have a little more, you know, like pizzaz, a little more oomph, a little more flash & sizzle, some more spice.

Designer: Ok, how about if i do a little more 3D, and maybe more drop shadows everywhere?

CEO: Yeah, Maybe. But u know what i mean. Like a little more futuristic, a sleek smooth experience.

Designer: You’re saying you want something that sizzles, has spice, and looks like its from the future.

CEO: Yeah, and makes you want to BUY our product online, like, RIGHT NOW

Designer: Oh well.

I think the problem is with the VOCABULARY here.

User Experience Design has started employing words like desire, delight, and awesomeness to describe a certain state of user happiness, but each of these words is a 100 layers deep in terms of what it means and what it can mean.

Think about delight. How do you define delight. Can you capture delight simply through buttons, colors, and layouts, or is delight a function of the underlying value proposition of a product? Can an interface delight the way an ice cream does? Or is delight simply not specific enough as a word to describe the end state of a User Experience.
Or consider “path-breaking”. What path? Breaking what? What does that even mean?

I think Design Processes need better frameworks to define rich vocabularies. I’ll cover this in Part II

Restarting this blog after 9 months….watch this space

I feel sad writing this post. After a rather interesting World Usability Day event last Saturday where we heard several claims and lists of features by the BIAL COO and future-CEO, I experienced first hand today several breakdowns and several experience nightmares at BIAL. Let me list a few here.

First, once I reached the boarding area, I neither found a complaint register nor anyone who knew where the complaint register was. Courtesy Mr. Amar Nair of the Duty Free shopping area, who was professional enough to escort me around to find the complaint register, we managed to get an official from the ground area. It turns out there is a complaint register that you can fill BEFORE you embark on customs and immigration. It also turns out that if you need foreign exchange and medical assistance, you should sort out all those existential issues out BEFORE you reach customs.The inside story is that the duty free shop boys end up helping out distraught passengers by running downstairs and getting medicines when any emergency help is needed. I fail to understand how the airport could have overlooked such fundamental issues.

Its 1:35 am and after several discussions with BIAL officials here and shop owners, I am convinced that the government and the official authorities of BIAL, despite tall claims about  the services being offered here, have not fully tried to understand what constitutes a superior user experience. THey have 1 hour free Wifi but they fail to advertise how one can access it. They have a Crossword and sell magazines, but you can receive change only in Dollars and Euros (sorry you poor Indian consumers with your depreciated rupee). They have shops selling all sorts of fancy jewellery and gear but not enough water coolers.

That’s it for now. I hope to blog more once I reach Hong Kong or LA, my next destinations on this short trip.

Via Bloomberg, some news that should cheer up job seekers: http://www.bloomberg.com/avp/avp.asxx?clip=mms://media2.bloomberg.com/cache/vqBhv_DWum98.asf&vCat=/ceo&RND=024451517

I just hope we use the economic opportunities this downturn provides and emerge stronger by 2010, especially on the infrastructure side.