Have you ever checked out Interaction-Design.org? No? Then you are missing out. They have so much amazing content and learning material it should be a go to destination for any interaction designer looking to learn. I’ve been given a special sneak preview of something they’ve been brewing up to share specially with you.

Social Computing

Releasing to the public in just a couple of days is a wealth of information around the topic of Social Computing. The information available acts both as a primer, as well as a source of reference for anyone working in the Social Interaction Design space. Below is a video that provides a general introduction to the topic. I highly encourage you to check it out and share it with your coworkers and peers. Access the special sneak preview here: Social Computing

Last year I had the honor to present at SxSW with Chris Risdon and Nick Disabato. Speaking at SxSW was such a great experience that I’m aiming to do it again next year. My submission for next years conference is a version of the talk “From Cancer to Bankruptcy” I gave at MidwestUX and STC Summit earlier this year. For me this is a fun talk to give as it allows me to relive some fun stories. For the audience it is a great resource to learn about ways to deal with unexpected events that come up during the course of field study.

Performing field studies are a great source of information and design inspiration, and it’s an activity that can be a challenge to pull off. Given that over my career so far, I’ve had the chance to complete over fifty field studies for various projects, I feel it’s my duty share the lessons I’ve learned with other designers and user experience practitioners.
If you’ve had the chance to see this talk, or if it sounds of interest to you, please be so kind as to visit my submission on the SxSWi PanelPicker and vote for it. If you have any comments, please leave them there and I’ll do my best to respond to any questions or critiques that you may have.

Thanks and I hope to see you in Austin.

At MidwestUX, I gave a shorten version of my upcoming STC Summit presentation. For those of you that came to my talk, thank you for your time and attention. For those that were not able to make it, below you will find a recap of the material I provided to the crowd. Really quickly, I’d like to thank the MidwestUX team for putting on a great conference, and for allowing me the chance to be a part of the event.

One of the best ways user experience professionals can build an empathic link with people, is to interview them in their homes, or their personal environments. Doing this comes at a risk though. Not a physical risk per se, but an emotional and mental risk. You learn about extremely sensitive information and you hear such emotional stories that it can eventually take a lot out of you, not only as a designer but also as a person. 

Midwest UX Slides

STC Summit Slides

The research that provided the content for this presentation came from my own experience doing user research with cancer patients and their caregivers, and interviewing people about their personal finance, specifically their retirement funds. Supplemental material was provided thanks to Whitney Hess and Erin Jo Richey, based on research they performed as well. After going back and reviewing all the various interviews I’ve done in the past, I found that many people fell into certain themes. The best way to describe these themes is by using the movie genre metaphor to categorize them.

Suspense

These are people with engaging stories that just capture your attention. Interviewing someone that falls into this genre really requires you to engage with the participant. You want to follow their story, going as deep as it may go. This may require you to go “off script” sometimes. It’s important to remain focus though, and don’t go down too many rabbit holes. You’re there to collect a certain amount of specific information and you don’t want to miss your chance.

Drama

These interviews are very emotional, and they leave you with a lot of baggage. They will haunt you for years to come, and in certain respects they can over-shadow the other participants in the study. Because these stories stick with you so strongly, I encourage you to develop some method that allows the other participants to stand out. My method was to give them nicknames based on an interesting aspect of their life, or something I noticed while sitting at their dining room table.

One important factor about interviews that are very dramatic, is the fact they are extremely emotional. It’s very possible that emotion will begin to effect you during the interview, even to the point they make you start to cry. This is totally acceptable, but at this point the interview is over for the most part. You can continue asking questions, but your way of thinking, and the way you process the information you are collecting will be affected by your emotional state.

Comedy

These interviews are just down right fun. You’ll quickly find yourself not only enjoying yourself immensely, but engaging with the participant on a whole new level. Because these in-home interviews have such a fun factor associated with them, time just flies by. So it’s important to keep an eye on the clock, and ask all the necessary questions to collect the appropriate data.

Participants that are good at telling funny stories can be a life saver though when you’ve already been exposed to very dramatic session. These remind you that not all is bad in the world and to not take everything so seriously. It’s easy to want to become buddy-buddy with these interview participants, but I would caution against it. It’s ok to joke around and laugh, but you still need to maintain a barrier between you and them to ensure you maintain your researcher role.

Thriller

You’re in for a shocking time with these types of in-home interviews. People will mention things very candidly that can be really off base, or you might notice something around their house that puts you on edge. It’s vital to never act surprised when these things happen, or to draw attention to them. However, if it gets to the point where the overall interview has become so uncomfortable, it might be necessary to put an end to it. Thank the participant for their time, give them their honorarium, and simply leave.

Documentary

Interviews that focus on a shared event or experiences are unique. This genre comes from the experiences Whitney Hess had while performing user research for the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. This is another time where emotions can run wild, especially if the focus of the interview is a traumatic event. Whitney recommends that you build an emotional wall up on the inside, and that the time to deal with your personal emotions is when you are reviewing all the data that was collected.

Foreign

Cultural difference can wreck havoc on your research if you aren’t properly prepared. Erin Jo Richey ran into this problem while performing user research in Italy. When it came time to provide the participant with their honorarium, they would refuse it. This was because the Italian participates thought of their participation as an honor, and not something they should get paid for. This is just one example of a cultural difference causing issues during user research, but it is something that can easily pop up numerous times if you are interviewing people abroad.

General Takeaways

I also provided some generic advice and steps other user experience professionals can take to best prepare for doing in-home user research. These included:

The Buddy System – Never go alone, not just for your own safety but for the participants as well. People actually feel more comfortable welcoming two people into their home rather than just one.
Be “On Time” – Being late is a huge taboo when you are meeting with someone at their home. I recommend showing up about five minutes early, and if you KNOW you’re going to be late call ahead of time.
Welcome Packet – Prepare a little welcome pack and mail it to the participants a few days before the actual interview. This should include pictures, bios, project background information, and supervisor/client contact information.
Humanize Yourself – This is best done by taking a glass of water if offered one. By doing this, you become a guest in their home rather than some stranger coming to study them.
Be 100% Honest – Never lie or deceive someone who is inviting you into their personal space. You need their trust to collect good information, plus doing otherwise is very unethical.
No Loitering – Once the interview is over … leave. Don’t debrief outside on their sidewalk, or in the car while still parked on the street. Drive to a nearby coffee shop and do it there.

I will be giving an expanded version of this talk at the STC Summit next month. If you have done extensive user research in either people’s home or some other personal environment, what are some lessons learned that you might have for user experience professionals preparing for this type of study?

In Part 1, I argued that the need for a designer to know how to code what they create is based on the designer’s chosen professional path and the overall size of the project they are working on. This has resulted in a variety of great comments, both here on the blog and on the twitterverse. If you haven’t had a chance to read it, please check it out.

Having dealt with that side of the argument, I want to provide some thoughts on why it’s important for designers to know about code, understand what a development lifecycle looks like, and why knowing these two aspects of digital creation is vital to being a well rounded designer. As I mentioned in the previous post, my educational background is in Computer Science. There are very few aspects of the coursework that I use in my everyday work, but what I do use is the concepts and domain knowledge that came along with it. Because of the curriculum I have a fundamental understanding of Object Oriented Programming, System Architecture, and the theory behind programming languages and their structure.

How does that help me as a designer?

Having this knowledge allows me to understand the medium I work in, at its most fundamental levels. At a high level, I understand what the technical constraints are on a variety of technical platforms. This understanding ensures the final design isn’t super difficult or complex to develop.  Later on in the overall process, when a developer challenges a design decision or offers up a suggestion, we can speak using the same language. We are able to collaborate more effectively on a problem because we have a shared understanding of the technical concepts that are required to make up a design.

How could this knowledge help you as a designer?

Effective collaboration

Being to speak the same language between you and another party is the first step to effective collaboration. This is something we do when working with users and business folks right? Why would it be any different when we are working with our technical peers? The good news is the craft of interactive prototyping is a great tool to use to facilitate a technical conversation. If you understand, at a fundamental level, how a particular interaction would need to be implemented, you are poised to better communicate that requirement to a technical team. Doing this with an interactive prototype isn’t the only option. As part of the interaction design spec, you could write out the interaction as pseudo-code. But, for the pseudo-code to be meaningful, it needs to be based on an understanding of the technical platform you are designing for.

More Marketable

It common to find that many User Experience Designers comes from either a psychology or traditional graphic design background. This background is necessary to effectively research user needs and behaviors, and to create a solution that meets those needs and supports those behaviors. However, if you obtain a working knowledge of the development side of things it allows you to contribute to areas of the design process that may not directly relate to user experience design. Also, your opinion on non-user experience design aspects of the system carries more weight. Other members of your team will put more trust in your designs and you, as they understand you’re not going to design something crazy and unmanageable.

Encourages Innovative Work

With solid foundation of what’s been done in the past and is currently being done within a particular technical platform, you are best prepared to design something new and innovative. Granted this depends on the project your working on, but innovation is possible on either the micro or the macro level. You will be better prepared to know when it’s time to break the rules and do something that’s disruptive or unfamiliar to either your organization or your audience. We already know this rule works out based on all the work that’s been done with design patterns. The best way to know when NOT to use a design pattern is to have an intimate knowledge of that pattern.

No Excuses For Not Learning

Knowing how to code what you design isn’t required to be a good, if not great, designer. But it doesn’t hurt. At the very least, a designer should have an understanding of the working fundamentals of the technical aspects of the medium in which he or she works. With the amount of information that is available online, in books, or even at local community colleges, the barrier to learn is very low. My recommendation to anyone that wants to beef up their skill set, or at least domain knowledge, on the technical aspects of the web is to pick up a book and build a “Hello World” application or webpage. Even doing something as simple as this will give you insight into what it takes to bring your designs to life and allow you to empathize with your technical peers.

If you are a designer who always goes to design conferences, break out of your comfort zone and attend a technical conference. Better yet, speak at one. It’s been my experience that technical conferences are very open to speakers from the design world. If attending, or speaking at conferences, isn’t your thing, go to local tech meet ups in your area. Not only is this a great networking opportunity for you but it’s a great place to find a mentor. It’s been said that to become a better design just design something. I’d refine this to say, “To become a better designer, design and build something…anything!”

At SxSW this year I attended a panel that meant to tell designers that there isn’t any excuses not to know how to code anymore. Putting aside some general complaints I had about the structure of the panel, I had a problem with the overall message the panel delivered. The claim: that to be considered a true designer, you must know how to code what you design, is misguided and in the end harmful to the profession of user experience.

What Makes For A Good Design?

Being a good designer isn’t founded in your ability, or inability, to code. Rather it’s based on the ability to think systematically about the particular problem space you’re working in. Understanding the What and Why behind a process or solution is a different skill set than knowing How to bring it to life. It’s the old argument of what’s more meaningful, right brain thinking or left. The truth is they are both meaningful in their own right, both are needed in world we find ourselves in today, and you need both for any design problem to be properly solved. To learn more, check out Daniel Pink’s book “A Whole New Mind.”

In addition to being able to think systematically, a good designer needs to be skilled in good, clear communication. Being able to think through the What and the Why of a problem only gets you so far. Without the ability to communicate those ideas in a meaningful way, all that brain power is meaningless. Communication can come in the form of visual or written work and yes, even code. The work that creates the greatest impact are those that combine visual and written ideas in a meaningful and compelling message.

How does this apply to User Experience Designers?

The role of a User Experience Designer is intentionally vague and open to interpretation because its specific meaning is dependent on the context they are working in. I believe there are three flavors of a User Experience Designer that can be found in the design world.

The Unicorn

The Unicorn is found on smaller projects where the skill set is broader due to necessity. Here you find those designers that know the how to perform research, conceptualize it, design it, and build it. This is the type of designer that needs to know how to code what they create because the projects they work on are smaller and and by a handful of people. They are able to manage the entire process, controlling the overall scale and complexity of a project. This can best be explained by relating it to an architect that has decided to design and build a dog house. It’s small enough that he can blueprint out the design, gather the material, and perform the labor to bring it all together.

Generalist

Generalists are designers that have a wide variety of skills, that may go deep in a few areas but are adaptable enough to tackle things they are merely familiar with if need be. They are flexible enough to jump in at various stages of the design process and provide guidance or partner with an expert to collaborate. Due to these attributes, Generalists are available to work on medium to large projects that require a teams made up of a variety of roles  to accomplish complex goals. I’d wager that this is the average User Experience Designer found in industry. Being a Generalist isn’t inherently a disadvantage, that’s why we see HR Generalists holding more predominate positions than say a Benefits Administrator. They are able to contribute to an HR department in a variety of ways, and in many cases you find that HR Generalists are the ones managing the overall efforts of a department.

Specialist

Specialist have a very focused and very narrow workflow and resulting impact on a project. This is by no means a bad thing! Specialists are invaluable and usually required for large scale and complex projects. For these types of projects, it’s important to have a team made of User Researchers, Information Architects, Interaction Designers, Visual Designers, UI Developers and countless other roles. To see the value of the Specialist, we can look to Medical Surgeons. Last year my father-in-law was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and it was determined that he would need his stomach removed and rebuilt using part of his colon. Given the complex nature of the procedure and the various body systems that were involved, this surgery required the skills of two specialized surgeons. This was not a procedure that you would want a family practitioner to perform.

The Importance of These Three Roles

Within the focus of the User Experience profession, we need a good mix of all three of these types of designers. We need those that can tackle the entire process, as they are great mentors for those that choose not to, or haven’t built those skills yet. We need designers that are able to work on larger projects assuming a variety of roles or as a focused specialist to ensure the project comes out successful.

It’s my experience that the type of designer you become is up a matter of personal preference and professional goals. Personally, I like being a Generalist. I like doing a mix of user research, interaction design, and jumping in a tackling some information architecture and usability work every now and then. Given my background with a Computer Science degree, doing some development work is within my capabilities, but I’d rather partner with a skilled UI developer and leverage their focused skill set rather than hack my way through it.

Being a Generalist is my personal niche, it’s what makes me happy as a User Experience Designer. Sure one day that might change that I will choose a specific focus. Or I might choose to leverage the coding background I have, build out my visual design skills, and begin to tackle projects from start to finish.

Again, it’s my personal choice to define the type of designer I want to be. How do you determine what type of designer you are?  If you want to be someone that can manage the entire process from start to finish, then you better be willing to learn how to code. If you like a variety of challenges in your daily work life, then find a few areas of the UX spectrum and kick ass at them. If you are passionate about a single particular aspect of UX, then dive deep and dive hard. Where you find yourself, don’t let others distract you or detract you from your professional growth based on how they define the world.

In Part 2, I’m going to present the other side of this argument, but from my own point of view, on why designers need to know about coding. Look for it to be posted later this week.

My 20 month year old son Tristan made a visit to my office last week. As we were leaving, he fell victim to my office’s front door. For years I have despised this door, as no matter how many times I walk through it, I always fall for it’s crappy affordances.

This is a door that opens outward as you walk through it from inside my office, so to open it you must PUSH. Myself, and many of my co-workers, continue to PULL on the handles to these doors as we are leaving the office. In many cases, it’s because we allow instinct to take over and guide our movement rather than step in and control our behavior directly. This is due to the fact that we are normally on the phone as we are leaving, calling clients one last time, or checking in with home for any last minute errands before heading home. Seriously, after over 4 years this is a door that plagues me and many others!

The lesson my son taught me, was that we humans have a naturally ability to compute and react to perceived affordances. (Something I already knew being a UXer, but he nailed it home) It wasn’t until this little human, who is still trying to figure out the world around him, attempted to PULL on the door rather than PUSH on it that it dawned on me that our reactions to affordances is almost instinctual. In a world where we are constantly exposed to more and more stimuli, I believe we are becoming more reliant on our ability to instinctively react to perceived affordances more than ever.

So why does this matter? It matters because as designers tackle problems that impact our everyday lives, it’s imperative that our instinctual reactions to affordances are taken into account. If you save me the five seconds it takes for me to figure out WHY the door isn’t opening when I PULL on it, then you are making my life a bit more stress free and easier to navigate. And if I ever meet you face to face, I’ll probably give you a hug.

So if you are someone that is trying to solve the everyday problems of people, consider how a toddler might behave when presented with a particular affordance. Because chances are, a busy adult with umpteen-million things going through their brain will react the same exact way.

I recently returned from SxSW where I was given the honor and privilege to co-present with Chris Risdon and Nick Disabato. Together we presented a 2.5 hour workshop on Behavioral Design and Persuasion. The workshop was split into three parts, with Chris covering the general theory behind Behavioral Design and Persuasion, Nick going into details behind specific concepts around Persuasion and showcase many great design patterns, and I was tasked to cover the ethical side of doing Behavioral Design. Overall, our talk was a huge success in my book and I want to thank both Chris and Nick for including me on this amazing journey.

In an effort to provide additional information for those that either didn’t stick around for my portion of the talk, or those that couldn’t make it, I’m posting what was fundamentally what I said during my presentation.

Why Ethics Matter

So why are Ethics important when it comes to doing behavioral design? I firmly believe that any type of behavior encouragement or change is some form of manipulation. Now, it’s important to note that there is good manipulation and bad manipulation. Getting me to sign up for your newsletter because you purposely used double negatives in your labels,  and then making it impossible for me to unsubscribe is a great example of BAD manipulation. On the other hand, getting me to acknowledge that my wife and I spend too much money at Target and encouraging me to save more is a form of GOOD manipulation. Ethical Philosophy is something that allows us to ask tough questions during the design process so that we avoid the bad manipulation and take advantage of opportunities to incorporate good manipulation.

The wonderful thing about Ethical Philosophy is that many of the theories can easily be distilled down to tangible frameworks that can be used guide the design process. If used early on in a project, they can be a guiding light that ensures the end product is as Good as possible. These frameworks can also be used during various check points of a design lifecycle to act as a gut test for the team, and get them back on track if need be.  Regardless how or when you use these frameworks, their main benefit lies in the questions they force you to ask yourself, team, and stakeholders.

Virtue Ethics

Virtue Ethics originated based on the work of Plato and Aristotle. The crux of Virtue Ethics is to live a balanced life, using the defined nine virtues as a guide to maintain that balance. If you are unbalanced in one or more areas, the concept is to begin acting (or pretending) in the opposite fashion. For example, if you are generally cowardly or easily scared, act brave and courageous. Eventually, you will stop acting (or pretending) and simply BE brave and courageous. Now, this is a very simplisitc explanation of Virtue Ethics, but it gets the point across.

How does this apply to behavioral design? Many applications exist today that track our everyday behavior, and report back on that behavior. The advantage of this technology is that we are becoming more aware of how deficient, or in excess, we are regarding our behaviors. A design that follows the Virtue Ethic framework is one that encourages or pushes a person to no longer be deficient or in excess. Mint.com is a perfect example of a design that fits into this framework. When I first using Mint.com I quickly noticed that my wife and I on average spent well over $300 dollars a month a Target. Compared to the national and local averages, we were spending too much money at Target. This allowed us to evaluate our spending habits when we visited Target and encouraged us to buy what we needed rather than what we wanted. It took a behavior that was in excess and brought it closer to something that is more balanced.

Categorical Imperative

The Categorical Imperative is defined by Immanual Kant in his philosophical work
Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals(PDF). Kant wanted to create a rule based system to morality that could be used to gauge any action or behavior. To this end he defined the following three maxims as a series of questions you could ask yourself when trying to determine if an action is moral or not. Firstly, you ask yourself if someone else was in your exact situation and they performed this act would it still be considered Right? Next, determine if you are using another person in some way by performing this act. Kant strongly believed that one person should never use another person, that we should always treat a person as an ends and never as a means. Finally, ask yourself if your action was a universal law, one where everyone in your situation and context was forced to act this way, would it still be Right? By going through these three morality “tests”, you can determine if a particular action is moral or not.

How does this apply to behavioral design? It’s a common practice for designers to use some type of pattern library to influence or inspire their work. Architects do this as well, starting with a common, proven base to begin their work. Looking at the Musical Paino Stairs created as part of Volkswagen’s The Fun Theory, we see a pattern that would be moral when put through the Categorical Imperative. If everyone, that was healthy and capable, had to use the stairs rather than taking an escalator, and it was “fun” to do, the world would probably be a slightly better place. People would get more exercise, burn more calories, and generally be more healthy. (In theory.)

Utilitarianism

Everyone wants to world to be a happier place, it’s only a few sick individuals out there that try to mess it up for the rest of us. Utilitarianism is based on the concept of equating morality to the overall level of happiness, or utility, that gets added to the world by performing an action. To determine this, the Felicific Calculus was created that allows you to compute the “exact” amount of happiness, or utility, an action adds, or removes, from the world. Two aspects of this formula that stands out to me are the chances of an action being repeated and the amount of people it impacts.

How does this apply to behavioral design? Applications or special social based programs can have a large influence on ones behavior and life style. Looking at the Evoke “game”, we find a great example that not only taught people in third world countries key survival skills, but it also inspired a group of entrepreneurial minded people to create businesses that help others adopt these survival skills.  This program not only affected a large amount of people, but it’s having lasting effects well after the first “season” concluded.

Altruism

The debate on if true Altruism exists has been around for a long time. Luckily, from a philosophical point of view it’s well and alive. The moral theory of Altruism doesn’t really have any type of creator, as it’s based on our very own evolutionary history. The basic concepts of Altruism can be found by studying the way humans behaved when we were restricted to a tribal based society. One of the most basic rules of any tribe is that an act must be one that, in the end, benefits the entire tribe. For this to work, everyone in the tribe was required to give something up for others, and accept something from their fellow tribe-mates that they in turn had to give up.  Everyone relied on everyone else sacrificing something for the benefit of all.

How does this apply to behavioral design? Several applications have popped up recently that are based on either a pseudo-barter based economies, or that attempts to help others without asking for anything in return. For this framework, I’d like to focus on ReadyForZero.com as an example of a product that is very altruistic in nature. ReadyForZero’s main goal is to help others gain control of the credit card debit, offering payment plans, advice on debt consultation or consolidation, and even go so far as to bring up the possibility of claiming bankruptcy. All of this is offered for free, in other words the creators of ReadyForZero took the time, effort, and money to create something to help others. Now, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a business model of some kind to make money for themselves, which they do. But it shows an example of helping others to help others, which eventually will help yourself.

Doing “Good” work is hard, and it’s something many designers strive to do. The drive to do “Good” is fueled by designers attempting to make the world a better place, even if it only impacts a small group of people. These frameworks are an effort to provide designers with the tools to gauge their work from a moral and a practical point of view. They encourage tough questions to be asked, questions that try to get at the “Why?” of a decision rather than the “What?” and “How?” Given the history that goes along with these four frameworks, it also gives designers plenty of rationale and resources to defend decisions they make when challenged by managers or directors.

This question gets asked in a variety of online forums and Q&A communities all the time. We also hear it offline coming from stakeholders and clients when projects are getting kicked off, or when designs are being reviewed. Fortunately, this question has a simple answer – YES! Now, the rationale behind the answer is where it gets tricky, and for all you out there that are a fans of User Research it’s where the fun happens. 

There is always someone, or a group of someones, that will use a particular feature or function. It could be personal preference, or some person out there has determined that using said feature is more efficient/productive than the standard method. The sad truth though is just because people use something as it appears on other sites and products, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do for your design/product. To make a truly informed design decision, it’s best you put yourself out into the world and do some good ole research.

Go find a group of people that represent your users and see if they are even aware of the feature you’re thinking of using. This can easily be done with a 15 minute conversation over coffee, or over the phone. If face to face interaction isn’t feasible, crank out a short, and I mean short!, online survey. You should pay close attention to WHEN people use the feature, and most importantly WHY. Other areas of interest should be when people DON’T use the feature, especially if you happen to run across someone who purposely AVOIDS the feature. All of these little data points are great starting points to have a meaningful and inspiring conversation with people who you will be designing for. The results of the conversation will allow you to answer “Do people use <Insert Feature/Function>?” with an informed response and help convince others how time and money should be invested during later stages of design and even development.

Recently, I’ve had to create several in-depth interactive prototypes, and keeping all the various designs and interactions straight was a bit of a daunting task. Especially when the level of interactive fidelity was high. To ensure that I hooked up every piece of interaction and wrote every logic case needed, I took the development of the prototypes step by step, or layer by interactive layer. This post is  a brief description of the process I followed. I’d be interested to know how this relates to your own process and any other comments you might have.

My first goal was to make sure the prototype was a complete click-thru of  all the designed pages. Now, this doesn’t mean I made just the main navigation click-able, but I also linked up any cross link opportunities too. Once I verified that all of the pages were linked together and could be traversed, it was time to move on to the next layer of interactivity.

Developing the various states for each page was next. Since I was using Axure, this meant I broke out the Dynamic Panel and used it anywhere particular components of a page changed given the right conditions. This was the part that took the longest, as I had to work out all the various iterations of the same controls.  I didn’t worry too much about the specific conditions needed for the various states, as keeping track of all the logic in my head was distracting. At this stage in the game, it was  important that I got all the finer details of the interactions designed out.

Now that all of the pages were linked up, and the states created, I got started with the really intensive stuff. Getting the detailed interactive logic done was the final layer to my process. The first bits of logic I tackled were those that effected the whole prototype. A prime example of this was the logged in/logged out states, which requires multiple layers of logic to ensure that it properly affected the whole prototype. Once these general logic cases were covered, I tackled the individual cases present in each page and state. These prototypes were of decent size, so I kept a checklist handy to ensure I didn’t miss anything.

Why doesn’t the iPhone allow you to customize the vibration sequence based on the context of the notification? This has been bugging me for awhile, but thanks to Eduardo Ortiz and Diego Pulido I’m bugged enough by it now to write about it. During a standard work day, my phone stays in the silent mode more often than not. Between SMS message, Boxcar Notifications, and emails my phone buzzes a lot. Now I’m like many people and I keep my personal email open all day so I can easily switch it when I need to. Feeling an email “buzz” come from my leg would tell me to check this tab rather than pull out my phone. The more I think about this type of use, the more I want this feature.

Thinking back, even my pager from high school had the ability to customize its vibration. Granted, the pager only had one function so it didn’t need do any logic to determine which vibration sequence to use, but still the ability was there. With an advanced device like the iPhone, it should be easier than pie to put some logic around what sequence the vibration uses based on what context is being called. This capability has to present already, as Apps have the ability to use the vibration of the phone in a variety of ways. Apple, if you’re listening (which I know you’re not) this would be nice to see in 4.x version of the iPhone OS.

What are some ways this type of contextual interaction could help you?