Inspiration from the past at CHI 2011

by Ananth Uggirala

Inspiration from the past at CHI 2011

Last month, I attended the annual Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference with a few of my colleagues in beautiful Vancouver. This conference was held at the Vancouver Convention Center, with picturesque views of the bay and mountains.

View from Vancouver Convention Center

In the last decade, CHI has become a place to showcase the latest innovations in interaction, like PaperPhone or MagicDesk. Researchers share new findings about how to design survey questionnaires, or how to conduct field studies in several countries simultaneously.  In addition to the ‘cool’ stuff, there are also a few talks that truly inspire and make you feel important as a UX professional. One such talk I was lucky enough to attend this year was, “What’s It Like to Design a User Interface for Six Billion People?”  by Larry Tesler, who was awarded the Lifetime Practitioner Award at the conference.

Larry is known for his invention of many familiar interaction techniques in all graphical user interfaces. These include cut-copy-and-paste editing along with their keyboard shortcuts, inserting, and overwriting text without entering a mode, among other things.

  Larry Tesler talking at CHI Conference

Invention of Cut-Copy-Paste

Larry talked at length about his career in the 60’s & 70’s at Stanford and PARC; how he hated modes and constantly thought of changing that prevalent interaction in computers. He and his partners developed various new interactions, which eventually resulted in the design of cut-copy-paste interaction. It was fascinating to hear how something considered so obvious today (cut-copy-paste) had taken several years to be conceived and accepted in the software industry.

Some of the objections Larry received to his cut & paste paradigms were:

1. Unfamiliar metaphor
2. User mistakes
3. Extensibility to other applications

As I took notes on this, I realized how we encounter similar objections to any new design which replaces an accepted interaction paradigm.  I also learned that great design needs perseverance, years of iterations & testing, and a vision for the future.

As he concluded the talk, Larry had the following advice to CHI practitioners. These are powerful takeaways!  I have them hanging on my desk as reminders, and have deciphered each of his points into actionable lessons for UX professionals:

Larry’s Takeaways:

• Unless you want a career in operations, build easy-to-use, bug free software.

Lesson: We all know that shipping products with bugs and hard-to-use designs will create a bad user experience for end-users. But, it also creates an unpleasant experience for company employees. Instead of working on innovative new projects, employees will be spending time debugging and fixing usability issues in the released product.

• Don’t be compatible with a bad UX.

Lesson:  As a UX professional, it is important to focus on end-to-end user experience for your products. This will involve crossing the boundaries of individual projects, understanding the ecosystem, and having the courage to not allow a bad UX in the ecosystem.

• Never confuse busy with productive.

Lesson:  In this fast paced, at-the-moment, connected life, it is easy to get busy. Set goals to achieve by the end of the morning or afternoon or week.  Tune out your email, social networks and phone. 

• You don’t have all answers. Team up.

Lesson:  Different skill sets are required to build great products. It is important to share your ideas and thoughts with team members, collaborate to achieve great results.

• If everyone else thinks something is impossible, it’s a great topic for research.

Lesson: Most often, UX professionals fall into the trap of doing research on the obvious. Research is meant to understand the unknown and uncover latent needs on projects.

• To fight an uphill battle, choose a short hill.

Lesson: Don’t give up if the problem is too challenging. There is always a small chunk of a big project you can achieve.  Start with the small chunk and reassess after completion.

 

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References:

1 Lahey, B., Girouard, A., Burleson, W., and Vertegaal, R. PaperPhone : Understanding the Use of Bend Gestures in Mobile Devices with Flexible Electronic Paper Displays ?” in Proceedings of the Conference in Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011)

2 Xiaojun Bi, Tovi Grossman, Justin Matejka & George Fitzmaurice. Magic Desk: Bringing Multi-Touch Surfaces into Desktop Work. in Proceedings of the Conference in Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011)

3 Sauro, J. & Lewis J.R. When Designing Usability Questionnaires, Does It Hurt to Be Positive?" in Proceedings of the Conference in Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011)

4 “From Basecamp to Summit: Scaling Field Research Across 9 Locations”, Jens Riegelsberger, Audrey Yang, Konstantin Samoylov, Elizabeth Nunge, Molly Stevens, Patrick Larvie, in Proceedings of the Conference in Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011)