Corvus Consulting

I’ve taken a shine to a couple of blogs that focus on small touches that make software experiences smoother, and might often otherwise go unnoticed (as good design, by its nature, often does). Little Big Details was the first of this breed, and sets a standard for an observant eye and the ability to dive into the details of how small touches make big differences.

It was on a second blog, though, that I found something worth noting about the overall evolution of Mac OS. On the Finer Things in Mac blog, Dave Chartier notes that in OS X Lion,

When clicking a Quick Look window’s new “Open with Preview” button in its top toolbar, that window morphs into the new Preview window that opens. Classy! The same happens with RTF files and, it seems, just about any files Preview supports.

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Fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are familiar with the Infinite Improbability Drive, a spacecraft engine fuelled by the energy of highly improbably events.

Fans of this blog (both of them) will be keen to learn about the Corvus Irony Timing Chain, which prevents me from writing year-in-review posts until a few days after New Years. The Chain makes space for the news that would have contradicted, enhanced or otherwise changed what I was going write. This exclusive innovation lets me write without having to look back on a post less than a week old and feel like a dupe.

Safely a few short steps into 2011, we can look back on 2010 for what it was: an exciting year that delivered a number of inflection points.

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While riding to the office on Thursday, life added an unexpected to-do to my list. Avoiding a car that suddenly stopped to avoid another car’s u-turn didn’t work out so well, and I spent a couple days in Vancouver General getting patched up.

My dominant right arm will be in a sling for at least six weeks. I’m ambidextrous on the computer, but quickly finding just how many two-handed moments in life I take for granted.

Making way around the house today and thinking of the learning curve I’m in for, Jane McGonigal’s story of recovering from a head injury through an inventive game came to mind. My situation isn’t as serious as what Jane faced; my arm will get better in time, and out of curiosity I see a cool opportunity on hand (yes, it’s a pun).

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Here’s the second of two posts focussing on subjects that come up often when I describe what I do, and do differently, in my consulting work. The first discusses the term ‘user’ in both professional labels like User Experience Designer and in software specification in general. Now the topic shifts to describing the nature of experience design.

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A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of teaching with Haig Armen and a lineup of local design pros in the SFU Publishing Summer Workshops. The course, a four day design intensive, was geared to bring graphic designers and others with careers in publishing into the world of web design.

We structured the four days around creating something concrete rather than just hearing the faculty wax philosophic, and with hypothetical design briefs in hand, the students applied each lecture across the four days and on the final day pitched their concept designs. It was simply incredible to watch the ideas take shape and turn into concepts that I would have loved to work on.

In addition to speaking on research methods, card sorting and sketching, I also presented on usability. There was a real challenge here, as I had 40 minutes or so to speak, but the lessons and methods of usability are too numerous and in-depth to pack into such a small amount of time.

The approach I took was to boil things down to three golden keys, crafted to pair with Kathleen Moynahan’s presentation on usability testing methods. I also included a fourth tip on creating engagement through progressive disclosure and the idea of the Mystery Box, but I won’t go into that to keep that part unique to those who were there.

I could tell you those three keys, but Crissy Campbell at Boxcar Marketing has done a great writeup of them as part of a guide on giving websites an autumn tuneup. Thanks Crissy!

Links

• Haig is the founder and creative director of LiFT Studios
• Kathleen’s website
• SFU Summer Publishing Workshops
• JJ Abrams talks about the mystery box as essential to compelling narrative

The annual cycle for Corvus Consulting seems to put me in front of new clients in the summer months. Even after seven years this kind of surprises me: isn’t this when people would take it easy on new work? From that it follows that it’s also the time of year where I find myself explaining what I do.

Two topics come up regularly in these conversations: why I call what I do “experience design” over “user experience design,” and the struggle for a succinct definition of just what experience design is.

The answers seem ripe for not one but two blog posts, and this is the first: why I shy from “user experience” (or user-anything for that matter).

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A prevailing direction in online registration has been to ask only for the minimum information required to create an account.It sounds like a surefire formula: less=easier=better=more customers. Despite whittling down what we ask for at registration and innovations using 3rd parties as authentication points and basic profile data sources, we never seem to get past treating registration as an unpleasant tax that new members must be hurried past.

No matter how immediate the gratification of minimalist registration, the approach boxes us into few choices for crafting the experience past the front door. As such, we end up dropping new members into an impersonal and uncalibrated signed-in homepage, or into an orientation or personalization process that is also abstracted from the core experience.

I’m a believer in “Less is More”, but I’m not sure that persistent problems with new member registration are just about the number of fields. Can taking signup out of the frame of mere account creation turn it into a more coherent first step of the new member experience? I think so.

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