My friend & college Matt Wallens asked me a few weeks ago if I was interested in presenting at Interaction10. I said sure, but “What are we going to talk about?”

D’oh!

Somehow, in the time between that question and this post, we found ourselves researching (notice the lack of sarcasm quote marks) by watching hours and hours of The Simpsons.

Here’s the thing: Matt and I both love The Simpsons. Not so much over the last few years, but if you can be a Cubs fan, you can be a Simpsons fan. With all that history, and our zany ability to quote on the spot from the show in the context of any current conversation, we realized there was a wealth of cautionary tales dealing with bad User Experience in every season.

It was honestly more of a problem narrowing down ideas than finding them.

The Session

We’ve titled it: Embiggen Your Knowledge: How Cromulent Design Could Make The Simpsons Less Funny. Below is the session outline. The plan is to introduce each topic with an associated clip from the show, then talk in terms of, “Now what can we learn from Homer’s [insert disastrous idea here].”

The Simpsons has been on TV for 20 years, longer than many of us have been in the User Experience field. Although yellow and limited to four fingers, The Simpsons have been continuously ahead of their time as it relates to UX, by way of poking fun of it by doing things oh-so-wrong. Discover the lessons that The Simspons have taught us about the dangers of bad design, UX practices, and not standing in the way of a t-shirt cannon. This presentation (with lots of room for discussion) features case studies of some of The Simpsons’ questionable techniques.

And yes, we will watch clips from the show!

10 Questions to be Answered:

1. What can go wrong when you let users design your product? (The Homermobile)
2. Why is it important to establish success criteria before a study? (”Is my brother dumber than a hamster?”)
3. How not to behave when you’re “behind the glass”? (What’s Wrong With Itchy & Scratchy?)
4. Why you should understand the problem before paying for a slick solution? (Monorail!)
5. How can you make customers happy by designing a very specific product. (Leftorium)
6. How can you solve a complex problem with a simple solution? (Inanimate Carbon Rod)
7. Why it’s OK to recognize (and go with) a better design. (Soap Box Racer)
8. Can you re-purpose a niche design/product and make it sell? (Springy the Olympic Mascot)
9. How soon should you show your design? (Dr. Homer’s Miracle Spine-o-Cylinder)
10. When should you build and when should you buy? (CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet)

Since it’s a 45 minute session, we’ll crowdsource the list down to a reasonable size in advance of the event.

I encourage you to go to the Interaction10 site and comment on our proposal, even if you aren’t going to attend our talk or the conference. The more feedback we get, the more likely it will be (I hope) that our talk is accepted.

Fewer dishes to wash. Recyclable as always (though some places won’t take pizza boxes). Easy to use. And I bet as close to 100% intuitive as you can get.

This is good design. Taking an everyday product and task and making it so much better it makes you wonder why it took so long for someone to think of this.

Love it. Would love to talk with the people who designed it. The design process I suspect is simple, but what was the spark; the moment someone said, “You know…”

Below are some tested (as in, I’ve done them) and not tested (as in, I haven’t done them, but I suspect it would work) ideas on how to use Twitter for your own UX needs. But keep in mind Twitter is a community. Well, it is a collection of communities. As such it will take investment on your part to become part of one or more communities before many of these ideas will be useful to you.

Because the one thing each idea depends on is a lot of people seeing your message and some of them caring or having enough free time to respond. It takes time to build that kind of relationship. Unless you’re famous. Then you just snap your fingers. And if you are famous you’re probably not reading this anyway.

Ways to Use Twitter — Tested

Research. This is duh, but I figured I should put it anyway. There’s plenty of pieces about how to use Twitter for your research so I’ll keep this one short. Twitter Search is a great way to find what people are thinking/doing with what you care about most. And you can save searches and trend over time.

I think of this type of research more on the qualitative side. I wouldn’t go so far (unless I had to) as to start categorizing feedback you find via people’s updates, then turning them into stunning pie charts, but at the very least you can get an understanding of some of the problems people run into. That’s one thing Twitter seems to enable: complaining.

Recruiting. I’ve used Twitter a number of times to recruit participants for usability testing. I didn’t keep track, but my guess is my calls for participation were about 50% successful. Which isn’t bad considering all I am doing is typing 140 characters and essentially doing Lazyweb recruiting.

I wouldn’t rely on this 100% for my recruiting needs, but I was very pleased with the people I got. Usually it wasn’t the people who follow me that ended up participating, but people they knew. I suspect if I weren’t looking for a specific profile and was just going with “must have used the internet in the last 10 years” my success rate would have been much higher.

Surveying. Whether you are linking to a survey tool or using hashtags or @s to garner feedback, Twitter is perfect for quick response surveys.

While not necessarily in the vein we are talking about, StrawPoll is a good example of what you can do with Twitter to get feedback from thousands of people. I never went this elaborate, but it wouldn’t be too hard to do.

With Twitter, surveying for quick response is as easy as updating with “[Survey] What process do you go through when deciding if a piece of software is right for your needs? @/DM your responses. RT plz!”

That’s 130 characters and a minute of your time. If you get 5 responses, it’s worth it because you now have 5 people who more than likely (given the open communication nature of Twitter) will be willing to do a follow up interview with you on their feedback.

Design Review. Got a mockup, wireframe, prototype you want quick feedback on? Link it up. Obviously this has to be something you can share with the general public. While this idea is sound and works, it’s probably the least likely thing you’ll use Twitter for. Unless you are getting post-implementation feedback on something that’s publicly accessible.

Remember a few paragraphs ago when I said people love to use Twitter to complain? Sending out a link to a mockup is a sure-fire way to get feedback on all the things that aren’t working in your design. I only did this once pre-launch, but it was for a design that was decidedly on the realign side of things. We were just moving a few things around on a page that was publicly accessible.

Ways to Use Twitter — Not Tested

Diary Study. I had this idea while waiting for the Twitter UX session to start at the BostonUPA MiniCon. Someone sitting behind me asked me a question and we got to talking. I mentioned a couple of the ideas above and then said this one without skipping a beat.

Imagine if you will, and you will dammit, getting people to update on Twitter instead of writing an email or filling out a form online or even writing with pen and paper. Diary Studies can be useful ways to gather data on what people do in the so-called Real World.

In this case though, they update on Twitter. Time and date are built in. The character limit means they have to keep it short, but that also lowers the barrier for doing the task in the first place. “Tried to sign up for a new account. Spent 2 minutes trying to figure out where to go to do it. Grr.” 101 characters, 10 seconds of typing, and they are on their way.

For the study, you follow them. Or they @ you. Or use a hashtag. Or any combination thereof. Probably doing mutual following is the easiest and leaves more characters for feedback. I suspect your participants would need to be on Twitter already for this to be done with little overhead. For participants not on Twitter, you’d have to explain what it is, how to use it, etc. Headache, but doable if needed.

Focus Groups. This is an extension on surveying, but instead of sitting back and waiting for the thousands of responses (yeah right) you keep the conversation going. When a few people respond, you update that they did and include their @ names. Tell people they can follow and join the conversation by using search to see what people are saying; just like you are. Ask questions, see what other people are asking and saying. RT if someone asks a good question you want feedback on.

For the most part, conversations blossom and wither pretty quick on Twitter, but I suspect this would work, especially on a topic that is both broad enough to entice many people, but specific enough to corral the conversation to a particular topic.

Your Mileage Will Vary

Like I said, you need to be invested in Twitter to make these ideas work, but I think it’s worth it. This won’t replace the usual methods for gathering feedback, but I truly feel it’s a great way to get quick responses to design decisions you need guidance on.

I am very interested to hear if you’ve used Twitter for your UX work and how well it went.

Failure is a word that’s overloaded with baggage and I believe it needs to be rebranded.

True Failure can be described closest by borrowing from that wonderfully accurate definition of Insanity: doing the same activity over and over and expecting different results.

Did that design you came up with fail or is it just not optimal? I’m not wearing rose-coloured glasses, a tie-dyed shirt, and flashing a Peace sign when I say that. There’s plenty of famous examples and quotes about failure versus “just didn’t work.” But those aren’t really important if you don’t apply that view to your own work.

Stop punishing yourself for trying something that didn’t work. Stop punishing others as well. If Science never gives us anything (I mean really, what has Science done for you lately?) it gives us a guide.

Hypothesize. Experiment. Review. Adjust. Repeat as necessary.

Sure, this makes you say “Well, duh…” while you are reading this, but in practise I bet you, like me, aren’t so high and mighty. You say, “Well, dumbass… You fucked up again.”

Well stop it. Only punish yourself if your experiments lead you down the road to Insanity. There’s no need to punish if the attempt was unsuccessful. “Unsuccessful” doesn’t have the baggage that Failure carries.

Go be unsuccessful. Do it a lot. Learn from it. Create again. And pay no attention to the Fail Early Fail Often shirt to the right. :)

Above (click the image to embiggen, the image that is. I’m not selling anything here.) please find one info graphic comparison of salsa hotness. See those little chili peppers? They’re telling you something.

We are a two-salsa household. My wife prefers Hot salsa and my daughter and I prefer Medium. We shop at Trader Joe’s (TJs) a lot so it’s easy to grab a jar of Trader Joe’s® Double Roasted Salsa (Medium) and a jar of Trader José’s Hot Chipotle Salsa (Hot, as the name suggests).

Above, the Meduim is on the left and the Hot is on the right. Now, I realise that the graphics used to indicate hotness on each jar are “for illustrative purposes only.” But taking a closer look, as I was wont to do during dinner tonight, you notice that each graphic uses a different scale by which to measure calienteness.

Medium uses 0-7 while Hot uses 0-11. From a scale perspective, their spiciness becomes virtually the same. By taste however, they are not the same. At all. ¡Ai yi yi!

Label Design

While these salsas are not made by TJs, they are made for TJs. As such, and as evidenced by the labels here, TJs has control over how the labels are designed.

Here is an opportunity. You have a category of product (salsa) with different varieties. There is a single identifying characteristic about salsa in which everyone is interested. You have an easily identifiable icon with which to indicate said characteristic.

Why not use a standard graphic?

I am not an aficionado of salsa (or chili peppers), but would the Scoville Scale provide a reference in this case?

Supporting the Decision Making Process

Yes, yes. I am “going off” on salsa label design. But think about all the salsa you’ve ever bought. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Sometimes you’ll get a Medium and it will burn your tongue off. Other times you go for a Hot and get barely a tingle. It isn’t enough to say Mild, Medium, or Hot (I’m looking at you Indian restaurants!).

That might be enough to get the consumer to the right class of salsa, but if there was a 0-12 scale and the graphic neatly identified a Medium as a 6 (compared to a Medium 5 or 7 let’s say) you’d have a better understanding of just how spicy that fancy-pants Corn Pepper Black Bean Relish Salsa was going to be.

There’s a lot going on in a grocery store. Particularly TJs on a Saturday. Designing your labels to support decision making can help your customer. It would ensure your customers are getting exactly what they want. It could also get your customer to branch out a little and buy 2 different Mediums instead of one. “Matthew! Increase sales, you say? ¡Ai yi yi!”

¡Ai yi yi! indeed.

And so, I walked to the restroom and did so. And that’s when I realized what I wanted to write about.

Here Begineth the Rant

… Men… honestly. How can you aim wrong while peeing into a urinal? Are you in that much of a hurry? Do you think you need to stand back 10 feet? I don’t understand …

This is what goes through my mind, more often then I’d like, when I use a public restroom. I become greatly annoyed and I can’t for the life of me figure out how anyone could do it wrong.

Which got me thinking: is this a situation of user error or a flaw in the interaction design?

A Peeing Experience By Design

Let’s think this through… If the Urinal was first patented in 1866 that means there’s been 142 years of opportunity to iterate on the design and the experience. And yet we still see yellowish stains or puddles on the floor in front of most public urinals.

I know, kinda gross but let’s leave our willies at the door on this one. I mean, the heebie-jeebie kind of willies, not… oh never mind. Just accept that all humans pee and it’s a natural thing and there’s something wrong with the way it works in public. I mean public restrooms. In public is another issue altogether.

The urinal is designed such that a man can aim in a limited arc along a horizontal plane. The sides of the urinal wrap some to allow for left or right side aiming to take place, thus limiting the amount of splash-back from the main “face” of the urinal. A protrusion at the bottom helps to catch the stream of “down aimers.”

Ideally, if the man stood within a few inches of the opening of the urinal he should have no trouble urinating without making a mess. At least, that’s the intention of the urinal’s design.

Why No Iteration

A lot can be assumed about the Peeing Experience by experiencing it oneself. One can also easily assess environmental factors. It’s even possible to understand some of the ergonomic hurdles to urinating successfully.

But one of the best ways Interaction Designers figure out what’s wrong with the current state of a design or experience is to observe the practice in its natural setting (contextual inquiry).

But therein lies the problem. Can you imagine the recruitment process?

Hi, I’m a designer currently working on a new interaction paradigm for the excretion of bodily fluid of the wastial variety. I’d like to observe you “doing your business” so to speak from 10:00 to 10:15 this Friday at your workplace.

I’ll watch you urinate and ask you some questions about your experience; about your approach to the urinal, what problems you might have urinating, and what you like most about using a urinal. I’ll also ask you to fill out a short demographic survey (after you wash your hand of course!).

We likely won’t use the entire 15 minutes, but I’ve padded our time just in case you aren’t able to relax enough to make.

Um… no.

More Research Is Needed

This is physical harm problem. I’ve taken a light hand here, but puddles of liquid on a tile floor are often a recipe for disaster and pain. Hence why companies put up “Caution: Wet Floor” signs after one-too-many courtroom appearances.

It’s a public health problem. Many diseases are transmitted via bodily fluids. A good design can help limit the likelihood of transmission, but perhaps it is also about behavior.

It’s a trust issue. You’ve been to restaurants that have messy bathrooms, right? How does that make you feel about the quality of the dining experience? Maybe you don’t think about it consciously at the time, but restroom cleanliness is one of the review factors for health inspections. Dirty restrooms are often an indication of a larger sanitation problem.

Yes, I thought about peeing from a Design perspective and tried to make you think about it too. Hopefully I did that in a non-icky way.

What gross thing/experience have you redesigned recently?

A long time ago, in a state far, far away I used to be a Barista. Of course back then we didn’t call it “Barista.” We called it “working in a café.”

When I first started, we had a real hard-ass manager. Thankfully.

He’d sit out with the customers and watch us work, every once in a while glancing at his stopwatch. I worked in a place that would often do 2000 drinks in a day. I’ll do the math for you. That’s about 2.5 drinks a minute (on average).

When you are producing 2.5 drinks a minute you can’t have any bottlenecks in the process. Here was the set up with 4 people:

Register This was the person who took the drink orders, took the money, and got the regular coffee (non-espresso) drinks.

Shots This person pulled all the espresso shots, syruped up the cups and told the Milk person what was coming down the line.

Milk This person steamed all the milk, did whipped cream, capped the cups, and was the last customer contact in the process so they were also the “have a good day” person.

Barback Very important position. Kept everything stocked, cleaned tables, dealt with bean orders, washed dishes. Made sure they place runs smoothly. Which is everyone’s job, but particularly the Barback.

Every half hour or so we’d all switch one position down the line so we wouldn’t get bored and to just shake things up. We would also randomly spring into dance, singing Hava Nagila, but that’s another story for another time.

“Interesting.” But…?

Here is where Starbucks comes in…

This morning, I stopped by the Starbucks that’s about half-way between my house and work. I was there for almost 15 minutes. All for a quad Americano.

There were 5 workers behind the counter. One on the register, one doing all the drinks, two taking orders and getting backed goods, and one cleaning tables. As I stood there, I channeled that hard-ass manager, looking for the single point of failure. I found several.

There were 6 people waiting for their drinks ahead of me. There were 7 people waiting in line behind me by the time I ordered and by the time I left there were roughly 20 people in the place, none of whom were sitting at the tables.

Earlier this year, Starbucks shut down for a day to retrain everyone. Quality is important, and whether the Training Day worked in the respect is up for debate, but in a café where your primary customer is a grab-and-go, speed is almost more important than quality.

How to Fix it

The café model I learned from is a good one. But there are some specific factors to take into consideration in any redesign. Start with asking good questions.

Environment Such a key factor when designing a physical space. Where do customers enter? Do they exit the same way? How long can the line be before people are waiting outside? Where do people wait for their drinks?

A café is entirely about Flow. When the Flow breaks down, the customers lose confidence. Confidence in quality and in their ability to get to their next stop on time. You have to take the customer’s goals in mind. If you are building a Café where you want people to sit for hours on end, obviously you are going to make different choices, but here we are talking about speed.

Efficiency Where are the bottlenecks? What blocks you from achieving your goals? What do you lose by completely removing those blocks?

Let’s say instead of keeping me there for 15 minutes you want to keep me there for less than 3 minutes. How can you make that happen?

Effect Okay, so I am enjoying some alliteration here… If you are able to answer the previous questions, you need to know how things are changing. You know how many people you get during the morning rush so you need to keep track how that changes based on the changes you make. This is more of a long-term measurement, but one that needs to be looked at daily.

How much time passes from when I enter the building to when I leave? You have to keep track even if that means someone sits in the corner with a stopwatch.

Great. Now I know how to redesign Starbucks. Thanks.

I am only using Starbucks as an example here. When you start to think in terms of “everything is an interface/interaction” you can do a lot to make things better by applying general Design methods and principles. I think talking in terms of concrete example is the best way (for me at least) to get a point across.

Everything gets designed. How well things are designed usually depends on how good your questions are at the beginning.

What did you design/redesign on your way to work today?

Do they wonder how the inhabitants of the buildings they’ve worked on changed the space or if the inhabitants have adapted in negative ways?

Here’s my case in point.

Someone here at work, probably walking up the stairs, likely hit or scraped their shoulder on the post that attaches the glass retainer above the stairwell to the wall. My guess is it has happened more than once and someone got fed up and redesigned the post.

If I were the architect or interior designer (not sure whose shoulders this falls on) of this building and I saw this… I’d feel ashamed. In software terms, this is the equivalent of sticky notes on the monitor, or cheat sheets, or… training! Something that had to be made in order to get the user safely around the poorly designed interface.

Post-Launch Assessment

Design is a cyclical process. At least that’s how I view it. And viewing it that way provides me with more work, which equals more money so you should agree with me. :)

It isn’t enough to design something, test it, build it, then launch. If you plan on maintaining what you launch (or your client does) you need to understand how people interact with and use what you’ve made.

That means giving them a few months to use it, then going out and seeing what they’ve done to make things better. Your findings can lead into the next round of requirements for v2. This is why having someone who is good at interviewing people (interaction designers, HCI people, usability specialists, whathaveyou) involved in all aspects of the design and development cycle.

These are the people you can rely on to tell you about the sticky notes, cheat sheets, and tennis balls.

Artifacts

Some of the workarounds I’ve mentioned are artifacts: physical items that help users deal with their everyday world. You won’t find them with a survey, or a remote usability test, or reading tech support tickets.

You have to step into the user’s world and see how they live. If you are in the biz, this is your Contextual Inquiry or Ethnography. But you don’t need fancy names to make a case for getting out into the user’s domain and talking with them.

Yes, it has a cost and it can be high. But it also has a distinct reward: you never know what people are really going to do with your product until you watch them use it. There could be opportunities abound.

Opportunities not only to fix problems you introduced in your design (for you will introduce problems) but gaps you didn’t know were there in the first place that you can fill with future revs or alternate products.

Consider

The next time you deliver a design to a client, or ship a product from your company consider including a free tennis ball for your customer. They probably won’t understand why, but then again you never know when a tennis ball will be handy to have around.

But I can’t blame my daughter. The fault is entirely mine. I need to design a better sleep experience for myself. The following post may make you think, “Well, duh” and possibly “What does sleep have to do with design and usability?” Both of which are fair. But I think people often take certain things for granted, like sleep, and if you break the process down you might find areas for improvement.

Like any redesign (or realign, if you like), you can’t (or shouldn’t) fix something until you identify precisely what’s broken.

Break It Down

I am going to use me as the template for this, but hopefully you can extract something relative to you.

What’s the goal? Better sleep. Feel more rested. Feel less tired during the day. Stop having nightmares about Vidal Sassoon.

What is happening now? Have trouble going to sleep. Mind is overly active when it’s bed time. Wake up a lot at night. Have trouble getting out of bed when it’s time.

What can you control? Bed time. Wake up time. Room temperature. Pillow type. Mattress type. Before- and after-sleep routines. Exercise.

What can you influence? Sleeping arrangements (alone, dealing with a blanket hog, etc.).

What is out of scope? Killing neighbors who play loud music late at night. Getting prescription medication (at least for now). Entering into Sleep Therapy (for now).

Design Solutions

That’s a good start. It may not be all-inclusive but it’s probably enough to get up and running. Er, I mean, down and sleeping.

Turn off the TV. Turn off the computer There are plenty of studies referencing this. Google it if you don’t believe me. But likely you aren’t surprised by this. The light from monitors, especially modern LCDs, is bright and can trick your brain into thinking it’s “active” time. That and the fact that TV kills your brain.

At least a half-hour before bed, turn off all electronics. Give your brain a chance to finish processing some of the stuff you were watching/doing and start thinking in terms of sleep.

Don’t read. Reading makes your brain work. Much the same with TV or the computer, stop reading at least a half-hour before bed.

Breathe deeply. Take a few deep breaths. “Deep” meaning your stomach pooches out, and you inhale and exhale slowly. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Doing this 5 to 10 times in a row, at any time of the day, will calm your mind and body substantially.

Create a routine. Decide on a time that your bedtime routine will begin. Take into consideration how long you want to sleep and work back from that. If you want to sleep for 6 hours a night, start the process 7 hours before you need to get up. Always do the same things (brush teeth, etc.) in the same order.

When the alarm goes off, get up. Read that last sentence again. Then do it. Seriously. Before I was introduced to the concept of a Snooze Button (thanks for nothing, Claire!) I would get up when the alarm went off.

I realise this sounds tedious, but repetition is a way to learn that most people respond well to, and you are teaching your brain and body to sleep better.

Measure Success

How will you know it’s working or not working? Having a general feeling about your progress is fine, but if things aren’t progressing the way you want you’ll probably want to be measuring daily.

Keep a sleep journal. If you are like me, this sounds like a lame idea. But when I think in terms of being able to measure something, notes over time (trending) can be extremely helpful. Note the time you stopped interacting with electronics. Note if your mind felt active before falling asleep. Note how many time you wake up at night. Etc., etc., etc.

Define your trial period. How long are you going to test your solutions? I’d suggest a month with this one. There are so many factors that are outside our control or influence that can hinder our ability to get good sleep. Stress, weather, sickness… these factors need to be taken into account. You can then adjust for them with your sleep journal to see how well you are making progress.

Iterate. Iterate. Iterate.

You might get lucky and your first month gets you where you want to be. But if your first test doesn’t work out, don’t give up. It just means you found a way that doesn’t work and need to adjust something to get you pointed in the right direction.

If you are going to spend roughly one-third of your life doing something, you might as well try to do it as good as possible.