15 years ago, Dave Gray founded XPLANE, a visual communications company that has been pumping out beautiful graphical explanations for all sorts of clients, products and services ever since.

His presentation at CanUX kept up the theme of drawing and sketching, but flipped the emphasis: while the other presentations were about communicating design ideas visually, this one was about designing visual ideas for communication. In other words, it was about designing for visual literacy.

Dave’s passion is for explaining complicated stuff in ways that leverage perception, invite collaboration, and spark the imagination. He suggested that although people can generally “read” visual artifacts, most cannot “write.” After a brief primer on the visual alphabet (check out symbols.com for more info), he took the group through a few exercises developed at XPLANE for stoking creative process. The basic premise was that everyone can learn how to draw.

What’s next for Dave Gray? We chatted a bit about his desire to advocate for visual literacy in academic and professional communities. Pretty cool stuff. Check out these links here and here for a sense of where he’s going with this stuff.
 
The idea of visual literacy is one that I’ve been really keen to explore over the last couple years—first from an applied linguistics perspective at school, then from a practitioners perspective as an illustrator and now an interaction designer. It’s a really interesting topic, and I’d highly recommend the book Reading Images as a great starting point for anyone interested.

You can also check out a paper and presentation I gave on the topic of vis lit and web-based graphic design back in grad school…sort of geeky though, so be forewarned!

Last year, when Brandon essayed about Sketchboards on the Adaptive Path blog, Derek and I became instant fans.  Since then we’ve played around with variations of the method at T+L—sort of hedging it with our existing process—so I was really looking forward to this session.

First we talked about the sketch part in 2 stages:

1. Exploratory sketches: quickly saturate the design space by generating a number of rough options. Use word-play, inspiration libraries (hurry-up, imgspark!), conceptual models to drive this process.
2. Refinement sketches: take the most promising ideas and add a more detail and weighting through different types of marks, labeling, etc.

 
Then we talked about the board part:

1. Get a large sheet of paper or whatever you’re going to use to lay things out on and give it some structure: for example, use stages in a user flow.
2. Add referential inputs like personas, scenarios, requirements, design criteria, inspiration, etc.
3. Lay-out sketches, review, annotate, iterate and decide what you’re going to prioritize in wireframes.

A few personal reactions:

• Although things can go at a fairly fast pace, you’re definitely trading scope for time.  Brandon proposed a 5 day sprint that would maybe output 3 or 4 wireframe-able templates.
• I was impressed with how natural and intuitive the whole process felt. Sketching happens on an informal basis anyway—this just put’s some structure around it and invites dialog.
• The main thing I love about Sketchboards is that they encourage and facilitate conceptual externalization. They force you to get your ideas out and onto the page, making them tangible, accessible to all and amenable to critique (before you fall in love with them!).

I’m going to forego summarizing this one, since for me the topic of sketching was developed more fully in the next couple of sessions. (I’m probably biased though, because those sessions applied more directly to our specific practice at T+L.)

Not that I didn’t enjoy the presentation. Jerome was probably the most entertaining speaker at the conference, all things being equal, and a few CanUX buddies and I enjoyed a great follow-up chat with him over dinner.

One thing that Jerome mentioned at the outset got me thinking introspectively. He talked about how people who express different “cognitive preferences” are important to creative process: generators, conceptualizers, optimizers and implementors.

This sort of hit home because, well, I think I’m sort of important to creative processes every once in a while…so which one am I? What’s probably most important, and definitely most humbling here is that the answer probably isn’t: d) all of the above. Probably can’t be.

There’s this sort of epic (for interaction designers, at least) 60 Minutes episode where they profiled IDEO back in 1999. Towards the end, one of the folks being interviewed throws out this aphorism that’s stuck with me: something like “enlightened trial and error triumphs over the wisdom of the lone genius.” It’s a blatantly obvious insight, but easy to forget when the pencil hits the page.

Jerome and others at CanUX08 reminded me that the best design emerges out of humble collaboration.

By the way, noticed that Mack Male put up CanUX resources for those who’re interested here.

Swimlanes is an early-process documentation method created by Yvone Shek and the folks at nForm.  As the image above demonstrates (here’s a closer look), multiple perspectives on a given use-case or design scenario are laid out in separate tracks, or “swim-lanes.” The idea is to capture and visualize implications of high-level requirements over time and in a parallel fashion. 

This is good because multiple stakeholders (business people, designers, project mangers, technologists) can see and give feedback on what they need to make happen/accomodate to, leading to a potentially more balanced and inclusive discussion.

To my mind, the key challenge here is making such a sophistic and integrated document like this flexible and agile. (We talked about the speed factor a lot, but I’m more concerned about the rigidity factor.) For more details on Swimlanes, check out Yvone’s original post here.

Next up: Five Sketches, Or Else! design process

Photo credit: mastermaq

Here’s a quick update for day 1 of CanUX 2008, Banff Alberta.

Luke Wroblewski kicked things off with what turned out to be a lively discussion of web form design—no small feat considering it was 9 in the morning! His talk covered some of the topics in his new book, so no need to get into the nuts and bolts here. A few things that stuck out:

• Web forms are this lynchpin in interaction design, but often don’t get the respect they deserve. And there’s really no excuse: there are a lot of evidence-based best practices to draw on.
• “Inside-out thinking”: Luke referenced this concept several times, and I think it pretty succinctly and accurately describes the mindset that drives a lot of bad design. Inside-out thinking happens when we stop empathizing with the user… 
• Beyond the form: before they can experience any functionality, most web apps force users to complete lengthy registration processes and whatnot. Drawing on sites like Geni for inspiration, Luke talked about integrating and embedding this stuff into a few lightweight, constructive actions that allow users to understand and feel accomplished in the site from the get-go.

Next up: Swim Lanes, a cool method for visually documenting design inspiration and requirements all at once.

Photo credit: mastermaq