eri on the interweb » User Experience

UX Studies: An Interview with Philipp von Kiparski

Erietta Sapounakis — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 03:41:10 +0000

Philipp von Kiparski has a Bachelor of Arts in Information Design from the Stuttgart Media University, Germany. His degree was based out of the Faculty of Information and Communication. Philipp has just completed his second internship as an Experience Architect here in Australia, at Different. I thought it would be appropriate to kick off this interview series with a recent graduate of a course focussed on user centred design. This interview was recorded on 28 January 2010.

Erietta: Tell me about your current role and your areas of expertise?

Philipp: Theoretically I’m an Experience Architect and a junior version of that I guess and I think what my areas of expertise … mostly comprise of are user research … the gathering of the data and how to structure this gathering cause there’s actually quite a lot of theory involved in how to gather info for which kind of results you look for. For example a very experimental approach compared to reviewing a product that already exists; you have to adjust your techniques each time and of course you also have to adjust the guys you are actually interviewing.

Of course [there's] the whole process of actually getting something out of this collected data—the task modelling as a more interaction focussed method of getting information out of it or the affinity diagramming which is more of a qualitative basis that gets you more into these patterns that really help you to image people or the average people actually [using] this, and the expectations they have and how they perceive the product.

The next step which I’m familiar with but not as practised in is actually transferring all these collected data into a reconstruction of a product or the entire concepting of a new structure which basically is wireframing and interaction design and all that sort of stuff.

I’ve learned about, in school actually, quite a few different approaches than now I’ve been getting exposed to at Different. I learned a design approach from Rosson and Carroll which is called scenario based design. They have a really interesting approach of slowly iterating a scenario. Just one story and you stick with that story and slowly expand on it …

The actual concepting I haven’t had much exposure to that, at least in the internships. Paper prototyping … to get your first research findings confirmed, whether they actually work, whether you got the idea of the product right. I did a video prototype actually for a project in school that was a head up display for a car and I designed a video simulation for that which was a lot of fun and the testing for that went incredibly well. The participants were really able to imagine they were actually sitting in the car and that was very interesting. That’s as far as I get cause I’ve never been included in the implementation. That was the border so to speak … I don’t know what it comes down to when people start coding it, the problems that can arise there.

eri: You’ve talked about a couple of internships, is this your start with your professional UX career?

Philipp: I guess you could say that. The first intership was a mandatory part of my studies. In the fifth semester … you have to do a 6 month internship in some kind of company that can make use of this particular set of expertise and abilities … I reckon this would be my first professional experience apart from the fact that I didn’t get paid.

Both: laugh

Philipp: I don’t know whether it counts professionally, but whatever. This was my first real exposure because interestingly my first internship was on the client side … at Bosch. They were all internal projects, and it was just a totally different atmosphere because they had time, and money and room to discuss. It was also much harder because within a company you always have the marketing department as being kinda the king … This makes it incredibly hard to actually get something through or get something passed them … Its also much more stiff and conservative atmosphere as compared to a consultancy which my second internship now was in which was a lot more flexible, more time pressure with less money and budget to do things. Always working against constraints and with what the client wants and all this stuff so its really interesting to see both sides.

eri: So tell me about the course that you did study and the qualifications gained in that course?

Philipp: The course was officially called Information Design and I think the priorities of this course were psychology: the psychology of information acquisition, the psychology of memory, the psychology of how humans try to understand things. Mental modelling is a big topic there for example. The other part was design. I’d say psychology was 40%, design was 40% and 20% was technical stuff like databases and coding and HTML and PHP and all that stuff. But that really got neglected which many were not really satisfied with because they were [planning] to get web design [skills] so they really needed PHP and HTML expertise. They were a bit disappointed but I wasn’t since I didn’t like it anyway.

The design stuff, we had real drawing courses as well as interaction design courses, interface design. We had web design courses … just those very specific things you need to know when designing an interface, like the fold, the order of items a viewer looks at first and how do you guide them with these tricks for navigation and all that sorta stuff … we also had tiny courses on business regulation and business law which was very cool to know so you have a basic knowledge of what you can call your own without anyone copying it. Just so you can have a basic understanding of … copyright … they also had library management and lots of economy information design.

eri: What were your favourite subjects in the course?

Philipp: Psychology. All of the different psychology courses.

eri: How much hands on experience did you get with research? How theoretical was it? How practical was it?

Philipp: Something that was really cool with my particular course of study was that it was heavily practical. From the third semester onward all our courses were solely project based so we always had company partners like Neckermann (a big e-commerce company), like Bosch, Porsche. We worked with all kinds of companies … so all our projects were maybe a watered down version of real projects but they actually were real projects. We were for example, analysing the web shop of Neckermann and were doing usability testing with them, with real participants. As far as I can remember each of those psychology courses always had a practical part were we actually did a survey or a usability test or online survey so we always had this exposure to practical stuff. I can’t remember a single course that was theory only.

eri: What subjects or skills do you think are most relevant to a user experience role and why?

Philipp: First and foremost I think you need to be really strong in your analytic skill. Without ever having heard about a thing before you need to be able to approach something, view it from all possible angles, see through it, see what’s behind the first layer, what it is comprised of , how it works, innately how it is related to other things …. having like X-ray glasses for everything. That not only helps you to understand the products you’re designing or redesigning, it also helps you to understand the people that are talking about it. That’s probably the second important thing to be really good at analysing the people side of things and be able to drill that down to their initial motivation to say something without leading them to say something that they wouldn’t have if you hadn’t asked that in a particular way.

eri: What do you wish you had been taught?

Philipp: All the crazy client management stuff. Because of course when you are learning everything in theory you always think of the best case, and if everything goes well, if you had enough time and money. But the practicality of the daily user experience professional is so much harder cause you constantly need to justify yourself, your methods and explain to everybody what you are and who you are and just defend your methods really. Of course if you’re dealing with clients they usually wouldn’t know anything about user research or usability engineering so you have to explain it to them as well and make them feel like it is something desirable so they’re actually buying [into] it and you need to guide them along the process and show them ‘these are the steps and you will get this deliverable and you will take part in this procedure to contribute to it’.

eri: What UX skills cannot be taught?

Philipp: … being analytical. What’s connected to that is making things easier. As Leonardo da Vinci said simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Its not easy to make something simple. Just because you understand something doesn’t mean that you’re able to make it simple for anyone. There’s actually a lot of effort, a lot of thinking, a lot of creativity involved in making something very complex so easy that everyone can understand. Its both something that you have to have an innate talent for, being good at explaining as a basic skill, and you need a lot of practice and knowledge.

eri: So I’m going to throw in a bonus question, you’ve just completed this internship, what sort of job are you going to look for now?

Philipp: This particular set of activities that the Experience Architect here [at Different] has, everything from the user research, up to the very point where it goes to implementation, so its research and concepting … I’m not sure whether this is a common set of skills that a job role would include in Germany … they either have only researchers … or a designer that really does everything; that is able to do the user research, the concepting and the implementation as well. I’ll probably end up in a research company … The usability testing, the research, coming up with personas and all that stuff is actually something that I enjoy most. I’m not enjoying sitting in front of the coding software and doing the actual implementation. Its just boring and tedious. I feel like a machine when I do that.

eri: well good luck in your next steps, and thank you very much for the interview.

Philipp: No worries, my pleasure.

UX Studies: Interview Series Introduction

Erietta Sapounakis — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:15:53 +0000

The aim of the interview series UX Studies, is to look at and discuss the education paths people have taken to skill up for their career in the user experience field.

The idea for the series came about after friends, looking to change career focus, asked me about what they should study. Unfortunately for them, I am not the best person to ask, because, like some in the industry, I have no directly related formal qualifications.

I think it’s important that the disciplines, skills and theory behind user experience be clearly articulated for those looking to enter the field and for those, like me, already in the field looking to expand their knowledge base.

I hope too, that the professionals that cross paths with UX practioners such as developers and business analysts come across this series and find it of some use.

Interviews will be based on the following questions:

Tell me about your current role and your areas of expertise?
What course/s have you studied? What are your qualifications?
What were your favourite subjects in the course?
How much hands on experience did you get with research?
What subjects or skills do you think are most relevant to a user experience role and why?
What do you wish you had been taught?
What UX skills cannot be taught?
and there will be a bonus question tailored to each willing participant.

Information Architecture for Information Overload

Erietta Sapounakis — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:25:43 +0000

Climate change, Copenhagen, Emission Trading Schemes, K Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull … it all gets a bit much sometimes. I don’t know about you, but the media landscape on this topic overwhelms me. So I am going to dedicate some time to reading Climate Debate Daily. It is information architecture for information overload.

The site visually presents for and against articles on climate change topics in a two column view. The simple layout device invites people to read both sides of the argument and make up their own mind. The site is deliberate in aggregating well thought out articles as an alternative to the sloganeering and rhetoric that mainstream news and politicians of whichever persuasion barrage us with.

A transcript of an interview with editor and founder of Climate Debate Daily, Denis Dutton is available on the ABC Radio National Counterpoint website: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2009/2483590.htm.

Tag Soup

Erietta Sapounakis — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 05:24:46 +0000

tag cloud generated by wordle for my abandoned delicious account

Yesterday I discovered a great online tool, or thought I had. Coming across the site I went to add it to my Delicious bookmarks—but I had already added the site in 2006!

My first attempt at Delicious (illustrated above in a wordle cloud) slowly and surely got out of control. My tagging was too granular, too specific. The tag lists became meaningless with too many tags listing only one or two sites. This is not how I wanted Delicious to work for me. So I started again. My new tagging strategy was to keep the tags as generic as possible. Now I actually refer to my bookmarks a lot more. My tags are really lists; directories of interests, resources, inspirations, a shopping wish list, and of course my reading list.

tag cloud generated by wordle for my Delicious links

I come across so many blogs where the authors litter their posts with tags. Its keyword spam to me and often a misrepresentation of the blog post (or image, or video) because the tags don’t represent the content equally. A passing mention to something becomes equivalent to the main theme of the post in the tags. This is not to say that tags shouldn’t be used, but if the ultimate aim is to offer a navigation device to related content they should be used carefully.

webDU 2009 — Year of the Prototype

Erietta Sapounakis — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 05:00:02 +0000

webDU logo

May 21 and 22 was the 7th webDU and my 3rd as part of the Daemon team who organise the event. WebDU is a technology conference, primarily but not solely, focused on developers. Amongst all the code and whiz bang-ery this year was an entire track dedicated to the consulting and planning side of projects: Team/UX (user experience). The room was packed for the whole two days.

As a non developer, the theme I took away from webDU 2009 was prototyping. Delivering prototypes be it a wireframe or design, that are closer to the final web page or web application.

Both Adobe and Microsoft debuted products at webDU. Steven Heintz of Adobe talked up the re-branded Flash Catalyst. Anyone familiar with the Creative Suite can now deliver interactive wireframes and designs to developers. As Steven put it in the keynote Flash Calatyst seeks to “make interaction more of a design experience“.

Shane Morris of Microsoft switched off the microphones (the recording) at the end of his talk, for the Australian debut of Sketchflow; which is all my dreams come true. It’s Visio on steroids and is more of a drawing tool where interactive elements can be produced easily. Not only does Sketchflow provide stencils for re-usable elements like controls and buttons but it lets you use and repurpose data, for instance creating different views. Information can be exported by developers for use as their sample data.

It was interesting to me that Adobe and Microsoft were both on such similar tracks. Both products get the prototype looking more like the design and both the wireframe and design behaving and functioning more like the application. Or as Steven Heintz put it “build[ing] high fidelity earlier in the process and bridging the gap between designers and developers“.

It wasn’t all new product releases though. Richard Turner Jones showed us how to use Fireworks for prototyping. He used it as a hybrid Visio/Photoshop tool. I love seeing how other people work. Richard went from sketch to wireframe, to design, to interactive prototype in an hour. He shared lots of tips and tricks. I had long forgotten Fireworks but Richard’s demo of the Pages utility in Fireworks to walk a client through each stage of the design process was compelling.

Simon Reid bought it back to the user defining user experience as a wholistic change to workflow not a redesign. He took us through his four pillars of user experience in his session “Pixel Envy: The Digital Art of Pencil and Paper” emphasizing that aesthetics should be the last step to avoid mimicry. He then spelled out his seven step design process which included people watching (contextual research) and persona development. My biggest take away from this session will be incorporating a process map to illustrate what a user is thinking at each step and not just drawing application workflows.

Since I am part of the organising team I wont speak to the atmosphere or awesomeness of the conference. I am clearly biased ;-) So I will instead leave you with the following reviews to check out more details of the event from impartial third parties.