Not that I knew it at the time, but going into User Experience turned out to be a great career move. I’ve always thought there would be job security with the number of new technologies and devices that will need designing – think of everything that will have a “screen” in the future. Who’s designing for these screens? Who’s creating the interactions, workflows, graphics? That would be us!

I often use an example of an interactive cereal box. What other aisle in the grocery store tries to communicate with you more! Let’s mix up a couple new technologies – like e-paper, RFID, and wireless power – and you have a talking, interactive cereal box. “Thanks for choosing Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, did you know we’re the #1 cereal for vitamin A?”, “Touch here to learn more”. We’re all set for years!

One of my first jobs was at an Ad Agency that had been around since the 1970’s and at one time had 70+ people working for it. WIth production conveniences, like desktop publishing, digital photography, etc… the number of people needed had been cut over the years. You didn’t need someone to run to the photo studio to check out the day’s photo shoot. You didn’t need multiple people hand setting an ad, etc…

I wonder if these jobs are now starting to come back. Not the same jobs obviously, but the number of jobs in the Design space. Where everything is getting an interface of some kind. Phones are more advanced, kiosks are more prevalent, having a screen is cheaper than having actual hardware buttons in some cases, and with that there is more work today for User Experience professionals then there has been in a long time.

UPA just released the 2009 salary survey – and the average salary of a UX professional is $85k, and it’s steadily climbing. These are people doing things like user research, heuristic reviews, interaction design, creating prototypes, usability testing, etc… There are many things that go into today’s interfaces. It’s not just a developer adding some fields and buttons on a screen anymore. People are taking User Experience seriously – and that means following the processes, doing the leg work, and going further than we’ve gone in the past.

Speaking of jobs ;-) – the company I work for currently has nine open UX related positions right now. And that says a lot, they’ve been very conservative about hiring in this economic climate, but they understand the need for User Experience across our organization.

If you’re interesting in working with me, or at the $largecompany I work for – let me know, here’s what they currently have posted:

User Experience Designer / Information Architect
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Aug 28, 2009-Job Number 0071X
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130840

User Experience Developer / Front-End Developer
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Aug 28, 2009-Job Number 0071Z
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130841

Web Design Team Lead
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Sep 2, 2009-Job Number 0072M
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=131240

Principal GUI Developer
United States
Job Posting:Sep 2, 2009-Job Number 0072I
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=131180

Application Designer (User Experience)- Team Lead
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Aug 28, 2009-Job Number 006VD
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=127080

Senior IA
United Kingdom
Job Posting:Sep 1, 2009-Job Number 0071F
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130560

Senior UI Developer
United States
Job Posting:Aug 25, 2009-Job Number 0071Q
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130740

Web Design Senior – Senior
GB-England-London
Job Posting:Aug 24, 2009-Job Number 006P6
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=123120

Web Developer
US-MD-Bethesda
Job Posting:Aug 5, 2009-Job Number 006J1
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=119000

And if my company isn’t for you, check out my older post on “Hiring on the Fringe” where you can find a list of sites that post UX type jobs.

(Above infographic by: http://www.good.is/)

Last week me and Stephen Thomas presented to our company’s UXC Luncheon. This is a quarterly event open to all the different User Experience groups in the company. Our topic was upcoming trends in Design and technology. This is actually the fifth time I’ve presented a presentation like this one, starting back in 2005. While some trends are still developing, there are some new and interesting things that will shape the years to come.

This year we hit on 23 different topics – ranging from the less practical interactive holograms, to something we’re enjoying today – location based gaming.

Due to the nature of many of these new technologies, we included a lot of videos this year – I tried to include a link to most of them.

So here it is – 2010 and Beyond:

Some notes – one of the biggest trends which I missed until this year was Augmented Reality and all it’s many flavors. This seemed to be one of the biggest trends coming in the next year. Once Apple releases it’s 3.1 update for the iPhone we should see a flood of these types of apps hit the app store, and quickly gain wide adoption.

Some topics like the command line, twitter, and location were back with updates for 2009. And although RFID has been around for a while, this is the first time the phrase “Internet of Things” appeared in my presentations.

We had a longer list then the 23 we got to – this took us about 1 1/2 hours to get through – we’ll save those for next time!

Please comment if you feel we left something out – or thought something shouldn’t have been included. See you next time!

Ever since 2007 Twitter has been the buzz. But why? Great company? Innovative technology? No, I think it’s because they didn’t really invent a new technology, they invented a new communication method. One that’s becoming as standard as using a phone, or a replacement to email. Twitter has the promise to be the next chapter in ways humans communicate. Twitter is the internet at its full potential.

Around 1996 I was working at a Barnes & Nobles while going to school. I was stationed in the software/computer part of the store, and every so often our community director would bring in someone on a given topic to present.

With the internet being pretty new, she got someone to come in to talk about the internet. Again this was 1996. I can’t remember who she got, at the time I thought he was way too technical – but now, I think he was from the future.

During his presentation to a group of about 10 or so customers, he described how the internet works, drawing a large cloud (and calling it that) on a whiteboard, showing connected computers. This is my fist piece of evidence he was from the future, basically describing cloud computing ;-)

What I really remember from this talk in 1996 is the question and answer session at the end where someone asked “where do I go to find something on the internet?”. This was before Google, so the common answer would be something like Altavista, or Yahoo – but this traveler from the future said “You just post a question to the community and you’ll get an answer” – “what a idiot” I thought. Now, I’ll concede that he was really talking about usernet groups at the time, but today you’d hear that same answer from many of our most influential speakers.

I know it’s pretty much what I do today, I’ll DM someone, post a question, or search twitter to see how the community is handling a given topic. I have twitter results injected in my Google results via Grease Monkey – and often find the realtime results more valuable.

Twitter is the internet. It’s a communication medium like no other. It’s what I believe the internet was intended to be. A collective social “thing” that allows us to harness humanity (a triumph really). When the internet, er twitter went down last month it was a big deal, as big as if AT&T went down (or when AT&T was down at SXSW this year, twitter was a alternative way to communicate).

I was on a twitter panel at work a while back (with a PACKED audience), and the question of “can twitter go out of fashion” came up. In my opinion, it can’t because it’s the internet. It’s not a place that can get old (like MySpace), it’s a communication medium. I guess it could go out of fashion like the pager, but only when a better form of communication emerges, not JUST a better pager.

The internet is a collection of objects (not tubes): text, video, audio, etc… today we find many of those objects through a system (Google), but in the near future can Google keep up with millions of people? Can Google index, and rank faster than an international community of millions?

How is twitter going to evolve? I think it will become a shared non-corporate communication medium. I’m hoping someone (Google) buys it and makes it free, portable, and reliable. It’s a snapshot of humanity, a moment in time where we can look back and see the biggest thing on this date is: Google Voice, Harry Potter, and #bringbackrachelle. Unlike past communication mediums, it’s public, and easily recordable for all time. Think if twitter was around when JFK was shot, instant recordable international reaction for all time.

How about when all the OpenID/Social Connect/Facebook Connect/OAuth gets settled, you can login via any number of tools, and then communicate on a single platform. Or maybe it’s multiple platforms that are all connected – where a Plurk and a twit will show up just as if they were from the same source.

Twitter is a new form of communication that has never really existed before, a critical mass of shared information – building on it’s predecessors: roads, telegraph, telephone, pagers, email, texting, and now twitter. This is only possible at this point and time with the technology we have today, this is the potential of the internet.

Big (D)esign has come and gone. I was fortunate to be part of the planning team that put this successful (yes, I can now call it that now ;-) conference. Over the past months, I was able to see behind the scenes of the conference: event planning, sponsorship, contacting speakers, scheduling, logistics – and got to play a part in many of these activities. It was great to see people from UPA, Dallas Refresh, and IxDA (among others) come together to put this together – that and the 500+ people who ended up attending!

In the past Dallas had been home to a couple of User Experience conference, we’ve had Wemaster Jam, Design Thinking, and Forrester had a Customer Experience Forum here last year. But none of these were happening in 2009. While Dallas may not have any UX focused conferences, we have an abundance of local clubs. I really mean abundance… Depending on what you’re interested in, you could literally go to a meeting about every night.

Dallas Refresh, UPA, IxDA, DSVC, AIGA, Adobe, Microsoft, Java, Ruby, Facebook Dev Garage, Mobile Monday, iPhone Dev, Social Media Club, the list could go on and on. That’s not counting special community events, like DevHouse, HackDay, BarCamp, etc…

Dallas really does have a really good, supportive community of Designers, Developers, Usability Professionals, and many others in User Experience related fields.

If you missed Big (D)esign, here’s a quick video I put together to learn a little more:

Big (D)esign 2009 from Jeremy Johnson on Vimeo.

And of course we had an afterparty ;-)

Big (D)esign After Party from Jeremy Johnson on Vimeo.

If you want even more! Here are some photo galleries on Flickr:

• My photos
• T. Scott’s sketching
• Carissa’s photos

I hope if you’re in the Dallas area, that you join in and become part of the community, join a club, attend a meeting, volunteer, share your knowledge, and continue to watch our community grow!

User Experience Groups within a large organization are all a little different. We have multiple UX groups here were I work, and I’ve either read about or talked to people from a wide assortment of large companies. This has the disadvantage of diluting the idea of a UX Group to the outside world. What do you do? How do you work? What tasks does your group perform? To help everyone understand In-house UX Groups better, I’ve broken down the 7 areas of focus – where I see every group having varying degrees of commonality.

First, what determines the make up of your group? In my opinion these are some of the factors that determine what kind of group you have:

• Why was the group originally created? What problems were they addressing?
• How high up is a true User Experience advocate in the org chart?
• How many people are in your group?
• Are you under Technology, Marketing, or are you your own “pillar” of the company?
• How long has your group been around?

In my case we’re: not high up in the org chart, very small, NOT our own pillar, and are relativity new.

This makes my 7 areas of focus different from others. So let’s talk about the different areas:

Consulting:
Spread yourself across multiple projects. Help get everything going, check in at defined intervals. Also fight fires as they arise.

This is where my group spends a large portion of its time. We’re small, and have a large development group that needs direction and help ASAP! We help set direction, create wireframes, etc… We check in and continue to consult as the project moves on. We try to make sure the development team is following our direction, and help them when they go astray ;-)

Innovation:
Prototype, design, explore new ideas and workflows. Ideas that do not exist today, and are not typically on any product plan. Iterate and improve those ideas.

While I’d say this is the most fun, and really what I believe most UX professionals would like to do, you need to be in a special place to solely focus on innovation. With our groups positioning, we don’t have the time, money, or pull to explore, to prototype “unfunded” ideas. Although, innovation can be defined in many different ways, and we do insert things I would describe as innovative into our daily consulting work, but as a group this is not our current focus.

Governance:
Produce materials that will govern UX across the organization. This includes Style Guides, Design Patterns, and Personas.

With our high developer to designer ratio we do spend a good amount of time trying to setup a governance process that works for our extended group. To me the three main areas (which I mentioned above) are: Style Guides, Design Patterns, and Personas. This helps a developer know what “widget” to use in a specific case, how it should look, and what are the needs of the person using it. Not very exciting ;-)

Evangelizing:
Spread the benefits and ideas of User Experience to the different areas of the organization. Present and socialize ideas and concepts that tell the story of “why UX matters” and why organizations should focus on it’s users needs.

This has been a passion of mine, and it fit’s right in with our new group. I have a entire group of developers, BDAs, and PMs who have not been exposed to UX and what UX means for them. As you’ve maybe seen on this blog, I really enjoy getting people interested in User Centered Design, new technologies, and modern interaction patterns. This could of been called “education” – educating co-workers on Usability, UX, UCD, etc…

Research & Discovery:
This helps you to really get to “know” your users, using Design Research methods. This can help create insights that can feed new products, features, and ideas.

This I have little experience with. Some UX groups have Design Research specialists that get them the data needed to do their jobs. They go out and shadow users, watch for patterns, and help make sure we’re designing the right things for the right people. They are the front-lines to our users.

Facilitating:
Facilitate workshops, using UX tools and practices like Design Studio sessions to bring collaboration to the Design process.

I’ve never seen a group of people hate meetings so much, but can never get enough workshops :-) This is a big topic in the UX community – what tools to use, what methods, what kind of workshops, etc… I’ve facilitated a couple of these here, and I do agree, it helps to: get things done, create alignment, saturate the design space, and produce usable materials that feed the design process.

Arbitration:
Bridging together different parts of the organization, using user data to help make decisions regarding product design and development.

Occasionally we’re brought in when multiple people or groups have conflicting ideas on how a feature should be implemented, or how a interaction should work. We provide two things that others can not 1) what the users would want, and 2) what are the “standard” practices. Remember we’re the voice of the people using the products that are being built.

Marketing:
The “8th” area… I don’t really think this should be a focus for a UX Group, but I’ve seen it happen, so here it is. Using the UX Design resources to create presentations, “slideware” targeted at customers, and other tasks better suited to a Creative Marketing or Corporate Communication Group.

While User Experience Professionals typically have the skills to fill these needs, more often you’re not really doing anything for the user. You’re positioning materials for customers, PR, and internal stakeholders.

Now if your materials come from a true User Center Design process, or through innovation – then yes, you should work with Marketing to communicate these successful ideas. Use this communication to get funding, alignment, even “innovation capital” (like the recent Microsoft 2019 spot) for you customers.

Here’s where my current’s groups focus is (view larger PDF):

(Here’s the Keynote if your interested in making your own…)

Good? Bad? I don’t know. I’m not sure if there is a gold standard for UX Groups and what they should be doing – it really seems like you need to be the right UX Group for your part of an organization.

…or to be the UX Group they need, not the UX Group they want (bad Batman reference ;-)

What does your UX group look like?

I personally think prototyping is the way to go when creating a new software product (or any product really). You get to “blueprint” out how something is going to work, how the pieces fit together, and how it will really work once launched. I think most people are sold on the concept, so it’s a matter of how to build this close-to-real product that you can test with your user base. Do you use paper? Mock-ups? Tools like iRise and Axure, or get real and build a non-functioning ready to reuse front-end?

The first step is defining what you’re going to use this prototype for. Is it to drum out business requirements? Demo to clients before they write the big check? Or get something as close as possible to the real thing, so you can start the User Centered Design process and test your ideas on actual people that will be using your product.

Obviously I enjoy prototyping for the latter, getting real feedback that our team’s ideas were dead on, or widely off-base (never!). To do this, you really want to build the prototype in the technology you’re going to create the finished product in (usually HTML or Flex for web based software). This solves two problems: one, this truly is as close to the real thing as you can get. By using the actual UI technology you’ll be creating the final product in, you’ll know what can and can’t be done, users will get a real feeling for the responsiveness, animations, and interactions. It’s real, sans the months of backend development needed to power this prototype. And two, you can pass this finished front-end code off to the development team, taking pressure off backend developers who may not be well versed in front-end development.

Microsoft when working on Office 2007 did this very thing:

“if you’re trying to build a prototype that you want use as a blueprint, it should exist in the same medium as the final product.”

In the past when I’ve run prototyping projects, the teams usually consist of just one designer/IA, one developer, and a small amount of a backend developers time (to get some fake system data up and running). Depending on the maturity of your front-end development group, you may have sets of UI widgets and code ready to go, this will help speed up the overall process.

Dave Cronin from Cooper recently wrote an article titled “Industry trends in prototyping” – which I agree with about everything in the article – he lists out four reasons for creating prototypes: prototypes make your designs better, help facilitate communication, enable user input and usability assessment, and help assess technical feasibility and reduce development time. He’s also a fan of creating “real” prototypes where it makes sense.

I love this comment from Philip Fierlinger:

Prototypes, on the other hand, let people feel the flow and experience the relationships. Building prototypes allows architects and interaction designers to quickly identify broken pathways and iterate quickly to find better flows – by feeling the experience, rather than thinking about it in the abstract. Developers, designers and clients also get a much more tangible sense of what the end product will be.

Again, I can’t stress enough how a “real” prototype will give you the best feedback for the effort. We’ve also used these prototypes to help sell ideas to business groups. Imagine trying to sell an idea for a mobile app by letting your VP access it directly on their phone. This will beat out any PowerPoint presentation.

Garrett wrote on this topic years ago, and the technology is now easier to use than ever before. There are frameworks, open source systems, and reusable icon sets ready to be molded into your own prototype.

Using wireframes or paper for low-fedility prototyping is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe your just testing internally, or you’re limited with your technology skills. There are discussions about what fidelity wireframes should be (both form and function). There are many tools at your disposal for creating wireframes and prototypes, and they’ve really just recently gotten easy to use. No longer are you stuck with Visio – here’s a list of some tools, ranging from very expensive to free with varying sets of features:

• Axure
• Pencil Project
• Balsamiq Mockups
• Adobe Flash Catalyst
• iRise
• OmniGraffle
• Lovely Charts
• Rapidrabb.it
• iplotz.com
• Prototype Composer
• fluidIA
• WireframeSketcher
• MockupScreens

Boxes and Arrows has an article from 2006 written by Scott McDowell, that goes over some of these options, but what’s really interesting are the comments below the article where designers talk from real world experience. And Russell Wilson from Dexo Design compares 16 prototyping tools (2008) and again, the comments are interesting.

I tend to use wireframes to quickly get across ideas and interactions. Something that could possibly be thrown away, or will be changed a number of times. Once the idea seems to stick, I move to high fidelity mock-ups, sometimes merging the mock-ups together in a slide-by-slide presentation showing the page flow with faked interactions.

GUUUI posted some links to videos showing lo-fidelity prototypes in action. Again, this can work to help guide overall concepts, but to get true feedback – you really need to have a higher level of fidelity.

If you’re in a good situation where you’re ahead of the product timeline, prototyping is your next step. Just like how a architect moves to a model, build out your prototype and test, iterate, improve, and in the end launch a successful product!

(additions)
Great post over at Adaptive Path: Rapid Prototyping Tools

Last month I gave a talk here at our Customer Experience University about what I call “Emerging Interface Patterns”. Very often we get buried in day-to-day work and miss out on new experiences, new things that are going on in interaction design just pass us by. This is tragic for those who don’t take the time to stop smell the pixels ;-) Everyone should be paying attention because these new experiences are great creative stimulus for innovative ideas.

In the below presentation I try to run the gamut of what’s new in User Experience, and Interaction Design – scouting ahead for what’s changing the landscape. As someone who is passionate about these topics, I love discovering new interaction patterns, and better ways to do something that was thought adequate before. And by consuming all these new patterns, you can blend them into current projects, and even synthesize something new.

What’s going on in Game Design? What are some of the newest UI trends? How is information design contributing to the interaction design practice? How are we bringing the real world into applications? These are just some of the questions I explore below:

Download PDF

At the end of the presentation I featured the recently revealed Adaptive Path Aurora concept “browser”. I was actually mostly done with this presentation when Aurora was revealed, and thought it was the perfect closing to my presentation. Why? Because it is the product of many of these emerging patterns we see in other areas of product and interaction design. You could say the design is somewhat reminiscent of the Sugar UI in the OLPC computer, or that having things fade away into the distance is bringing the real world into the experience. The way you can quickly type in a search, or the contextual menu that pops-up to reveal more actions. These are all things we’ve seen before, just not together in this new and innovative idea.

While you could of lived in a cave for the past couple of years and had the same ideas, I theorize that by observing these trends you are “building on the shoulders of giants” and can better combine, iterate, test, and innovate.

I did want to mention a combination I’ve had in my head for awhile :-) on page 30 I have a shot of the Prius fuel consumption screen. I think by using game design and comparing this to other drivers (not just Prius, but all cars) people would instinctively want to “win” by having the best gas mileage. If we could get a mandate for all car companies to include a version of this, with a way to transmit “scores” to a central database, I think we could be off foreign oil in no time! The elevator pitch would be “It’s like Nike+ for fuel consumption” ;-)

via: http://flickr.com/photos/88262773@N00/2525850407

Last, things change fast. Since presenting this we’ve seen new patterns in Google’s Chrome browser, and Mozilla’s Ubiquity. Remember to keep up, stay informed, and absorb as much as you can.

Starting in 2005 when returning from SXSWi a coworker and I would put together a trends presentation talking about up-and-coming technologies, patterns, websites, etc… and 2008 is no different. The presentations keep getting longer and longer, as innovation keeps building on the previous year, moving faster and faster. This year my co-presenter was Dustin Askins of Travelocity, and we gave the presentation internally to our UX groups, and just this week at the Dallas UPA Chapter.

Why SXSWi? I think it’s really good for getting a pulse of what’s going on in the User Experience field. You get to meet with a wide verity of people from different practices, and hear from some of the top web professionals. An while there are many great conferences (like UIE, IA Summit, UX Week, etc…) SXSWi is consistent on it’s wide ranging topics (great for “T-Shaped” People).

When looking at trends across technology, marketing, UX, and business you start to see patterns of what the leaders in their respective groups are expecting for 2008 and beyond. Things I keep seeing rise to the top: Mobile, Open Platforms, Data Control, Mixing Virtual and Reality, Semantic Web, Interoperability, and Location Based tools (see slide 33). None of these are unexpected, I sure we’d all agree these are hot items that will effect multiple areas.

I’ve never posted these presentations before, so I have 2005, 2006, and 2007 to post along with 2008. So if you’re new to the web and User Experience, now is your chance to catch up on a couple years worth of knowledge.

So say hello to 2008:

| View | Upload your own

2007 On SlideShare

2006 On SlideShare

2005 On SlideShare

I also have most of this presentation in a podcast (I think my recorder battery went dead…), so listen in. Hopefully I will continue to keep this trend of my own, it’s always interesting to look back…

[EDIT 05/12/08]
Here’s some video from our UPA talk:

Me & Dustin speaking @ Dallas UPA from Jeremy Johnson on Vimeo.

As a Designer, I sometimes need to evaluate different technologies and platforms from a Designer’s perspective. Why is it important to get a Designer’s view? As Designers we can quickly be boxed in with inflexible UI layers, unusable sets of standard patterns, and the inability to create a great experience. By reviewing and testing, we can determine the pros and cons of a given technology solution. In honor of Eclipsecon 2008 ;-) I’ve put together a presentation on a popular application platform – the Eclipse RCP.

Eclipse has it’s roots as a development IDE, and while that’s very efficient for developers, for non-developers it’s not very user-friendly. For this particular technology I broke up the potential problems into four groups: Visual Style, Structure, Usability, and Focus. These were four areas where Eclipse had problems, when looking across a large number of Eclipse based applications.

The Designers View of Eclipse:

| View | Upload your own

To be fair, they are trying to fix these issues, and some very smart developer/designers are creating good applications using Eclipse. But, projects without proper UI layer specialists (Designers and Developers) will default to the problems listed out above. From a Designer’s view, it’s not easy to get a great application out of Eclipse.

One great presentation out of Eclipsecon 2008 is from Morten Moeller, titled: “Designing Business and Technical User Interfaces in Eclipse RCP Applications” which basically states current Eclipse User Interfaces could use some work, and how to made them better – with technical examples of how the presentation layer works.

This is not to say that Eclipse, as a platform is not capable of great things, but just that current popular Eclipse patterns that seem to be prevalent across most Eclipse based applications are not great from a Design/usability perspective

Remember, while the Designer’s view is very important (after all I’m a Designer ;-) there are other business needs that weigh the overall solution. Such as: development time, current skill set, scalability, etc…

With experience becoming an important factor in differentiating products, having a flexible UI layer is becoming a major factor when choosing a technology to base your product on, so if you’re part of a team evaluating different technologies, make sure your team takes into account the Designer’s view.

If you’re an Interaction Designer, I’m sure you’ve noticed a new design pattern in the past year – one that doesn’t really seem to have a proper name yet. In fact, you’re probably already incorporating this pattern into your designs. It seems like almost every major redesign is leveraging this pattern to help hide complexity: Amazon, Linkedin, TripAdvisor – and sites like Target, Google, and Yahoo have been using it for awhile. It’s a design pattern I’m calling “Revealing Interfaces”.

| View | Upload your own

I have a habit of taking screenshots of interesting UIs. I have a large collection that I browse through for inspiration when creating something new. I started the above presentation to help provide some context for what I was trying to do with some of my own Designs. I’d been interested in reveling interfaces and recently I came across a couple of pieces that when put together gave me the idea to help better explain this pattern.

The first was when John Maeda came to my work to give a talk. While reading “The laws of Simplicity” I came across this quote:

“Hiding complexity through ingenious mechanical doors or tiny display screens is an overt form of deception. If the deceit feels less like malevolence, more like magic, then hidden complexities become more of a treat than a nuisance.”

I like the fact that while a revealing interface could harm traditional usability heuristics by “hiding” away functionality, once someone actually uses the interface, they could be delighted by the options revealed to them.

The second was when around the same time I saw a post “Hiding Complexity” over at one of my favorite blogs (future perfect by: Jan Chipchase). These two photos so elegantly demonstrate what the purpose of a revealing interface is: removing initial complexity.

At it’s most basic, it’s really something as simple as a drop down menu on a website. But in the last year or so, with more highly skilled people at the helm, pushing the limits of XHTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX it’s becoming much more.

No longer are the days of waiting for a full page load just to update your status. With a single click you have access to power user features that used to be buried three pages deep. An entire site can be navigated from the main page, without overloading the front page with tabs or links.

The interface becomes more fluid, interactive, and more like a conversation. In some places it can even read your mind ;-) “Yes, Netflix I was wondering what the plot of “reign over me” was, thanks!”

Along with these new reveling interface patterns comes a new budding visual language to denote when something can reveal more information – and when does it just take you to a new page? I’m sure there are a new pile of accessibility concerns with the extra levels of DHTML and JavaScript – and how does usability change, when you can’t really ask the question “where would you click…” or “what do you expect…”?

Please take a look at the embedded presentation, hopefully this post can help start defining this pattern and get the conversation going – and feel free to start that conversation below in the comments :-)