Jon Hung

Pandora’s box is a story about a tremendous power contained in an innocuous-looking vessel. In one version of the tale, set in Ancient China, a careless spirit misplaces the relic, where it spends hundreds of years hidden in a cave. During this time, the box’s appearance becomes battered, and its decorations grow worn. People walk by, thinking nothing of the plain-looking box, but a peasant, unaware of the chaos within, decides to open it up and in so doing, releases pandemonium.

This ancient story is set in an age of magic, yet the idea of the plain yet powerful object pervades our society today. Old magic is replaced by modern machinery, a metaphor for design & technology. In today’s world, technology is a pandemonium of complex computations & design is the façade that masks it. It is no wonder that the myth shares names with a powerful music player with a deceivingly simple design.

Simplicity +

Pandora Radio is a music player whose simple appearance does not reveal the fact that it unleashes a journey through sound. Its interface is no more than a text box and a few buttons. It is a central example of good design, taking complex information (libraries of music) and simplifying it (into categories & associations). Pandora changes an involved process (choosing new music you like) into one that is easy and enjoyable (provide familiar inputs and receive novel outputs). While our music selection gains variety and becomes more complicated, Pandora makes the process of exploring music easier than ever, requiring less than a click every half hour to make the thing do its magic.

Complexity =

Behind the scenes, it’s driven by a powerful database of audio associations, The Music Genome Project, the power hidden in Pandora’s box. Harnessing the Genome, marketers have caught on to the idea of custom playlists. On Pandora today, a listener can create a Nike running playlist, or a Bacardi dancehall list. Branding professionals have a history of seizing typography, color, logo & shape, buying up areas of our perception like a gold- miner laying down claims. With Pandora we see a new form of brand identity emerging, which will be based on a sound, intensity, pitch, wavelength.

Instead of offering branded playlists, I’d rather see Pandora offer personal playlists created from their genome. Their interface could be supplemented by some means of adjusting the musical qualities of a playlist.  This would, for example enable a guitar enthusiast to take a Jimi Hendrix playlist and max it out on the “bleeding guitar solo” quality. Advanced users would mix & match these qualities to create custom channels, based on their mood & preference.

Design that changes our lives

This would allow the plain-looking box to gain notice not only from marketers, but also from music enthusiasts. More than a marketing tool, Pandora is a navigation tool that helps us meander the complex audio landscape. Listeners can passively building musical repertoire, becoming “educated enthusiasts” while maintaining their busy lives. The experience can be more instructive than a few hours of digging through a record store, without all the digging.  With a few improvements, Pandora will enhance the way listeners interact with music, leaving an imprint on the way we browse, discover, and catalog the sounds we love.

I’m thinking about buying the yearly plan. Not because I intend to exceed their monthly limit, or even to get the cool desktop app. I am on the verge of paying for this free service because I now understand the importance of supporting good design. If I’m hoping to garner wages and make a living for creating design, I have to support those that are doing the same thing.

Cheers pandora!

photo by Tony the misfit

Moving home is a tough decision. Many of my peers understand the desire to save some money, deal with career indecision and get some training. On the other hand, they know it also can mean months wasting away on the couch, getting your laundry done. So when I told my friends “Adios!” as i left for home, I can’t help but feel guilty and a little defeated.

As people are struggling, I’m sitting on the couch with my dog after a delicious 7 hour eating fest. Even though I’m leaving behind a beautiful apartment in hip, fast-moving San Francisco, I have no regrets about this decision. My parents house is in a quiet and solitary town where I can focus on my work with less distraction (not as busy as San Francisco). I’m going to be staying in a beautiful home, with a huge garden. Saving money.

But I refuse to view these three months as a defeat. I will grow and accomplish a lot personally and professionally.

For three months, I’ll be at home at my parents house in Lompoc, CA. I was offered a position at Citrix Online, a company located down the road in a town called Goleta. The company appears to share the same passion I have for User Experience Design, and so I simply could not turn this opportunity to learn UX, work with UXers, and perform the work I plan to pursue as a career.

Oh yeah and home made Chinese food every night ain’t bad either.

I hope you’ll stay with me and wish me luck!

photo by Francisco Antunes

If you’ve ever been called out for “being subjective”, then you know how frustrating it can be. It seems hardly fair that after performing research and forming reasoned arguments, a colleague or partner can shut you down with one phrase, usually putting an end to any rigorous debate or academic inquiry.

Psychologists and designers suffer from a cliched generalization that we engage in a subjective discipline. This half-truth seeks to invalidate the factual and empirical findings which are made in the field.

Are we, in fact, being subjective? Yes and no. The truth is, you can be subjective while being factual.

In their (and your) defense, let us explore this misunderstood claim:“You’re just being subjective!”

We’re somewhat mistaken in how we use the phrase. Subjectivity comes in two flavors : ontological and epistemological. Lets start by distinguishing the two types.

Ontological subjectivity

A discipline can be said to be “objective” in ontology if it studies phenomena that which exists without human beings, and makes claim that remain true and valid without the existence of human beings:

• Natural sciences — rocks, trees, oceans, animals
• Physical sciences — matter, planets, stars, atoms,
• Chemical sciences — material, reactions,

In contrast, disciplines that are “subjective” in ontology focus on topics that rely on human consciousness, and whose claims will be nonsensical without a human being.

• Psychological sciences — emotion, judgment, reasoning, action
• Aesthetic sciences — perception, color, style
• Philosophical sciences — morality, values, knowledge

Are you being subjective? Well, if you study human behavior and action, you probably are. Designers and psychologists (as well as economists, historians, and similar professions) concern themselves with subjective topics. We find human subjectivity, consciousness and decision making more interesting than atoms. However, that does not mean these studies are not based on facts.

“When a pin pricks my finger, I draw away”.

“This shade of green is present in the works of this period”.

“When making decisions, humans are risk-averse and prefer certainty”.

These claims have a subjective ontology, but are based in factual observation. They are nonsensical without reference to a human subject, but this alone does not make them biased or matters of opinion.

We are not Subjective!!… epistemologically

“Psychology is subjective. Design is subjective.” Attacks on design are not ontological (attacks on our subject matter), but are epistemological attacks, questioning the nature & extent of knowledge that the fields produce. Attacking epistemology is saying our conclusions are rooted in opinion, rather than fact.

I whole-heartedly reject this idea. Investigate the statements listed above, and find me the bias in them. As professional, academics, and progressive thinkers, we hope to eliminate any deviance from hard facts. Do critics really believe that designers & psychologists don’t value facts? We ALSO strive for epistemological objectivity!

Am I confusing you yet? Well, my main point is this: It is wrong is to assume that studying humans means we’re only capable of making opinions. Design is NOT SUBJECTIVE. Psychology is NOT SUBJECTIVE. We make factual claims, though we study areas that require a subjective ontology — a knower, a perceiver, a person with opinions, bias, and willful behaviors. This is the human “subject”.

Designers, stop selling yourself short.

One can study human perceptions, emotions, desires & consciousness without being steeped in bias, assumptions, and opinion. You are engaged in an objective discipline. Various debates have fueled the divide between subjective and objective, to the point that subjectivity has become a dirty word in almost all disciplines. So stop associating yourself with that word. It’s confused and muddled and should no longer be effective as a claim.

The *methods* that they [design and psychology] use are another factor that affects people’s judgment. The “hard sciences” can rely on quantifications more than the “soft sciences” are able to do. This is of course partly due to their respective subject matters. Electrons, e.g., are more “reliable” when being measured than humans are

-markus weber-

Yes, studying human beings is a bit like trying to hit a moving target. However, we are still able to make factual claims about effectiveness of a design, the persuasiveness of an argument, the likelihood an idea will be adopted. Perhaps more importantly: isn’t the un-reliability of human subjectivity part of the reason these fields are so fascinating? It’s the reason I’d rather study this than engineering.

For the independently employed, stock images are a rip-off.

Do you find yourself spending too much time looking for a decent stock image to use in a design? I did today, and its a slow & arduous process. Even worse is the fact that most of them cost upwards of 40 dollars to use!

I understand that being a creative professional takes years of training and cultivation. One of the goals of mastering a craft is to be able to charge money for that. However, I ask myself today: how many stock images require a master to create? Most just require an SLR. Maybe someday I’ll reach a level of expertise where my skills warrant charging a ton of money for what I can produce in a few seconds.

From my current vantage point as a beginner, I wish that people would be a tad more humble. With competitive free resources out there, at least make it cheaper! And I say that as a profit-seeking photographer.

So before you buy a stock image to complement your design work, blog, etc, check out this useful post by Mashable. I’ll recommend this free stock image site where I found the image I used in this post. http://www.sxc.hu/index.phtml

Intriguing UX articles from this week

5 second usability test. As designers, we need to manage people’s immediate perceptions. A generation of internet surfers (like the channel surfers of the previous decades) will judge a websites value very rapidly. A great article

Jakob Nielsen on the Twitter phenomenon. A founding father of usability speaks about the new social media trend. Not to be confused with Nielsen & Co (media watchdog and marketer).

Another set of interviews from Jared Spool. Very useful to web designers and devs. One of his interviews is with Dan Brown, author of one of the bests texts on web-design documentation (Communicating Design). I have a copy of his excellent book on my shelf, but I don’t own Da Vinci Code.

Derek Powazek speaks on designing virtual communities. Front and center on A List Apart, this article talks about how designers can create web applications that engage users to interact with one another. I haven’t fully digested the article, but Yahoo’s Luke W has a few things to say about it.

Using verbs as Nouns in an interface. Your words matter, especially when you guide a user through your information design.

Oh, and here’s some pretty stuff

A video of a designer at work, at high speeds. Incredible and inspirational.

Whats in your bag? A look into the tools that designers carry with them. Lots of apple and moleskine (bah)

You know the sinking feeling when a computer dies to the bluescreen.

My Dell showed the utmost dedication by serving me five long years, much longer than most people expect from a Windows laptop. My expectations were simple: a place to store files, do word processing, and check email. But I got so much more than that. We had built a story together: I went through changes and stages in my life as it stayed dedicated through it all.

It was the vehicle through which I enacted out my boyhood fantasies. It enabled me to become an ace sniper, powerful barbarians and crafty wizard through the realities its CPU and graphics-card rendered.

It stood by me as I focused as a student and online poker player. It took the beats of my sub-par performance stoicly watched me slowly grow my skills and assets.

It took the heavy beating of high-resolution images and resource intensive software like a champ. As I venture down the path of programmer & designer, I thought we would reach glorious heights together…

But now its days are done. It finally got the blue screen of death this week and I must unfortunately begin to say goodbye.

My work has been impeded now that my laptop’s gone. I was using it in the office for the few months I’ve been working, now they have me on a Mac and its not the same. Sure its flashy, clean, and fantastic, but it can’t even run the software I need to do my job. As an aside, I wonder if theres software that can fake a bluescreen to get out of work (theres probably money in creating that).

I’m forced to work from home, and boy have things slowed down. Not that I had many important files there, but I got a real pleasure in carrying my work wherever I went. Cafes, libraries, even my own couch is closed off to me as a workspace now. My back, butt and neck cramps from the chair I sit in. I’m shaken mentally and physically and now I have to consider buying a replacement.

Dell, I’ll miss you. Things won’t be the same without ya.

photo by spdorsey
Welcome to the little plot of interwebz I call “home”. Pretty modest digs, but I’m planning great things. Seasonal themes, high-quality content (I promise!) and more design than you can shake a stick at. Stay tuned!

From around the Web

• IxDA posts videos from a recent conference Very Useful
• Frog Design’s Robert Fabricant: Designers are in the Behavior Business (Design is not just about “making stuff”.)
• WordPress invites users to perform usability testing

Nick Fincks’ top UX books. (link)

I own two books on his list already (Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things & Dan Brown’s Communicating Design).  To Nick’s list I would add two books: Nudge by Thaler & Susstein and Designing for People by Henry Dreyfuss.

From the twitterverse

• Make your commerce website usable by breaking it into three steps.
• Cheapskate’s Guide to Usability
• A 14-point usability checklist. A Tweak a Day Convinces Visitors to Stay

The concept of User Experience is becoming pervasive.  People in all fields are learning how to create better usability. More people are designing websites, and doing a good job at it. Information is ubiquitous, open, and accessible. What’s to motivate people to hire a dedicated UX designer?

A UX pro goes above and beyond what’s listed in these articles. They advocate for usability in the toughest of design environments.  A pro works under the constraints of a tight budget to make quick tweaks, but they can also seamlessly integrate usability through the entire development life-cycle.

When I was obsessed with poker, I visited discussion forums to improve my game.  In this highly competitive environment, giving tips and pointers was frowned upon.  The last thing people want is for someone to help your competition, which they called “teaching the fish”.

In a way they are right: by bringing people’s competencies up, the skill gap narrows and your competitive edge shrinks.  More work and more knowledge is required to eek out profits.  The best thing professionals (in poker or in UX) can do is to read up on what’s now “common knowledge” and stay ahead of the field.  It’s what I do everyday.

You want to ‘survive’ this recession? Stop talking about Oprah and do the following:

Learn something new.

My goal is to become a product designer.
With a modest programming background and no artistic training, I guess you could say I’m learning something new… Standing at the entry point of an emerging field, with everything to learn in front of me, I’m actually very excited. Being a noob isn’t always that bad.

Work harder than everyone else.

There’s always someone working harder than you.
Having been rejected from jobs or clients, I go back to this important maxim. Out of hundreds of applicants, are you really the hardest working? If you’re looking for a job or a new client, there will always be better people out there. If you’re not the best candidate, there’s not a reason to select you. You’ve actually got to be the best.

Do the leg work.

Don’t drop the ball.
Give genuine responses.
Show care.
Solve problems, don’t make them.
Now’s a good time to apply these time-honored principles.

Surround yourself with fighters.

Who seems to never stop working?
Who challenges themselves regularly?
Who’s a fighter?
I won’t let you know when I find them,
I try to hold on to them for myself.

Take risks.

If you know me personally you know I have no problem with this one.

Shut up.

No whiners here

You just suck. << The original article this response was written to.

The Door in the Face

A familiar situation

Will you donate $1000 to our organization? [Response is no].
Oh. Well could you donate $10?”

- or how about this one -

Can you help me do all this work?
Well can you help me with this bit?”

- from Wikipedia -

Many of us will reluctantly answer yes to the second question, due to an effect called “door in the face” by social psychologists. We’ve fallen victim to this powerful technique which is readily employed by salesman, fundraisers, and even our friends.

But, are you familiar with the opposite effect, called the foot in the door? It’s another trap which is less known and trickier to pull off. Used correctly, it can help you design a survey that creates increased conversion rates.
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