ted boren archives
“When we misuse authority by preventing failure, we diminish accountability and capacity for learning.”
Barbara Tanner from George Wythe University . The context was in education, but I think it applies to allowing teams and individuals to take risks in the workplace as well. This made me think back to Scott Berkun’s session on spectacular design failures at UIE 13, as well as his essay on learning from mistakes. If we are so afraid of failure that we risk nothing, then we don’t grow.

posted by ted on Monday, Nov 24, 2008 · 4 comments

Path leading up to a grove of trees adjacent to the Smith Family Farm near Palmyra, New York, where Joseph Smith’s first vision occurred. Very quiet, very peaceful, very inspiring on multiple levels. A few days prior, at the UIE 13 Conference, Luke W encouraged us to use color combinations we found in nature. After leaving the grove, I told my wife that I had found a color palette I wanted to use someplace in my work here at the Church. Now I just need to find the opportunity…

posted by ted on Thursday, Nov 20, 2008 · 0 comments

Compartmentalists, Specialists, and Generalists

Jared Spool just posted an interesting article on the ideal makeup of a UX team . He makes a useful distinction between a specialist and a compartmentalist:

While the former is about having the majority of your experience in a single discipline, the latter is about only having experience in that discipline… . A compartmentalist isolates themselves from the other disciplines around them, not really learning what they do or how they do it. Compartmentalism is bad for teams, because it means you have to have enough work to keep that individual busy within that discipline, and if needs shift or emergencies crop up, their value is dramatically diminished.

I would also add that a compartmentalist tends to make decisions that cause problems for other team members—the compartmentalized user researcher makes design recommendations that don’t meet the needs the business analyst identified previously; the designer designs something that will take $5 million to implement; the HTML coder who transforms those ultra-accessible semantic forms into screen-reader nightmares for the blind.

So I agree with Spool that compartmentalism is bad. But he also says that the main reason to choose a specialist over a generalist is economic; if a specialist is available and affordable, you would hire a specialist, according to the article. But aren’t there times when specialization is a negative for the project? Even if I could afford a specialist HTML coder, business analyst, interaction designer, and user researcher… isn’t there some inherent value in having the same person play one or more of those roles, depending on project size, complexity, or a host of other factors?

I don’t think economics is the only factor.

posted by ted on Monday, Nov 17, 2008 · 7 comments

“Leaders inspire. Managers require.”
A participant at the George Wythe University Statesmanship Retreat last weekend, commenting on the difference between leadership and management. Not to say that good managers can’t also inspire—but when they do, that is when they Lead instead of merely Manage. Also, you can lead without being a manager—something good designers do every day.

posted by ted on Monday, Nov 17, 2008 · 0 comments

“For now, we should just be happy that Windows 7 appears to be on the right track. You can almost look at consumer-level Windows—that is, 95, 98, Me, XP, Vista and Win 7—like the first six Star Trek movies: They pretty reliably alternate between crap and quality.”
Summarizing paragraph of the review of Windows 7 by Gizmodo. As soon as they brought up the Star Trek movies I knew just where they were going. Does that make me a geek, or does that make it a great analogy? Anyway, I use Windows at home, and am simply looking forward to an OS that gets out of my way. Hopefully they can deliver this time.

posted by ted on Tuesday, Nov 04, 2008 · 0 comments

OK, so not everything on leaveyourprint.com is a nice as this banner, but it’s a big improvement on a lot of Utah government sites I’ve seen. Get involved in designing your government!

posted by ted on Monday, Nov 03, 2008 · 4 comments

“Great rock stars would be lousy designers, lacking the discipline and respect that is needed to accomplish effective communication. I still have absolutely no idea what Kurt Cobain was trying to convey, specifically.”
Nathan Ford, decrying the use of “rockstar” to describe a top-notch designer. Instead, he suggests that a “master composer” is the better musical analogy.

posted by ted on Thursday, Oct 23, 2008 · 7 comments

View of the historic Charles River from the conference hotel for UIE 13 in Boston last week.

Now that we are back from the conference, I’m faced with the usual dillemma of how to apply everything we managed to sip from the firehose of information and ideas… To make it easier, I took two sets of notes at the conference—one with specific ideas I thought I could apply short-term to my current projects, and another with more general insights I would need to mull over. How about you? Any thoughts about making a reality out of conference pie-in-the-sky?

posted by ted on Tuesday, Oct 21, 2008 · 5 comments

“If people don’t see it, make it bigger.
If you can’t make it any bigger, make it bold.
If you can’t make it any bolder, make it red.”
Tongue in cheek, Luke W paraphrasing the design mantra of those who don’t know how to really implement a visual hierarchy, today at UIE 13 . How many of you out there have heard those actual words? More than I’d like to think…

posted by ted on Monday, Oct 13, 2008 · 1 comment

“The brand is what you tell your friends about afterwards.”
Mark Hurst of Good Experience, in one of the most concise and useful definitions of “branding” I think I’ve ever heard.

posted by ted on Wednesday, Oct 08, 2008 · 1 comment

“We like looking five-years ahead because it gets beyond the immediate reactive requirements and starts considering what a great experience could be. If we only looked one year ahead, we’d be stuck with the current realities. If we look too far out, we get into the realm of science fiction.”
Spool, explaining why one of the three key questions for experience design teams is whether they can articulate what the user experience will be in 5 years. Good article, if you’re in an introspective mood… I think me and my current team make the grade on 2 of the 3 questions… How ‘bout you?

posted by ted on Tuesday, Oct 07, 2008 · 1 comment

(Top) The view from my house between General Conference sessions. (Bottom) The view in the evening, after Conference was over.

Though not as spectacular to me as last year’s sun breaking through the clouds on the mountain on conference morning, I still like this pair of images. The cloud descends upon the mountain, the prophets deliver God’s message, and then after the cloud leaves, something has distilled on the mountain to sustain us for a little while, till the next time.

Thanks to Gilbert, Chris, and company for improving the online conference experience, by the way.

posted by ted on Monday, Oct 06, 2008 · 0 comments

Mark Hurst of Good Experience describes how the current financial crisis “could have been avoided had the people in charge followed a ‘good experience’ approach to their work: committing to simplicity (rather than gratuitously complicated products), a long-term approach (rather than short-term gains at everyone else’s expense), and an integrated view of their own role in the world (rather than a narrow view of ‘just keeping my head down, don’t ask me to think about it’).”

posted by ted on Wednesday, Oct 01, 2008 · 3 comments

“Companies and organizations still can’t explain what they do in one paragraph.”
Jakob Nielsen on the ubiquitous but often uninformative “About Us” page.

posted by ted on Monday, Sep 29, 2008 · 0 comments

“I’m just a Wanna-Bea.”
Todd, describing his new role in trying to take up the slack left by Bea’s imminent departure for a well-earned sabbatical. Bea, you will be missed! (For old times’ sake, here’s a list of all the great thoughts and images Bea has posted on Northtemple.)

posted by ted on Friday, Sep 26, 2008 · 1 comment

Jared Spool has written a great article on what goes into a well-done critique . We have several design team reviews each month, plus many additional reviews with customers and stakeholders on specific projects. The points reviewed here about respect, design ownership, and tact are highly relevant to both kinds of reviews.

posted by ted on Tuesday, Sep 23, 2008 · 3 comments

“If it ain’t broke, you’re not trying hard enough.”
Seen on a QA engineer’s whiteboard today

posted by ted on Monday, Sep 22, 2008 · 1 comment

“They are not always in agreement, but they are always in harmony. They are not uniform in opinions, but they are united in effort. They are many, but they are one.”
Elder Dallin H. Oaks, writing of how Church leaders avoid contention conducting the affairs of the Church in The Lord’s Way. Just as relevant to designing in a team.

posted by ted on Tuesday, Sep 16, 2008 · 0 comments

I’ve always been a fan of Google’s changing-yet-always-the-same logo. Here is today’s celebrating the first successful test run of the now completed Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

What’s your favorite Google logo?

posted by ted on Wednesday, Sep 10, 2008 · 2 comments

Hurricane tracker from MSNBC
While browsing for examples of complex online mapping applications, I ran across this hurricane tracker. While I’m not sure I found anything I can use directly, and despite a few nitpicks (let me move the floating panes, and puh-lease put panning and zoom controls in the usual places and formats!), there is a lot of good here.

First of course is the news interest (check out Hannah, Ike, and Josephine under the “more” link). But most impressive to me is the number of variables they are able to show simultaneously, without overloading the viewer: category of storm over time, speed of storm (more distance between symbols = greater speed), wind speed, and direction. These are all visible in the static version, like you can see in this screenshot.

But to really get the feel of it, load and re-load the screen and watch the hurricane unfold. Watch it move faster and slower along its path and watch the cloud spin faster and slower. Watch the “current position” symbol get larger and smaller. Cool… and scary if you live on the Gulf Coast. (Take care everybody!)

posted by ted on Wednesday, Sep 03, 2008 · 2 comments