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I really can’t tell you how book clubs managed to survived in the era of the internet tsunami and remote online relationships, but I can assure you they are really far from dying. They are alive and kicking.

If you believe a book club is something that suits only your grandma, you are wrong.

If I say the words “book club” the first thing that probably comes up in your mind should be a “noisy circle of middle aged women, drinking tea and reading out loud verses and poems”.

The reality is not that far: there are still a circle, the booze and the monthly book to read, but things have just evolved into something new, fresh and exceptionally powerful for your career.

Bookclubs turn out to be an invaluable professional tool: in a world where anybody can claim to be or claim to do whatever they want, how do you manage to withstand a fair and honest discussion with peers and professional colleagues without the curtain of fake courtesy typical of formal events and conferences?

You have to sport a fairly complex mix of ingredients:

• Time
• People
• A Place to stay
• Technical Competences
• Professional Skills
• Dialect and Communication skills
• Charisma and Empathy

The beautiful features of a book club is that the book is not only just an excuse to gather people together with a same common interest, it is, in the reality, the kick you need to push yourself into finding time to keep yourself growing in the field.

People and users as well, make strategies to overcome their obstacles, a book club is an unique chance to explain yours and learn others in different scenarios, from dealing with clients to the many ways to fine-tuning your internal workflows.

Each professional has his strength and weakness, even tho you are a freshman and it may seems scary at first, never miss a chance of a confrontation!

“You’re not the devil. You’re practice.” — Bruce Wayne

Go out and look for a UX Book Club!

If you live in Italy, check the official UX Book Clubs website: uxbookclub.it, you’ll find me in the Emilia Romagna UX Book Club.

If you are living anywhere else, I’m sure that you’ll find one close to you.

Take a leap of faith and try.

Afterthoughts

What happens if the “girls are mean to you”?

Here a small consideration about the learning experience among peers.

In the last days, I saw the recrudescence of this motivational image all around LinkedIn and other socials with a cr*pload of likes:

Sorry sir, if you like this probably you are not the smartest at all… If you *believe* you are the smartest guy in a room, you are an a**hole.

• You failed into teaching others
• You failed into understanding others
• You failed into measuring yourself
• You probably are a freeloader
• You don’t know the definition of “smart” very well

There are many, MANY, reason to “change the room” but, IMHO, being the smartest, is not the right one, at least for me.

Jump into another pond if you want to learn,if you want opportunities! It is way to easy to blame others for your failures, you can’t compare people with an unmeasurable metric like “smartness”.

To be smart and to be skilled are quite a different thing, and a good professional should have both characteristics carefully dosed.

How comes that the exact rephrase doesn’t sound so appealing?

BE the dumbest guy in a room. It’s the right place for you!

Because, It is not.

It’s nearly Christmas and I’ve been working on a couple of projects full time.

I was totally engaged in my work, bound in my deadlines that I stopped “living” for quite some time, and I mean I stopped going out late at night, watching movie or TV serials, just to be able to snatch as much time as possible.

It was totally unhealthy and, guys, listen to me: don’t try this at home.

Since I realized that, I was trying to rebalance my work / life ratio by catching up with some new TV series piled up in my secret stash. Gosh, I cant’ believe that I was nearly going to miss this astonishing serie: “Almost Human”

The Ante

“Almost Human” (imdb) is a somehow complex tv sci-fi serial with a really nice cast (everybody loves Karl Urban… I love Minka Kelly as well, but fortunately for us, she is not the main character) and an insane level of detail, about pretty much everything.

So… I really enjoyed watching the episodes all at once, I bet that you will too if you love eyecandies, but the curious fact is that, at a some point, I started noticing small details that cannot happened by chance…

You may argue that can all be my imagination, but some kind of detail should really had been carefully designed by someone, someone who HAS TO BE an experience designer.

Seems to me that ages have passed from the TV era where the stereotypical asian tech ninja kept smashing on a keyboard to find forensic evidences from a sub par low fidelity video stream of a cc cam like it was black magic (CSI anyone?).

Today TV serials sport wonderful shiny interfaces and huds, our taste today is slightly changed and so, also the dystopical future portrayed in our media, is evolving too.

If you are interested in User Interfaces in movies, be sure to read “Make It So” from Rosenfeld media (the website), it will be a small gem in your reading list.

What is different in Almost Human?

I talked about experiences, I was dreaming, was I?

Thinking about our job: the Devil really lies within details, and if you look at “Almost Human” with a UX critic eye, you will be surprised, how deep and how precise are the designs in their fictional reality.

Each prop, product or scenario follows very strict design rules, guidelines that we have to apply everyday when we design experiences. I was shocked to see how those things are so well implemented in the show, because, well, it’s just a show and a good creation process is always time consuming.

To observe such quality is really delightful.

What are the lessons that Almost Human reminded me? Nothing fancy, I admit, but glad to be remembered from time to time.

I call them the Majestic Seven.

The Majestic Seven

Metaphor

Things are complex and our capacity of communication and comprehension is very limited. When we design we have to rely on metaphors, because they can explain a variety of concept that our bare language cannot.

In the show, Dorian, the man made automa, is put in a suspension state. It’s then awake by a technician using a long electrified stick, a rod…. or better a magic wand.

The technician is a mage and he brought his works to life using a simple gesture, hi techly, but yet so familiar to us. This allow our mind to focus on what’s important (for the user and for the show) the story, instead of keep us concerning about technicalities like “How Dorian is activated”.

The message is clear: It is “magic”, don’t bother try understanding, it doesn’t matter.

Feedback

All the times that Dorian accesses the network, a sparkle runs down from his cheek beneath his skin. It is feedback.

Is it necessary? Functional wise no.

For the user it is really meaningful: Detective John Kennex always spots this signal and asks “Dorian, What are you up to?”.

The system is doing something and it let the user know.

It gives back the control to the user, a thing that in a conversation is very valuable.

Feedbacks are also different from case to case. Dorian’s sparkles are of bright blue hue, other soulless models show a red hue instead. This enforce the idea that Dorian is different. So that we have to use the right feedback in the right way.

Purpose

The Chef Carlo Cracco uses to say that: “Everything on a plate is part of your dish and should be eaten”, which is a fancy way to say that there is no room for meaningful decoration in what you design.

If you design something, it needs to have a purpose, otherwise it is only complexity added.

Context

Your design is not living in a protected environment: it will interact with other components, items, people and so on.

Design with the context in mind, otherwise your outcome will be unpredictable.

In the show, the police uses these fancy crime scene delimiters: they are some sort of light projector based, with a running text that serves as animation.

They are visible at night and in broad daylight, they are clear to understand and even though they are just a projection, they “mimic” a physical obstacle.

Who is the “user” of a product like this?

The trivial answer: it is useful to the people who want or don’t want to trespass, by informing them about the fence of the crime scene.

The answer is right, but it is not complete.

A complete answer could be: It serves as a signage for both who wants or don’t want to trespass the crime scene, and officers! It is the way, how officers spot unwanted trespassers.

A beam of light is just ephemeral as a stripe of tape… when you trespass a stripe of tape you are “perturbing” your context, generating information: if you break the tape it can be detected, if you rise the stripe to pass underneath it can be detected as well.

How can you implements these kind of features with a different media?

In the show they found a clever solution: there is some kind of identification on the edge of the crime scene and whenever there is a trespassing, the whole projected light, change its color to green or red.

Costraint

John Kennex has a synthetic limb. It give him stamina and endurance, however everything comes at a price. The limb needs to be charged overnight and must be calibrated to be used.

Is it by design? Is it a technical limitation?

Try to design cognitive hurdles whenever some kind of friction is actually expected even if it is counterintuitive.

An interface won’t allow you to manage 1000k items, is it a technical limitation? No, it’s not. If you ask Users if they ever need this options they probably will say that they don’t know today, but “who knows in the future”, and you just ended up by rising the complexity one notch because nobody has the gut to decide.

Use constraint to discourage bad habits and promote good habits.

Constraints, physical or technological, are present in every project. How can you leverage a constraint to be a design propeller instead a demotivation?

By making a clear path for the user primary objectives.

As a designer probably you will wasting years only to improve the human likeness of the artificial limb, but it is something that your user really need? For Detective Kennex the prosthetic limb is just a mean, not part of himself, that’s why he hasn’t any problem stabbing himself.

Culture and Sociality

You can always tap in the great culture knowledge to design things: you don’t have to explain what the “play” symbol means, or how to do a swiping gesture. Some conventions, interactions, meanings had became cultural.

You can leverage this kind of knowledge if you really know your User.

However beware of the opposite: if you try to be creative, you cannot go against something cultural, it is very risky.

In the show, full synthetic automata looks and behave like giant dolls. Will you expect something different? You may wish, but in reality a robot who doesn’t behave like a robot is a huge letdown (Dorian sometimes is too human for my taste)

Amaze

This last one is obvious 😛

I am really surprised how easy is today to conduct mobile user testing with an Apple device.

I am really biased towards the Apple ecosystem, since I own a middle end android phone and I hate it from the very bottom of my heart.

It fails me in every sense: I cannot update it with a custom rom without sacrificing features, I cannot develop for it, it is unstable, it has became obsolete in a matter of month, it lost all this value quickly as well.

Holster your gunz, please.

I have to clarify that I don’t hate the whole Android ecosystem by per se, I’m arguing about the total absence of valuable tools to be productive in my field of expertise: prototyping, user testing and apps or services evaluation.

Yes, I know… there is actually something here and then, but relying on half baked products can be frustrating on the long term, especially if you don’t have really a choice.

I didn’t choose at first an high end android phone because I want to make tests with the Average Joes, but frankly I just ended up doing user tests with an iPad and an iPhone.

You got me. I test Android designs with an iPad and an iPhone… seems legit 😛

Let’s Continue

The Wireframe sketched with Balsamiq

A the beginning of my career, I needed to do some user testing, I was evaluating hidef document cameras, camera glasses, and other very expensive stuffs.

Fortunately today you can achieve nearly the same results using the right combination of hardware and apps with just a fraction of the cost. In the past it would have taken you at least 400 Eur in not “reusable” hardware…

The most important thing is that you will have a reusable hardware setup that you can actually reuse in many other proficient way, easing and better justifying the investment.

What you Need

Whenever I have to do a prototype evaluation, I found myself comfortable with this very simple setup:

Hardware:

• a Macbook
• an iPad
• A TV screen
• an AppleTV

Software:

• Powerpoint / Keynote
• Linkviewer (1.99 Eur) (http://link-viewer.maxmondon.de)
• X-Mirage (14.99 Eur) (http://x-mirage.com/x-mirage)
• Pocket Wavepad (Free) (http://www.nch.com.au/wavepad/pocket.html)

Optional:

• Beamer (15.00 Eur) http://beamer-app.com/

I really want to stress out that there are commercial solutions which are much more valuable and complete, however since I already own the 90% of this setup, I just bought the apps I was missing.

Prototyping is about speed: to be able to test a large number of design in a very fast and less expensive way.
I don’t like to use Axure, which is he best tool if you need to build really well defined interactive prototypes, I prefer to use something more swifty and less time demanding, like Balsamiq or Powerpoint. Tools that every people in the organization can use.

Yes, I said Powerpoint, if you never used Powerpoint for prototyping purposes, I assure you… you *will* love it.

We are testing Ideas, not the execution.

So if you test ideas and interactions, you probably don’t want to test the best fidelity you can produce, but the “good enough” design. You will gather the same amount of insights, or at least the 90% of them, without having any bias like the stress you have when you try to gain valuable information your test at any cost. Since tests are actually expensive, in terms of time and budget, I always try to make each session very cheap, but I try to do them more in numbers.

How we can leverage Powerpoint?

Powerpoint, and Keynote as well, has a very useful feature: it can export interactive PDF from your slides, which is, in fact just a PDF with some link that can let you jump to a particular page. Got it?

1. The first step is to size your slide size to a mobile device size, 1024×768 or 768×1024 for a vertical layout would be fine for emulating the 80% of tablet devices.
2. Then you can start designing your home page using the powerpoint drawing tools, lines, texts, shapes. The good thing is that you can cut and paste images from your mockup or the web directly in the slide canvas, even vector from Illustrator as well.
3. Then you just have to hilight an item and create a link to a new slide number. Then you keep designing slides, until the main part of your navigation is “functional”.

It’s just like building a “gamebook”, the one you loved to read and play in your childhood ( the Lone Wolf series FTW! ).

Using Powerpoint to Prototype!

Tools like Balsamiq ( http://balsamiq.com ) are natively capable of exporting clickable PDFs, you just have to design your mockup accordingly to the correct size, without chrome and window containers.

If you want to really speedup the prototyping of “standard application prototypes”, the ones with typical OS UI, consider licensing interface component libraries like Keynotopia (http://keynotopia.com ): a lot of components come for free with a tweet for personal use if you want to try it.

When you finished, you just have to save and export your presentation as an interactive PDF.

The beauty of this, is that you can test your mockup right away on your PC/MAC with a PDF reader!

Let’s get Real

Once you are satisfied your PDF protoype, It’s time to get it lose in the real world: take your iPad and fire up Linkviewer.

LinkViewer is an incredibly useful app: it’s a chromeless PDF viewer which runs fullscreen, nothing more.
You have to load your PDF into Linkviewer and voila’, you have done.

An example of a clickable PDF built with Powerpoint

Since it is actually a PDF, you won’t benefit of any kind of transition or animation, but It is a prototype, you don’t need this kind of fidelity.

You can start sending some invites to your testing users, because we are nearly half way.

Now we need our laptop, I use this application called X-Mirage.

X-Mirage leverages the Airplay functionality, present on both your macbook and your iPad, to mirror the screen of your iPad and/or your iPhone directly on the laptop screen.

The killer features is that you can actually record what your watching. Cool isn’t it?

The iPad screen mirrored on a Mac Window via X-Mirage

You have the prototype on your tablet, you can record what the users are doing, what’s missing?

I use a free app from the IOS store called Wavepad to record the audio from the users, directly on the device and I email myself the mp3 track. You can also use the microphone on your mac using the audio recorder.

Mission accomplished!

And the rest of the setup?

Well it is devoted for the awesome part of your work.

We need to find a way to use the AppleTV to show your results to your board of stakeholders. The tricky and awesome part is that you can build a more complex setup of instruments, to record your users and directly beaming in real time the feed remotely to the AppleTV maybe in another room.

How will you do that?

I will give you two examples.

• The easy way is to directly hook up your mac directly with the AppleTV positioned in a separate room with all the stakeholders and developers gathered, and beam on the big TV a mirror of your screen. However you will have to found a way to stream also the live audio of your user! Remember, the think aloud protocol is very powerful!
• The hard way involves a middle step, an application called Beamer.
  Write down a strict interview schedule. For instance, you may have 3 tester in the morning with, 15 minutes of pause in between.Well, start the first test and during the break, merge the video with the audio. You have to merge the audio with the video, using some software like iMovie, since there is no actual editing involved, it should be a very straightforward task, no need to make things fancy, keep it simple.Then, while you are interviewing the next user, you can use Beamer to stream your video footage to the Apple TV, while you are recording the following interview.

Beamer is a incredibly powerful app, it just beam any video file directly to the AppleTV, I use it all the times to watch something on the big screen while working.

Drag the Video on the Beamer Window and you are done!

Nwhoa, great isn’t it?

The icy on the cake is that on the Apple TV, your stakeholders review team are totally able, directly with their Apple remote, to pause, stop, or FForward the video footage without even interact with you! I mean, they can see something fishy, pause the video, take notes, discuss and resume, without missing anything (you can’t do this with a live feed).

Can you grasp the power of this process? I can guarantee you that watching someone using your product worth a thousand of written documentation, and You just achieved this with a very trivial cost.

Care to Try?

Let me know if it works also for you!