Morten created a stencil for the Google Drawings addition to Google Docs. Could be interesting to try. Comparing Google Docs as a wireframing tool to Omnigraffle and Visio, his five outlined advantages include:

1. It’s live. The entire team can work on the same document and see each other’s work instantly
2. The wireframes live in the cloud, no sending files around, no outdated documents
3. The risk of losing data is zero. It saves for every edit you make
4. It’s free
5. Most people already have a Google account, so no sign up required

Credits: Morten Just

We can experience tiny operational interactions and we can experience grand narratives. Perhaps there is room for both of these when we think through and visualize experience, flows and time. Here is a quick idea to support these in an electronic sketch. A thicker line is basically used to denote the bigger story which is more linear, whereas the smaller interactions such as onlicks, hovers and drags are represented in a thiner style. The grand narratives also have starting points denoted by “play points”. These could be used to help guide readers to the important beginnings in a sea of little boxes. Just thinking (uhmm… I mean drawing) out loud. What do you think?

Credits: Jakub Linowski

The other week while discussing the idea of narrative with Bob, he reminded me of the Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 80-90s. These types of books basically are written in a second-person point of view and readers are given choices requiring to flip back and forth throughout the book. As the plot unfolds, readers also may find themselves finishing with various types of endings, with some being less desirable than others. Looking for examples of CYOA books I also came across a superb narrative visualization project by Christian Swinehart. Christian analyzed a couple of these books and began comparing which pages are composed of pure story, decisions and endings.

What does all of this have to do with the remaining design artifacts scattered throughout this blog? I think books like these through their combined use of nonlinearity, choice and guidance raise a few interesting points around how our time based (flow) deliverables could potentially look like and behave. What if readers of our deliverables were guided through a set of predefined flows? What if the flows we design required readers to make choices in order to achieve multiple endings? On one end of the extreme spectrum we have passive documents such as wireframe decks where there is often a single thread of experience. Here we have guidance, but no choice as we flip from the first page till the end. On the other hand of the spectrum, we might have a fully interactive prototype. Here we have zero guidance and tons of choice (perhaps even too much). Could this more balanced combination of guidance and choice then be a more powerful means of conveying interaction and narrative in our field? I’d think so.

Credits: mewrite (flickr image), and Christian Swinehart (visualizations)

The academic group over at Hochschule Luzern (Competence Center) in Switzerland have recently explored a visual representation that captures the interaction of various people across multiple services or touch points. Done in the context of a service design assignment, the Blueprint project portrays the flow of time horizontally and captures multiple actors vertically. More so, the visualization also layers additional data underneath and contains such things as fail lines, emotions and costs, while at the same time leaving more room for additional variables. In some way, the deliverable shares some resemblance to the Experience Maps posted earlier.

As an additional note, Blueprint+ is still a work in progress and will be turned into a toolkit in the future. Stay tuned. :)

Credits: CC Explanations and Services, Hochschule Luzern (Andy Polaine, Roman Aebersold, Robert Bossart and Andrea Mettler)

Usability testing is a pretty standard practice and I assume most of us here have done or might do a few of these evaluations in their design careers. Last month, I had the chance to spend some time with end users on a software project and I thought of sharing some of the documentation which resulted from the activity.

Right after doing such a test, we’re often faced with the challenge on how to capture and convey some of the interesting findings to others on the team or even ourselves. Some people try video, while others overlay the identified problems on top of screen captured images. In this round of testing I was aiming for something slightly different. Essentially, I wanted to a capture the core notes per each user on a single piece of 8.5×11 paper (perhaps in a persona like fashion?). Each page would have starting points of what the user has initially done with the use of red text, followed by dark grey notes as the actions unfolded. The findings were then tagged accordingly as: ideas (light bulb symbol), confusions (question mark) or positive remarks (happy face). Further more, the sample also makes use of subtle informal sketches through out the page to help convey the issues somewhat visually.

Perhaps to someone who lacks context of the project or products being tested, a deliverable such as this might not be adequate enough at conveying the issues. On the other hand, for those who have participated in the test as observers, the following usability test snapshot might act as an inspiration piece for the design work ahead.

Please post as a comment (or submit) ideas of your own on how to best convey, remember or prioritize findings from design research.

Credits: Jakub Linowski