Dermot and I were interviewed recently for a documentary about live video performance by Grayson Cooke.
eightfilters interview
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Cyberpunk and ways of seeing: KW Jeter’s Noir
There’s just no point in thinking that you’re picking up things that don’t exist, or talking to people that are just part of some dummied-up sensory load. The kind of stuff died out back in the mini-theme-park days. Kids standing around with big ugly goggles on, swatting at nothing. That kind of stuff’s crap. But seeing the same things that everybody else does, but just seeing them differently… hey, that’s the way it is for everyone.
Jamais Cascio recently posted a call for more social-cultural futurism. This is a theme I’ve been thinking about a bit lately, particularly as it fits within my ongoing research about cyberpunk science-fiction and its role in creating capital imaginaries. It’s also an interesting thing for futurists and science fiction writers to focus on, with the emergence of a narrative about the supposed end of generational fashion, culture and music.
I want to look at a cyberpunk novel that examines different perspectives rather than different technology, and gives us a vision of a post-cyberpunk world that has passed its initial hyper-acceleration, and settled/devolved into stasis. It shows us how people engage with the shock of the new psychologically – by constructing belief systems and ‘ways of seeing’ that interpret the world in ways that make sense and allow them to function.
Noir by KW Jeter functions as an interesting examinations of noir tropes, but also as an examination of false consciousness, ways of knowing, ways of doing and critical inquiry outside the bounds of modernist scientific investigation. The plot hinges on an alternative investigatory heuristic that is enabled by McNihil’s (surgically implemented) ‘way of seeing’.
The science fiction novel in this case is a ‘lens’ system. It allows us to view what is already here, from a different perspective or a different level of focus. Of course, all fiction does this to some extent, but it’s usually implicit rather than explicit. Literalising the change in vision allows us to see things from a different perspective without having to adopt a worldview that we’re aware of but dislike. It’s hard to get inside the worldview of a white supremacist, but it’s not so hard to imagine seeing the world in cinematic noir.
McNihil’s lenses function in an interestingly self-aware way. McNihil has them implanted because he’s more comfortable in the eternal night of the black and white world of noir film. He’s not happy, by any means – but the lenses function as a cushion. He’s well aware of the reality of what he’s seeing, but his lenses translate it into a visual language that better fits his image of himself and the world around him. Certain objects do not translate into his world, though. Some items do not have appropriate analogues within his noir visual system, so they take on extra import because they don’t fit.
In this way, Jeter puts us in the mind of someone who, despite knowing the truth, returns to the comfort of his way-of-seeing because it makes sense to him, and indeed it is only way he can function. Even though he knows it is false, and even though he is reminded of its falseness when reality forcefully intrudes, even though he has learnt tricks to see through the noir vision and see reality when he wants to, he falls back to his way of seeing. He cannot not fall back to his way of seeing, because to see reality as it is would require rewiring his head.
McNihil acquired his lenses by choice; he wanted them, he paid dearly for them. But he has become so used to them, he may not be able to function without them. And despite the knowledge that he does not see ‘reality’, he functions within the world effectively.
I think Noir functions as a nuanced critique of the science-god clear-eyed barrel-chested hero of golden age science fiction, but also the march of progress modernism that runs through that body of literature. It’s a dystopia, but not a conventional one. It’s not a dystopia because of the conflict between great forces, but because that’s where we ended up.
I keep coming back to Noir for a couple of reasons. Jeter is an underrated science fiction author, partially because much of his output has been within other people’s universes. He’s written in the Star Trek and Star Wars universes as well as a criminally underrated set of sequels to Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. His Blade Runner sequels delve deeper into the questions of identity and memory that were raised in Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, in a way that prefigures a lot of the themes and plot points in the recent Battlestar Galactica remake. He also manages to draw the Blade Runner film and the Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep discontinuities into the same universe in a way that feels satisfying.
Noir is set in the same universe as Jeter’s earlier novel, Dr Adder. Dr Adder was, but for the cowardice of publishers, one of the the first cyberpunk novels. It prefigured the obsession with communications technology, surgery and body modification as personal expression, weird sex, post-corporate societal breakdown and leather and chrome that exemplified cyberpunk style. Noir includes elements of this, but it’s set much later in the same universe. The characters have gotten past the shock of the new, and have started to cobble together their own styles, belief systems and ways of living. If Dr Adder prefigured the hyper-acceleration of early cyberpunk culture, Noir sets out a vision of a mature, semi-static cyberpunk culture.
What are you working for?
I’ve been working on this project at Sputnik for that past couple of months. It’s a microsite for Google Apps.
I worked on the creative concept, the content strategy and some of the copywriting. I’m currently working on the UX for the second release.
I’m really proud of it. I’d love to hear what you think!
Try it out on a mobile or a tablet.
Getting started on a under-resourced UX project
UX, at least in my experience, is multidisciplinary practice that entails an indepth, embedded knowledge of one’s culture. It’s a practice that sits at the nexus of creative design, content, and technology. It’s in the middle of hard data, soft data, aesthetics, intuition, communication, and account management. Not many people can hold every single aspect of a web project in their heads, so inevitably we develop heuristics and shortcuts to make things more efficient. We rely on our experience, our implicit knowledge and our intuition to work together.
Research is important. Data driven design is important. UX practice can and does involve very close-focus decisions that are informed by testing and analytics. Testing is everything from guerrilla testing to A/B and multivariate testing. Analytics is everything from bounce rates and page consumption through to user flows, goal funnels, hover patterns and user tracking. This is all important.
However.
Chances are, unless you’re working in a consultancy with an extensive testing contract, or working in a UX team with a testing lab, or working on a high-traffic web site with functionality for rapidly-deployed multivariate testing, you’re not going to be able to do all of this. On some projects, you’re not going to be able to do any of this.
If you work in a design agency, or a creative agency, you’re probably working on multiple client websites. You’ll rarely have access to the history of the project, particularly anything that was done by the agency before you. You’ll probably only be brought on to specify the current project, which may be anything from a whole site refresh / rebuild, to the design of a single page. You won’t know what the previous agency tried to do, and why it didn’t work. Chances are the previous agency was in the same situation you’re in. They were probably using a best practice approach with limited information, and the project may have failed in spite of that. Maybe there was a downturn in the market. Maybe someone stuffed the site with keywords and Google nuked its pagerank for 6 months. Maybe the client had $10k and wanted to compete with CNN. Maybe the client got cold feet halfway through the project.
You will probably never know any of this. But you have been tasked with making a website that keeps the client happy, appeals to their users, is usable and accessible, on-brand, on-message, within budget, on-time, and beautiful, even in IE6. And by the way, the client’s bought into a ten year contract with a kludgy CMS that never, ever generates decent code, your dev team are overloaded and have priority bookings on other clients, you’ve only got 16 hours of billable time for UX/content strategy/analytics framework and your designer is about to go on holiday. What do you do?
This is a little checklist that I try and work from. I don’t always manage to use it, but it’s pretty good place to start. It’s useful for getting on top of a project from the very start.
Step 1: Get a brief.
Do you have a brief? If not, get one. Get a sit-down briefing from the account manager.
Still no luck? Write your own brief. Should take about 15 minutes.
Basic brief structure:
- what is the project?
- what do they want to achieve?
- budget
- timeframe
- constraints
- requirements
Ok, now you’ve got a brief. Give it to the account manager. Account managers are always busy, and they can be a bit hard to deal with if they’re in the middle of something. However, account managers are your friend. This doesn’t get said enough, so let me say it again: account managers are your friend. They deal with all the numbers, the clients, the organisation stuff so you can do your job. You know how much you hate doing your tax? That’s the kind of stuff they do every day so you can be creative. So cut them some slack.
So, with that in mind, ask your account manager to have a quick look at the brief you’ve written up. They’ll very quickly let you know if you’ve missed anything, or you’ve gotten anything wrong. Take notes, fix your brief.
Ok, great! We now have a brief.
Step 2: Coffee shop
Now, take your brief, a stack of paper and some sharpies, and go to the coffee shop.
Purchase a caffeinated beverage of your choice. I like a soy latte. Doppios are good too.
Don’t begin your beverage just yet. Let it sit on your table, gently tickling your nose. Mmmmm.
Ok, so, now read your brief. Read it again. Highlight the things that jump out at you. Highlight the things that you _know_ are going to be a pain in the ass. Highlight the things that you’ve worked on before. Circle the things that need research. Note down any references to previous projects that were similar. If you work in an agency, you’ve worked on at least 3 specifications for every 1 project that actually got built. Some of that stuff is reusable.
Ok. We’re trying to see this project from every angle. That’s why you’re not allowed to drink your coffee yet. I want you to mess with your brain chemistry just a little bit. The perspective of a hungry, impatient, un-caffeinated person is different from that of a well-fed, juiced-up coffee fiend.
Ok, now you can have your coffee.
Step 3: Drink your coffee!
Mmmmm. Good, yeah?
Step 4: Sharpies.
Once you’ve got some coffee inside you, pick up a Sharpie and start taking notes.
Firstly: what is the client trying to do? Not ‘what have they asked for’. What are they trying to do? The answer is rarely ‘build a website’. A website is a means to an end. The end is usually ‘make more money’.
List out all the other things the client could do to achieve the same goal.
For example:
You have a client with a small business selling bath soaps. They want you to build them a brand new website. They have an existing site that has never generated much business, and they feel a new site will bring in more traffic. They have a budget of $5k, and one of the owners can edit a bit of HTML and is familiar with Facebook and Twitter.
What else can we do in this situation?
Well, we could:
- Tidy the existing site
- Run a social media campaign
- Do some SEO and SEM to drive traffic to the existing site
- Create a content strategy
There’s a few things we can do in this situation. Take note of the other possibilities, and take a few notes on what the project might entail. Take note of how much it might cost. Particularly take note of possibilities that are likely to be more effective for the client. Clients are usually willing to be sold on a more effective solution. In this situation, my initial thoughts would be to:
- Tidy up the existing site template
- Work up an SEO / SEM strategy to bring in more site traffic
- Work up a content strategy to ensure the site is being regularly updated, in line with the SEO strategy
- Sketch out some ideas for a social media strategy that the staff can work on together, to launch in a couple of months
- Propose a stage two project with a more in-depth site redesign, contingent on the success of the initial project.
In this situation, we want the client to have some ‘quick wins’. There’s a lot they can do, and a full site redesign is just going to chew up money and time. Some smart campaign work with social and SEO, and a site ‘tidy-up’ is going get them some results now, rather than six months time.
Also, once they start making more money, they can see a) your skills and b) the value of investing in their web properties.
This, hopefully, means you’ll have a larger budget for the stage 2 project.
Step 5: Diagram.
Ok, so, you’re still at the coffee shop, and you’ve thought through all the different options. Take 5 minutes and sketch up a diagram of the different options with some notes about complexity, benefit and cost. You’re going to take this back to the account manager and show it to them, so make it easy to read. They’re busy, remember?
Now pay for coffee, pack up your stuff, and go for a walk around the block.
Step 6: Walkies.
Pull out your mobile and call your favourite developer. (Well, I do this because my developers are in Melbourne. You might be able to just chat to them in the office.) Have a quick chat to them about what you’re proposing, and get a sense of the relative complexity of it. Developers are also usually busy, and they don’t appreciate distractions any more than account managers do. If anything, they’re probably more irritated, because they had the entire structure of their current project in their head when you called. So be nice.
Make sure they know that you want to get their input because a) they know more about actually building the damn thing than you do and b) you don’t want to give them a poorly specified job. Also, you want their input because it’s much more efficient for you and them if you have the chat up front, rather than in a week after the client’s already signed off on the specification.
Ok, now you’ve gone through the initial process. You should have a sense of the project scale, the alternate options, things to look out for, and what other projects you’ve worked on that you can reuse / appropriate. You’ve gone for a bit of a walk to clear your head, see if anything else comes to mind.
Step 7: Accounts
Now, go back to the office, and have a chat with your account manager. Wow them with your attention to detail, your commitment to creating the best solution for the client and the users, your thoughts around how they can position the work into an ongoing project, and your thoughts around potential budget-busters. They’ll appreciate your work, and they’ll take it back to the client and convince them of its value.
Having gone through this process, you’ve given yourself a good start on the project, brought the account manager and client into line with your thinking, and you’ve given the developer a heads-up on what’s going to land on his desk next week.
Step 8: Get to work.
You know this bit. Hop to it.
Blog redesign wireframing
Trying out some new designs for this blog, trying out the iPad version of Omnigraffle. Want to make this site into a portfolio site, with a blog and some portfolio pages for my academic work, UX work and video art.
Some paper wireframes:
And some iPad wireframing:
Pretty happy with this workflow.
Some wild speculation about UX in 2012
In response to a thread about emerging UX themes, some wild speculation and a bit of a wish list about UX in 2012:
Invoked computing and web tools / cloud services
Decoupling from specific physical devices, powerful-enough mobiles and tablets, plugging into persistent subscription cloud services. Focus on faster streaming and efficient in-browser behaviour rather than constant machine upgrades and physical storage. Think iTunes Match and Google Docs, coupled with increased bandwidth and mobile internet. Security will be an issue to be addressed.
Functionality in context
There will be less software with massive menus listing every function, more intuitive surfacing of functionality in context. Inevitably, power-users will complain when their workflows are disrupted, but this will be offset by large numbers of new users.
Tablet design patterns
Tablet designs will start to mature, supporting dominant hand-switching, orientation changes. Apps will remain popular for the limited screen real estate on smartphones, but web apps will be more popular on tablet. This will also lead to convergence between tablet design and desktop design. More people will be designing for mobile first, and will be looking for efficiencies. Luckily, this will lead to the death of on-hover menus.
Convergence in mobile devices
This is a big call, but there should be a shakeout in the massively fragmented mobile OS market. I’m hoping for a dominant flavour of Android to emerge, as well as the Kindle Fire OS reaching maturity. IOS will remain strong, and Windows Phone 8 may turn out to be a strong competitor. Supporting every permutation of Android will turn out to be as frustrating as supporting IE6. Analysts will focus on the phone usage and data consumption as a measure of mobile OS value, not merely product activations. Low-end Android ‘feature-phones’ are a separate category to smartphones, and they will be treated as such.
and lastly:
Flash will continue to lose relevance
Flash will continue its current trajectory towards being a tool to create multiplatform games and animations, and not a common file format. No-one’s cracked Flash on the mobile yet, and people will realise that it’s a problem with Flash that can’t be fixed by throwing more processing power at it. Flash is an artefact of a mode of desktop computing that was rooted in an endless upgrade cycle. Low-power tablet computing will lead to a move away from crufty, crash-prone formats like Flash. HTML5 isn’t there yet, but gaming will be handled by smartphone apps, and video will be h264 and its alternatives.
Postscript: gamification
Gamification will lose favour once people realise adding badges to a boring experience doesn’t make it compelling, and adding badges to a compelling experience is redundant.
There’s some good stuff in gamification – it’s the stuff that’s been ripped wholesale from interaction design. The rest is misapplied pop psychology and bad pedagogy. UXers and game designers will reclaim interaction design, and gamification advocates will move onto the next consultancy trend.
Getting started for the year
I’ve been interested in taking part in Jason Wilson’s Pomodorojerk for a while. I’m trying to get into the habit of writing regularly, and this seems to be a good way to get words onto page.
It’s not like I don’t write a lot at work. Most of my job is communication – ultimately, most design jobs are about creating communication tools, communication artifacts, or design specifications for other creative workers. And I’ve also been doing a fair bit of copywriting on a work project that will be launched next week. I wanted to try my hand at copywriting because, well, I’ve been a writer and editor in the past, and wanted to see how I fared writing advertising copy. I also wanted to try it again because copy and content strategy is a big part of UX design, and it’s good to know how it works. It’s good to be able to visualise the copy in your head while laying out site wireframes, to know where the copy should sit, how much space it will need and what kind of headings it should have. It’s also good for laying out the IA of a site – adding scratch copy to wireframes allows you to layout the IA and see where duplications and omissions might be. It’s also much more interesting than lorem ipsum.
So I’m going to try writing each morning before work. I’ve started going to the gym in the mornings, taking my Kindle to churn through some reading while on the cardio machines. I can’t handle the garbage that they have playing on the TVs, but I can easily get through a couple of chapters of a novel or a textbook in half an hour.
25 minutes of writing as soon as I get back home is an easy commitment – and doing my writing before I jump in the shower is a good way to limit myself to 25 minutes.
I’m not a huge fan of New Years Resolutions, they never really seem to work for anyone. Having a birthday in January tends to conflate birthday resolutions with New Years as well, lumping personal commitments and reflections into that lazy morass of post-celebratory remorse. That said, I’m trying to focus on a few important projects this year, rather than spreading myself thin across whatever sounds interesting.
I’m holding off on committing to any new academic projects. I’ve been working on a research proposal for a study of cyberpunk literature and capitalist imaginaries, but between my proposed supervisor disappearing to the USA and my partner’s sister giving birth to twins, I think I’ll put that project on the backburner. I’m still reading through a lot of the literature on science fiction, cyberpunk, futurism and feminism because, well, it interests me! But I also expect I’ll pick up the project in some form in a couple of years. I imagine I’ll blog some reflections here as well. Science fiction, futurism, design fiction and user experience seem to make sense to me as a grouping of interests. Cyberpunk authors have always had a strong focus on the built environment and its effect on people, and more nuanced approach to portraying affect (in some cases).
I’ll be taking part in Jurassic Lounge again this year with eightfilters but I’ll be doing less performance. Dermot and I are working on a curatorial project that will bring in musicians, artists, filmmakers and creatives to talk about their visual influences, in a casual setting.
My main project for this year will be focusing on building my UX skills out into a broader design skillset. After reviewing some work I did a year ago, I’m pretty impressed with how far I’ve come. I’ve got a solid grasp of my UX work, to the point now where I can start slimming down my specifications to fit into an agile workflow, and I can estimate the size of a specification project fairly easily. The next stage for me is to start prototyping the projects that I’m working on – moving away from thick specification documents into working prototypes. I’ve tried basic clickable prototyping using InvisionApp, which is good for mapping screen flows, but I’m keen to start creating high-fidelity prototypes with working JQuery animations. I’ve found a solution using Fireworks and a JQuery tool called TAP. I’ll blog some more about how it works over the coming weeks.
Oh, and lastly, I’m going to redesign this blog, as a proper design project. I’ll be documenting that as I go.
So this is pretty nifty
Testing out working with an iPad. Certainly seems fine for writing. Some nifty wireframe tools for the iPad as well.
Means I don’t have to lug my laptop home each night.
UX Careers
Inspired by a couple of articles about coding and UX, and a Reddit thread about how to get into UX, I thought I’d write up a blog post about how I got into UX. UX is a broad field, and UX skills are certainly in demand – though some company’s expectations are out of control.
My path into UX design was a bit circuitous. I didn’t study IT, web design or human factors. There’s lots of good courses in those areas, and a specialisation in human factors or human-computer interaction (HCI) would definitely help. My UX practice draws more from my background in journalism and editing – so a focus on content and copy – as well as from my experience in marketing and academia.
I work in a creative agency, working on clients such as Google, Schweppes, Westpac and Sanitarium. Working in a creative agency is a bit different to working in a UX consultancy or as a UX architect within an organisation. You have to work on different clients, different brands, and different platforms.
My UX practice involves everything from content strategy to field research, to business strategy and gap analysis, rapid prototype development and iteration, market research and customer experience design. Customer experience is a parallel field to user experience that has grown out of marketing. A knowledge of this field will serve you well if you are looking to work in a creative, digital or marketing agency. Human factors or HCI will probably suit a UX consultancy, a usability consultant or a software startup.
I work closely with strategists, designers and developers to deliver the user experience, and such I have to understand everything they do as well as my own field.
Of course, I don’t understand it to the depth that they do. I can’t code particularly well. But I have a good knowledge of how code works, and what we can and can’t do. I’m not a strategist, but I can think strategically. I need to be able to speak everyone else’s language, well enough to be understood.
The more you know about the people you’ll be working with and their professional field, the better. Studies in anthropology, ethnography or psychology are great for developing a user research/product development UX practice. Journalism, editing, literature are good for content strategy or microcopy focus. A solid understanding of content and copy will serve you will as a UX designer in a news organisation. It may also help you in a marketing/customer experience design role.
Outside of studying at university, these are the things that I’ve found helpful.
- I worked as a current affairs editor (video and online) for several years. This was useful for learning workflow, writing, editorial and content strategy.
- I worked as PhD researcher / academic for several years. This was useful for learning how to run a research workshop. It was also useful for learning how to run productive meetings.
- I worked as a social media producer for WWF / Earth Hour for a couple of years. This was good for learning social media strategy, microcontent and CMS management.
- I ran numerous blogs, news websites and online projects for friends and community organisations. This was great for learning how to run workshops, learning how to sketch, manage ongoing UX improvement and iterations.
- I studied technical drawing in high school. This was good for learning how to sketch paper prototypes.
- I spend a lot of time online, reading widely (lots of UX blogs, design blogs, literature / academic blogs, comics) as well as reading books. A Book Apart offer great design and UX books, as does O’Reilly.
If you are considering a career in UX, I would suggest reading as much as you can, then try applying it on actual projects. Find a community group and volunteer to help them update their website. Intern at a digital or design agency. Hang out at a UX consultancy. Volunteer for usability testing (UIE periodically ask their email subscribers to volunteer for testing in exchange for access to training webinars). Sketch up a software product prototype, blog about it, engage with other designers and refine your idea.
It’s a good training exercise to review your favourite websites and think about what you’d change to make them easier to use. But always remember that UX is about getting the best experience for the user within the bounds of the project scope, the budget, and the client expectations. UX is about communication and compromise. Once you’ve learnt the principles of good UX, get out there and get your hands dirty.
2011 in pictures
