Notes for an Upcoming Show

Creating word combinations conjuring ideas obscure to the unfocused, not providing a center of attention for others- and in this way remaining on the fringe of vision and understanding.

Choosing square composition photography thumbnails gathered from news sources recreating the imagery as painting and layering over text to challenge inferred meaning.

Parenthetical additions post-words imply not going back to add in-line, but continuing with a modification.

image, meaning: object as image since we are not seeing the actual sub-atomic make-up of the object, and therefore not the object itself, but rather an image of the object inherited by a property of grouping.  But this is 'abstraction' as only a matter of scale and scale is exactly what we are talking about here.

paint, chemical grounds spread: the relationship between the paint particles and pixels is that there really is no difference (again with scale in mind).  There is a space in the material for each paint particle as there is a larger space for the completed image.  Paint is composed of electrons and so behaves similarly to electrons where there are forces of attraction and repulsion and the photons that interact with the paint and our eyes indicate these forces (photons carry the message of the paint).  This can be said of any material really.

layering of paint chunks and text: Never before have we been surrounded by so much text.  Not only is the diversity of content staggering, but also the diversity of sources.  With all of these 'drawings' in letter form, it becomes easy to drift into the unstructured meaning and create entire personas based on the input, inference, and reaction to textual information- which is not unlike the action impulse of imagery.  We are paralleling the user behavior of imagination and creation of meaning in classical image and textual forms.  With both of these powerful catalysts in play, a third form of inferred meaning is conjured through the creation of 'space' in the mind of the user where two obscurities collide to create an outlet of energy that could be a place of new absence, or rest, or could function as another path of meaning.  There is space because objects create its existence and the collision of imagery and escape of meaning-energy is exactly the process at the sub-atomic level.

A User Experience Note on Text Input Fields: When to display pre-filled info, side-step help, or nothing

The tremendous increase in data analysis and market trend in big-data stem logically from data collection in the first place.  While a large part of this data collection is done without user knowledge, the other big chunk comes from manual user entry; and typically through the use of user input forms.  With the help of some script, it is possible to pre-fill info into a text input field that, when the user starts typing in the field, becomes invisible.  This pre-filled info, typically a higher color value like light grey, helps the user understand what is required of the form, often for validity.  It is also possible to place some text next to a text input field in order to achieve a near-same result.  Several differences exist between the two methods of helping the user from a user experience perspective and, with the growing form-input-data-collection trend, it is becoming increasingly critical to understand when to instantiate one method over another, when to utilize both methods effectively, or confidently abandon both.

Here, I’ll propose a rule regarding helping a user fill out form data and then develop corollaries around that rule to help with this decision making process for designers and developers.

Text that provides help for users to fill out form data should be used whenever possible.

In practice, anything that helps users interact with technology should be utilized whenever possible, but adding features that help can degrade the simplicity that avoids the ‘hurting’ in the first place; interfaces become cluttered and confusing.  So the question becomes how do we define ‘whenever possible,’ and will our definition hold over the long run and across a myriad of projects? 

Attempting to set a long term standard for any user experience methodology is only possible when considering those base human factors that bubble up through the user experience.  Such factors include the cognitive aspects of communication, response systems toward reward, inherent motivators of curiosity, and incessant drive toward learning. For form input data decisions, the elemental aspects to consider are metaphor, metonym, and conservation of energy for the user.  We are concerned with metaphor and metonym because these variables govern communication- and communication is explicitly on trial here.  The energy variable flows through all user processes from action speed, to action distance, to action anticipation, and also inherits the time variable.

Examining the differences between ‘suggestion text,’ high color value text appearing in an input box, and ‘help text,’ text appearing to the side of an input field, we see that both catalyze the same result of helping a user fill out a form.  While suggestion text is typically limited to only a couple words, help text may be one or two sentences.  This makes sense as the field input is limited on size whereas there is often more space around the field.  So we have one obvious, but non-trivial, corollary already:  

Use help text when suggestion text could extend beyond more than a couple of words.    

Another issue that arises quickly from this is how the user experience is affected then by possibly having one form with multiple fields where it is possible to implement a combination of help and suggestion text.  Here we can implement our conservation of energy law to make a satisfying decision.  Considering a user’s eye movement, then a combination of help and suggestion text would cause the energy expended to be at its greatest as the eye travels from side to inside the field and back again on down the form.  (Note I am considering a form that is a single column and more than 5 inputs).  So we have developed a second corollary:

Use as few variations between help and suggestion text as possible.

Now we arrive at what makes this issue most challenging to resolve- in order to follow the above corollaries we require subjective judgement and subjective judgement leads to debate and can impede project progression.  But there is one objective criticism we can apply to the process when deciding on help text, suggestion text, both, or neither- at least based on user experience guidelines.

Apply the correct treatment based on what the user is thinking when they approach the input.

When a user approaches an input box, their intent should be pre-analyzed by the user experience team.  Is the user approaching the box with a strong idea of what they will be inputting?  An example of strong intent would be a username/password combo.  An example of weak intent would be the VLAN MAC addresses of an unassigned server profile.  Grading the user’s intention at the input box level then helps the decision making process for utilizing help text, suggestion text, or neither.  

At the interface design level, help text can also be used as the input label, cleaning the interface of redundancy and shrinking its footprint (especially advantageous for small form factor screens).

Design like golf: wang

What are the minimal elements needed within the interface presentation in order to effectively communicate context and potential action(s), and how should those elements be placed in order to conserve the greatest amount of user energy to realize place and to focus effort?

Perhaps this concentrated and protracted question haunts every blank sheet of paper, digital artboard, or open html editor- if it doesn’t, I encourage the designer or developer in the moment to attempt to embrace this banshee of inspiration and follow its undulating flow down a concentrated hallway of effort and closure on the task at hand.  If we approach our design workflows like golf, where every play counts and reward awaits for those who work to minimize their approach to the finish, then we are forced to place a tremendous amount of effort into the thinking process of our designs so that the actual employment of stroke produces maximal effect and our failures at least place us near enough our intended goal that we can recover quickly and without too much difficulty.

Iteration and mistake are inevitable- they are a positive part of the exercise that stimulates growth and learning, but they do not disqualify us from the tournament; we can remain in play for as long as we desire and the course is endless.  Greatness is realized by the user and by ourselves when things appear easy to comprehend and to act on- this is the ‘naturalness’ of the interface that makes it feel easy to create and to interact with.  The interface looks ‘easy to do.’  We can recognize this sensation in other contexts such as painting, music, woodworking, cooking, teaching, equation solving, and leadership.  Examples in the painting context are early portraiture works of John Singer Sargent where a shadow cast by a nose is a simple blocked-in stroke of paint held together by surrounding form shadows and by the light it fends from its role to protect a secret held by the sitter.  Such intention of purpose, laid down with the energy of storytelling, will exude greatness to any user, observer, or creator.  Though Sargent would tend to the bravado in his growth, his mastery of placement of pigment and conjure of potential energy in his subjects only grew more obvious.

Bliss, in the Roland Barthes vocable sense of the term, takes form within the interface of humans and technology as we minimize our visible work in the ‘final deliverable.’  We are already presenting our work on some of the finest materials ever crafted and utilizing some of the most excellent tools ever available- with these massive difficulties overcome, it becomes easier to realize the course and path to our goals by focusing only on the shot; what strength is needed to move our position and what general location we wish to land before the next attempt is taken.

Growth in the tournament is mutual for the user, the creator, and the creative observer.

See you at the 19th hole.

After Tree View Controls

A tree view control is a common graphical user interface widget that allows for the navigation of a hierarchy of information.  This control allows a user to click into the nodes of the tree, commonly called branches, to view the farthest node or leaf of information.  The information could be a folder structure with files inside or a networking domain with devices and device component IDs.  While useful for exposing the hierarchies of data or the backend programmatic signature of the data, tree views should be employed with great scrutiny when concerns for swiftness of workflow are paramount to usability in a software context.

From their outset, tree views naturally introduce complexity to a user about the data they present.  This obvious inheritance is often not necessary for a user to accomplish the task at hand and so the cognitive work of the user that is immediately escalated becomes an unnecessary source of friction that impedes expediency and builds a tone of intricacy into a software product that could otherwise benefit from a more fluidic, lightweight, and apparently simple interface.  

Tree views demand that the user know a priori or learn the container structure and embedded elements, which can require significant drilling into node elements.  This hunting and seeking of information, especially in the case of first time use, requires time as well as physical and mental effort to seek, click, seek, remember, and click (if luck permits) that unapologetically take away from any accomplishment of acting on the data that a user is hunting for.  The question, ‘Where is the thing?’ heavily burdens the workflow of needing to do something with ‘the thing’ once it is located.  While grouping elements within a container structure that may inherit a hierarchy is a distinct and foundational human tendency, within the context of software applications, there are other control presentation methods that can increase the speed that a desired outcome is attained and, through this unhindered workflow, the user gains a sense of satisfaction in their efforts that can lead to the sale or renewal of more products in a strict business sense and promote infectious positive energy in the broader societal sense.

A very clear usability limitation of tree views is that they often are restrained to vertically-biased rectangles, yet can contain nodes that expand two, three, or more levels deep.  This presentation then requires the user to perform a kind of horizontal scrolling acrobatics, to expand a node, scroll, scan, and hopefully click to expose the details of the target node for further action.  The fact that tree views are often not the location of action on a node, and if they were, are severely limiting in the screen real estate they permit, means that their implementation demands an engineer to exquisitely balance the concepts of action and navigation- not simple feats that challenge senior and principle level developers and designers alike.  All the time that a user spends engaging with ‘tree swinging’ as they navigate a potentially complicated hierarchy is time spent not focused on achieving their ultimate goal; whatever that may be, it is most certainly not locating a node on a tree.

If we can collapse the distance between a user’s current location and their destination then we have necessarily reduced the time of their actions and promoted their satisfaction with their efforts.  Data structure and hierarchy can be crucial to understanding how to solve a given problem and learn workflow, but they can be exposed in areas perhaps more appropriate than a tree view.  Conversely, a tree view can be immensely useful if the hierarchy it uncovers is shallow and if the tree itself is ‘short’ enough to allow for quick scanning for target nodes.  As the tree’s complexity grows, its usefulness decays rapidly, and much like physical trees under human gaze, it becomes an object of bewilderment and paralyzing bliss rather than an object under control.  This statement applies with greater warning as the number of nodes encountered proliferates through an era of planetary size data structures.

What Doesn't Change Across Form Factors in Interaction Design

Users.

Users don’t change.

There are no new ideas in the combination of words below, you create the ideas and meaning as a viewer and user of this document.

Although the concept of ‘the user’ is perhaps the only thing that doesn’t change across form factors when considering user experience design, the users, their selves, do change. Of course we know this is true because we are reactionary and adaptive organisms existing in a constantly changing environment. Our interests, capabilities, dependencies, and expectations are in flux with our surroundings. We are all users, and only through an understanding of ourselves, do we uncover our understanding of others.

There are, however, certain properties of the human mental construct that remain constant enough to create around and, with reasonable certainty, predict a user’s response to the imposed stimulation. This in fact drives to a founding stone in this essay that when creating for users, we are invoking a simple action-reaction process not unlike that at the biological or sub-atomic level. We have the concepts of a receptor and stimulator (probabilistically more physical) and the concepts of an impulse operator and reactionary value (probabilistically more energetic).

Considering first the receptor-stimulator construct, we must appreciate the problem of designing for user experience as visual communication problem solving; dependent on a language as alive as the object that inherits it, but also consisting of ‘atomic’ building blocks that form the inputs for predictive calculations. These basic shapes of the visual language act exactly as the phonemes of verbal language and are universally recognized and ‘spoken’ across all cultures and demographics. An example here would be a circle- it may be called many things, but it is always a circle and recognized, or received by, its never-ending roundness. This roundness then acts as a vehicle for non-specific user reactions such as comfort, safety, and time-dilation.

So there are receptors of the human mental architecture that don’t change across humans at the most basic level or over time (much)- if they do change over time, they change isotropically. There are also stimulators, the building blocks of the visual language, that do not change at all.

We can liken this phenomenon to that of our taste receptors where we have the same receptors for sweet and sour; it is our cultural learning and development that alters these receptors making them more or less affinitive for a particular taste, yet the existence of the receptors is the same. The stimulators, the chemical combinations that invoke sensation, are constant because of the electrochemical laws that govern their shape in space.

Naturally following the pattern of our surrounding universe, elements of the visual language 

are drawn together, interact, and create higher order structures and groupings invoking patterns and sequences catalyzing new reactions in viewers, or users. Not only are new shapes instantiated, but also new spaces- the encapsulating envelopes and framing devices of the visual language- the negative space is altered, and new meaning is realized. As we consider form factors, we must take into account this space surrounding the object and not just the object itself.

Let us define what we mean by form factor in this context before going forward.

A form factor is that container for an interface, for the construct of the interface, and for the user of the interface.

With this definition, we understand the device and the user are both form factors that must be accounted for in design. So we are not just thinking in terms of pixel dimensions or metric units, but also in terms of human intelligence, cultural affiliation, age, or any other number of human properties. While this broad definition of a form factor may seem to intimidate or retard the genesis of design, it is actually more useful than aversive because it forces us to rely on those fundamental human properties that are universal, and in this way things are created that appeal to the greatest audience with greater assurance of their impact and potential reaction.

We also see that the form factor is the space in which the user experience takes place- it is an empty container for processing, interaction, and design. The form factor is not the limiter or catalyst of design problems of user experience as it is typically approached. The major cause of problems in user experience design is the lack of user (human) understanding at the fundamental level during the design phase.

As the word ‘interface’ was mentioned, let’s define that before going forward as

An interface is a constructor that maps a set of inherited functions onto any set of given data to allow for impulse, action, and potential cognition.

So the interface is that active glue which binds the form factors of design, of space, and of the user. We can understand this programmatically as the functional constructor bringing variables and methods into an active or kinetic process. The interface architecture does not exist without the three form factors, yet its elements (elements of the visual language) do exist independent of design and the user, but not of space.

If we now take a big picture perspective of this lecture so far, we will see that all users have fundamental receptors, and therefore, predictable responses to visual stimuli. That user experience design is a process of visual problem solving relying on the same principles of reception and reaction as those on the biological and sub-atomic levels. That form factors include the users as well as the used objects and interfaces.

Let’s continue down the path of understanding the user then to realize specifically those things that don’t change across form factors. From a visual communication problem solving strategy, we can break designing for the user down into concepts of energy and in this way continue to steer toward the foundational and fundamental elements that govern user experience.

We can begin with the potential energy side of the equation or the design planning phase. The visual problem is solved by accounting for universal human traits and conforming the design to draw out (enhance) or push back (de-emphasize) the responses originating from those traits. Let’s take for example the human trait of curiosity. Curiosity is biologically an open receptor for electrochemical change with a high amount of potential for energy change and according to physical law, there is a tendency toward equilibrium with an increase in entropy. (This is the action potential). When the receptor is covered, it undergoes a conformational change and this change, paired with a series of electrochemical responses, indicates the process of learning at the macroscopic level. (A protein folds according to the naturally allowable folds and the system remembers or learns its abilities). At a higher perspective level, the receptor’s host learns this process of stimulation and physical change comes from an external source and the paths of certain stimuli are attributed to a system of rewards and punishment. (Cause and effect are attributed to this process as a method of understanding and predicting the future).

This is a universal process shared inter-culturally amongst all humans and we must search out those other unchanging traits when designing across form factors.

In another language of study we can view this process in terms of linear algebra and the state vectors of quantum mechanics. Let’s pretend we are in the human basis | h > and we create a very simple equation that equates the operation of an interface on a human user to produce some sort of impulse as an eigenvalue. The equation looks like: 

human basis, | h > : I | h > - i | h > = 0

In its simplicity we see the human basis as a state vector which is unchanging and we emphasize the likeness of all humans under specific visual stimulation. So we design our operator ( I ), the impulse of the interface, to produce a measurable and predictable reaction if we understand the unshifting state vector.

If we tend now toward the kinetic energy side of the equation, the design and manufacturing process itself, the visual problem across form factors can be solved in numerous ways. Essentially these methods all employ the use of reshaping information to ‘fit’ the form factor. This is done spatially and temporally. Spatially, the technique is essentially to bifurcate the data from one form factor and reconstruct it to fit the alternate form factor. During this process, information can be lost, the architectural elements can be critically broken and the interface’s ability to allow for potential cognition as we have defined it can be jeopardized. 

This precipitates an issue at the pinnacle of user experience design, especially across form factors, that design is not about haphazardly placing shapes within a frame, it is about composing a message with utmost sensitivity to user cognition. It is also not about squishing and smushing information to fit various form factors- each form factor, whether human or object or interface has its own intrinsic properties that convey the presented information differently. For example, a tablet is held differently than a phone, and therefore will be interacted with differently. The direct translation of visual data from one form factor to another by reshaping it should be approached with exceptional care. 

The most impactful and effective visual design is nearly identical across form factors- it does not depend on the spatial constraints of the display, only on the unchanging fundamental properties of the user. And, here lies the difficulty of this problem; a difficulty that energizes those that undertake the search for its solution.

Temporally, information is reshaped by understanding the user’s ‘read’ of the presented message. (Note that the reading action is necessarily time-dependent). This is not only done by the local placement of objects within an interface, but also by employing those elements of design that again call to the human receptors of visual processing. Namely contrast, composition, and conservation of energy for the user. Through contrast, importance is established- high contrast elements are read first while low contrast elements fade into ‘second reads’ or beyond or are not read at all. Composition is the layout of the interface and it is clear that the human form factor will read a composition differently based on cultural learning. However, this can be tailored through the use of contrast. Conservation of energy is a principle followed by the rest of the universe and we are no exception. We will read information with a default minimal effort and increase or decrease this effort based on our interest in the subject matter. The majority of failures in translations of visual information across form factors occur because at least one of these principles is not respected.