“Human-centered design is an approach to innovation in which user research drives design decisions by providing an understanding of end users. In practice, different people, teams, or even companies manage each step of the design process, making communication of user research results a critical activity.  Based on an empirical study of current methods used by experts, this paper presents strategies for effectively communicating user research findings across organizational or corporate boundaries.  To build researcher-client relationships, understand both user and client needs, and overcome institutional inertia, this paper proposes viewing user research clients as users of user research outcomes.  This reframing the crafting of communication across boundaries as a parallel internal human-centered design process we refer to as a double ethnography.”

Roschuni, C., Goodman, E. and Agogino, A. 2013. Communicating Actionable User Research. Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing. Pre-publication draft available here.

I’m teaching the School of Information’s UX research class in spring 2013.

Syllabus here.

Through following the work of interaction designers at three San Francisco consultancies, my dissertation asks: What do interaction designers make, and how do they make it?

Interaction design is a relatively new discipline, separate (though descended) from industrial design, software engineering, and graphic design. Today, interaction designers play an important role in shaping digital technologies used by millions of people around the world. But though interaction design has been the recipient of a great deal of enthusiastic hype as the conduit of “design thinking,” there has been surprisingly little scholarly examination of the profession.

My dissertation project begins with two seemingly simple questions: what do interaction designers produce, and how do they produce it? Answering those questions is harder than it looks. My central argument is that in order to understand how interaction designers shape digital systems, we must supplement a dominant framework – that of “design as thinking” – with a complementary concept of “design as performance.” Through an ethnographic study of projects at three San Francisco interaction design consultancies, my dissertation introduces this concept and explores some of its dimensions.

Many of interactions‘ readers undoubtedly live and breathe deliverables, but here’s a quick definition for those who are still innocent: A deliverable is a document created by one group of people that is then passed to another. Hence the name. Like a parcel, a deliverable has a sender and a receiver. In commercial interaction design, the sender is likely a designer or consultant; the receiver, the developer or client. As a primary form of communication between key players in the creation of a technological product, deliverables can have very high stakes.

As a print graphic designer, I never heard the word. I dealt with comps, flats, or proofs. I started hearing requests for deliverables only when I started working as an interaction designer.

I didn’t like it at all.

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Slides from talk

It’s the second week of a six-week website redesign at a San Francisco design consultancy. The visiting researcher asks the senior interaction designer about his work. He responds, “Oh, I’m not doing any real work on the project anymore. I’m just showing up at client meetings and hand waving.”

“Hand waving” is an apt name for what happens when designers meet with clients. To make good decisions about the direction of a project, clients or other external decision makers need to understand designers’ proposals, whether they are for an interactive interface, a product, a system, or a service. But there’s an inevitable gap between the existing representations and the experience of the future interactivity. Static wireframes might not effectively convey how a menu drops down, or the emotional effect of an animated transition. Or perhaps a video scenario for a future product family needs to reference detailed research on everyday media consumption. To make matters worse, the goal of interaction design is often not a menu drop-down, a transition, or even a scenario, but rather relationships between varying combinations of humans and machines that support human goals and activities.

Visual and interaction designers bridge that gap between representations and future imagined interactions through hand waving. That is, they supplement visual representations with verbal explanations and evocative body movements. This hand waving for clients is treated as a routine part of their jobs, but is often dismissed as not “real work.”

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Acceptance rate: 22%.

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