Experience theme for Covenant Eyes
Cindy Chastain's article, "Experience Themes," at Boxes and Arrows outlines a neat way to package the concepts that help user experience designers put creative work into context.
When I was leading many design/development projects at a time, I'd write a creative brief for each—it helped me and the team stay clearheaded about each project. An experience theme seems like an alternative to a creative brief.
The following thoughts apply Chastain's article to my work at Covenant Eyes.
Covenant Eyes is rich with stories
At Covenant Eyes, Inc., we have a full-time blogger, Luke. As I see it, Luke's job is to draw out the stories surrounding Covenant Eyes and to share them using the Internet. He's our storyteller.
What are the roles? There are so many stories, from people in so many places in life.
- husbands, fathers
- wives, mothers
- children
- pastors, rabbis
- counselors
- porn addicts, recovering porn addicts, people who have beaten the addiction
- and the list continues
What are some theme concepts?
- For people fighting a problem with pornography: Learn to be honest again (These words come from Michael Leahy's mouth while he was visiting our offices.)
- For mothers with children who use the Internet: Protect my family
- For fathers with a teenage son: Teach him to be responsible for his actions
Experience transcends our services
What work do we do at our company? Although others I work with may claim we deliver software, I think we deliver information. Our software allows us to provide information-rich reports on Internet usage that can be used within relationships. I think of these as "accountability relationships."
The theme concepts listed above have little to do with software or even our service. The real value we provide is that we can provide the sense for people that what could be their little secret is not actually hidden. That little bit of knowledge has proven its ability to change lives, and relationships, for the better.
The hard part is carrying the experience theme across our touch points with users
I recently helped put together a spreadsheet to inventory the automated emails we send to users at various points. There were over 60 emails, and they fulfill needs ranging from billing concerns to helpful reminders after a few weeks of being a customer. Many of these messages should be revised, and keeping the theme in mind will help create a coherent experience for our users.
Covenant Eyes has multiple touch points with its users.
Beyond these emails is a myriad of other touch points:
- sign up form
- help documents
- filter settings controls
- accountability reports
- tech support phone calls
- blog posts
- and so on
Taken all together, these communications can benefit from an experience theme.
I suspect the key to pulling this off is to have all those involved with crafting these touch points understand the experience theme and leave it to them to carry it through. As the company's user experience lead, my job may be to facilitate the definition and adoption of an experience theme, and motivate and lead by example so others will carry the vision.
Seams between systems and the Vignelli NYC subway map
I just read "Mr. Vignelli's Map" by Michael Bierut over at Design Observer. In the post, Bierut remembers and analyzes why the public rejected Vignelli's map of the New York City subway system. (Here's the Vignelli subway map.)
The Vignelli map smartly acknowledged that for passengers of the subway focused on navigating the subway system itself, above ground geography was nothing but a factor of added complexity. So the map instead was oriented around the subway lines and stops themselves, abstracting actual geography. This was a keen simplification from an information design perspective.
But consider this observation from Bierut's article.
To make the map work graphically meant that a few geographic liberties had to be taken. What about, for instance, the fact that the Vignelli map represented Central Park as a square, when in fact it is three times as long as it is wide? If you're underground, of course, it doesn't matter: there simply aren't as many stops along Central Park as there are in midtown, so it requires less map space. But what if, for whatever reason, you wanted to get out at 59th Street and take a walk on a crisp fall evening? Imagine your surprise when you found yourself hiking for hours on a route that looked like it would take minutes on Vignelli's map.
The concept of designing the seams between systems has become apparent within the user experience design community over the last couple years. This is an example of that problem of seams.
Passengers of the subway system are also navigators of the city itself, so their context of use spans beyond the subway and the end of their decisions are not merely which stop to get on and off of, but where they are going once they get out of the subway.
Bierut makes the point:
The problem, of course, was that Vignelli's logical system came into conflict with another, equally logical system: the 1811 Commissioners' Plan for Manhattan.
How can designers consider the seams between the subway system and the city plan to result in a better-designed subway map?
NYC, of course, has a functioning subway map. Is functionality the only litmus test?
(I've taken the subway in New York City only once, and managed to get from Point A to Point B successfully, although with some anxiety.)
The Thanksgiving Duck
Lila and Eva wishing you peace on Thanksgiving, 2009.
As mentioned last post, I tried a duck for Thanksgiving. Lila summed it up with "It's okay Dad, but it's not appealing."
I could not fit the bird into the crock pot, so my Plan A was foiled. Instead I roasted it in the oven. I applied poultry seasoning and tucked onion and apple chunks inside before putting it into the oven.
What about the fat? The infamous problem with duck is the layer of fat under the skin of the duck. I poked holes in the skin so the fat would drain out during roasting. This certainly helped and the skin was actually very nice, golden and crispy. There were still some unappealing sections of fat, although they were easy to separate from the meat.
I've never had duck before, and the taste and texture was unexpected. It wasn't bad, and the overall dinner was great.
A recipe for disaster?
Against the advice of Adam, I am going to attempt to cook a small turkey in my crock pot for Thanksgiving.
It's just me, Lila, and Eva, so we don't need a big bird.
If I can't get it to fit in the crock pot I reserve the right to abort to Plan B, which is to put the bird in the regular old oven. But that isn't as interesting.
On a side note, I'll bet the frozen chickens feel like rejects this time of year. Poor little birds.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Update, 10:47 PM
The smallest turkey at the store was 10 pounds! That's four more pounds than I dare to try to fit into the crock pot. So, while I nearly decided to find the biggest crock pot ever, I decided instead to get a 5 pound duck.
Oh yes, the game's afoot now. Plus, the bill was less that than of a 10 pound turkey. 
WUD 2009 at MSU recap
Yesterday's World Usability Day event at Michigan State University was good—but a little odd.
The morning sessions were spot-on, and some of the afternoon talks were good as well. However, it was clear that some panelists didn't understand their audience of usability and accessibility practitioners. Their talks were still interesting, but they didn't understand the user experience industry's take on words like "accessibility" and "sustainability," which was this year's theme.
So, here's a quick recap.
Assistive Technology Expo
I attended the Assistive Technology Expo in the morning. I posted yesterday about comments regarding CAPTCHAs gleaned from that talk.
The two presenters work in the technology field providing technology support for people with various disabilities and are themselves blind. They demonstrated how they use screen readers to accomplish various tasks online, like checking the weather, tuning into a football game streamed online, checking stocks, buying groceries, and buying a computer.
I appreciate observing and listening to people with disabilities who use the Internet, because it helps counter what I know about the technology with what is clear about people. That is, people adapt and make things work to the best of their ability. These two presenters were gracious about technology-related problems that I know many sighted people would be upset with. They also pointed out that most websites are at some level usable by them, but of course they prefer ones that are more accessible. We did see a number of examples where they simply wouldn't have been able to overcome some technical roadblocks without significant additional effort.
One part of the presentation included them showcasing how they use an iPhone. An accessibility feature on the iPhone causes a single tap on the touch screen to say the name of the application (or letter if it is the keypad), while the double-tap will activate it. So, they have audible feedback to find the function they need, plus the capability to then activate it. This seemed to work very well for them.
Another point made during the session is that these assistive technologies like screen readers and electronic braille devices are quite expensive. Some screen reader programs are more expensive than the cost of the computer itself. However, the presenters voiced hope because the prices are coming down. They cited Apple shipping Macs that have built-in accessibility features at zero additional cost. Also, for Windows, there are some screen reader programs that are only a few hundred dollars.
Special Session: Contemporary Issues of IT in the Sustainable Global Knowledge Economy
This panel session had presenters on the topics of:
- delivering broadband across the state of Michigan even to rural areas (George Boersma)
- ITEC, a center in Lansing that provides after-school programs to help youth learn about technology, science and math (Kirk Riley)
- IT accessibility (Sharron Rush)
- global knowledge economy (Mark Wilson)
All the presenters were well-spoken and interesting. Sharron Rush seemed to be the one presenter that is part of the usability and accessibility profession, though the others shared important information and perspectives.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to provide more details on these presentations.
Hybrid Technology for a Sustainable Future
Shane Shulze of Ford Motor Company presented information on what Ford has been working on in regard to battery powered cars. His talk was focused on battery technology, and it was interesting to see the audience's response.
One participant spoke up and asked about how these new cars will address the safety issues with quiet-running cars. Shane's answer was that Ford is aware of the issue. I suppose we can look to future prototypes to see how what they do with this issue. (From a UX perspective, I think that is a really interesting question: what are the design concerns in regards to the volume and appropriateness of the audio.)
e-Government Services for a Sustainable County
Salina Washington of Oakland County and Constantinos Coursaris of Michigan State University presented on how Oakland County has transformed their delivery of services to citizens of Oakland County with the eGov department of the county government.
This presentation was inspiring. We know that good, usable technology can improve service delivery and decrease costs, but this was an actual example of that happening.
The take-away from this was that when faced with a challenge, like a massive cut in budget, instead of going the traditional route of laying people off, think creatively and as a group come up with ideas on decreasing costs and making the most of the resources that each part of the government agency uses.
Sustainability and Agility: UX Designs for Eforms
John Rivard spoke about integrating UX and Agile development at a bank. He shared examples of their workflow, like work-ahead, follow-behind. This was also an excellent presentation and it seems that the way John is working is similar to how we operate at Covenant Eyes.
That's all folks
All-in-all, it was a good day with some unexpected, but enjoyable talks. Good job to the organizers from the MSU Usability & Accessibility Center! Also, check out Tom Schult'z posts on his blog.
WUD: captcha problems discussed in assistive tech expo
Tom Schultz and I are at the World Usability Day event hosted by Michigan State University today. We sat in a session this morning that focused on a demonstration and discussion of assistive technologies.
An interesting point in the discussion was that problems with CAPTCHAs for people with visual impairments. One of the presenters went through a process at the DELL website, selected a computer and went to purchase it, but on the way to checking out, he had to pass a CAPTCHA that asked him to enter the characters he sees in the image into a text box.
Of course the problem was that he could not see the image and there was no alternative available. No sale.
Someone else brought up Google's use of audio as an alternative to the visual CAPTCHA, but the presenters pointed out that for someone who has both visual and hearing impairments, this is still insufficient.
(You can try the audio CAPTCHA on the first page of the sign up page for Blogger. Try it out!)
They pointed out that a CAPTCHA that used reasoning could be a more accessible approach, and another idea was to send an email to verify that the agent is, in fact, a human (that's the point of a CAPTCHA).
I'll probably post another update from this conference later.
Paper: crucial to Web design
At first thought, Web design is a digital job. But as long as I have done this work, I've had paper on hand.
In the 90s I'd quickly sketch different ideas for overall design, narrow it in, and then sketch out the plan to create the layout with tables, complete with pixel dimensions for each cell and notations on margins, borders, and padding. I'd annotate the sketch with hexidecimal codes for colors to use. The process placed ink before pixels.
As CSS gained ground and the industry left table-based layouts behind, I sketched fewer details, but usually still rapidly drew thumbnails of page layouts on paper before settling in.
For a time, I thought I could do most of this work with computer programs as my primary tools: Word, Excel, Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, and straight textual coding tools like BBEdit. Later, OmniGraffle joined the toolbox, and I did first-round design digitally.
Ink before pixels again
Over the last six years paper and ink has again become my first tool. Hand-drawn sketches and notes are fast and fluid—far moreso than code or Photoshop.
With a quick sketch in hand, the coding can leapfrog some easy-to-make first mistakes. For instance, last week I needed to create some screens for a 3 page sign up process. I spent about 30 seconds drafting two quick page layouts on paper before I jumped into Photoshop and Dreamweaver to create the graphics and code it up.
By doing the second sketch, I was able to make better use of a design grid and utilize white space more effectively. That's 30 seconds well-spent, and it means I didn't have to waste time in Photoshop or with code on a design that had whitespace problems.
Good paper is worth it
When I started my latest job, I asked for some paper to sketch with. I was provided with some cheap cardboard-backed white notepads. Each pad fell apart within a week or two of use, and was better suited to ripping sheets off then holding together. Irritating!
I started to use my own notebooks for work, and just a couple weeks ago purchased a set of Moleskine Volant notebooks. They are softcover notebooks about 5 by 8 1/4 inches, and are well-bound with excellent ruled paper. I think they're the best notebooks I've ever had.
XSL to get text from Apple Pages documents
Pages is the name of Apple's basic word processor program that comes with their iWork suite of applications. It's not a bad program, but a number of months ago I needed to switch up to MS Word for the Mac.
Well, this morning I was looking through some old files and found a text document I wanted to print that I had done using Pages. Unfortunately, I had removed iWork from my Mac, so I no longer had the software to open the Pages document.
After a cursory search on the Internet for a program that would let me open Pages docs without having the program itself, I came up empty-handed.
So, I inspected the Pages document and realized it was a package. (Right click on the document icon and Show Package Contents.) The package contained an index.xml.gz file, which I unzipped and found within the body of my document amidst a whole bunch of XML code.
I momentarily considered reconstructing the text in TextWrangler, but thought it might be fun to write an XSLT file to do the work.
Please note that this is a 1st draft meant to retrieve the text from my document. It will not handle anything fancy, just text. Plus, it will only try to make each chunk of text into a plain-text paragraph in HTML, suitable for copying and pasting out of a browser window. Use at your own risk. 
Ok, here's the textFromPages.xsl file.
Others may take this initial XSL file and do what they will with it. I hope that if you take this and make it better, you'll comment on this post to let me (and others) know.
To have it be useful to you, you'll need to know how to apply an XSL transformation to a source XML file (specifically the index.xml from Pages).
Hint: Firefox will do the transformation for you if you include the proper xml-stylesheet directive right after the XML prologue in the source XML file. It looks like this: <?xml-stylesheet href="textFromPages.xsl" type="text/xsl" ?>
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