DESIGNING *for humans

keep it simple, stupid - online version available

My article for Barclay's 360 corporate magazine on simplicity, clarity and complexity in business is finally available in a slick, online magazine format.  You can view and print portions of the entire issue.

Ergonomics of Typography

While I've never had any formal education on typography (or perhaps, because of that absence), I've always had a great amount of respect and admiration for the discipline.  And just as a skilled driver can win a race without understanding the physics of internal combustion engines, the vast majority of us can write effectively without comprehending the physical details of the particular letters we are assembling.

But my interest in typography has recently grown due to my exposure to two leading practitioners.  Michael Beirut and Oded Ezer are very different kinds of designers.  Beirut, who I enjoyed seeing lecture a few weeks ago at a Philadelphia AIGA event, is an expert at applying typography to design projects.  His encyclopedic knowledge of type history can be seen in this video from Atlantic Magazine:

On the other hand, Oded Ezer is a true typographer who creates letter forms.  An Israeli, he works primarily in Hebrew type, both in applied and experimental forms.  I am currently reading Ezer's just-published The Typographer's Guide to the Galaxy, a visual review of Ezer's body of work ranging from relatively simple and direct treatments (like the image at the top of this post), to unconventional 3D treatments of letters and "Typospermatoids" (pictured below) - a hypothetical half sperm/half letter, "whose typographic information has been implanted into their DNA."  For more information, see Ezer's web site.

This emphasis and exposure to typography has caused me to re-evaluate my own perspective on the field.  For the usability or human factors practitioner, typography is generally considered in very functional terms.  Whether it's road signs on a highway, warning labels on medication or data captions in a software application, the focus is on the appropriate visual clarity, legibility and structural hierarchy.

But Ezer's unconventional, even anthropomorphic treatment of typography has me thinking of letters as actors with characteristics, rather than inert symbols.  More specifically, I realized that some of the basic principles of ergonomics could be mapped to typographical elements, and that typography and anthropometry (the study of human body measurements) are curiously related, at least metaphorically.

The fundamental principle of anthropometrics is that although people need to conduct the same types of behaviors and tasks, they vary greatly in their physical characteristics.  The same is true for different type faces - while they vary greatly in their physical characteristics and appearance, each must represent and allow the assembly of the same sets of characters into words.  That is, any font (English font, more specifically), is a variation on representing the 26 letters of the alphabet, etc.

But a more striking similarity between ergonomics and typography arises when one considers the rules that govern fit.  In my series on Ergonomics for Interaction Designers (part 3), I discuss the four key factors - reach, clearance, posture and strength.  These four inputs can be applied to assess the ergonomic fit of any person in any context.  But they are also metaphorically comparable for assessing the characteristics of a type:

• Reach can refer to the size of the typeface.  For example a taller type would have a greater "reach" or expanse than a condensed one.
• Clearance is physical space, or in the case of type, white-space.  A type with more space around the letters has greater clearance.
• Posture is the degree of alignment, such that a very slanted type would have a greater postural deviation than a a more linear type.
• Strength is the visible impact of the type as conveyed by the contrast of line thickness and boldness.

As a basic example, we can visually compare Arial Black with an italicized version of Times New Roman.  While both examples are at the same type size (13 pt), Arial Black clearly has greater reach and strength, while Times New Roman has a slanted posture.

Perhaps an interesting mental exercise, but anything more to it?  I've just begun to examine this interrelationship, but I think there may be inspiration here for typographers.  Gaining an understanding of human physical characteristics, and how they vary, could influence the design and application of typography, not for functional purposes as much as creative and exploratory endeavors.  Conversely, my interest in typography may lead to new ideas for addressing ergonomic issues - but if not, I will have gained a better understanding of an intriguing, ubiquitous design niche.`

Human Factors Professionals are Poor Designers

The Spring 09 Newsletter of the Product Design Technical Group of HFES starts off with an editorial by group chair Steve Belz, which articulates a cliche, but accurate situation:

"…Human Factors professionals, as a discipline, are remarkably poor designers.

 

There, I said it – but before you tune me out, please hear me out. I would love to be wrong, but I believe the evidence suggests otherwise...

 

Even the most forward thinking graduate programs fail when compared against our graphical and industrial design colleagues. The blank page is our profession’s Achilles heel. Making something from nothing and developing distinctly differentiated design alternatives – distinct from the status quo and from each other – is tremendously challenging for many in our profession. Indeed, I have met only a handful of Human Factors professionals who are truly talented in this area.

 

By contrast, Human Factors professionals tend to excel in evaluating design, an area which these very same colleagues struggle. Turn us loose on an existingng design and we become masterful in our ability to articulate potential advantages and disadvantages of a particular design or set of designs."

Steve concludes his editorial by soliciting suggestions that would lead to the improvement of design output from human factors professionals. 

I am in 100% agreement with Steve, and can speak from personal experience - just take a look at any random presentations pulled from a Human Factors & Ergonomics Society conference and compare them to typical presentations from AIGA, IDSA, (fill in your design organization conference here).  While one would expect an inherently higher level of design quality such organizations, this is more than a quantitative difference, it is a qualitative one.  Beyond a better use of typography, graphics and layout, there is a qualitative gap betweenexpectations at technical conferences (like HFES) and design conferences.

Traditionally, human factors conference audiences don't expect much from visual communication - they expect to see data, statistics and references - the visual equivalent of the primary product of human factors professionals, the technical report.  Whereas designers create designs as their outputs, and therefore treat all of their work, whether presentations or products, accordingly.

There is a simple solution to this for human factors professionals.  One that will make their presentations stand out as elegant, entertaining and engaging.  Do what I do and don't create  presentation on your own - work with a skilled designer who has the right set of skills and expectations to achieve quality results.

Pre-Cursors: Products That Foreshadowed Web 2.0

 

Like the adage about pornography, a precise definition of "Web 2.0" is elusive, but I know it when I see it.  Back in 2005, Tim O'Reilly (of the eponymous media publishing company) wrote a comprehensive overview of What is Web 2.0.  From the end-users perspective, 2.0's key attributes, O'Reilly presciently suggested, include "harnessing collective intelligence" (think Wikipedia) and "rich user experiences" (think YouTube).

I would add that the most powerful and defining characteristics of Web 2.0 applications are the real-time (or near real-time) distribution and sharing of individual experiences.  Whether its videos, photos, words or music, the high-velocity growth of services like Flickr, Twitter and Facebook are centered around the capability of taking the uniqueness of one person's life, sharing it with others, and vice-versa.

The scale and diversity of these applications is unprecedented, but, of course, the use of technology to connect people is not.  In fact, there's a strong case that the  course of technological development over the past two-hundred years - railroads, telegrams, radio, telephone, TV, air travel, mobile phones, the Internet - has been driven by the goal of connecting people, for economic and social benefit.

There's a qualitative difference between the massive, grand-scale innovations of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the bottom-up affect of today's many smaller-scale efforts to connect people.  But, the emergence of everyday technologies to connect people in a simple, one-on-one manner is not unique - and played a significant part in the lives of many of us in the 35 and older crowd.  I recently had the opportunity to re-examine some of the popular technology products from my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s, as a contributing commentator for William Lidwell's forthcoming Deconstructing Product Design.  It was during this period of writing that I recognized parallels between the popular technologies of 25+ years ago, and the digital social networking tools of today: 

 

    Sharing and Tagging Photos - The Polaroid Instant Camera

My father was an amateur photographer.  He had built out a good part of our Brooklyn basement into a darkroom for developing film (toxic chemicals, rubber gloves) and owned numerous high-end contemporary and antique cameras.  But he still saw the value in purchasing a Polaroid SX-70.  Unlike predecessor "instant" cameras, the Polaroid was a true SLR, and the film development process was not only quick, but automatic.  The photographer did not have to do anything to develop the ejected film (e.g. tearing, shaking, etc).  This, in conjunction with the suspense of watching the transition from green blobs to colorful images, made it ideal for kids to use.

The ability to take pictures and then quickly see the results increased the informality around photography that we take for granted with digital cameras and camera phones today.  Rather than waiting days or weeks to finish the film roll, drop it off for processing and then await the opening of the photos (incidentally, a suspenseful ritual that has been lost), Polaroid photographers could share photos instantly (more or less).  The casual nature of this photography led to photographing multiple takes, or images of the same event to get slightly different perspectives and to create copies to give to people who shared in the moment.

 

This share-ability characteristic alone is noteworthy, but it was the thoughtful design features of the entire system that really fostered interpersonal communication.  For example, the picture format included a sizable tab, a "whitespace" if you will,  that was typically used to write brief descriptive or entertaining notes about the photo.  And the camera was not just portable, but collapsible.   In fact, the collapsed SX-70 (above) looks strikingly similar to a modern smart phone, with the viewfinder housing resembling a belt-clip.

 

 

 

Sharing Music and Playlists - The Sony Walkman

It may seem strange to discuss the Walkmanas an example of technology connecting people.  After all, it is  the grandfatherly symbol of escapist entertainment, separating the listener from the outside world and people.  But that didn't seem to be the intent in the original model, with two headphone jacks for shared listening experiences and a muting function to allow conversation.  Similarly, Andreas Pavel who invented the Walkman’s predecessor, the Sterobelt, saw his invention as a "means to multiply the aesthetic potential of any situation”, rather than dividing the listener from reality.

If anything it is the more recent developments of digital rights management that have made iPods and other Walkman descendants into  more solitary devices.  The power of the Walkman, and its competitors, was the medium - the audio cassette, which empowered anyone to create their own music mixes (aka playlists) from their collection of records, tapes, and eventually CDs.  The Walkman then became the medium for tape-sharing musical preferences and discoveries.  And again a small amount of whitespace allowed for descriptive tagging, decoration or at least identification.

 

In retrospect, it's easy to see how these popular technologies spread the memes of sharing, and were I clairvoyant, I would prognosticate on how some of our modern, emerging technologies will foreshadow our future activities.  For example, perhaps gestural interfaces will enable the sharing of physical interactions the same way now can with visual and auditory information.  Or future generations will be able to share artifacts and memories from their entire past lives as easily as we can email a photo.  Only time will tell, but my advice to designers of these to-be-determined technologies is simple...make sure to leave room for some whitespace.