Day 5: 3 Things I Learned Today That Thought Me How To Save The Day When Someone Throws Curveballs At My Inner Child

Greetings from Portland, Oregon. I am here to attend the User Experience Engineering: Interaction Design Conference (#UXInteractions) this week. As advertised, we are learning to sail beyond our limits in Interaction Design. My first session for the week was Hagan River's Enterprise Apps: To Boldly Simplify Where Nobody has Simplifies Before. Her lecture was engaging, funny and made me reminiscence about the bloody usability battles I lost negotiating with stakeholders and also reminded me of the ones that I won that made our users go merrily on their paths. Merrily merrily merrily song goes here...

3 Takeaways from Hagan's workshop:

• Arbitrary iconography sucks
• Pagination is evil
• Best Practices for form, navigation design and goals for style guides.

However, today's gift writing is not about the design principles that would help us sail in the muddy waters with less mud with clear blue skies. I think we would all like the coordinates for those waters. Please keep reading on.

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Design Exercise That Switched The Lights on On My Bulb

Exercise: Design a homepage for the library.
User: Patron of the library
Needs: A visitor who wants to find new books, see what she has checked out or overdue, see what is in on order....
Time: 5 minutes
My Sketch:

I realized what made me feel at ease after I sketched my mini design challenge. Here are the 3 things that might help bring harmony in your being in times of an urgent request.

1. 2Cs and 3Ws: Exercise instructions are very clear and concise. There is no question about the direction, or who the end user is for this design. Often times this is never the case for software development. It generally feels like, the person who is writing the requirements does not have time to fully bake the bread. It feels like one of those take home and bake goodies, but without the knowledge of what it is exactly that we are baking, who we are baking it for and why? So, instead of engaging with unproductive inner dialog, help the person who throw you the red ball answer 2Cs and 3Ws as soon as possible. 
2. Trust and embody that you are absolutely doing your best within the time you have. It does not matter if you have 5 minutes or 5 hours. Refer to project management triangle and tell the requester to pick any 2 in the triangle to set expectations. It is better than asking if they would you like fries to go with that?
3. No matter what it is that you are doing, do it with a joy and curiosity of a clown by sneaking little gifts that maybe no one else would ever notice. Perhaps a little smiley face is hiding somewhere in the page... :)

If you experiment with these 3 things, will you let me know how your inner child reacted to this?
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