The opening plenary at CHI 2007 was Bill Moggridge, the co-founder of the design firm IDEO. His talk was essentially a plug for his new book, Designing Interactions, which consists of a series of interviews with various industry folk to support a skills framework for intuitive design. Among those highlighted this morning were Takeshi Natsuno (i-Mode), David Liddle, Tim Mott and Larry Tesler (Xerox Parc), Jeff Hawkins (Palm), Mat Hunter (Kodak), and Paul Mercer (iPod).
The design skills Moggridge articulates involve a process of iteration and experimentation that build on each other to moments of intuition. In other words, intuition isn’t implicit in anyone—it is built through experience.
Paraphrasing, vital skills for designers to have include the ability to:
- frame and reframe both problems and objectives.
- create and envision many alternatives that might address those problems or meet those objectives
- select from these many alternatives, building and using intuition to find the best approach
- visualize and prototype the intended solutions
- synthesize a designed solution with relevant constraints that will impact the result
Essentially, this is an argument for a frequent dialogue between the designer and the world in order to gain the experience needed to make intuitive decisions about the object of design.
The most interesting excerpt from the interviews was the one that followed the interview with Takeshi Natsuno. Natsuno helped create i-Mode, a mobile phone service that includes purchasing beverages from automatic vending machines using the phone device. As an example of the perils of design without constructed intuition, Moggridge showed a user test of a Japanese woman trying to use i-Mode to get a drink. The entire process took 35 minutes and included errors of no service and bar code failures. It also included a call—on a second cell phone—to customer support, who had the poor woman complete a long online form through the cell phone interface. At some point, the process of using the phone to buy a drink required putting coins in the machine.
