Momentum

The User Experience

This week’s Speaker Dinner took place at the Colonial Clock Building Zeeland. While enjoying a fabulous dinner catered by Via Maria, the Momentum crew had a conversation on User Interface with Grant Carmichael, founder of ThinkXD.

Grant Carmichael is a User Experience Designer based in Grand Rapids. He has over 18 years of experience in the design field and finds it rewarding to have worked with so many talented people in West Michigan during this time. In 2008, he founded ThinkXD, a UX practice that specializes in the strategic design of product and software application interfaces as expressed with frameworks, task flows, wireframes and interactive prototyping.

Grant was most recently an Interaction Designer at Knoware, a studio dedicated to web applications and embedded display products with a knack for invention. Prior to Knoware, he worked as a Project Leader/Interactive Designer with Square One Design, a nationally recognized graphic design studio gifted at finding the right personality for an experience. He got his start in Grand Rapids at Trillion Post Production. Grant has a degree in Industrial Design from Carnegie Mellon University, a foundation that he still draws upon today to keep the end user at the heart of all of his projects.
Grant reflected upon his experience as an interaction designer to share 6 points on how to create a great “user experience”:

1. Learn the rules, bend them-start with methodologies you know but don’t rest on them. Along the way you may learn something that will change and improve the process.

2. Get to know end users-it is very expensive to build the wrong product so discover your end user’s goals. Draw from empathy, observe, and try to immerse yourself in their lives. Discover their stories and unveil their attitudes, motivations and values to learn their goals and understand their behaviors.

3. UX=Brand-in eyes of most users, the interface is the product. The user experience must align with brand messaging. Aesthetics are important in creating emotion, but if the UX is tedious, chaotic or boring, you damage the brand.

4. Sustainability is good design-If you design with sustainability in mind, you will reinforce values that start to raise awareness and ultimately influence behavior. Interaction Designers can help people see how much energy they are using, how to rethink their needs (buy a car, or Zipcar?), how to plug into local communities, how to retire old products responsibly, etc. Why mop up business problems when they are narrowly defined? Reframe the problem.

5. Sleep on it-don’t forget to employ your unconscious mind to figure it out.

6. LOL every day-enjoy what you do, it’s infectious, builds morale for the team and creates the conditions for the clear thinking that your end users deserve.

Grant cited the following resources:
About Face 3 by Alan Cooper http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/zeitgeist/book/detail/96/about-face-3
Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm
Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto http://www.brucemaudesign.com/manifesto.html
Let me sleep on it: Creative problem solving enhanced by REM sleep http://www.physorg.com/news163700544.html
IXDA.org
MichiganXD.com

Thanks Grant for coming out and sharing your expertise with us!