“With a focus on psychology, UX designers can build services that directly help people improve their lives. It’s not new; AA and Weight Watchers were around before the Internet, and they help people through difficult and long-term behavior change. Still, there are big advances to be made. Web services are starting to blur the edges between online and offline interactions. Nike+ and Fitbit track and provide insight into your exercise. ReadyForZero helps people change their behavior and get out of credit card debt. HealthMonth creates competitive / supportive groups of people who improve at the same time.

This is grander than enabling behavior—it is changing behavior. It is also only just beginning.”

Read the rest of my guest post over at UXMag.

Am I a great designer?

The answer to this question matters – to me, and to everyone else.

First, it’s deeply personal. I don’t think many people aim to be mediocre, and this question is the yardstick by which we measure our professional life.

Second, in the vein of Cennydd Bowles’ excellent closing plenary from the IA summit, being a great designer involves having a huge, positive impact on the world. We should all strive for this, and if the field is to realize its full potential, we must. We cannot settle for mediocrity, for focus on profits, for improving the short-term at the expense of the long-term. We cannot use, as Umair Haque puts it, yesterday’s ideas.

So how do we measure it?

The thing is, it’s very hard to even understand the question. What is a great designer? We can judge someone by many metrics: respect, pay, book sales, twitter followers, users of their products, revenues of their products, or any of a million other things. My gut tells me that these things may be a result of greatness, but that they don’t strike at the heart of the issue. One doesn’t need to be popular or rich to be great.

With that in mind, I’ve set down a simple list of things that I think I must do to even begin to enter the realm of greatness. It’s a draft version; let’s collaborate on making it better. I can only claim to check a few of these items off my list, but it’s obvious that trying to fill each of these areas will make me significantly better. I hope you find it equally useful.

A Framework

Using this guide is simple: Answer the questions honestly, and strive to fulfill each one completely.

—

1. Are you working on something truly important?

You should be able to answer this unequivocally. You are increasing happiness on this Earth, and can prove it. In the future, when you look back on what you are doing right now, you will say “yes, I was working on the right thing”. You are tapped into that youthful, driven sense that the world needs saving and you’re playing a vital part. The most important decision we make as designers is not within a project, it is what project we choose to work on.

The guy who codified planned obsolescence was a very successful marketer. He helped sell billions, even trillions of dollars worth of product. But I don’t call him “great”. I call him a bastard, responsible for untold landfills of cheap, discarded consumer goods.

2. Are you learning something new?

You are actively learning a new domain of knowledge. This involves at a minimum reading, being taught or mentored, and practicing in this domain. No matter your age or experience, there are many things to learn. Stagnation does not make a great designer.

3. Are you a mentor?

You periodically meet with a designer more junior than yourself, providing them with guidance, feedback, and inspiration. Mentoring or teaching is one of the most powerful ways a person can use their time. A few hours of your time can have an lasting, sustained impact on the future of both your students and the world. Every great designer should take the time to pass their invaluable wisdom onwards.

4. Are you a mentee?

You periodically meet with a designer more senior than yourself, who helps you continually improve yourself. The most successful people in history have all had mentors. Leonardo da Vinci had Andrea del Verrocchio. MLK had Benjamin Mays. Not only do mentors have answers to your questions, they tell you which questions you should be asking.

5. Do you contribute to your professional community?

You blog, speak, write, evangelize, organize, or curate within your own niche of the design community. Everyone, from the youngest fledgeling designer to the lifelong thought leader, has a unique and important perspective on the design profession. We are lucky to call ourselves members of one of the most flexible, forward-looking, wide open professions in the history of the world. Your contribution is important, and while creating it you shape your own unique expertise.

6. Do you feel ownership of your work?

You endure the unbearable bad feedback that throws your passionate work into a trash can, and bask in the radiant glow of good feedback while staying humble. You champion your designs and the ideals that created them, through unending hurdles and teams and budgets and whatever else can be thrown in your way.

Creating beautiful designs, handing them off, and walking away is easy. Long term ownership of a design is hard. It makes you take heroic stands as well as accept brutal compromises.

7. Are you proud of your day-to-day efforts?

There are many ways to define good work, from quantitative results to qualitative feedback. Here, we take a self-reflective approach: You do great work so long as you feel that it is great. You have produced your very best effort given the constraints and needs of the project. You have battled and danced with these constraints until they made you bleed, and you have left the design room with something to be proud of.

8. Have you ever created anything timeless?

You have made something that even your kids would someday be proud of. This thing has longevity – its effects will last beyond the next version, the next redesign, the next generation. It has impacted the future in a noticeable way, large or small. Someone in the world has benefitted greatly from this thing, and would thank you from the bottom of their heart if they ever met you.

9. Do you empower your team to be better?

You make a conscious effort to improve the dynamic of your team. You are a source of positive energy, selfless in your efforts to help your teammates become great themselves.

Our ability to bring the best out of everyone around us results in better products, smarter people, and happier colleagues. Even when we must fight for our designs, it is with respect and shared optimism that we approach this “fight”.

10. Are you happy?

This is a difficult question, but it pierces the heart of the issue: Your overall happiness is a subconscious yet powerful evaluation of how you’re doing. If you do crappy work and are mean to people, you will be unhappy. Buddhism teaches that attaining happiness is forgetting the self, and this applies profoundly to our work. If we care deeply about what we do, we can lose ourselves in it, become vulnerable to it, grieve when it fails, and experience real bliss when it is successful. This question can be alternatively phrased: Are you vulnerable to your work? Thus, if you have done great work, you are happy.

—

How many of these can I check off? Not enough! I argue that we should all be scoring 100% on the first nine questions, and doing our best on the tenth. If our entire community can hit this stride, we are well positioned to change the future for the better.

I invite you to check out some new content and some reorganized content at the work and projects pages, a better footer, and one miserable defeat to Internet Explorer’s vicious bug engine (can you find it?). I should also mention that IE6 is dead to me.

Thanks to everyone who reads and comments, expect more good content to follow.

This update includes some great new pattern libraries posted by the community.

Pattern Libraries

1. Ari Feldman’s OSX
2. AXLIB – Open Source Project
3. Mine (shameless, yeah)
4. 960px Grids
5. Axure’s Official Library

Training

1. Axure’s Official Examples
   
2. Axure’s Official Tutorials
   
3. How to do Animations
4. The Official Axure Forum
5. How to change Rounded Corner Radius

Feature Creep, the result of giving in to the attitude that “this feature would be nice” in your product, inevitably results in increased design and development costs, bloating of your product, and a reduction in simplicity.  Here, I propose a strategy for the discovery and brutal elimination of unnecessary features.

Ideas reproduce.

Those driving ideas and products tend to be idea generators – people who bubble with enthusiasm and want to leverage every possibility in their upcoming product or version.  As creatives involved in the process, designers also think up options and features that may provide usefulness.

During the brainstorming phase of a project, the team ideally produces a wealth of directions that the product can take, and explores all avenues.  Ideas flow freely, bounce off each other, and breed like rabbits.  They should be remembered, captured, tagged, identified, explored, and discussed.

Then, they should be decimated until only the best remain.

Natural selection.

After the optimistic, criticism free generation phase of the project, it’s time to take the gloves off.  Set expectations with the team and ground rules for discussion.

1. Ensure you have defined your problem.

   Without knowing what you’re solving, the solution will be meaningless.  Write down the problem as concisely as possible.  This should have been done before the brainstorming stage, but sometimes the problem can shift as brainstorming continues.  Do not leave this step until your problem is identified.

2. Collect your solutions.

   Your brainstorm session has ideally generated a wealth of interesting and insightful solutions.  However you have decided to manage your solutions – sticky notes, bullet points, twitter posts -collect all of these solutions in a single place.

3. Evaluate each solution relative to the problem.

   How well does the solution address the problem?  Which is simplest?  Examine each solution with the highest suspicion.  It should stand up to attacks from many angles, supported by how well it addresses your original problem.

4. Sidebar all solutions that don’t directly relate to the probem.

   Some of your solutions will be crazy, head-in-the-clouds, never buildable, frilly junk that were fun at the time but can probably be tossed now.  Others are great ideas that could be included in a “version 2″ of the interface you’re building, and these can be kept on the sidelines until later.

5. Design and enjoy your clean, simple, realistic interface.

   With this now-limited solution to your problem, you will have a manageable design and development project, in which you have the resources to focus on quality interaction, simple visuals, and standards based development.

Demo the HTML OR  Download the Axure (.rp) File

What’s new in this version?

I’ve gone a little nuts with some of these.  There are a few new techniques, described in my last post about Click and Drag simulation, as well as some simpler but useful widgets.

• AJAX Field Validation
• Carousel
• Carousel with simulated “Click and Drag”
• Field Validation
• Hover Tip
• iPod Menu
• Map
• Map with simulated “Click and Drag”
• Progress Bar
• Self-Healing Delete from List
• Tabs Left

The “Click and Drag” widgets are still a bit rough around the edges, so I’ve marked them “beta” and recommend against using them for user testing.

What if I want to add something to this library?

People have contacted me interested in contributing to the library, and I think that’s a great idea.  Until a site gets set up where users can upload their own, the current method for submitting designs to this template is to e-mail me at: loren at acleandesign dot com.   I’ll be happy include well-polished masters and to credit the author.  It’s not a permanent solution, but I don’t have time to create a full community site.

“Draggable”, Animated Carousel

The Carousel will be included in the next pattern library update, but until then, this is what it will look like:

Try it Out OR Download the Axure (.rp) file

There is another release of the library in the works, in which I’ve basically gone off the deep end with some sweet interactions.  However, I’ll wait until a few more pieces click together before I post it, including some additions from other designers.

How it’s Made

This Carousel uses a couple of tricky techniques that are confusing at first, but useful once learned.  Here are the fundamentals:

1. Windowing
   To create the movable filmstrip of items, place one dynamic panel that will be your “window”, which shows only a few items at a time.  Inside that dynamic panel, place another, much wider dynamic panel that has all your items nicely lined up and spaced out evenly.  Then, all you have to do is move the inner dynamic panel around using interactions.

2. Animation (with Momentum)
   Victor at Axure has explained how to do time-delayed interactions, and I won’t repeat that.  However, momentum hasn’t been discussed.  To create momentum, move your panel by a decreasing amount each time.  Your cases should look something like this, which will create the appearance of slowing down:

   Case 1: Move (panel) by 50px
   Case 2: Wait 50ms and Move (panel) by 40px
   Case 3: Wait 100ms and Move (panel) by 30px
   Case 4: Wait 150ms and Move (panel) by 20px
   Case 5: Wait 200ms and Move (panel) by 10px

3. Fake Click-and-Drag
   To do this, first, lay an image map region over the “window” panel.  Then create a hidden “Controls” dynamic panel on top of the image map, which will have controls inside that move the inner, “filmstrip” panel around.  Set the onClick interaction on the image map region to show the “Controls” panel.
   So, when the user clicks the image map, “Controls” will appear between the mouse pointer and the image map they just clicked.
   Now open up the Controls panel, and within it create two more image maps, one on each side.  Use the MouseOver interaction on each of these image maps to 1) animate the “filmstrip” in its respective direction, and 2) re-hide the Controls panel.
   Finally, in the middle of the Controls panel, place some helpful text and arrows telling the user to slide their mouse in either direction.
   Here is an exploded view:
   

Whew.  Did you make it through all that?  You deserve a bonus (it’s included in the .rp file, too).

Happy prototyping!

I am excited to present: The first Axure stencil library.

Demo the HTML OR  Download the Axure (.rp) file

The excellent Yahoo Design Stencil Kit has canned wireframe objects for Visio and Omnigraffle.  Unfortunately, no such kit can be found for Axure, a much hotter design tool for prototyping rich interactions.  If you’re an interaction designer and have avoided trying Axure out… stop avoiding.  It’s great.

In this first release, I’ve compiled the simple and advanced widgets that I use in day-to-day prototyping.  Are they perfect? No.  But they will give new Axure users an idea of what’s possible, and hopefully inspire advanced users with techniques they hadn’t previously used.  Note: This was created in Axure version 5.0.0.1515, no guarantees that it will work in older versions.

Interesting Widgets in this Library

• Calendar
• Embedded Video
• Expand/Collapse Animation
• Inline Edit
• Lightbox
• Live Search
• Photo Scroller
• Post a Message
• Rating
• Tabs

Boring but Useful Widgets in this Library

• A bunch of nicely aligned form elements with labels
• Rulers
• Various lengths of Lorem Ipsum text

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