Josh@IgniteNYC: Games in Social MediaWednesday, July 21, 2010 IgniteNYC finally posted my video from their event during Internet Week here in New York. It’s a condensed version of the talk I gave at SXSW’10 called “Add Some XBOX to Your UX.” I don’t have a video of that, but I wrote up the entire talk in article format which you are invited to check out here. Update: Vote for my SXSW 2011 talk!If you liked the talk above, please make sure to go vote for my SXSW’11 submission, +10! Level Up! Games and Social Media. It’s going to be an expansion on some of the ideas touched on in this talk and in my talk at SXSW’10. And leave a comment, if you feel just so inclined. Thanks! Advice for the Novice UX DesignerMonday, July 19, 2010 So. I am a user experience designer. It’s not the first thing I bill myself as these days, but once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away those two words did sit boldly on my business card. And, in fact, I have been doing some form of interaction design since 1996 and have been a student of the field since around 1999-2000. This is not to brag, just to make sure it’s clear that I’ve actually got some sort of credentials, here. Over the years I have been lead developer on myriad projects. And I often find myself having to interpret and build from user experience design documents that you might call, well, novice. Now, UX is an art. There’s some science behind it, but it’s an art at its core — you have to feel it a bit. It’s like music. There’s a science and math behind the tones and structures, but to really make music you have to kind of know that stuff but, maybe more importantly, you just kind of have to feel the music. Novices can “feel the music” with UX and produce really great stuff. And there are a million ways to get creative with UX. Apple shows us this. Some of their little micro-UX innovations have similar cultural impact of pop songs — small user experience brainworms that you can’t get out of your head after you experience them once. Think of how well your iPhone has trained you. Pinch zoom. The home button. And like any form of art, I think user experience design actually benefits from the participation of novices — people who haven’t been fully brought up to speed on the orthodoxy who will dig in and make new things, even if they’re kind of weird or “wrong” in the professional sense or whatever. The tools of UX are not hard — you can use a paper and pen (I do!). And anyone can look at something — a website, an app — and think about how it has been designed with the user in mind. I’m not at all elitist about music or writing and I’m certainly not going to get elitist on someone for experimenting with design. These things improve when the masses start creating and the technical vernacular becomes common language. So I love when new people get involved with user experience design and I’m a complete advocate of new designers getting their hands messy with new ideas. But. I would like to offer one major suggestion to help bridge the gap from novice user experience designer to professional. It’s one idea that will improve the quality of your work if you’re new to the field. It will also help the developers who will implement your idea be able to do so efficiently and with as few headaches as possible. Learn the “inherent nature” of the platform you are designing for. Let’s use iPhone as an example. Hold it. Play with it. Think about each action you take to do something and how each element looks and works. The tabs. How those tabs look and work. Navigation bars along the top (those bars with “page” titles and sometimes “back” buttons). Tables. Surely you’re very familiar with how those work on the iPhone, those things that slide up and down with a list of options and when you select one it slides out to the left and whatever you selected slides in from the right. Even real basic stuff. Helvetica. It’s everywhere. White backgrounds are very common. Buttons and icons. Notice the consistency (at least across Apple’s apps). That’s the “inherent nature” of the device. That’s what it was designed to be like. Bland, maybe. But. That is what you will be building from when you design your app. There’s no getting around it. Apple has gone out of their way to create solid solutions to common UX problems. And users have been well-trained. They know how tab bars along the bottom of the screen work. They know how tables work. They know what a button looks like. Etc. I am a minimalist designer at heart. Every design element needs to have a reason for existing or else it’s noise. (“It looks better” can sometimes be a good reason — see below. “It looks better even though it confuses people” is a bad reason.) My advice to you, the novice UX designer, is to build on top of the “inherent nature” of the device. Be boring, but be crystal clear. Change things only when absolutely necessary. Establish the bare minimum difference between your UX design and the out-of-the-box UX design that the iPhone ships with — the bare minimum that still allows your app to do what it needs to do. Do not reinvent wheels. Do not succumb to the need to show off or do something differently just because you’re a badass. Reinventing some existing UX paradigm in a flashy way is generally the hallmark of an amateur. Amatuers do not understand UX with much depth and confuse wanton rearrangement with actual innovation. Don’t innovate! It’s okay. User experience design is not about innovation, it’s about creating clarity for your users. Don’t sacrifice the latter for the former. If you start from the “inherent nature” of the platform and design your app (or website or whatever) from that starting point, deviating only when necessary, will accomplish two things right away:
Now. I know that you do not want a generic iPhone app or website that’s just black and white and full of boring Helvetica. Especially brands. They want their iPhone app to look like their branding! Which is great! But here’s how that works. You do the above. Make the boring thing. Make it usable and easy for your developers. (Developer ease takes a backseat way, way behind usability, of course — but unless you’re very lucky, you probably don’t have an unlimited budget for your project, so developer effort can be important.) Do these things. Only then, as a last step, should you look at what you have and take a very critical look at how you might apply a visual theme to the user experience design without interrupting that design. You can do easy things like applying graphics or changing the colors of elements without interfering with their visibility or the overall visual hierarchy. (Interrupting the visual hierarchry would be, for example, making the brightest thing on the screen the least important thing to the user. Websites do this all the fucking time when they decide to make an article headline blend into the background while four million ads, a giant header graphic, and several dozen little “share this!” widgets jump around on screen. Apps do this, too! Here’s a fun little user experience game you can play at home! The next time you’re using some app (or website), stop for a second. Think of two things: 1) What’s the most important thing here? Why am I using this app or reading this page? 2) what’s the most visually striking thing? What gets my attention first? Are these two things the same thing? They usually should be. They’re often not.) Ahem. As I was saying, when making decisions about modifying the look of your initial UX design or applying a visual theme, you need to be aware of not diminishing the quality of the user experience. It’s amazing how often this happens. Remember, also, that design elements like this are communication. Do what you need to communicate your brand clearly. Nothing more. Every single design element needs a reason for existing. Extra design is the same as extra UX: unnecessary noise. One final point. Understanding the inherent nature of the platform you’re designing for will save you from making really amateur and obvious mistakes. Think text fields in iPhone apps. What always happens when a user selects a text field on an iPhone that might affect how you place that field on the screen? How does one type letters on a device with no hardware keyboard? Right. Plan for that. Text field on the bottom half of the screen? Is that the best place for that? Pay attention to this kind of stuff. It’s important. So this is my rant. I’ve kind of focused on iPhone UX, here, but all of this goes for web UX, as well. Or any platform. iPad. Android. Desktop applications. Know the inherent nature of the platform! Really get in there. Think about how the designers of the core operating system or platform intended for it to be used. Stray from that, but intelligently. And not just for the sake of being weird or as a way to show your client what a rockstar you are. (Nobody cares if you’re a rockstar.) The user comes first. I know what I’m talking about. Pay attention to the above. You’ll get much better results all around. Thank you. Goodnight. Thrillist for iPhone is Live!Wednesday, June 9, 2010 Hey — just a quick note: Thrillist for iPhone has launched. Get it in the App Store. Check it out. Find a new place to eat or someplace to get drinks this weekend. It’s good for that! I lead development of this sucker — along with Zoe Roman, Jesse Boyes, and Cam BenBassat. We’re quite proud. Rawk. Josh@SXSW: Saturday, March 13Friday, March 12, 2010 
So, yes, SXSW 2010 is upon us. I arrived in Austin Tuesday evening and have been madly hammering out the last updates to my talk, Add Some XBOX To Your UX. I’m really looking forward to finally getting it out there — I feel like I’ve been working on it forever. I started taking notes on it soon after I first submitted it way back in, what, May or something? June? Wow. Anyway, I hope it’ll come off well. I’m confident. So. After the talk, I’m going to put up, here, a version of my notes edited for easier reading — along with a few outtakes from the talk which I think are interesting but just didn’t fit in. The original full version of the talk clocked in way too long, so some good stuff had to go. I’ll also post some links to books and blog posts and such — my bibliography, of sorts. (Check out the books in my Shelfari shelf widget to the right, as well, to get an idea of what I’ve been reading.) Hopefully SXSW will record some audio or video or something. Anyway: Check out my talk! Add Some XOBX To Your UX. Saturday morning, 9:30am. Bring a cup of coffee and a breakfast taco. Book Review: Racing the BeamMonday, January 4, 2010 Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost @ MIT I really enjoyed this. It looks at game design from the perspective of the design of the Atari VCS (2600) system itself — how the limitations and quirks of that game console led to certain design decisions (good and bad) that affected some very seminal games.
Also: I am just a bit young to have experienced the Atari 2600. I’ve seen them and probably poked at a game or two as a kid, but I’m of the Nintendo generation. Reading this book with the internet handy to watch some of these games in action gave a really great introduction to the Atari 2600 (or, at least, as good as one could get without really playing one). And this book contains a lot of info about the history of Atari (and Activision and other 3rd party devs) as well as the historical context of all of this. Finally, this book seems like a great introduction to the hardware history of computers. The book talks about the chips, the design of the motherboard (if that’s what it’s called), and how the hardware impacted the platform. And get to learn a bit how TVs work. Electrical engineers won’t be impressed, but I learned some stuff. So, yeah — even though this book can get fairly technical (on an introductory level, at least), it’s still a very easy read. Well organized. Fun. Very interesting. Great book! Crossposted to Game Design Advance. Book Reviews 2009Monday, December 28, 2009 I’ve started using Shelfari to organize some of my reading. You may have noticed the widget in the sidebar with books I’m reading. For fun, I thought I’d just copy over my reviews from that site over here every once in a while. Two reasons: 1. I’m still kind of mildly uncomfortable putting thoughts into sites like Shelfari. Maybe it’s a fear that they’ll drop dead one day and I’ll loose my notes. So might as well duplicate them on my own server. 2. It’s as much of a snapshot as to what’s on my mind as anything, so I might as well toss those notes onto this jumbled scrapbook, as well. A side effect of using Shelfari has been that it’s hooked into my OCD need to mark things “complete” which has given me a little extra juice to finish books I might otherwise drift away from. And having the widget on my blog gives me a little extra kick to pick up and read new books in lieu of other time-killing hobbies like whipping up on junior high schoolers in Modern Warfare 2 or spending hours mindlessly poking around Reddit. (This isn’t everything I’ve read this year, to note.) Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis“A very good read, and despite being 20 years old (or so) quite illuminating as to our current financial crisis.” ✭✭✭✭✭ Columbine by David Cullen“I hadn’t thought too much about the Columbine massacre since first hearing about it and then around the time Bowling for Columbine came out. I enjoyed this book, though (as much as one can enjoy the story of something so horrible). Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are painted in very vivid colors and Dave Cullen does, for the first time that I’ve heard, really get to the core cause of the tragedy. And very interesting to hear about the effect on the community over time.” ✭✭✭✭✭ The Road to Los Angeles by John Fante“One of the few Fante books I haven’t read. It’s good. Like the other Arturo Bandini books it’s tense and tightly wound, the fantasies of a young writer ramming up against the indignities of real life.” ✭✭✭✭✭ Chuck Klosterman IV by Chuck Klosterman“Fun. Like sugary cereal or a donut.” ✭✭✭✭✭ The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe“David Plouffe is a good writer and even though I followed this election pretty closely, I enjoyed hearing the events strung together into a narrative from his perspective. It’s an exciting read (despite knowing the outcome!) and, as always, Obama’s an inspiring guy.” ✭✭✭✭✭ When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish by Martin Gardner“I grew up reading Martin Gardner’s math books. Loved ‘em. So I was excited to give his new collection a shot. And it has a few good essays. I enjoyed learning about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum and the poem Evolution (from where the title of the book comes). And I’m always game for a good thrashing of Ann Coulter. Sadly, though, the math chapters were way too elementary and have been covered by Gardner himself on many occasions. And the chapters dealing with faith and skepticism are so basic and so much like shooting fish in barrels that I started skipping them altogether. So. I think this book might be wonderful for a high school student, but there’s just not really enough there for an adult reader. I still have great respect for Martin Gardner, but either I’ve outgrown him or this isn’t his greatest effort. Possibly a combination.” ✭✭✭✩✩ Final ThoughtsLots of 5-star reviews, right? I guess two factors are at play: Since I don’t read that much, I tend to be highly selective about which books I’ll even crack open. And I think I have pretty decent “book radar” as far as selecting good reads. Especially with authors like Michael Lewis and John Fante who I’ve enjoyed in the past. Oh, and I tried for the second time in my life to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer. And you know what? It’s not for me, I’m pretty sure. I gave up about halfway through. Too much effort. Not enough payoff. Which is sad, because it has some truly amazing sections. But I just lost the energy/will to dig through DFW’s massive, dense disgorgement to pick out the diamonds. So it goes. Maybe I’ll resume next summer. First Snow of the WinterSunday, December 20, 2009 
We had a blizzard in New York last night. I don’t think I’ve really experienced a “blizzard” before because I’ve never seen weather like this. Dense snow. 30-40mph winds whipping around. Around midnight I put on my winter jacket, gloves, and hat and went out to walk around in it a bit. Failure. Too windy — ice shards blowing into my face. Cars stuck in the road on snow banks. Drunk people slipping around. I lasted about five minutes before I came back in. Wow. Anyway, things are much nicer today. 
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Hello, There.I'm Josh Knowles, a technology developer/consultant on a variety of mobile, social media, and gaming projects. I grew up in Austin, Texas and currently live in New York City. E-mail me: chasing@spaceship.com Recently on TwitterI am chasing on Twitter. Random Popular PostsAll Previous Posts
© Josh Knowles, In Perpetuity.
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I’m a programmer, so when I think about game design it’s very hard for me to completely distance myself from thinking about what would be easy or difficult (or impossible) to actually implement. Sometimes laziness prevents me from making design choices that would be harder to execute. But I like to think that having an intimate understanding of the platform (say, iPhone) gives me a more refined sense of how to make something good particularly for that platform. I can avoid getting mired in things that just won’t work. Like how painters study their brushes so they know what the possibilities as as far as texture, stroke weight, etc. So talking about game design from exactly this perspective clicked with me very nicely.
