One of my favorite culture blogs, The Art of Manliness, featured a wonderful series some time ago titled 30 Days to a Better Man. Within this series they touch upon one activity that I have always wanted to keep up with, and as indicated by this blog, have yet to do so. Keeping a journal is another item I have placed on my always-expanding “I’ll get to that soon” list. To assist myself in pushing through to making this a more naturally occurring activity in my life, I am going to start a new weekly series here in which I will detail the lessons learned, or ideas taken away from the week related to design, development, the web, and other professional topics.

Outline

Writing is an area I have not taken seriously since the days of my long gone high school senior year. Thinking it would be just-get-back-on-the-bike easy this time around was a giant mistake. The list of revisions for my last post will show just how recklessly I rode that type-setting bike straight into on-coming traffic. Slowing down and learning these old lessons again is a required activity for anyone who wishes to become a clear, more understood, and more respected communicator.

Right out of the gate is where I realized there are issues with my writing abilities. Just as in any design, development, or other project planning is the key to a successful undertaking. My strategy for writing up to this point has been one of brute force. Taking an idea and gathering my thoughts within the text-editor seemed as if it would work just fine. With this process I was very wrong. What occurs here is a buck-shot of words, thoughts, and idea-clippings that begin to lose focus and purpose. Taking a few moments to gather my thoughts into a form which shows a clear path of thought will be my new first step. A simple outline is all I think will be necessary here:

1. Heading
   1. Main paragraph thought
   2. Supporting thoughts and examples
   3. How to utilize and execute these thoughts

Approaching my future writing in such a way will hopefully help me to control my communication, and avoid the rambling that seems to creep into my current process.

Focus

I have too many side-projects. Recently I’ve had a case of best-idea-ever-itis, and it has been bad. It has caused me to be frozen in a state of trying to do, learn, and create in far too many directions. My plan for action begins with applying my work ethic to these projects as if they were for actual clients. Blocking out time in my schedule dedicated to just one project, controlling my work hours as to avoid burn out, and a strict specification list to stick to. The only remote downside to this is that my initial timeline to launch these projects will be pushed back to realistically fit into my paid-hours. I only label it as a remote downside because my hopeful schedule is being pushed back. However, this is better than allowing these ideas to sit frozen on the ice-block for an unpredictable amount of time.

Don’t Lose It

That old saying “If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it” has been ringing far too true lately. For a while now I have been living inside frameworks for my development needs. This has caused me to lose basic knowledge of coding practices and concepts that should solidly stick with any developer forever. Especially in my position as an educator, I need to restore this knowledge to the front of my mind. My solution for this will be to think more about my applications of frameworks. While I am developing, I will actively consider “can I do this myself?” or in a better way “I am going to do this myself instead”.

This approach is one I believe the developer community should fully embrace. In this time of easy Google solutions and the sea of tutorials for “How to do X effect in Y language”, making sure your abilities are grounded in a solid foundation of best practices, concepts, and a strong vocabulary of your language’s syntax will ensure you’re always on the leading edge.

It’s Mind & Body

There is no way to separate the abilities of your mind from the state of your body. Sleep, physical activity, and proper nutrition are all important to your professional career as they are your physical health. For the past few months, I have been living on a west coast schedule while working on an east coast schedule. My sleep has been limited to about five hours per night during the weekday, which shows now in my work and drive. This lack of sleep has also been affecting my time spent in the gym. Other than keeping my body strong and healthy, the gym offers time where I fully focus my mind away from the daily pressures of work & life.

In the creative industry, it is extremely difficult to shut the observe and learn part of your brain down. The constant awareness of your surroundings, the looming deadlines for clients, and the “Just five more minutes” that turn out to be an hour make this no easy task to accomplish. At the gym the surroundings, the people, the sounds, the smells, and most importantly my routine all remain constant and nearly unchanging. All these remaining so constant combine to bring me into an extremely focused, near meditative state. It’s hard to think about much else when you’re in the middle of a heavy squat, and it’s that strict mental capacity that adds to why I love to lift weights as a stress reliever. My goal to better this area will be to keep a more controlled work schedule at home. My ever changing hours at my full-time job make this difficult, but that’s only because I haven’t put enough effort into planning my hours up to now.

In Conclusion

Taking a look back at what I’ve learned during the week past is already making a full impact. Just taking this step towards understanding why I made the decisions I did, and what I can do to make better on my actions later is a great tool towards bettering myself. I hope this series will help a few of you to start doing the same, and also to share your thoughts, ideas, and solutions to some of the topics mentioned here.

You want me to fly what? Fine. Just give me 5.

How often do we find our favorite posse of space-explorers flying an abandoned, highly battle damaged, alien ship the likes of which they have never seen before? Oh, and they need it flying as soon as possible, because the baddies are coming? Someone’s having an off day if the ship’s not running inside of 5 minutes. As an interface designer, I could not be more jealous of the alien races and their job well done. These alien designers have found techniques so effective they translate over species barriers. Not to mention the language, culture, or sensory type barriers, too. Damn, that’s good. Stop taking all the credit, McKay.

A principle being used by these advanced sentient beings is the concept of affordance. This principle takes what you have learned from the world around you, and offers a usable context of it within your design. What do I do with this? It looks like I can push it. How can I make this happen? It looks like I can spin it. Shouldn’t this be over there? It looks like I can slide it. The answers to all of these questions can be acquired through understanding your reactions to the world around you. You as designer can ‘afford’ to design your elements to be more usable by applying these day to day experiences.

Successfully deploying this concept is not the straight-shot it first appears to be. Simply making an element appear as a button to make people press it is not a real solution. Studying the reasons why people know to push that button will help you to more clearly understand why it will make a great answer to your interface design.

Learn through observation

A place I recommend looking to better understand quick, successful answers to design affordances is sitting in your favorite cafe, bar, or restaurant. Observing people in these casual, everyday situations will offer more to your workday than merely a change of setting. For instance, have you ever taken notice of the metal plates placed on doors? Nearly 100% of people opening a door with such an element will do so from this point. When you begin to notice actions and behaviors such as this, your mind should begin to ask all new questions. Do people feel more comfortable pushing the metal? Do the contrast of materials give the user an indication of where they should interact? When you begin to understand the world around you through questions and observations such as these, your execution of the details and user-flow choices will undoubtedly improve by leaps big enough to make the Galactica crew jealous.

A recent trend that showcases this principle is the illusion of depth. Utilizing depth will assist you in guiding your users to the points of interaction placed throughout your interface.

Grooveshark's interface uses subtle edges to highlight the interactive areas of the interface.

CNN creates the appearance of ridges to promote a tactile feeling within the main navigation.

Keep it consistent

Even in the multiverse, writers know one key thing is important to the success of their franchise: consistency. Having characters grow throughout your story is acceptable, and expected. However, your fans are going to notice when you start throwing in anything that’s completely out of character. In fact, any episode or scene in which this occurs will undoubtedly be thought of as that horrible scene where when referenced by your audience. What a turn off that would be.

The same applies to the affordances selected for your interface design. Your light direction, materials, shapes, and feedback must reliably stay consistent throughout your experience. Sometimes it is called for to change from the usual within your design. For example, an error message or a payment confirmation. However, these deviations have the goal of jolting the user into awareness, which is not something you want to constantly do. These deviations from the norm must be calculated precisely, as they can lead to many an array of distractions and confusion to your users if not performed accurately.

Settling into a few rules for your design needs will help keep things moving swiftly. Especially when working across teams of any number, in any spread of locations, the need for guidelines must be insisted upon.

A New Generation

Science fiction writers have long been the inspiration for many devices our scientists and engineers bring into reality. Cell phones, touch-screens, biological scanners, and dynamic buildings all appeared in science fiction before anyone outside of Nikola Tesla could fathom such things. Now more than ever, a new surge of scifi inspired tech is upon us.

No more telling dad how to bowl, he'll get it.

2002’s “Minority Report” brought a new concept of interface to the forefront of everyone’s imagination. Why can’t interfaces be as simple as pushing things around as you would in the physical world? Slowly, the days of mimicking motions on screens and devices are leaving us. Instead, we are bringing real behaviors, motions and other physical actions into our digital products. With the addition of motion capture, gyroscopes, and accelerometers, we are giving experience designers a whole new look at the appliance of affordances within their products.

Many games are being created to utilize accelerometers in handheld devices.

The answers are always right there

As designers of experiences, services, and physical products, the question we are always chasing is “how can I make that better?” Nature has provided us with millions of years worth of research and development that we are now only beginning to tap into. As our technology strives to match the natural world, our design affordances will evolve into some of the most nuanced, and amazing aspects of our interfaces.

What are your thoughts on how to properly apply affordances throughout a design? Discuss your ideas with all of us in the conversation below.