My UX Soundtrack
It’s 9 o’clock in the morning. Another working day as UX/Interaction Designer in Worldsensing, Barcelona.
I start the computer and restore the browser tabs with the mail, the calendar, the document manager and the stories panel for this sprint. I clean my glasses (I need them to read and work on the screen). I maximize the Google Hangouts Chat window (Slack, I still miss you!) and I run the necessary software for the tasks I must do. I have almost an hour before the daily stand-up, time enough to review the messages and the agenda, maybe I even can continue with some task. I connect the headphones to the audio output of the laptop.
I’m ready.
There is no play button, there is no volume, there is no playlist: the music comes out of me, whistling silently, inwards, the right song for every moment.
As in almost all areas, tasks are rarely linear. This is not only due to the agile methodologies of our sector (ICT/IoT) but also to the fact that our brain (or at least mine) is always connecting ideas, images, memories and words: while I interview a user, I cannot stop projecting his words towards future tasks, jotting downs sketches to apply later that valuable information. Those relationships are also reflected in the soundtrack that accompanies my work, so please, take this playlist not as a radio broadcast nor a podcast, think about it as a sort of Spotify or Genius algorithm that suggests the right music based on that I am working on. So, fortunately, similar tasks will have a different soundtrack in other people.
As it should be, let’s start with some research.
Researching
David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, The Velvet Underground.
Researching can involve several different tasks. Of course, when talking with users and stakeholders, I’m not whistling around while they are speaking :-) , but when digging for information or preparing meetings and interviews I can’t stop hearing ‘Digging in the dirt’ from Peter Gabriel as the opening for those tasks. Benchmarking, comparing or looking for information it’s always like Gabriel’s or Bowie’s exploratory music as well as Lou Reed’s band was.
Workshops applying design thinking methodologies share also this music choice and, in fact, I’m seriously planning to introduce the sound and music element in a next workshop to enrich some of the activities planned for it.
Flows
Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio.
Defining a proposal for a flow is like soft sketching with watercolour, letting flow the brush and the water quietly in overlapping layers and seeing if the connections between steps succeed each other in such a way that — when you move a little away to see it with perspective — the whole is coherent and harmonious.
Flows are like Jazz: product owners, hardware engineers, firmware and software developers as well as designers we are like musicians of a band performing all together, but contributions and improvisation of each one is brilliant.
Sketching
The Rolling Stones.
Sketching is not really a task for me, is a tool: you can sketch at any stage for any purpose. Having said that, traditionally in the UX area, sketching is associated when the first screen ideas are drawn. Sketching here is giving the flow its personality converting boxes to rough screens where components and information begin to break into the scene, coming out from the stone like the slaves of Michelangelo.
It’s time to let go, to let the hand move drawing with the illusion that it is she (the hand) who controls the stroke. Sketching for me is like the R&B from the Rolling Stones: sometimes it can look like a dirty sound but in fact it’s rooted on the best Blues in which music and voice seem to be torn from the soul of the musician, in the same way that sketching few lines makes sense revealing only the essential.
Wireframes/Low-fi prototyping
Michael Nyman.
Sorting, structuring, organizing, converting all the ideas to a system… to project: wireframes are the bridge between the freehand sketches and the visual design.
Structured music, as Michael Nyman’s music is, helps me to visualise and imagine the building blocks, the components of an atomic design not focusing in a screen but in a complete solution. When creating a wireframe I’m continuously zooming in and out, back and forth, trying to keep the proposal consistent between screens and between elements inside a screen.
UI Design
The Rolling Stones (again), Led Zeppelin.
When creating and iterating on the design, after defining the flow and the structure we arrive always to a crossroad where we can choose almost infinite expressions for the same face: working on the best typographic hierarchy, choosing the right colours, creating the needed icons… Matching it all together, never forgetting who are the users and how are they going to use it, but balancing in a delicate game with other stakeholders and with our own company branding.
And again, then here comes the Rhythm & Blues trying to never forget the fundamentals, fighting to avoid too many things, trying to keep the result as trusty as possible to its origins but always leaving a window open for fresh air.
Interactions and Micro-interactions
Bruce Springsteen (versioning on his unique way), Raimundo Amador.
I can’t design the interactions or the micro-interactions as an stand-alone feature: even from the earliest sketches I almost know how things will appear and disappear, how can they move and how animation can help to read and interact with the information as part of the end to end storytelling… but there is always room for experimenting, for fine tuning up timings and synchronise the subtle dancing between components in a screen: too much movement will annoy the user, isolated and disconnected movements can be perceived as incomplete and neglected work. That’s why I choose Bruce versioning or Raimundo and his fusions: they both balance between different worlds and creating a new and improved one’s own.
UX Copywriting
[No music]
Yes, no music. Writing is the only thing I need to be silent. I need to listen the words coming in and out from my mind, but only my words. Even music without lyrics can distract me taking me from one place to another.
The same is when writing a post, this post for instance: no music, no songs, only my silent words.
(Preparing the) Testing
Muddy Waters, The Doors.
Preparing a test involves a deep knowledge of what you are testing, not only the screens but also the initial use cases and everything around the solution: asking the right questions (mostly ‘why?’) at the right moment is usually the difference between a good and an awesome test. Improvisation is the key, but as all the bluesmen know, improvisation is only possible when you’ve been hardly working before.
Testing
[No music]
Sincerely, I tried once to perform some user testing with a soft background music to create a comfortable environment. I abandoned that path: the idea was not useful for me.
Creating and taking care of a design system
Penguin Café Orchestra, Talking Heads.
A Design System, for me, has to combine order and creativity in an unique way, not only because is a kind of rationalisation of a creative process to distribute the visual and the interaction building blocks, but also because it’s important to share and communicate the design system in a way that it is known, used and assimilated as a fundamental tool by the different departments involved: developers, pre-sales and sales teams, marketing department or even operations.
It must be a ‘system’, but it also must look well and awesome to engage and be really adopted.
Spreading the word
Danny Elfman, Prince.
This is one of the most important tasks I must perform: to divulge why UX is important at all levels. Sorry, let’s say it better: why being User Centric is essential for all our solutions and for our business. Despite the many existing literature on the difficulties of collaboration between engineers and designers, I have always found this collaboration easy and necessary. Sometimes with friction, of course, as in any relationship between people can happen, but always looking for a constructive solution to any challenge. In the case of Worldsensing, I have found a motivated and receptive team open to understand the advantages of including an UX/Interaction Designer profile like me, but not only between engineers and programmers, also among product owners, salesmen, pre-sales and other departments of the company. Open-minded like someone ought to be to listen for the first time to Prince or to understand a movie soundtrack like a fundamental part of the storytelling as Danny Elfman does.
Well, that’s it. This article is over and now I can’t stop thinking about the subject for the next one. Probably it will be about “UX and the Industrial IoT”, an idea that I begin to model while I pick up my notebook to go to the daily stand-up whistling the melody from ‘Fugir de tu’ by Joan Manuel Serrat.
