Product launch

Here is how crazy last week was — there was something even better than seeing the Pogues live in concert. And that was the launch of the IQ MAX, the new turret (a specialized financial trading-floor communication system) from IPC. I was lucky enough to be part of the team of industrial and interaction designers at frog who spent most of 2005 working with IPC to understand and design for the intense communication needs of financial traders. The whole frog team was invited to the launch party, which was held at Jazz at Lincoln Center in the Time-Warner building, and everyone who we’d worked with on the IPC side was there as well. (Missing in action were the extremely flattering David, who was lured west by the call of the open road and new information visualization problems to solve, and Ian, who was en route to a meeting on another continent.) It’s a rush to finish a project and see the final result go live. It turns out that it’s even more of a rush to see a final physical product: the difference between an appearance model and the final object is so much stronger. It’s three times the rush to be at a fancy party, listening to salespeople touting the improved user interface as a sales point. (The Hats reading this will be amused to know that one of the sample names on the prototypes we produced was Ewan Kirk, Goldman Sachs. Which reminds me, I owe him an email.) IPC’s user-centered development process, and their work with frog, is already getting press: Businessweek Online interviewed Michael Speranza from IPC and frog creative director Robert Fabricant for a piece that went live the day the turret launched. A white paper on our internal process is, I know, being written, and if it’s made public I’ll post the URL here as well.

What’s my job again?

For the “please come up with a name for my profession” files, from a posting to the NYCCHI list: “whether you call yourself an information architect, experience planner, interaction designer, or customer anthropologist, we’ve probably got a position that would fit you well.” Sadly, I probably could make an argument for all of those as separate positions in the right sort of organization, though I hope I never, ever use the title “customer anthropologist” unironically.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Check me out on today’s Gizmodo: Question (is) Everything: Design that answers unimagined questions Note please the Half-Life shout-out at the end (hi, Harry!). If you want to read Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation, cited in the essay and a major inspiration for my own thinking on the topic, it’s available from his site under a Creative Commons license. The essay began as some idle thoughts, while drawing several variant sitemaps for the same project, about everyone’s favorite theoretical trope, the problematic (defined by noted Marxist-structuralist wackjob Louis Althusser as “the system of questions commanding the answers given.”) There is no sign of Althusser in the final version, or indeed of sitemaps, in case you were worrying.

My job makes the papers

Today, information design is a chi-chi professional trade that is so rarefied it has split into a series of subdisciplines with names like “user experience design,” “library and information design” and “user interface design.” (Cory Doctorow, “Flights of Fancy on Flexible Chips,” NYT 12/7/05) “Chi-chi”? Oy vey. In my experience, the User Experience Designer, the Information Designer, and the User Interface Designer are all the same person, working at different firms or agencies. I’ve been a user experience specialist, an information architect, and a design analyst, and I just keep doing the same wireframes and sitemaps and card-sorting tests. The irony that a field whose basic mission encompasses naming and categorizing cannot decide what to call itself we shall, of course, pass over in silence. (Cory’s piece, by the way, is an interesting take on the same custom-fabrication trend Clive has written about, focused on home-toasting computer chips. Tasty.)