We are back from the IIT Design Research Conference, which this year was held in Chicago and attracted lots of people from all kinds of disciplines: interaction designers, ethnographers, info architects, design students, but also teachers and nurses.

Thursday opened with Robert Fabricant from Frog Design, who talked about his concept of “Designing with Intent” and how it should incorporate more user research into the design process. Doing the research is not enough, though; the secret is in translating the results into meaningful data. There is a social nature to research – you have to communicate and talk with the people. People love giving opinions – we need to take advantage of that in order to make better and more sustainable products.

Dan Saffer, Kicker Studio’s founder, gave his “Tap Is The New Click” talk about how we have evolved from the world of robotic mouse clicks and keyboards to the wide world of touch screens and gestural interfaces. In order to design for these types of new systems, we need to understand the limitations of the human body. These new systems call for us to get in touch with our human factors and ergonomic roots as designers; our bodies are not meant to do repetitive motions over and over, which increases the possibility of “gorilla arm” (try holding your arm out straight ahead of you and move it back and forth over and over, and over). In order to make effective designs, we need to design it for the way we as humans are hardwired to behave. “The best design should dissolve into behavior”. Saffer’s book on the subject: Designing Gestural Interfaces. Below are his slides from a similar presentation he gave at another event.

The use of stories helps to evoke a more compelling sense of empathy for the user — that’s from Kim Goodwin’s presentation on incorporating storytelling into research. (Goodwin is GM at Cooper and the author of Designing for the Digital Age.) “What is more impactful? If I tell you ‘The customer support really sucked!’ or if I say ‘So, the waitress let me wait 20 minutes before she came to my table. When she did, she frowned, twirled her pony tail on her pointer finger, and told me they were out of most of the items on the menu.’” Which will you remember? Does one story cause you to be more sympathetic to me and the situation over another?