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I spent a few days this week in Seattle attending a private Microsoft conference about engineering best practices.  Being a Microsoft employee not based in Puget Sound, I’ve traveled to Seattle several times in the past couple of years so I’m somewhat familiar with SeaTac.  The past couple of times I’ve been to Seattle, there has been a major construction project at the airport and both times (in March and this afternoon) I’ve made errors while trying to return my rental car.  It’s frustrating when you make an error, but it’s even more frustrating when a system isn’t designed to help you gracefully recover from the error.

Last March, when I tried to return my rental car, I saw the “rental car return” sign a few moments too late and couldn’t actually turn into the “rental car plaza” (I believe that’s what the fine folks in Seattle refer to the rental car garage).  Instead, I followed a cab to the lower level of the garage where the cabies and shuttles pull in to pick up passengers.  When I made that mistake, I ended up having to  circle around the terminal a second time in order to enter the correct entry to the garage.  This experience was frustrating and it added a few extra minutes to my airport commute.  Recovering from this error wasn’t exactly graceful but at least the system allowed me to recover from the error.  It still seems ridiculous to me that there wasn’t a clear way to get to the level of the garage designated for returning rental cars from the commercial vehicles level.

This afternoon, my error was more drastic and recovering from it (using the airport’s system) was essentially impossible.  I’m not sure which entrance to SeaTac I had used this afternoon, but it certainly wasn’t the one I’ve used in the past (I needed to pump gas and used GPS to guide me to a nearby gas station and then to the airport).  I correctly followed the signs marked rental car return so that I was in the right lane and not the left lane, which was marked freeways.  At one point, a series of orange cones marked an exit - but an exit to what I wasn’t sure.  And since nobody was entering that exit, I just followed the rest of traffic straight ahead.  A moment too late I realized that the unmarked exit with the orange cones was where I was supposed to be heading to return my rental car.  I tried not to panic because I figured like most airports, there’s probably a way to go around the terminal and come back to where I needed to go.  Unfortunately, that was not the case today.  At that point, my only option was exiting to one of two freeways.  This option wouldn’t have been so bad except that the freeway I chose was a parking lot (due to further construction on the freeway).  Getting off at the next exit, getting on the freeway in the opposite direction, and finally getting to the airport and correctly entering the rental car return part of the garage added an extra 30 minutes to my airport commute.  I find that extremely unacceptable.

In both of these situations, the designers of the airport seem to assume that travelers won’t be making any mistakes.  In any situation, that assumption is ridiculous, and it is even more ridiculous in the case of travel.  Observing people at airports, they tend to be overwhelmed, short on time, and confused.  Designing a system for any user (especially this set) and not accounting for errors is poor user experience.  I realize that the airport is undergoing a construction project, but even a temporary design should minimize errors and offer users a way to recover from errors.

Jared Spool gave a great talk the other day at SXSW comparing magic and mental models. Spool’s talk was really fun, very valuable, and timely. He centered the talk around several magic tricks, which were very entertaining. In using magic as a metaphor for experience design, Spool pointed out that people enjoy magic but they don’t have to know how it is done - in fact it might be more fun if they didn’t know. This same point can be applied to user experiences - the user shouldn’t have to know what is happening behind the scenes. The model presented in the UI should be that of the user, not the designer. He used the example of files in operating systems - there are no files (just ones and zeros) and nothing is ever deleted. But does the user need to know that? No, it is much simpler (and offers a better experience for the user) to just create this illusion that there are files and that they’ve been removed from the recycle bin (or copied elsewhere on the hard drive). He also talked about perceived performance vs actual performance. They’ve found that task completion is the one factor that impacts users’ perception of performance. When users can complete a task quickly and easily, they perceive a system to be faster than it really is. Finally, he pointed out a number of ways to delight users - being whimsical (e.g. Twitter), attention to details (e.g. displaying the correct iPod color in iTunes), and offering critical functionality (e.g. Farecast’s fare predictions).

Today marked the first day of SXSW Interactive. Panel programming started in the afternoon and it was fairly light compared to the upcoming four days. I attended two panels - How to Rawk SXSW: The Basics and Respect!. The How to Rawk panel was entertaining but not really all that useful - especially since I’ve been reading up on SXSW online. I actually wasn’t expecting much from this one but there wasn’t anything else going on that I wanted to go to so it wasn’t a total loss. I think I was just super annoyed by the amount of time they spent talking about drinking and and how to “hack” (kill?) your liver. I guess I just always wish Americans/Westerners were a little bit more sensitive about other cultures - and that’s saying a lot given how OK I am to be the only person at a party not drinking.

I really enjoyed the Respect! panel. I must admit that my main reason for attending was to satisfy the fangirl desires of my inner 21-year-old-web-designer who would have just *died* had she not seen Jeffrey Zeldman speak. The panel focused on how to gain respect for the web design profession but I felt a lot of the issues discussed could be applied to all of user experience. Zeldman was joined by designers Jason Santa Maria and Doug Bowman, writer Erin Kissane, and IA Liz Danzico. All of the panelists offered valuable insights but I think this panel could have offered richer perspectives had the panelists been more diverse - all except Bowman worked at Happy Cog.

The key takeaway from the panel is that getting respect for design/user experience by other disciplines (dev/pm/mktg/your client) involves A LOT of work. I already knew this from experience but it was cathartic hearing great designers facing the same issues I’ve encountered in my ux career thus far. A few points mentioned:

• get your stakeholders/clients involved early and throughout the design process - if that means handing them blank sheets of paper to sketch their ideas, do it.  Aside from learning about your client’s vision for the project, you’re also making them feel involved.
• utilize the “Alzheimer’s method”- there’s a good chance that your pm/client/dev isn’t familiar with a user-centered design process so you’re going to have to reiterate it over and over again throughout the design process.  This means explaining the value of every deliverable (e.g. this is a wireframe and here’s why we use it) at every stage.  This is all part of educating stakeholders about the design process and only through learning about it will they learn to respect it.
• network with your peers/talk to people/be nosy - don’t expect to get invited to meetings - you have to push your way through and it all involves talking to the information gateways at your org.  Learn who’s meeting with whom and ask to be invited.
• present design in pieces, not as a whole/complete solution - again, this is to make everyone feel involved/part of the process.  It also makes design more tangible to non-designers and less about smoke and mirrors.
• “design is a dictatorship” - at one point, Bowman was describing what design is like at Google and how almost everyone can have a say in what gets implemented.  Zeldman counters with, “Design is a dictatorship.”  That was my favorite quote of the entire day.  And he’s right - given that you have a *good* designer as the dictator.