Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

Chapter 2
CREATIVITY LOVES CONSTRAINTS
A good friend of mine, Erin Sparling, is one of the most ingenious people I’ve met when it
comes to technology. He’s always finding new things to hook up to the web, like the time
he connected the front door of his apartment to Foursquare. He programmed the door to
unlock when a friend comes over and checks in with the Foursquare app. He’s built a
coffee table that doubles as a web server and has connected various appliances to the web
and programmed them to turn on when he sends a signal. I’ve asked him to lecture about
technology in all the classes I’ve taught at General Assembly, and he never ceases to
impress with his ninja presentation skills.
He calls the talk that he gives “Boundary Conditions of an Arbitrary Medium.” I love
this lecture because it covers one of the most important questions that UX designers are
always grappling with: What are the constraints and capabilities of the system we’re
designing for? In web design, new technological developments are always coming along,
and we’ve got to consider whether they’re appropriate for any given project. But we’re
also always facing constraints that mean some of the things we’d love to make a site or
app do just aren’t possible, or at least not yet.
Erin uses the progression of technology in oil paints to illustrate how the repertoire of
current technologies has so much to do with shaping any project. He shows how during
the Renaissance and up to the late 1800s, artists had to make their paints from various
sources of pigment, like lapis lazuli, which they’d grind into a powder, and some form of
binding agent, like tree gum or egg yolk. Paint had to be prepared fresh for every painting
session, and this made portability a problem, confining painters largely indoors.
Eventually, painting was able to move from the studio to the outdoors with the invention
of the metal paint tube. Before long, the impressionist painters were breaking the
boundaries of the form with their masterworks capturing the delicate dance of sunlight
glistening over seascapes and animating haystacks with an early-morning glow.
Probably no domain of human creativity has been tied so closely to technological
advances as design in computing, and the pace has been staggering. I’m often working
with video, and given the state of the art now, it’s amazing to recall that up until 2009,
none of the browser vendors had settled on a video format standard. That forced
developers to encode multiple versions of any web-embedded video, which was a real
slog. Apple and Microsoft solved this by pushing through the h.264 standard, and video
online has boomed. Now we’re in the throes of the shift to mobile, and we’ve got to be
totally up to speed with responsive design, geolocation, voice commands, and touch
interactions. But as fast as changes evolve in computing, they’re also always incremental.
When phones first went mobile, they were fundamentally like landline phones, with large
keypads, and they were only voice enabled. They were also about the size of a brick and
almost as heavy.
The phone that’s widely considered the first smartphone, the IBM Simon, wasn’t
invented until twenty years later, and it showcased a retinue of new features, such as a