Flying on airplanes can be an annoying process for any person, but it can be even worse for someone who requires wheelchair assistance. The risk of a damaged or lost wheelchair is terrifying, and also bathroom assistance doesn’t always work as planned. Those flying internationally have increased concerns due to language barriers and new processes.

I asked my former co-worker, who relies on a power wheelchair to get around, about her experiences. I learned that airlines hand out orange fragile tags upon request, like the one shown here, and standard white sticky tags for wheelchairs with their unique specifications (such as battery type and wheelchair model type), but these do not indicate all the instructions needed to wheelchair handlers.

So passengers often make their own handwritten notes and attach them with tape. These notes are often damaged or lost.

United actually has the most comprehensive and lovely form I found, that they recommend filling out, printing, laminating, then affixing to the chair. Then keeping a copy for yourself. I really like the design of this form. I wish there were an easier way than finding a place to laminate it, then punching holes and using string, or finding the right kind of tape to affix the form…

These forms could still be damaged and the small text does not promise that anyone will read them. Passengers often have to talk everyone they encounter through the process of the levels of assistance that they require, but through bad experiences, they don’t trust that others will understand the rules.

“You need to tell the airline what assistance you will need when making the reservation, but more importantly, you need to bring this up again when you check in for your flight… I remind them that no luggage should be placed on top of a wheelchair as it can cause damage. If the ground crew isn’t there, then I tell whoever takes the chair to please relay the message. You can also attach any directions (sometimes in different languages) to the top of the seat. Waterproofing the directions isn’t a bad idea, either. I am usually assured that nothing is ever placed on wheelchairs, which I do not entirely believe, so just in case I always bring Allen wrenches in my carry-on.”

— Ashley Olson

The explanation process for special instructions can be lengthy. First the passenger must call the airline and explain instructions. Then they must arrive early to explain their custom instructions again at check in, to crew leads, TSA, ground crew, and to attendants.

After seat transfer, most custom or power wheelchairs are stored in cargo, because they can not be folded. Workers want to work quickly and sometimes do not lock the wheelchair into cargo correctly, or they put items on top of it, or they may throw a wheelchair onto an automatic conveyer belt. Keep in mind even with these pre-cautions, the plane is flying at 600 miles per hour at 40,000 feet in the air. There is usually turbulence, causing intensive shaking of the contents for a prolonged period of time.

One amazing organization called All Wheels Up is currently the only organization in the world advocating for Wheelchair Accessible Air Travel and crash testing Wheelchairs for Commercial Flight. Meaning that they are advocating for being able to take wheelchairs on board and remain seated in them for the duration of the flight. However, we are still a ways away from this and may have to resort to stowing and signage.

For wheelchair signage, “Most have official forms that must be filled out re: weight and type of battery on their websites. It’s good to talk to the guys loading it but there needs to be good signage for the guys unloading it. One tip he also gave, put the note in the language of the country you are traveling to or do something fun and friendly to make them understand the importance of this device. He also recommended having the name of a vendor at your destination who can do repair if needed.” - How do you fly in a power chair forum topic

I first thought about a two-step approach for my process. First a bright yellow protective cover for wheelchairs, with words and icons. Soft, but puffy coverings may mitigate that risk of the chair being tossed around like a box (hard coverings). They could also help indicate where to grasp or lock.

It may be costly to sew completely custom chair covers, and have them easy to remove and re-apply. Most people simply use bubble wrap and tape around delicate parts such as electronic screens or special handles, and this is suitable enough for them. But if the design is complete and easy enough to use, some may see it as a longterm investment. It would be less costly than replacing the chair, and also save the worry.

First sketch ideas for custom covers and special instructions:

For a more affordable option, I decided to design the most simple stickers and tags that I could think of, which are more wheelchair specific than the “shattered glass” fragile stickers. From my research, I discovered that key features are to be waterproof, include more than one language, and must indicate special handling, as well as some custom instructions such as locking areas. I would like to create this as a sticker, that also doesn’t leave an residue when it is removed. So that it can be placed in multiple areas to be seen from many angles. I may also try it as a sticky tag with a loop, that doesn’t have the risk of leaving reside. I will create separate stickers for handling with care, and for locking instructions. So as to reduce cognitive load.

First draft for handling with care:

I will gather more feedback from my former co-worker who uses a power chair as her means of transportation. After a few iterations, I hope that I can get a prototype sewn/printed and tested by her, or some of her friends, to see if the design improves upon their airline experience. Please feel free to comment if I have gotten anything incorrect here. I am not a disabled person nor wheelchair user, so any new information is completely helpful and I will add it to the designs. Thank you!

Updates: Photos from my co-worker’s travels, her own iterations, along with tags given by the airlines for research purposes. (Velcro and fabric versions yet to come).

Anna and I have submitted an application to the 2017 Adobe Creative Resident program to build out this tag project, and a second app project! I have received many private messages from people of the disabled community in support.

I’m Kasey Wang, a recent graduate of UX Academy, now job seeking. Please ❤ this article to support, and connect with me on LinkedIn!

Improving the Wheelchairs on Airplanes Experience was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today I take a photo blog and sketching journey through symbols and icons of downtown Palo Alto to explore these questions. Come on, let’s go!

Alright! first I see this plaque encrusted into the cement, nearby what is a gutter or a storm drain. You can see my shiny shoes standing on top of the drain. The plaque says, “* NO DUMPING * FLOWS TO SF CREEK” and has a picture of a fish in motion, as well as two stars. I got very excited to see my first symbol/icon, so I have highlighted it here in bright pink and blue.

The fish is a part of a longer story that if we dump trash or toxic waste into this drain that is meant only for rain water, it will not go to a water treatment facility, but it will flow into the creek which has wildlife inside of it. The star icons seem only to be serving as a divider for the phrases, (such as the water here on the symbols to the left).

Now it’s important to note the difference between symbols and icons. Because this one walks a particularly grey line between the two definitions. While we have here a tangible object or “icon” of a fish, if you can’t read English, then the meaning of fish = don’t pour toxic chemicals down this drain… might be a bit of a stretch. So this fish is symbolizing a larger concept. Which definition so do you think the fish is…?

• A symbol represents products or ideas, whereas icon represents only items that are visible.
• Icons are restricted to graphical representation of objects and one can easily understand what they stand for. On the other hand, one has to learn what a symbol stands for, as it is not similar to what it stands for.
• Both symbols and icons represent other things, but icon is a pictorial representation of the product it stands for, whereas a symbol does not resemble what it stands for.

— from differencebetween

Personally I’m going to go with “symbol” for the whole plaque, based on the “does not resemble what it stands for” definition. There are a couple jumps in logic, that is different than seeing a fish plaque to symbolize that I am 1 mile away from the Fish Market in Tokyo, for example.

From now on I will use “symbols” and “icons” in an interchanging way for sake of “Symbols 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10” congruity of my photos in this Medium post — but please be aware of the differences. :)

Symbols #2 and #3: Icons about the internet!

Our second exciting stop on this journey is a tiny, tiny, tiny icon of an iPhone to indicate “download on the App Store”, and a smallish icon of a computer mouse with a cord (typical of PC’s nowadays, but indicates, “navigate to this URL”). It got me thinking how icons may be perceived by different generations or advocates of different device brands.

The icon at the bus stop is recognizable as a computer mouse with a cord, even though you probably wouldn’t log onto a computer with a wired cord to check bus times there — it may have been selected for understandability across several generations. Like how the phone icon on the same sign is a pay-phone or a home phone, and not a mobile phone.

Is this because the sign is for an older generation, or perhaps for transcend class for those who use pay-phones and public computers? Or is it the equivalent of the “floppy disk” icon to represent save. (Although kids don’t know what the floppy disk is anymore, they know the symbol means save!) Ways to find out this information may be to watch what kind of people are using the bus stop, or to ask people there what they think the icon is or what it means.

For the iPhone symbol on the box that connects to a beacon device, it is very, very tiny. I could still easily tell that it’s for the Apple App Store and that it’s asking me to download an app. As this is a quite recognizable icon, at least to me, a person with good eyesight and who owns an iPhone. It took me a while to figure out however the app was called “Downtown”, as I thought Downtown was a location indicator. So we want to be careful with words that have multiple meanings. The app is to be able to order food or drinks from wherever you are sitting in a cafe, but the app had an error in downloading, and it looked like the company has since pivoted to a different name and service.

Alright, so next I found a symbol that is like the bus on the bus stop sign above, but with a completely different meaning due to it’s placement and it’s text. Let’s take a look:

This icon shows a car, and it warns of approaching vehicles existing or entering a driveway, from the right and the left, of the picture shown. It is actually well placed. I’m usually staring at my phone at that point on the sidewalk, and the yellow color gets my attention to the blind driveway on the right. The front of the car here with circle headlights would be what someone sees, as a car is coming out of or headed into a blind driveway towards them. This is a strong sign and and good placement.

I thought the picture of the car started to look a tiny bit like a cartoon hippo as I was re-drawing it. I hope that no real hippos were offended in the making of this joke!

When I made my way to the cafe, I needed to use the bathroom. This icon of a lock was in a black color and in an “open” position, (if you’ve ever seen a padlock, the U shaped part can swing out to the side when it’s open). This icon symbolizes that the bathroom is unlocked and (hopefully) “vacant” as the word states.

The cafe workers were leery of me taking pictures of the bathroom, and rightfully so, so I didn’t get a shot of the change this sign makes when it’s occupied. It is a nifty change because the lock icon shifts to a red color instead of black, and it appears in a locked position (with the U shape closed onto the square padlock).

I drew it, and while drawing, I also thought maybe the shape looks a little bit like a shopping bag. So I joked that while waiting for the bathroom, you can do some more shopping in the cafe.

Next, I was inside of the bathroom and found this hand-washing icon:

The icon shows hands together with bubbles above the hands, like one would see while they are looking down and washing their hands. It is located inside of the bathroom, above the soap dispenser.

You’ll see in my notes that I start to write “something about this…” and I jotted down connotations that something about it is eerie. The hands look like they are wearing gloves because they have an ending and because they are so straight and large with the fingers touching. Maybe gloves symbolize a “worker”, but why would someone wash their hands with gloves on? This makes me think of scary things like American Psycho with a serial killer, Ronald McDonald the clown, or maybe the bad guy in Sonic the Hedgehog (Knuckles) who all have gloves or glove-like hands. The nicest connotation that I could imagine for this picture was “awkwardly holding hands with your crush, in a field of fireflies.”

Better icons that I found online include either have fingernails, have the hands arched, or do not have the line that “disconnects” the hands.

Symbols #7, #8, #9, #10: Hand-painted icons!

It seems that I wasn’t the only one drawing icons in this city. Someone in Palo Alto hand-painted these icons onto a traffic control electrical box. The text reads, “wind power”, “efficient shower”, “ride share”, and “we care”. On the other side there are 4 more eco-friendly icons to symbolize reducing our negative environmental impact. This is a great idea to use easy to see icons to spread a message.

Next in our UX Academy lessons, we learned how to create vector images, because they are easily resize-able. The topic was on food and drinks.

9 Vector Icons that Symbolize Food and Drinks

Since my in-laws are Chinese-American, and I think of them often, my work took on flavors of their preferred cuisines! There is a fortune cookie, hot tea, an Impossible Burger, boba tea, Adzuki bean non-dairy ice cream, ramen noodles, steamed buns with sweet black sesame paste inside, lotus root slices, and a coconut. Here are my icons, created in Illustrator:

Need icon inspiration? Check out www.nounproject.com with free icons that you can either use, or look at to reference. Or like I did, you can find the object in real life or in an image search, and practice reducing it down to it’s main parts. Drawing without looking at a photo can sometimes help with this as well, because our minds tend to reduce objects to simple shapes in our attempts to recall and draw them. In the current age of flat icons, even beginners may be able to become great illustrators!

I’m Kasey Wang, a student at UX Academy by Designlab in the Fuller Cohort. Please ❤ this article to support, and connect with me on LinkedIn.

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UX: Symbols and Icons in Palo Alto was originally published in theuxblog.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Empty your mind and your calendar.

40 hours at a job and 40 hours to study? — That’s… not going to work.
(EDIT: It HAS been done! Impressive!)

2. Keep your bookmarks organized.

You’re going to keep receiving them.

3. Wrestle with your files in Ai/PSD/Sketch.

Make that software work for you! Keep wrestling as hard as you can.

4. That “optional” reading? Mandatory.

You need reading for the REAL WORLD… and assignments due on Sunday.

5. Cuddle with Pomodoro,

or Trello, or Habitica, or any other productivity hack to avoid distractions.

6. Yet still… stay on top of Slack for bonus gems.

Local hangouts with your peers, free design magazines, and helpful videos!

7. Take lots of notes and draw.

You will be able to use some of it later for your projects.

8. Get out in the world!

Find real world examples for your projects. Or, switch up where you work!

9. You will sweat through your first mentorship call.

If you didn’t, then you’re not working hard enough.

10. Congrats, you did it!!!

Now do it all again next week, but times 100!

I’m Kasey Wang, a student at UX Academy by Designlab in the Fuller Cohort. Please ❤ this article to support, and connect with me on LinkedIn.

According to Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, the goal of design thinking is “matching people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and viable as a business strategy”. The method for employing design thinking is an ongoing process of empathizing and research, synthesizing, ideating, prototyping, testing, and repeating where necessary. To get a bigger picture for some of the strategies used, you can check out Design Kit for methods.

User Experience design always employs design thinking, and content strategy falls under the larger UX umbrella.

According to Kristina Halvorson, author of the book Content Strategy for the Web, the goal of Content Strategy is that it “plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content”. Content Strategy focuses on the type of audience that is being reached, the brand, word count, SEO, messaging priorities, and call to actions. To spread a coherent message that matches the needs of the business and the audience it’s trying to reach, content may include images, words, and multimedia that are researched, tested, and iterated throughout the entire design process and beyond.

The similarity here is focus on the intersection between business and audience, thorough research to make sure people’s needs are being met, and designing effective as well as aesthetic solutions that evolve and change as the business grows. Both Design Thinking and Content Strategy also highly involve organizing and prioritizing what to do, and when to do it. Design Thinking focuses on the “big forest”, while content strategy are “the trees”, that the user can see, read, hear, and interact with.

To get a more thorough understanding of Content Strategy, I recommend the article A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Content Strategy. A big rule for content, much like for design guides and user interfaces, is that the content should be consistent across the brand. Otherwise conflicting messages are going to confuse the audience, and they will feel like something is “off”.

A recent example of lack of consistency was H&M’s Autumn Collection 2016 Commercial. While the content of the commercial is incredibly liberating and inclusive across race, genders, age, and body types — the reality of the company paints a grim picture for women.

H&M employs 14-year-olds working 12 hour days, fires women for becoming pregnant, and pulled all their plus size clothes in stores after this collection was announced — keeping what they consider to be plus size women hidden away from the public, forced to purchase online.

The one ideal that matches their PR move, is H&M’s transgender specific workplace initiatives include non-discrimination protection based on gender identity and transgender inclusive healthcare coverage.

Even so, overall H&M’s audience was outraged at the discontinuity and disingenuousness between their messages and their actions.

Bad design in-consistencies are quite easy to spot. I want to talk about how I was confused today when I tried Neuro drinks. The packaging had these large words: “vegan, gluten-free, lactose-free, natural flavors”, yet with unnaturally bright colors, a link to clinical trials, and a picture of a brain, I guess to make me feel young and smart? I’m pretty much their target demographic. I reached for it and put it back, reached for it and put it back, and repeated this five times, because something felt “off”. For the sake of UX research, I ended up buying a bottle of the Sonic energy version for $2.

Neuro honestly looks like an aerosol canister of Febreeze, so I was very suspicious. Models have dyed hair, caked makeup that may not be vegan, and air-brushed armpits. A far cry from “natural”. I took a taste and immediately regretted it. This was like cough syrup, acidic, and sugar-filled. You know what else is vegan and can test humans as “smarter” in clinical trials? Coffee. Also Red Bull, Rockstar, Monster, Sambason, and Guayaki energy drinks, and many brands of vitamins. Suddenly I felt Neuro did not stand out as any healthier, nor smarter.

While I deeply support founder Sanela Diana Jenkin’s philanthropy work and entrepreneurship, I can’t help but imagining that the design team is a bit “try hard” in their cool science, packaging too many millennial motivations onto one small label, to the point where it becomes suspect. Their website has far too many words and varied image styles for me to understand clearly what I’m buying into.

Now I’m going to give an example of two companies whose content is consistent and minimize their message, to provide more clarity over clutter.

Apple comes out on the top for me. From their latest commercials, to their imagery, packaging, products, and stores — you can see it from a mile away and identify it as an “Apple” product. The current look is clean, sleek, clear, futuristic, lightweight, and minimal. Words on their site are used sparingly, because there is so much white space, but words like “Light. Years ahead.”, “Wireless. Effortless. Magical.”, and ““All the power you want. All day long.” signaling to futurism, control, and reliability in the simplest of forms.

The brand has evolved along with the times. Apple used to have it’s effective “Think Different” campaign back in the day, with rainbow colors, inner company pirate flag, and some anarchy hammer-smashing commercials as well. (Differentiating the company as younger and more creative than IBM and Microsoft.) and while the company has had some mistakes, there was never any glaring discontinuity towards it’s smart and youthful audience.

The brand my husband Mark chose that has consistency is ESPN. The wording on their site includes, “The worldwide leader in sports” and headings like, “What kind of lineup will Joe Maddon use in Game 3?”. Pictures are of baseball and football players in action. Their logo is a fast and fierce red wording with a line through it as if a baseball has been thrown straight through. Videos have announcers at a desk commenting on sports games. It is clear who the audience is — sports fans!

ESPN launched in 1979 and is an American-based global channel that focuses on sports-related programming including live and pre-taped event telecasts, sports highlights and talk shows. Mark says, “If you like sports, and you like to argue about in stupid ways, like you would find in a sport’s bar — they do that.” The type of talking is similar to early radio shows beginning in 1921 America covering details of baseball games and other sports, where announcers also sat at desks and narrated, as well as commented on the sports action. Following this long history, there’s no surprise that ESPN made Forbes Most Valuable Brands list at #31. (Apple was #1! I win!)

Mark then pondered about ESPN’s sports articles website Grantland as being superior to The Ringer (independent from ESPN). He says that “Grantland is consistently intelligent and has the writers I’m looking for without clutter, but The Ringer has too many writers” and it goes into other pop topics and news. “You have to search harder.” So the key here is word count, message priority for the intended audience, and lack of clutter. Critics are not sure that Bill Simmon’s The Ringer will succeed outside of ESPN.

Here’s a great example from a designer’s portfolio on some new ESPN experiences with both design thinking and content strategy. See if you can now spot the similarities and differences between the two processes, after what you’ve learned in this article!

I’m Kasey Wang, a student at UX Academy by Designlab in the Fuller Cohort. Please ❤ this article to support, and connect with me on LinkedIn.

Information Architecture is how we organize and label interfaces, so users can find what they are looking for. It leads them through an experience. IA includes users, content, and context. Let’s take a look at a sitemap of an imaginary grocery app:

With an improved mapping, hopefully John Travolta can find what he was looking for in the store without even thinking too hard about the design. A lot of the navigations that we go through as consumers, we don’t give much of a thought to their structure, but there are individuals who make it their job to invent and organize such structures. IA is partially an art, largely psychological, and also a science involving thorough user research.

If you’ll notice, in my sitemap there are sections with a particular meaning such as “fruit”, and this is organized into sections with sub-sections such as “checkout”, then finally a user-flow that someone could take through a grocery store app (that often mimics what we may do in real life walking down grocery aisles), but could be made any number of ways!

Now imagine a time before grocery stores. Humans have always needed a way to organize and hand off information to others, so that they have a context for what they are doing, building, or finding. IA is as truly as old as cave paintings of hunting, using hieroglyphics as a basis for language, the abacus from as a basis for math, or in creating map directions by drawing lines in the dirt with crude shapes. We still draw maps a lot like thousands of years ago. With a “bird’s eye view”, maybe some landmarks, names of landmarks, and relational directions up, down, left, and right.

Modern work & trends in Information Architecture:

There’s a fabulous documentary you can watch on Netflix. It is called Design is One: Lella & Massimo Vignelli. This famous modern design couple describes drafting and re-designing the New York City subway maps and signs, and also information guides and maps of National Parks, for print media — before computers were available. They also describe in the documentary how their process changed after computers were available.

“If you can design one thing, then you can design everything.” — Massimo Vignelli

I also enjoyed a part of the discussing how Lella and Massimo Vignelli brought the 1957 Swiss typeface Helvetica to America for print media and made it famous —well before a Helvetica license was purchased by Xerox…. which was among the first corporations to address the notion of information structure in 1988 and use the “elegant and inspiring phraseology, the architecture of information” to define its corporate mission.

And a Helvetica license was purchased by Apple, which became standard for the iPhone! They were influenced by Xerox’s Graphical User Interface, using it in their designs. Were they also influenced by the Vignellis?

Design builds off of previous design. Famous designers look to other famous designers, and people look to mental models that humans are already familiar with in order to begin building their architecture.

Just think of the “trash can” icon that you see on your screens to mean “delete” or to throw away! Or the “floppy disk” icon that means “save progress”. This is how symbols can form, even though we don’t use floppy disks any more.

Information Architecture became HUGE when humans had to invent the internet, extranet, servers, and ways to connect everything. If you’re at all familiar with hosting a LAN party to play video games, or with printing something at school or at work, you may be more familiar with examining some of the larger systems at play:

When we use these systems, we want to have a useful experience. We want the internet and our lives to be an easier place to navigate, from the basic to the fine details. Good designs heuristics include the ability to be: Findable, Accessible, Clear, Communicative, Usable, Credible, Controllable, Valuable, Learnable, and Delightful.

However — not every designer is so kind. There is also something called Dark Patterns, for user interfaces that are specifically designed to trick people. Harry Brignull is working on understanding these deceptive user interfaces in order to protect people from their harms. He is an Independent User Experience Designer in London, UK and curates this site, Darkpatterns.org. Here is a talk he gives on the subject:

Here are my 3 predictions for IA trends in the future:

1. In the future, I believe that we are going to see more seamless and beautiful designs — because many more people will begin to specialize in architecture. As well, there will be more dark patterns, due to giving out so much of our private information, and increasing demands of sneaky businesses! Hopefully we will recognize them as soon as they begin appearing. Is a prince in Nigeria really trying to wire $10,500,000 to me?

2. In the future, large levels of content and data will be at our fingertips, without even the need to swipe on a screen. A new language will develop with gesture controls. Augmented and virtual reality will become as common as the iPhones in our pockets, and finding food, shelter, jobs, and partners, will become more instantaneous!

3. In the future, will become one with our devices, which will move in life with us. We will rely on saving more of our memories to external digital memory. No one needs to memorize phone numbers anymore. That’s why I was designing Savant, a way to recall computer from moments ago or even months ago, in a faster way than looking through “files and folders”.

However the creator of Gmail, Paul Buchheit said, and accurately —

“You’re clearly a talented team, however we are concerned that there simply isn’t sufficient consumer demand for this product. This difficulty is further compounded by the increasing popularity of mobile devices, meaning that your index will only include a fraction of the things that I have seen.”

After the rejection of the above version of Savant to the Y Combinator portfolio, we pivoted to target DevOps teams and made Savant accessible over databases with multiple users, as well as simplifying the UI to one right-click. While this also failed as a method of version control due to my lack of adequate user testing, I strongly believe that in the future we will have many more ways to log, track, sort, and recall information directly in front of us and instant — perhaps through the use of bite-sized information from chatbots, or with video and information glasses. I look forward to working on more ways of organizing information, and creating systems in the future!

Looking for more IA inspiration? I recommend these modern masters:

• Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond, the book by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango
• A Brief History of Information Architecture, an article from a book by Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosat
• A huge list of videos and slides from speakers at World IA Day 2016
• Christina Wodtke’s website Elegant Hack

I’m Kasey Wang, a student at UX Academy by Designlab in the Fuller Cohort. Please ❤ this article to support, and connect with me on LinkedIn.

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Information Architecture: “What — where am I? And why am I reading this article?” was originally published in theuxblog.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Task Analysis Mapping:

Task analysis mapping is done when researchers and designers (and designer-researchers) are trying to understand how someone completes a task on their own, without guidance or prompting. Since everyone has slightly different ways of going about solving problems.

The Example Problem:

You’re a design student living in San Francisco in 2015. The living room walls are in dire need of a new paint job, that you’ve decided to fix. You’re not the only person who lives there, there may be reasons why the walls haven’t been painted, and who pays the costs? Your goal is to outline all of the steps that it takes to paint a living room.

My Example Mappings:

As I do live in the Bay as a design student, I understand what could happen in my own situation. So I’m going to use myself, my husband Mark whom I live with, and my landlord as the key stakeholders. I wanted to map 2 different and likely scenarios based on our temperaments.

Scenario A: Hired help by the agreement of the landlord.

Scenario B: DIY with couples quarrels and a surprise ending.

First, the 8-step Scenario A:

In Scenario A, the young married couple who recently moved into a rented apartment negotiates with their “lazy-cheap” landlord to call and pay contractors to fix the walls. The contractors prepare, prime, and paint a basic white-matte apartment paint as expected. After the work is finished, the young married couple thanks the landlord for co-operating in the negotiation. I know this mapping is a little bit emotional, and centers around a legal contract, but this is often times how business goes between renters and landlords in cities like San Francisco. Rental walls are also typically painted a version of plain white, so I factored this into the information.

Next, take a look at 16-step Scenario B which is more whimsical, but is also probable between my husband and I with our quirky temperaments:

In this Scenario B, there is the same problem and the same “lazy-cheap” landlord. However in this case, the wife stays on the phone and negotiates to pay in exchange for release of liability and to choose their own color. Which is of course requires a DIY approach.

A rollercoaster of newlywed emotions forms between the young couple, as they first enjoy trying new apps to test colors. They have no problem going to a store and color-matching, researching, finding supplies, and then paying with their joint-accounts. They are generally well-off and have a car, multiple iPhones, and a lot of time and silliness on their hands.

When the couple can’t agree on the color from the 3 narrowed down samples, the wife concedes to the husband’s favorite color and is also left to do the work. She does her best at first, but eventually gets angry and sad. The husband feels badly, and decides to surprise her by secretly re-painting the walls in the wife’s original color choice. They kiss and make up.

I know these two approaches are a little different than what most of my colleagues worked on (discuss, agree, schedule, find supplies, prep, paint new color, done) but I wanted to make sure I included human’s fickle emotions and some possible issues and motivations encountered in life in San Francisco.

There are open-ended ideas and process research that can come from Task Analysis Mappings, and with enough different routes to solving the problem and enough data, more knowledge can be gained about creating new positive products and services. I know these scenarios could have included more or less steps, or focuses, depending on what this is research for exactly — but even at this general stage it has sparked in me some wacky ideas for things like wall-color VR apps, paint commercials and contests from Home Depot or Lowe’s, and even ideas for newlywed workshops, or apps about tenant-landlord agreements that I never thought of before. Although there’s currently no context for businesses here — maybe it’s for the specific paint or tape companies? I realize that further Task Analysis Mappings can be done to hone in on certain parts of the process or variable. These could variables like people with disabilities, or even someone in a co-op with 23 roommates.

I learned that others in SF will have different experiences than myself, in their resources and approach then I would. But there may be overlap in general strategy, tools, or brands, which are important to observe. Overall, I learned painting a wall isn’t such a simple task — and could be framed different ways depending on specific people and environments involved!

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When I described the various functions in UX such as user research, testing for usability, prototyping, creating interfaces and user flows, visual design, and delighting users — my grandpa, Mike Stephens, responded

“Well in my day, they just called that ‘Engineering’ or simply ‘Design’ and maybe ‘Customer Service’ used to help inform and re-engineer/re-design. Everyone had it in mind, but we didn’t call it User Experience Design.”

So I sought out the first use of the term. I was surprised to learn that the earliest modern usage came about in 1993 by Donald Norman, the writer of “The Design of Everyday Things”. While UX is still a crossover of design, engineering, and customer service at it’s core — when companies revenues increase, they can afford to break down the role of design into sub-categories. UX as a practice goes back to even ancient times wherever there was a product, a service, or a particularly powerful feeling to render.

#1: 1993, User Experience Architect, Donald Norman

Even before the 1995 publication in HCI, meeting notes from a colleague of Donald Norman’s at Apple surfaced from 1993, and stated that Norman changed his job title from “User Interface Architect” to “User Experience Architect”. Norman has discussed inventing the term in interviews.

“I invented the term because I thought Human Interface and usability were too narrow: I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with a system, including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual.”

Mostly the term UX was in use for the field of Human Computer Interaction, but this term is now evolving. Norman also describes UX as “encompass[ing] all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products”.

#2: 1966, Delighting Young Minds, Walt Disney

Walt Disney was an incredibly imaginative and dare I say — even magical person — with a childlike spirit and a perceptive mind for the future. He described the idea that would later become Disney World as,

“always in the state of becoming, a place where the latest technology can be used to improve the lives of people.”

I also spoke with my grandparents about this as well — and he said they took my mom on opening day and couldn’t believe “we were made to feel cared for”, “the food was so good and cheap”, and “there were things there you’d never seen before”. I too remember Disney World, particularly Splash Mountain, Space Mountain, and then Tomorrowland as my favorite parts — they had the concept of video phones (iPhones hadn’t been invented yet!), rocket ships to bring us to live on other planets, and monorails that would zip around at really high speeds (Elon Musk hadn’t been planning his Mars colony or the Hyperloop yet!) I’m sure everyone has their own special memories of Disney World, like the signatures from your favorite movie characters and being able to visit their colorful houses. Disney’s use of technology and delighting all of the senses with both nostalgia and futurism, creates happy memories that want to be repeated again and again, and is a huge inspiration for UX Designers today.

#3: 1955, Designing for People, Henry Dreyfuss

Now after speaking to my grandpa over the phone further, to find UX overlaps in the good old days — he did mention a part of the company at IBM called “Human Factors” and they were in charge of usability. Usability is only a portion, but a very important portion of User Experience Design.

The lead of this concept was most notably Henry Dreyfuss, who was an American industrial designer who wrote the book called “Designing for People.” His concepts ensure not only designing for safety, but designing for a wide of an audience as possible, so that people with different sizes and abilities, could access all parts of the product or service without troubles.

In his book, Dreyfuss writes:

When the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the industrial designer has failed. On the other hand, if people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient — or just plain happier — by contact with the product, then the designer has succeeded.

Personally, I have a sectional couch that I moved into my smaller apartment. In order to fit, it must be split into 2 sections now, which makes it not as aesthetically pleasing, and my back arches in an unhealthy pose when working on it. And because of the couch-split, I have no room anymore to add an ergonomic desk chair! I may be using the couch now out of context, but it’s something worth considering for designers to imagine new ways of furniture that change as a person’s housing situation changes. Not all ideas succeed (at first) to work well with people and our fickle habits. This next history lesson about conveyer belts shows how very important prototyping is and designing for the end user.

#4: 1430 — 1930, Conveyer Belts of Da Vinci & Ford

Ali Rushdan Tariq describes that in circa 1430, Leonardo da Vinci designed conveyor belts to deliver food to kitchen preparers, and an early sprinkler system for safety measures. The prototype backfired when the conveyer belts operated too wildly and also the sprinkler system went off, ruining some food.

This was an early example of good-intentioned technology, but a bad UX! Ideas can be improved however.

Fast forward to the early 1900’s industrial revolution and we have these “conveyer belt” methods employed in factories and in the car building assembly line process first by Oldsmobile, then made famous by Ford in 1913. Toyota followed suit, but also focused on safety and input in the design process for people. Which led to inspire many UX designers!

#5: Circa 3000 BC, Feng Shui, an ancient form of UX?

So far I’ve spoken about 5 prominent white western men who have dominated history of UX — oof, I know right — so I wanted to stretch my mind a bit further and dig in to some possible influences from Asia.

Feng shui is currently defined as “A Chinese philosophical system of harmonizing everyone with the surrounding environment.” It is classified as a physiognomy (observation of appearances through formulas and calculations), and it’s practice “discusses architecture in metaphoric terms of ‘invisible forces’ that bind the universe, earth, and humanity together, known as qi.” and existed even well before the times of compasses.

The goal of feng shui is to situate the human-built environment on spots with good qi measured by location and an axis in time. It incorporates a lot of cleanliness and order, “white space” (in designer terms), balanced elements, some subjectivity, and design with functionality together. For example, if you leave your toilet seat open all the time, (not only is the smell and the look unappealing) but it’s said that you are “draining your money away”. This could surely be said for something like a bad smelling and looking restaurant as well — who would want to spend money there?

Other designers agree regarding the modern correlation -

“Feng Shui, to me, is a bit like a decorator/interior designer/display manager/luck-enthusiast. At the end, it’s about creating a flow that is comforting for your market/audience/customers.

So what does all that got to do with UX? Well, I know its silly, but that’s how I got myself into UX, implementing Feng Shui into my design and development process for the web” — Winston Huxley

It’s true that no one wants to see 10 pop-up ads in their apps, just like we don’t want to be interrupted tripping over socks in the hallway. This may be a trivial metaphor re-iterating the point — but the koi fish has been highly admired in Chinese lore. The koi symbolizes powers of longevity, good fortune, success, courage and longevity, demonstrated by its ability to swim against currents and upstream. Placing a koi fish in one’s home (or in one’s game!) may bring those principles into one’s life! So long as your app is tidy:

I hope what you can take away form this article about the 5 Things You Didn’t Know about UX Design History — are lessons that you can incorporate to your product or service as a Whole in the world, as something to Delight, as a design that people can Use, and to expect some failures while improving Productivity, and to gain back some wins with the Balance of orderly qi. Good luck on your future UX endeavors, and let me know how they are going by leaving a comment.

I’m Kasey Wang, a student at UX Academy by Designlab in the Fuller Cohort. Please ❤ this article to support, and connect with me on LinkedIn.

5 Things You Didn’t Know about the History of UX Design was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.