Engagement Planning is like HopStop

Meet my mousepad.

It features my favorite city. I beat for New York because of all the tastes, smells, art, music, theater, people, parks, museums, pigeons, cabs, friends, subway crushes, halal stands, crazy but sensible street-crossing rules. One of the things I like most is the transit network that makes it possible to find your way around a crazy city - the trains, subways and buses that make it possible to navigate this crazy place and get from Spring St. to Chinatown or Columbus Circle.

Maps and wayfinding systems inspire me. Just like seeing an efficient transit map empowers me to explore new cities, sot do good digital experiences allow users to search, absorb and discover. Just like New York, there is so crazy much to see and experience in the digital space.

This thought inspires me in my work. Engagement Planning / Experience Planning is not just figuring out who we are talking to, what makes them tick, and what we need to tell them, but how to get them to identify a Point B, and then to help them figure out how to get there in the least amount of time, stops and with the least amount of effort, thought or friction.

This requires a different kind of thinking - how many stops are people willing to go, what we can do to ensure they will take each next step, how to make sure they feel validated when they get to their end-destination.

I live for this stuff.

*HopStop.com is a website and app that gives transit direction options, given user input of a starting point and an end point.

information design

(Disclaimer: This is more of a data dump than anything, anything else!)

When I was in high school, my ultimate professional dream was to be a graphic designer. I'm not sure what it was that really made me want it. Thinking about it now, maybe it set me apart or gave me a creative outlet, maybe it gave me an area to explore and try to conquer. I also think it made me feel like an artist, which in a more conventional sense (drawing?), I never was.

I got an internship at a boutique design firm owned by two amazing designers. They were married, the guy was French. The junior designers whom I sat with told me on my first day that the most important question for a graphic designer is WHY. Why was this icon placed here instead of there, why this color, why this lay-out, why?

Design, after all, is not art. Design needs to make sense. And good design makes... invisible sense. (Does that make sense? Haha probably not.)

I've continue to carry a torch for graphic design although I don't do it anymore. I still appreciate something that I think was designed well. Tight grids and interesting typography still catch my eye.

Right now, my favorite branch of GD is information design. Arranging and presenting complex information in a way that makes it easier uto se. In essence, it's about effective communication and it takes a lot of things into consideration, such as understanding what language and codes people easily understand, usability, ergonomics.

Maybe more than other kinds of design (I'm not entirely sure about this), information design takes the user's point of view so that the user experience is as simple and obvious as possible.

The most obvious application for this would be in wayfinding - helping people navigate museums, exhibits, transit systems, roads, etc. There is also informational graphics - signage on gym equipment, or appliances. It can also be applied to web design.

Several pages and tons of content go into any webpage. And the starting point of any webpage is a site map that details navigation through the site. I've seen maps that are pages and pages long, and the best maps take every option that users might need into account. (This is really dorky, but this excites me to no end. My new dream profession might just be web architect.)

And one thing this highlights to me is that what I love about graphic design isn't that it is artistic, but that it makes sense. That it is design, not art. Because there is, of course, the visual side of graphic design. But it's more about effective communication, not aesthetics. Not that there are no aesthetics in graphic design. But really good design doesn't just look pretty, but it makes sense.

One of the souvenirs I wanted to buy on a recent trip to New York was a poster of a map of the bus routes. Local public transportation really freaks me out for more reasons than I care to enumerate, but the bus and subway system in New York made complete and perfect sense. And what a beautiful map!