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Tony Sokolowski
Design Director
Vertigo |
Tony Sokolowski discusses how building compelling user experiences has changed over the last year and a half, starting with Family.Show and finishing this year at MIX08 with Memorabilia.hardrock.com
Hi Tony. You’re the Design Director for Vertigo Software. Tell me a little about yourself, your background and Vertigo?
Hi Will, I’ve been designing user experiences and leading design teams for almost 15 years, mostly within agency/consulting environments at companies like Aaron Marcus
and Associates, Viant Corp., and now Vertigo. I was also at Yahoo! for several years, focusing on their Finance, Local, and Search properties. Like many UX designers, I imagine,
I followed somewhat of a winding road. I was a traditional graphic designer before I was a UX designer, and a painter before that. In hindsight, though, it all makes sense.
It has been and continues to be quite a fulfilling ride. Seeing Muriel Cooper’s work during my first typography course at California College of Art was definitely my “light bulb”
moment. That’s when I became hooked on information visualization and user interfaces.
To bring you up to the present, I’m approaching my third year here at Vertigo as Design Director. It’s a company of great ability and personality, with a strong culture of
openness and collaboration that has kept things alive and interesting throughout its 11 history. These qualities were immediately apparent to me when I first walked in the door,
and that was the big attraction. That, and a clear challenge. I think it’s fair to say that Vertigo has been known primarily as a technical vanguard, but the attention to design
has always been there. My role, on a fundamental level, is to nurture that part of us and bring it more to the forefront because, in truth, the most interesting projects for us
and the most fruitful for our clients are the ones that combine design and engineering.
This culture of creativity, openness, and excellence is manifested in everything we do. Our publicly released apps are prime examples of this. You can find a lot of these
"best practice" applications on the Labs page of our website. These apps are in many ways how we got our start, how we continue to get our name out in the world, and continue
to grow. You can also see the spirit of this community in our employees’ blogs. We're about 50 people strong now, and our design group has doubled over the last year. Becoming
the experts, and sharing what you know, always pays off. That's our marketing department in a nutshell. I can't imagine us hording knowledge, ever. It doesn't hurt our business
to share. Quite the opposite actually. Getting out in the world, and sharing what we know and what we do, whether it's a local user group, or a 1000 person keynote, is one of our
most rewarding activities.
Most recently, Vertigo has been known for the very impressive work on the Hard Rock Memorabilia site. You’ve done a lot on our platform before (Family.show, Video.show, Slide.show) –
what do you like about it, and how has it changed between Hard Rock Memorabilia and Family.Show?
What’s not to like? I don’t mean to sound flippant, but for those of us who work almost exclusively with Microsoft tools and technologies, it really is game changing in terms of how
WPF and (increasingly) Silverlight enhance our ability to deliver quality user experiences. For example, rich data visualizations, which are what Family.Show was all about from a UX
perspective, have become much more attainable for us with regard to both presentation and interactivity. Ideas that used to not make it past the designer’s drawing board due to
technical feasibility issues or time/cost limitations, are now being realized in our final applications. I’m also thinking about our ability to address the more subtle, but extremely
important, behavioral qualities of the UI: fluid and more natural transitions, actions, and feedback for the user. A favorite example of mine is from the Video.Show application,
where we have the background fade to black as a selected video begins like the house lights going down in a theater. It may sound silly, but these things add up to a more intuitive
and engaging experience.
With respect to changes to the platform since we began Family.Show (our first WPF application) a year-and-a-half ago, I think the theme there is all about maturity. The
trajectory for the platform and the tools - the promise - was pretty clear from the beginning, and the improvements have been steady in coming. We’ve certainly matured in
our processes and knowledge base through trial and error along the way, and we have a growing community of experts out there that really help move things forward. At Vertigo
we’ve been fortunate in that our WPF and Silverlight projects have almost all focused on robust, end-to-end solutions. We’ve done very little demoware, and some of our highest
profile projects have served as “best practice” reference applications for the community. This is to say that we’ve really had to dig in to all aspects of the tools and
technology and prove them out. Working with pre-Beta and Beta resources, and the rapid release cycles, hasn’t always been stress-free. But we’re committed. We’re totally onboard.
I have to say that I’m excited about the platform for reasons beyond the new capabilities. WPF and Silverlight have really created a headline around the designer-developer
relationship that has sparked a ton of new thinking about “how” and ultimately the “why” behind our work. And here I’m talking about the wider community, not just within Vertigo.
We don’t quite have the Rosetta Stone yet, but it’s really something to have a this renewed sense of combined creativity applied toward a shared goal. At the same time, as the
platform matures, we’re seeing clients’ expectations around UX rise, as well as their willingness to invest accordingly. This benefits everybody, and especially the people who
use our products day in and day out.
When you were working with Hard Rock International, was it hard to convince them to bet on Silverlight and Expression Studio?
It was very difficult to convince Hard Rock International to consider Silverlight 1.0 when the alternative was Adobe Flash. The major concern here was end user adoption.
We worked very closely with Microsoft to build the case, but we were never able to provide ample data to Hard Rock International regarding number of downloads, percent of
browsers with Silverlight 1.0 installed, etc. When we learned that Deep Zoom (aka Seadragon at the time) was going to be integrated into Silverlight 2.0, all it took was a
five minute demo of the technology in a face-to-face meeting to sway the CMO and CEO of Hard Rock International. It was that convincing. Following from that, Expression Studio
(specifically our use of Expression Blend 2.5) was never really an issue. Hard Rock International trusted us to use the tools we deemed appropriate for the project.
What can you tell me about the design and development process you used for the Hard Rock Memorabilia site?
Breaking it down, we had one designer who assumed the interaction and visual design roles. We also had six full-time software engineers and one full-time Creative Developer
who created the xaml, and bridged the gap between visual and production design. But to everyone who watched the project develop, this team turned into a single, gigantic multi-armed,
multi-headed beast at that crucial moment when they were given the green light on Silverlight 2.0/Deep Zoom. Really, the best I can do here is to paint a picture of intense
collaboration and parallel work happening at breakneck speed. We’ve all had projects like this, right? The team took over our large screening room and didn’t come up for air until
the site went live. The result is simple (in the best sense of the word), but the functionality, behaviors, and interactions are not out-of-the-box Silverlight. It was an intense
effort to bring it all together. I don’t mean to be mysterious, it’s just that the dust hasn’t settled enough to tease out a nice description of the process. We have released a
bit of the proprietary technology that went into the site (called BigPicture™) to CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com/BigPicture),
and will have more information available on our own website shortly.
How does prototyping play into your design and development process?
We certainly have many different flavors of prototyping going on at different points in the design/development process. Sometimes focusing on navigational/organizational models,
interaction models, and flows. Other times we’re prototyping the behavioral aspects of the UI: specific animations, timing, etc.. In parallel, on the technical side, we’re testing
out the capabilities of the platform. It’s a fairly continuous process through various levels of fidelity as the application is taking shape and, in the end, it’s all about iteration.
We follow a SCRUM approach (a flavor of Agile development) in our project work, so it’s also about focusing on manageable chunks of work and carrying them through.
How does Expression Studio and Visual Studio help you prototype?
One of the ways the Expression Studio/Visual Studio combination helps the most, at a basic level, is the ability to implement the UI concurrently with the backend development
work that’s going on. I mentioned our Agile approach before, and this ability to work in parallel is invaluable to our process. Beyond that, I would say that Blend gives the ability
to break up the UI work into multiple pieces, and to prototype, or iterate, on those pieces in isolation without affecting the uber-project file.
What we’re working on most in terms of prototyping is getting the early interaction design/information architecture work, the stuff of wireframes, out of the static realm
and more into the more dynamic Blend. It’s a challenge in that Blend has a steep learning curve, quite honestly, for those of us designers who don’t have a programming or front-end
development background.
One of the big features of Silverlight 2 is Deep Zoom (and nicely used in Hard Rock Memorabilia) – do you think we’re going to see more zoom-driven interfaces, and do you think that’s a good thing?
I’m sure we’ll see more and I do think it’s a good thing. 2D information visualization - simple typographic solutions and rich graphical presentations alike -
opens up a vast amount of possibilities in assisting comprehension and decision making. I’m talking about the visual languages of symbol, metaphor, color, size, proximity.
All these elements that engage our senses and the way our minds work. The idea of adding the language of 3D space to that mix definitely has me very excited. That’s where
the future applications of Deep Zoom are headed.
From an interaction/navigation standpoint there’s something freeing about the zoom. It feels like a more natural discovery mode on some fundamental level. The challenges
it presents are plentiful though. It adds complexity to an already overloaded set of physical controls, the mouse and the keyboard. I would also say that there are mental model
issues to be uncovered and resolved. But these still feel more like opportunities than roadblocks to me.
Ultimately I think it’s a question of finding the right kinds of applications - where zooming helps to tell a story that you can’t tell, or can’t tell as well, in some
other way. I’m thinking right now about the Charles and Ray Eames film “Powers of Ten.” Have you seen it? Where the viewer travels from the galactic scale to the molecular scale
via the earth and a couple napping on a picnic blanket in the park. There’s a story there at each individual scale and another story about the relationships between them that’s
developing as the film progresses. When Scott Stanfield, our CEO, presented our Hard Rock Memorabilia work during the MIX08 Keynote, I think he hit on a very similar kind of idea.
Given the number of changes in the world of design (Silverlight 2, Surface, iPhones, WiMAX), how do you see UX design changing?
Well I think there’s something telling in the examples you just mentioned. There’s obviously an ever-growing mix of devices, appliances, platforms, formats, etc. out there, not
to mention contextual overlaps (work, home, mobile, group, solitary), and more of us, as people, as consumers, are engaging with that wide array all the time. It used to be that
you could say UX design was about humanizing the interface, but now you have to ask, “which interface?” Or, “which combinations of interfaces?” We’re definitely seeing the larger
discipline of UX design segmenting, then recombining in various ways to address these as specialized cases. But at the same time, I think we’re starting to come to terms with the
overload. I think the role of the UX designer in its many forms is going to be increasingly about getting this complexity under control.
Any predictions for the future?
Well, gee, that’s a big question. It’s an election year after all, and an Olympic year too. Or perhaps you’re thinking about a certain high-profile merger story happening
right now in the technology sector?
I’ll wager that you're thinking more in terms of UX design, but did you notice that I’m dodging your question?
