Another talk I heard today was from Kevin Brooks, principal staff researcher from Motorola Labs. His talk involved techniques for listening and for telling stories, to encourage collaboration in design.

This really hit home because we recently had a design meeting where the mind of our very brilliant, former NASA-engineering developer had to meet my mind, which is so non-NASA-esque. We were trying to communicate ideas to each other and were just striking out. I couldn’t understand the functional-speak, and I wasn’t doing too good of a job explaining the plight of the user.

So, back to Kevin. (This is the “bracketed story” method of telling you what I want to tell you, just in case you were wondering.) He noted that we live in a society that is far too focused on speaking and not nearly focused enough on listening. And even when we do listen, we do it with the mindset of “when are they going to stop for a breath so I can butt in” or with the idea that we’ll trump their story with one better.

However, when we truly listen to someone, we give them freedom to express their ideas. We empower them and deepen our relationship with them. Who doesn’t like to be around someone who listens to them?! It’s important to really listen and deeply understand what the other person is saying. Listening can in fact be addictive.

One important lesson I learned from Kevin’s talk is that it’s not my job as the listener to “fix” the speaker. That halts their creative process. In fact, I’m bad about doing this. My mind races ahead of them with a bunch of questions, which I usually butt in and ask, because I am curious but also I’m thinking this will show them how interested I am. But, sounds like (scuse the pun) that it’s better to just sit back and listen.

So, back to our meeting, where we weren’t communicating and weren’t making much progress on our interface design. Neal used a great tool, the analogy. By showing us the interface of Picassa he got us thinking more along the same lines. We were both able to translate our own perspectives into something the other could understand and collaborate to make something better than each of our own contributions.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Usability, UX Week 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.