This Friday Nov. 8 at noon in the Levine Science Research Center, the Computer Science department will host Nick Jones, a freelance user experience designer who creates websites and interfaces. Jones is also an Art Director for the local advertisers, McKinney. Recess writer Jordyn Gracey spoke with Nick Jones at McKinney’s offices at the American Tobacco Campus.
Recess: Since you will be speaking a little about Hollywood interactions [on Friday], can you talk about the ones that you’ve worked on?
Nick Jones: I lucked out. I went to school and got a certificate in 3-D animation. But I didn’t have any interest in moving to Los Angeles. The idea of doing 3-D animation anywhere else in 1999 or 2000—well, there were no jobs doing that, or at least I didn’t know of any. So I lucked out and got a job making websites for A-list celebrities [such as] John Travolta [and] Denzel Washington.
There were hundreds we were slated to do around the time that the dot-com bubble burst. It was the early days of Flash. [The websites] were animated and they had music and were totally over the top and ridiculous. Having done those websites got me an interview at a lot of different places. I ended up working at an ad agency for a while, but I never stopped freelancing.
Prometheus is when I really started to get into the interfaces that we are going to be using. They [wanted me to] do a website for this android [and] one of the parts of the website was for this device which is an iPad and I’m like, "OK, we’re 80 years in the future and we’ve got an android that looks like a human. Our technology is that advanced, yet we’re still going to be using iPads?" No. We’re not. We’re going to be using some crazy thing that none of us can even think of. Just getting a taste of that fantasy world where you can just make it up made me realize that in [2002] when "Minority Report" came out was the first time I’d ever seen these floating interfaces.
R: It’s pretty canonical now.
NJ: Yeah, it is. Every interface designer has watched that thing in slow motion and knows how that works. Somebody set a high bar for what an interface could be at some point in the future. We’ve all, as interface designers who were probably kids when that came out, thought, “Man, wouldn’t that be cool if that was real.”
We all have this shared understanding of what the future is going to look like because we’ve seen it in the movies. I haven’t done any interfaces in movies, but it’s a place I want to start to play, especially because you’ve got all this data and all this cool stuff happening in almost real time on the web. Then you’ve got these interfaces [that] are all done in post-production. They’re all fake. They just get to dream up whatever they want. And that needs to keep happening or we’ll just be dealing with what’s possible.
R: Given that technology and what people expect of their technology is evolving, how do you get to know your users and stay current with what their requirements are?
NJ: By being a user, mostly. I spent most of my career creating things in a vacuum, designing things and then creating them in Flash, animating them and getting them to a point where I really liked [them] but not showing anybody. Now I stick things in front of people constantly as I work on them. I’ve tried to get away from the idea that there’s any magic to what it is I’m doing. Nothing needs to be hidden. It’s okay to show people something ugly and let them use it, and even let them own it a little bit. Because they’ll make a suggestion, and even if it’s something I’ve thought of before, when they see [the change in there] the next time, they own that with me. They’ve made a contribution.
R: Do you want to do some shameless self-promotion and talk about McKinney and your work there?
NJ: I came to McKinney in 2009. I was freelancing, just sort of sitting in my basement doing a lot of fun stuff with no interest in going into an advertising agency for sure. I came and visited, and they were building this digital team and their digital capability, and I felt like I could contribute there. I had a skill they didn't have in house yet.
The advertising world is funny. McKinney is sort of an anomaly. It's not the slimy, manipulative advertising agency that you think of when you think of an ad man. I have learned how to work for a brand; not just to make something pretty, not to make something that's fun to use, but to understand a brand and understand that what we need to do is tell their story.
I've been a part of telling McKinney's story—that's been a big part of my role there. Much of the work I've done there hasn't been client work. I've done McKinney's website and [work for] Urban Ministries. [That's] the homeless shelter in downtown Durham. We did an online game called "SPENT." With everything that I've done, [even] stuff with movies, SPENT has been the one thing that I look at and say, "I'm going to be proud of that one forever." We're doing another project for [Urban] Ministries right now. I'm hopeful that when we launch it I'll feel it has really helped real people who needed help. Not that it helped some rich guy get richer. I think that's a big part of what my talk will be about; technology is capable of so much that we don't use it for. How do we, as interface people and keepers of the data, make something meaningful to people?
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