We’ve heard it before: we should focus on designing for an experience; experiences are fundamentally different design challenges to a product or services; experiences are designed from the outside in.

We’re also told that we can apply this experience-centric perspective to tackle problems beyond the design of a product or piece of software. But we don’t often see examples of these ideas being put into practice. So that’s what I’d like to share.

Earlier this year I was asked by a client -YHA Australia – to work with them on a project aimed at selecting a new core IT platform for the organization. YHA Australia operate a network of some 120 or so hostels across Australia, and the system serves as the primary booking and hostel management system for each property.

During the first meetings to discuss the system it became fairly clear that the organization lacked any real sense of purpose for the system, and no clear idea of the strategic role the system might play in the organization.

More importantly for me, there was no real understanding of the role of the hostel management system in delivering a service or experience to hostel guests. What this meant was that we had no basis for prioritizing system features, or weighting features in the selection process.

To help facilitate this understanding I proposed to undertake some work with organization to help them better understand three things:

• what does the guest lifecycle look like, and what are the characteristics of the experience at each point in that lifecycle;
• in order to deliver on that desired experience, what does the business need to be doing; and
• what are the technology requirements or features needed to support these business functions.

This approach explicitly mirrors the user:business:technology trinity of requirements that need to be balanced in order to deliver a quality experience, that in turns delivers value to the business. It also provides us a slightly simplified view of the framework Peter Merholz discussed in his recent HBR article, which begins with the experience and works inwards through interactions, touchpoints, procedures & systems.

In order to understand the guest lifecycle we brought together a group of experienced industry operations (hostel management), marketing and front-line service staff. We worked through a series of brain-storming and analysis tasks to arrive at a draft lifecycle.

This draft lifecycle was held up to reality using a number of techniques including:

• contextual enquiry
• interviews (with guests, more staff)
• research in social networks

Using materials, research notes from previous projects (I’ve been working with YHA Australia for a decade), and interviews with back-office staff, each element of the customer experience was mapped to one or more front- and back-office tasks that need to occur to ensure the delivery of the experience as ‘designed’.

This research allowed for significant improvements to be made to the lifecycle in the pre- and post-stay stages of the service delivery. The detail in these two stages was meaningful because it allowed us to identify elements of the experience that would have been unsupported and yet clearly fit within a guest’s mental model of what constitutes the experience, even if not being a part of the traditional view of the service.

Most importantly, the research allowed for the experience to be deconstructed, and the important elements highlighted. This part of the work was informed by competitive analysis carried out previously, allowing points of clear and valuable difference between YHA and it’s competitors to be identified and prioritized.

By this stage we were back into familiar IT territory: what were the characteristics and features of the system needed to support the business functions previously identified. The big difference now, however, is that each business activity is directly related to a specific element of the guest’s experience.

Structuring the evaluation framework in this way also allowed us to question a lot of firm assumptions about what elements and functions within the IT system were most important. When features aren’t directly delivering a customer benefit, or enabling staff to deliver a customer benefit, it is muct easier to question the importance of that feature.

This framing of the problem also focused attention on several different sets of interactions within the overall service delivery system:

• that between guests and the system, mediated through 3rd-parties (e.g. external reservation sites);
• that between customers and front-line staff; and
• that between staff and the hostel management system.

In other words, we have defined user experience requirements for two distinct audiences: customers and staff.

Describing multiple interfaces

The next stage in the project is to layer in the functions that the business needs that aren’t tied directly to a customer experience. These include features related to financial management, corporate governance and risk management. In this model, these business-centric considerations are separated from the guest-centric considerations, and evaluated in parallel.

We are still in the process of using this approach to select the organization’s new IT platform, but this new framework has helped to transform the decision from a tactical, ‘day-to-day’ operations decision into a strategic choice affecting the whole organization’s positioning and point of difference.

I’ll be talking about this project, the approach, and lessons learned at UX Australia 2009 – a 3-day user experience design conference, with inspiring and practical presentations , covering a range of topics about how to design great experiences for people. It will be held on 26-28 August 2009, in Canberra (Australia).

On the phone yesterday with friend and colleague John Cass (SNCR), he happened upon an interesting topic. One for social media professionals of all kinds: designers, builders, funders, pundits. The question came up: doesn’t our expertise, built over years of spending time online, qualify us to see what’s really going on with social media? How it works and doesnt?

Or, on the contrary, does one have to be in the target market, amidst the majority of users, to know best what’s going on?

Who knows best — the person with the most experience in the technology, or the person most like the mainstream user? One is old, one is young. The older person may not know what’s most hip, hot, cool, or in. But the young person may not have yet learned things, call them technology’s symptoms or side effects, that the older person has.

I was reminded of a debate that plays out among anthropologists and other cultural academics (those who study human “sciences”). Take a culture, a new, foreign culture. It’s texts, rituals, pastimes. We want to study it, to understand what’s going on, and what these practices mean. But we have a problem: as outsiders we cannot know that our interpretations of the practices are accurate. We are not on the inside; and therefore we don’t know the validity of our observations and interpretations.

It’s called the “hermeneutic circle.” Inside the circle, one knows by right of membership and practice what’s going on. Being on the outside, one can only observe as an outsider.

So cultural anthropologists turned to comparative techniques, and by comparing and contrasting practices across cultures, drafted a set of structural principles and descriptions. The method is simple enough: look not at the content of a ceremony, but its structure. Look not at what’s on the mask, but on which member of the tribe wears it. Look not at the dowry, but at the obligations and debts that flow back to the family that has paid it.

Rules of the game, not the game play itself.

This distinction occurs again in communication theory (especially in pragmatics). Language is not speech. Language is the system in which meanings can be preserved and through which they can be reproduced. Speech is the performance of communication, and uses language as its means of expression.

We are, it is said, unique among creatures in our ability to separate the meaning of statement from the performance of a statement.

What am I getting at? Designers ought to recognize where I’m going. As a designer of social interactions, John and I had to ask, who knows better: the teen who uses Facebook or the old guy who knows social media? The user or the observer? The performer or the structuralist?

Which is more meaningful: how social media is being used, right here and now, by these people. Or how it works, across different applications, regardless of who is using it?

Who knows best? The insider or outsider?

I do not have an answer. Both, I suppose. The user may know this application, or use case, best — but know little of why. (So it goes anyways in cultural anthropology: the member of the group knows what’s happening but doesn’t have a reason — it takes being an outsider to think in terms of reasons). The observer can see the structure, function, and process, but may not be able to play the game.

As many folks know, I come and go with social media for the reason that I have to be in it to be a user — but out of it to reflect more freely on it. As it happens, coming and going is also good protection against burnout.

I recently took time out of twitter to catch up with some sites and services that i hadn’t used in a long time. Built a small dbase to capture notes on screens — in the hopes of writing about the grammar of social interactions.

I had to write this piece to get the question out of my head as well as to raise it among professionals and practitioners. We know that our own experience(s) on social media are neither universal nor common. Most of us have been doing this for a while — and are no longer captivated by novelty of technique, result, or effect. Many of us are (variously) strategic in our uses of social media. We may have reputations to keep, peers to respect, tongues to bite.

So how do we know that we know better or best? Knowing the technology isn’t enough –it all comes down to user experiences in the end. “Technology” is a thing, and social media are not “things” but are actions, interactions, communication, and distribution. One might describe qualities of a thing, features and functions of a thing and entirely miss what it can mean, and how it might help make meaning.

My own personal take on this is that one must first admit to multiple users and kinds of users. Multiple uses and use cases. This might seem to be stating the obvious. But I have heard time and again, from those who should know better, that “social media is ____”. That what it is, is based on that person’s experience.

That said, we have to make observations. Simply knowing the user experience is (if it were possible to know many) still not enough. Knowing what it’s like to drive doesn’t make one an auto maker. Process, function, design, architecture — those things that will ultimately facilitate and help produce an experience for (many) users — these are structural forms and rules necessary to build by. Structures still empty of users are still structures. Structures inhabited lead to habits, in time.

At the end of the day, because there is no one right, global, or universal experience or perspective possible, the professional’s I think comes down to flexibility. An ability to shift perspective, to take perspectives, and to contextualize an application or user audience as clients (etc) demand. It then becomes a matter of changing one’s own mind.

I think the designer’s approach is as much his or her own mental awareness of the problem space and opportunities, of familiar and common forms and actual uses and practices, as it is anything else. This ability to be in, or out; to know how it goes, but also what makes it that way.

Photo by vividbreeze

For the past weeks people all over the world have been sweating behind their computers. They weren’t just hot because of the weather, but because they dared to take on the Mozilla Labs challenge. People tried to come up with the best possible way to manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance. In the end more than 120 concepts were submitted… Let’s look at a few of them.

The exact challenge Mozilla Labs, together with IxDA and us, formulated was as follows: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”

We (and I may also speak for Mozilla & IxDA) are really proud of the fact that so many people took on the challenge and submitted a video with their solution (Yay). Right now the jury (me included) are working our way through them all, trying to see what brilliance was created. It is interesting to see how different the concepts are, but also how people present them. Some show recorded Powerpoint sessions, others talk us through while playing loud music and there were even some paper prototypes. It’s fun to see how some are really able to sell a bad idea, while good ideas are blown away by a unenthusiastic presentation. Reviewing the material so far has led me to two conclusions:

• UX designers need to learn to sell their creations;
• A lot of people need to focus. Stick to one problem and try to solve that first, don’t bring in new challenges or 20 nice but totally unrelated features. Focus. Focus. Focus.

Below are a few of the concepts (random selection), but you should definitely check them all out on the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge: Summer 09 page.

BTW: until July 5th 2009 you can also give your vote for the “People’s Voice” award.

Concept: Tree

Concept: TabViz

Concept: Semantic Browsing

Concept: Each one on its own square

Everyone reading this knows what a brainstorm is (I hope). I want to review a bit about the process I’ve used to find success in brainstorms, why they are helpful, and how they can be more successful in a corporate environment. If you work in an agency, this may not be as helpful, but might offer an interesting perspective. For those in the corporate environment, I hope this will help give you new ideas and erode old beliefs.

At a basic level, if done well, running brainstorms can show leadership and faster ROI for a team. If you can help the team create and develop ideas in a short session instead of weeks sitting alone, it makes you pretty valuable asset. Brainstorming is also great for engaging the full team and solicit their ideas. By “the full team”, I don’t just mean Design or UX, it’s also development, test (or QA), Project Managers… everyone. It’s important that designers get rid of the idea that we’re the only creative people on a team. Everyone is creative, some people are simply more creative, and others show it in different ways. People think in all different ways, but a good idea is the same no matter who says it.

Win them over

After accepting the fact that everyone can be creative, you can start to collaborate with people more productively. In addition to the great ideas you can get, you’ll also win over people. Many times developers or QA aren’t asked for their ideas, so the simple act of asking can get them excited and involved. Plus they will most likely be more dedicated and work harder when they’ve got the feeling they were involved in the early proces of the product.

Many times developers or QA aren’t asked for their ideas, so the simple act of asking can get them excited and involved

Let me assure everyone reading that I’m not telling you to allow a developer or someone else to make a design decision, but to simply get their ideas. In the corporate environment, another fallacy to wear away is that the designer always has to come up with the idea. This puts a lot of pressure on designers, but if you believe good and great ideas are hidden anywhere on the team, all you need to do is find them. Once you find all the ideas, the job of a designer is to tell a great story, make it simple, usable, and culturally relevant. That process and thinking is where the real design work comes in. Good ideas can be cheap, telling a great story takes a lot of time and thinking… but let’s get back to the ideas.

Involve people who want to be involved

When you do brainstorms, don’t involve people who don’t want to be involved. I’ve run a few sessions where people didn’t want to be involved or didn’t think they could contribute and sit quietly. Since I’m not in an agency, it’s not on my shoulders to try and make everyone look good in a meeting. So when someone isn’t interested, I leave them out, but let them know as an FYI in case they change their mind. A session with one negative person can quickly take the whole session down and drain the energy in the room.

It’s also important to get people to feel inspired. On the last project I worked on, we all went to see Wall-e to kick off the project. In addition to that we reviewed sites, objects, or products we all enjoyed and thought were cool. Somewhat of a warm up exercise to get us thinking broad so we didn’t stay in a software mindset. I’ve seen IDEO, Frog, and a few other companies put toys and object on the table during the brainstorm. Whatever the team finds helpful; if it works, go for it!

On the last project I worked on, we all went to see Wall-e to kick off the project.

Types of brainstorming

There are two style of brainstorming I most often use for corporate teams. One is what I call Improv Brainstorming, and it pulls from… Improv comedy. The second is a simple round robin approach, which I’ve seen many times. For any brainstorm, these are general rules of engagement I have. Several are pulled from IDEO.

• Be visual
• Defer judgment
• Stay focused
• One person talking at a time (I’ve heard people dispute this, but it works for me)
• Defined agenda

For improv brainstorming I use these rules and processes:

• Start with a single idea
• Build on that idea
• Offshoot other ideas or just start with a new concept
• Use a moderator to help guide ideas and conversation
• Have ideas in your back pocket to restart things in case they get stalled

For round robin brainstorming I set it up in the following way:

• Everyone has N minutes to sketch a few ideas on their own
• Everyone presents their ideas
• Team votes on a few core ideas
• Another individual round for N minutes dedicated to those ideas
• Present again / repeat

Hopefully all of that will give you one idea to use in your work place. I’m simple, so if you walk away with just a single idea, that’s enough for me. Someone once told me that it’s not what you know that’s important, it’s what you don’t. If that’s true, brainstorming certainly is a way to get to the important stuff fast.

Image by Jakob Botter

Josh Porter has a nice post out this week on the importance of taking user behaviors into account in social experience design. In Behavior First, Design Second, he makes use of an example I often use myself: what if twitter removed the follower count from user profiles? But I differ with Josh’s reasoning that some social behavior is hardwired.

It may be the case that certain human qualities are enduring attributes of human nature (ack, don’t like that term…). It may be that from the Ten commandments through to the Seven deadly sins, qualities like vanity, jealousy, greed and some number of others are simply human. But if they are, I’m inclined to consider them impulses, inclinations, tendencies — effects but not causes. I like to think that these social qualities are most often reactive, are responses to situations, social context, and social relationships or dynamics.

Josh cites the accumulation of followers on twitter as an example of a tendency to collect. It might be that all humans are inclined to collect; I’m more inclined to think that collecting is a social phenomenon. Be that as it may, collecting is related in my mind to ownership and possession. It’s related also, but in a different way, to numbers and magnitudes. A collection is a number of things and a pile of things. It might be that I like the pile, or that I like the number. It might be that I can show off the collection, or talk about how many… Owning and telling are different in my book.

Collecting, then, isn’t to me the behavioral explanation that Josh puts forward, but is a behavior behind which may be different psychological motives:

• Some twitter users may collect followers and be happy in their hearts for the number they can count
• Some may think about being seen having a large number of followers
• Some may think about their own status in terms of their follower count
• Some may think about the attention they’re getting from their followers

In other words, counting followers is a design-related behavior in which other motivational and psychological (and psychosocial) factors are implicated:

• status is derived from number of followers
• attention is attributed to number of followers
• status is projected onto number of followers
• status is associated with some important followers (not all followers collected are the same!)
• vanity is reflected in a number of followers

In other words:

• Collecting can have a social function: expressing or standing for status or position
• Collecting can have a communicative function: a representation of status to others
• Collecting can have a personal function: making one feel that there’s an audience that pays attention

and so on…

Collecting is probably not the original or primary cause or motivation behind the follower behaviors seen on twitter. We may count things, but I don’t think that’s grounds to assume that we count people in the same way. Yes, we count the number of people, but that’s not quite the same. The number can represent and signify to others; our motives for signifying are not our motives for collecting.

I think it is probably more likely that the follower phenomenon on twitter can also be explained by means of interaction design. Twitter is a communication tool. Communication, as a system of action or interaction is contingent on the participation of another person. I can tweet, but I cannot do anything to make somebody else respond. This may be the single-most common reason that new users stop using twitter — they simply don’t get anything back. The only type of interaction that does work, independent of any other user’s attention, recognition, response (etc) is following.

I would claim that following provides success. It’s an action that works, an action that can be completed without involving interpersonal or social contingency. It’s an action that to many users may also serve as a friendly gesture (I’m following you!); which may also involve an expectation (follow me back!), and these have little to do with collecting and a lot to do with exploring the sociality of a tool using competencies developed over a lifetime.

In fact one could argue, though it’s a bit of a stretch, that the expectation for reciprocal following (which is the habit of new users) is a social workaround to the asymmetry of relations designed into twitter. That symmetry is preferred, socially speaking, to asymmetry: and an etiquette of reciprocity is the hack that overcomes the design flaw…

I just wanted to comment on this because it is endlessly fascinating. And because I think the motives in social interaction are multiple, escape attribution to a single behavior or practice (eg collecting), and should be understood and unpacked with an eye to the social dynamics of the site or service in question. Social media interactions are a result of social dynamics, and escape explanation by means of the behaviors of individuals only.

We should be talking about this stuff — and I’m glad to see it covered — because the social practices that emerge around mediated communication and interaction are a complex of personal, social, community, and public uses and utilities, values, and actions.

I hope this is taken in the right way. I want to move this kind of thinking along; my disagreements or distinctions are always with respect and, I hope, a shared interest in learning.

From Joshua Porter’s blog:
We don’t just collect attention, of course. We collect lots of things. Most video games are built entirely around the premise of collecting things. The more you collect the higher your score. The more coins that Mario and Luigi collect, the better they do. It’s a causal relationship. We understand when playing these games that collection is the way to achieve success.

As designers we must remember that behavior comes first. Always. The quirky, the obscure, the vain, the annoying, the wonderful. We need to observe human behavior if we are to support it in design. If people collect things, how can we support that? If people are vain…how does that affect the design? Will it kill some interesting behavior…or will it help drive adoption of the service?

So, back to behavior. Some behaviors that drive us nuts are core to the human experience:

We want attention.
We collect things.
We want status.
We are vain.
We make judgments accordingly.

Being open-minded when conducting user research is almost the definition of the activity. In reality many people find it difficult to fully conceal their hypotheses, and the way they both ask questions and listen to answers ultimately limits what they’re able to learn from the research. Recently we interviewed a young man who had moved back to the US from working overseas and was now back in school. My colleague asked a question that was based on the framework of “old Alex” and “new Alex.” But of course Alex (not his real name) hadn’t told us that he viewed his transition in those terms. And Alex didn’t dissuade us from that framework until I explicitly asked him if he thought of himself as having a new and old version. A lack of open-mindedness can also impact how research data is analyzed.

In the design process, there’s a tremendous need for open-mindedness when considering solutions.

For example, a few years ago we worked with a technology company that had done their own ethnographic research into how enterprise customers were purchasing technology. They organized their results according to their pre-existing purchase decision model, rather than allowing the findings themselves to shape the model. In both cases, the learning is skewed by these presumptions, and the ability to act in a new way is limited by them.

In the design process, there’s a tremendous need for open-mindedness when considering solutions. Although design projects invariably have constraints, we’ve found real power in suspending those constraints when ideating. Even if a team is developing a new website, rapidly brainstorming concepts that impact hardware, branding, marketing, and beyond is not a waste of time. If those concepts are outside the brief, they may better illustrate the qualities of an excellent solution that can then be brought back into the (say) website. And there’s always the possibility that a great idea will expand the brief. It’s always exciting to encourage a team to brainstorm beyond their nominal solution area and see an organization rally to support them: we’ve helped hardware teams identify software opportunities, and Internet services teams identify retail opportunities. And there’s typically someone in the meeting who’s empowered to run with these “extra” opportunities and see if they can’t be developed further.

Living With An Open Mind

Chatting over dinner with some colleagues recently, at one point I bought up The Hipster PDA. One of the younger people at the table hadn’t heard about this, and once we explained the concept (essentially a binder clip and a stack of Post-It notes) she shook her head in gentle disgust and said “People have too much time on their hands.” I felt stung, stymied, and frustrated. Reflecting later, my frustration was not in the dismissal of the idea (because there’s a lot of crappy ideas out there) but in the dismissal of the people who had come up with the idea; essentially, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I’m sure that we can each recall ideas (and the people that created them) that we’ve dismissed out of hand. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink has led to the inappropriate fetishization of rapid assessments (take to heart Peter Merholz’s summary of the book: “Snap judgments are valuable. Except when they are not.”). In “Living In the Overlap” (interactions, September/October 2008) I argued for more a considered approach to how we dismiss what doesn’t appeal: “Here’s a bunch of stuff I haven’t tried: Project Runway, High School Musical, American Pie movies, robot wars, molecular gastronomy, Halo 3, Dancing With the Stars, Frisky Dingo, sudoku, biopics, House, Desperate Housewives, Portishead, Fifty Cent, Dane Cook, The Da Vinci Code, The Life of Pi, Marley & Me, The Lovely Bones, Augusten Burroughs, and Mitch Albom. I’m mildly curious in some; intensely disinterested in others. A lot of it might make a “sophisticated” individual uncomfortable. But my profession is identifying and establishing the connections between people, culture, brands, stories and products, and that means it’s absolutely crucial that I know of, and a little about, all sorts of stuff that I may personally regard as crap.”

Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink has led to the inappropriate fetishization of rapid assessments

Of course, open-mindedness and curiosity are essential for innovators: designers, researchers, people-who-make-stuff-for-others. But an open-minded discussion about our own open-mindedness may be hampered by two factors. First, we tend to frame open-mindedness and curiosity as character traits, something that’s baked into who we are and won’t significantly change (at least once we hit our mid-twenties and are less prone to self-redefinition). Second, who would acknowledge to themselves, or others, that they aren’t open-minded? No one thinks they are closed-minded, just like no one thinks they are racist. We place a cultural premium on our personal qualities and that can blind us from taking too close of a look at ourselves. While I’ll try not to get too therapy-y here, one way we can improve is to learn to hear those moments in ourselves when we aren’t open-minded.

Exercises to Open the Mind

Let’s instead consider open-mindedness and curiosity as skills that can be developed. One way to increase our openness to new ideas is through improv training, which emphasizes accepting offers. Many people are now familiar with improv’s “Yes, and…” philosophy. It’s become an icon for successful brainstorming, where the reaction to a new idea (an offer) is always yes (an acceptance). In improv training, there are a range drills to build a natural facility for acceptance. In one example, actors line up beside the stage. The first actor takes the stage, and the next actor enters the stage, states who they are, and pretends to give an object to the first actor. The first actor accepts this gift, and uses it to explain their exit. The next actor comes onstage and the drill proceeds. The drill might look something like this:

Actor 2 enters
Actor 2: Hi, I’m a baker. Here’s a loaf of bread.
Actor 1: Thanks, I’m going to go put this in the cupboard.
Actor 1 exits
Actor 3 enters
Actor 3: Hi, I’m a spaceman and I’ve brought you this moon rock.
Actor 2: Thanks, I’ll take this over to the Smithsonian.
Actor 2 exits
repeat

It’s not funny, but the goal is not entertainment; it’s to reinforce a crucial principal. The training builds from there, with more complex games that develop a broader set of skills, but the fundamental driver is being comfortable accepting any offer.

Getting Out of the Comfort Zone

A corollary to open-mindedness is our comfort zones. It’s important to learn to feel the edges of our own comfort zones. Only then are we empowered to make explicit choices about whether or not to venture outside that zone. In Amsterdam recently I walked into a cheese shop, stocked with an array of huge wheels of cheese, and I became overwhelmed, and felt unsure how to proceed. I just wanted to sample Dutch cheese, not do my weekly cheese shopping (as I imagined was the typical scenario). Suddenly this was too much to navigate, and as an introvert, I wasn’t up for asking for help if I didn’t even know what to ask, so I walked out. As I left, I realized that I was lletting the opportunity pass by and I returned to buy some cheese [You'll either recognize exactly the small intimidation I'm describing, or else think I'm crazy, in which case I suggest you read about introverted travel here.]

I asked for a recommendation. The cheese-man asked me one or two questions, then handed me a piece of Old cheese. The cheese, of course, was delicious, and so was the empowerment of overcoming discomfort. The awkwardness I felt was about the complexity of trying to perform a familiar task in an unfamiliar context, and with the myriad options that introduces. Once I realized that and chose to ask for help, I was able to stretch my comfort zone just that much more. And a few days later in Leuven, Belgium, I reused this new script and once again bought cheese (a Bruggian version of Gouda).

A few months earlier, however, I gazed at the edge of my comfort zone and decided not to cross: walking through Santa Monica we came upon the Independent Spirit Awards ceremony. Crowds of people were gathered, waiting for a glimpse of the stars. We found the serious autograph hounds who were there with portable plastic bins stuffed with headshots for signing (and reselling on eBay). It was a definite subculture: people filled each other in about the unspoken rules: what happens when a celeb approaches, when to use your Sharpie, how to hand it to them, and so on. I was fascinated but my obvious outsider/passerby status felt like a barrier. And then I saw a woman covered in tattoos, where each tattoo was a signature. I realized her particular shtick was to get autographs and then go directly to the tattoo parlor to have that autograph made permanent (the ultimate version of “I’ll never wash this hand again!”). I watched her and the group for a while, and thought about whether or not I would ask her for a picture. There was something slightly wild about her and I couldn’t figure out how to make the request. Sure, in the cold light of these pixels, it’s easy to think “What’s the worst that could happen?” but in the moment itself we may deal with it less rationally. I was actively taking pictures during my trip and I really wanted a picture of this woman but I was never able to do it. As with the cheese, I did step outside the experience for a moment, look at where I wanted to go, and decide whether I was able to cross that gulf. Here, I couldn’t.

While I’m disappointed with the result, I have to acknowledge my own human limitations, and point out that both were deliberate choices about how to deal with the edges of my comfort zone. Looking at both situations, I can see how the presence of a familiar “script” where each “actor” knew their role (i.e., man enters a cheese shop) made all the difference to me.

Being open-minded and curious is a journey, not a destination. There are always new opportunities to grow and develop our abilities in the course of everyday life and our work. And on that journey is a bounty of new adventures, new stories, and new ideas. I believe that developing skills in building and managing our own open-mindedness and curiosity in everyday life is the first place to start in our development.

Top image: nogoodreason

Here in Drupal7 User Experience Project land we’ve been moving from ‘iteration zero’ to the actual production iterations. In iteration zero we’ve been doing a lot of our strategic thinking and documenting, but now it is time to start producing output that the developers who are working with us on this project can turn into something that will be contributed to the Drupal7 Project.

There is a real cadence to the project, and although there is no time in the schedule for us to take a breather, between you and I, it has been impossible for us not to do so (just a little), before heading back into the fray. I’ve noticed this effect a few times in agile projects and I think that I’m going to try to encourage project managers to allow for a little breather at this point in future projects I work on.

I thought I’d take a moment to share with you some of the other shifts that start to happen as we move from Iteration Zero into the Production Iterations.

Communication Framework: From Abstract to Concrete

As I’ve mentioned in the past, a big part of the time we spend on this project is spent either communicating with the community about the work we’re doing, our process and our ideas, or trying to work out a better way to communicate with the community.

One of the biggest challenges of the Iteration Zero stage in the project is that it is, by and large, a series of quite abstract and strategic discussions.

It is really easy to forget that many people find abstract and strategic discussions really difficult. I think there are particular types of brains that embrace the abstract better than others, but experience in this project phase is also very helpful.

In Iteration Zero there is often a lot of writing and talking and not much making/showing – this can create a very challenging environment for project participants. It is pretty easy for people to have vastly different interpretations of the same concept and it can be difficult to make sure that everyone is on the same page with the higher level strategy for the design and product. I’ve experienced this recently not only with the Drupal project, but with a few other projects I’m involved in.

Abstract discussions can be difficult to grok due to their predominantly conceptual nature.

It is pretty easy for people to have vastly different interpretations of the same concept and it can be difficult to make sure that everyone is on the same page with the higher level strategy for the design and product.

I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have explained and re-explained the very same concept, each time thinking that it’s been communicated clearly, only to discover that we still have at least two very different ideas about how something is going to work. There are at least two reasons for this: firstly I have to take responsibility for communicating – if the message isn’t being received I have to re-evaluate either what or how I’m communicating. We also have a second and somewhat unique problem when communicating with the Drupal community and that is that they have a tremendously strong mental model of How Things Work In Drupal. Every time an idea is presented the community almost invariably tries to map it directly to their mental model of How Things Work In Drupal – this is natural and what we *do* with mental models, but when the concept we’re suggesting actually breaks the model, we can run into trouble. It just doesn’t compute! It becomes abstract, difficult to understand, as we have to try to find ways to make concepts more concrete.

Iteration Zero can be a stressful time as a result of this abstraction – people aren’t really certain that they know what you’re talking about, but you’re also asking them to make decisions that will be really significant in shaping the product they’ll be getting at the end of the project.

I think it’s pretty common for people to be fairly fraught towards the end of Iteration Zero.

Thank goodness it is also around this time that something excellent happens – things start to become a little more concrete. There are still a bunch of abstract concepts that need to be agreed on, but as designers we’re also starting to get our heads around exactly how things will fit together and we can start to communicate that.

This is around about the time that we had a fundamental overhaul of the way we’ve been communicating with the Drupal community and interested onlookers on this project.

Towards the end of Iteration Zero we were starting to get a little down about the some of the feedback we were getting on the D7UX project – people were saying that they didn’t want to get involved because it was too intimidating for people who didn’t have UX experience and expertise, that they didn’t think it would actually happen or be a success, that they felt that the discussion was too disjointed and widespread.

It was clear to us that we needed to change the way we were engaging with the community to help them help us. Essentially, we needed to change the structure of the conversation from it’s abstract Iteration Zero format to a more concrete format appropriate to the production iterations, and, we suspected, to a format that most of our participants would find much more comfortable.

Over the course of a day, we created a ‘Project Framework’ on the D7UX site by breaking down the project into it’s main component parts and providing a wireframe, description and outline of ‘what we’re thinking’ for each part. Threaded comments allow people to give their thoughts on each component as it evolves over time.

Allowing people to participate in a place that is most comfortable to them is a key part of our communications strategy. We wanted to continue with this strategy even as we move into this new phase of the project, but also to aggregate the discussions into one place and to facilitate this we created a system of tags for the project components and put together a series of Yahoo Pipes to pull tagged content together. We added a link to these pipes on each of the component pages in the framework.

It was a pretty big overhaul and quite a time consuming process, but almost immediately we noticed a significant difference in the way that people were communicating with us on the project – the interactions became much more focussed and productive and felt a whole lot more positive, and that trend seems to have continued. It also makes it much easier for us to be more conversational with the community in the project – thanks to the simple addition of threaded comments and also the aggregation of the main part of the conversation into one place.

Overall, we’re really pleased with the effect that changing the format of the conversation from abstract to concrete has had on the project to date and the effort involved has already been rewarded.

The Challenge of System Design with User Stories

Another major challenge that we’re butting up against at the moment is to try to make a system design fit into an agile environment.

I’m a big fan of agile methodologies and have had a long term interest in finding better ways for UX practitioners to engage in agile methods. Unfortunately, there is no denying that pushing a design project like this one into agile iterations is tricky.

The way that our user stories are being developed at the moment is that the project manager from the developer agency (Acquia) is writing user stories then pushing them over to us to check that they are right and for us to adjust and re-order as required. To date, we have mostly let them sit in a large spreadsheet whilst we focus on the design strategy (iteration zero) and try to ignore the need for user stories.

We’ve done quite a bit of work on developing an Audience Matrix that allows us to take quite sophisticated ‘views’ of the design from multiple audience perspectives, but to translate this into user stories is untenably complex. The alternative to date has been overly simplistic. We are struggling to find a way to make good use of our audience modeling work to date without breaking agile.

Another issue that we’re butting up against is the nature of system design and templating in an agile environment. There are sets of design elements or template components that would ideally be designed in components then re-used throughout the project – for this project examples of these would be the admin header, the overlay window and the edit-in-place interaction model. Describing these using user stories is incredibly clumsy and inappropriate.

Once these elements are built and we start looking at user pathways that make use of them for particular tasks and outcomes then user stories will come into their own, but it seems that in the same way that developers need a piece of time to set up their development environments and databases without requiring user stories being used, designers need some time to get the ‘design environment’ set up without requiring user stories.

Again, this is something that I’ve come across on a number of agile project I’ve worked on but I’ve not seen any allowance for this way of working in Agile UX project methodologies.

If you’ve had similar challenges and some ideas or solutions then I’ve love to hear from you!

Update on Crowdsourcing Usability Testing

In my last update I was telling you about the Crowdsourcing Usability effort we had launched. Since then we’ve seen that WordPress have launched a similar campaign and they managed to get coverage in the New York Times no less, so we will be watching their progress with interest. Exciting times!

Launching Microprojects

Want to dip your toe in Open Source Design? Help out with D7UX? Well, here’s a great way to give it a try – sign up to help out with one of our microprojects! You need to commit just 12 hours over 3 weeks, but you’ll get a feel for what it’s like to design with one of the most vibrant and clever communities you could ever come across. Be warned, it’s challenging but potentially very addictive!

Today was the closing day of From Business to Buttons 09. During the day several good speakers went on stage and shared their knowledge with us on some very different subjects. We had fun, listened seriously and secretly tweeted the brilliance onto the interwebs. And now we bring you a report of some of the talks.

Bill DeRouchey – Designing Humanity Into Your Products

Today Bill did the opening keynote by telling us how important it is to design humanity into products. He did this by giving many examples, both good and bad. Bill states that as a company it is really important to have a healthy relationship with your customer. The only way to do this is to be on the same level, respecting each other and talking to each other in a human voice. And that is where the problems arise.

A lot of companies are faceless, lacking a human voice. They communicate to customers in a distant and very formal way. This formality is in fact a way of communicating power and at the same time fear. An example of this can be found in a lot of car advertisements, where cars are sold with features instead
of emotions “This is the most fuel efficient car around.” By communicating with this tone you avoid a possible connection of customers with your product or company… Because what is there to connect to? According to Bill companies have to change their tone of voice and step forward with a real voice. By doing this and making themselves vulnerable and honest they can create sympathy and understanding, thus creating slack. And Bill states “Slack is the most underrated thing.” I think he’s totally right there… A good, and obvious, example he brings up is the Microsoft – Apple comparison. Microsoft is the closed faceless company that we think is stupid every time it makes a mistak… While Apple is a company we understand, feel related to and forgive when it makes a mistake: because making mistakes is human.

So how do we humanize technology? This is a question Bill asked himself. Robots were an attempt, also the happy face of Mac and even Clippy of Microsoft Office. But there is an easier way of humanizing your digital products, and that is changing your tone-of-voice. And that is what Bill focuses on for the rest of the presentation. He gave a lot of examples of how good copy can help you sympathize with a brand or service. It’s important that this copy is not distant, but very recognizable. Like when you want to buy a product you can place a button stating “Order this product”, but it could also be “I want this now!” It’s the same function, but a totally different tone of voice. Another, and in my opinion one of the best, example was Moo.com, a service to order your business cards. When you order business cards you get an automated reply from the system. Normally this would be a very boring text stating your order is being processed. But Moo.com approaches it differently by just rewriting the copy… It’s not an automated no-reply mailaddress, but Little Moo the service robot that e-mails you a story of the upcoming steps. He will be sending the order to Big Moo, the printing robot, who will try to finish up your order. This way of approaching the customer brings a smile on your face and builds up a relationship. And all of that just by changing the copy and approach.

Tips:

• Good tone of voice humanizes the interaction between me and the service
• It’s extremely important to focus on the words
• Get the best writer you can afford
• Don’t talk AT people. Talk TO them as peers
• Write as you speak. Speak as you write
• People remember humor

Lennart Andersson & Niclas Andersson – Designing beyond the screen: the convergence of products interactions and services

Lennart and Niclas are both working at Ergonomidesign, which is a Swedish design firm I really respect. During their talk they explained the approach their firm takes towards convergent design, which is basically that type of design where different fields come together (in their examples: physical and digital products).

First they jumped into their way of looking at research and approaching projects, which is focused on ergonomics. They split the field up in physical, cognitive and emotional ergonomics. Physical ergonomics focuses on the way your body works and it’s limits. Cognitive ergonomics is a field interaction designer are used to, focusing on the mental workload or how people’s mind works. And lastly you’ve got emotional ergonomics, which looks into emotions and the way people connect with designs. How do they associate things? If you’re interested in learning more about this I recommend the interview we did a few weeks ago with Lennart and Thomas, prior to the event.

The reason they’ve got such a broad scope is because all the products they design touch all those fields. And more and more interaction designers will start touching those fields soon, with more physical products getting digital interfaces. But it’s not only the interaction designer that is involved in this proces. Lennart and Niclas show us of what disciplines their teams consist, which is a combination of interaction, service and industrial designers. By bringing them all in on the same time you get a great mix of knowledge, which should lead to better products. Each discipline will touch the fields of the other disciplines, but mainly focus on their own. A industrial designer will look at how strong the material must be, an interaction designer at the way somebody will interact with it and a service designer at the different contact points.

Another topic the Anderssons (no family btw) touched was the world of natural user interfaces. How do we bring the natural into NUI? Is it truly a more natural way of interacting? Lennart said that “A natural gesture does not necessarily equal a natural interaction.” Which is very true. Consider this: sticking your thumb in the air is a natural gesture to OK something… But when you are in a public space you are never going to keep putting your thumb in the air to say OK to a user interface waiting for confirmation. You would feel ridiculous. And is it intuitive? People are clueless how they must respond, since it is new. Here arise all different questions around the discussion of most advanced yet acceptible. And NUI’s are so immersive that you are completely cut out from the world. It is so unique and new that it needs all your focus, which isn’t a good thing.

Other interesting brainfarts:

• Emotional experience cannot be designed, but enabled
• How do we stage for a good user experience?
• To design really useable and compelling natural user interfaces – you need deep insight about the users

Gene Liebel – Every 3 Seconds, a User Dies Somewhere

Scott Berkun – Why Designers Fail and What to Do About it

And so we approached the end of the event with the closing keynote by Scott Berkun. He pulls us into a world of failure and learning from failure, which designers aren’t good at.

As designers we don’t like talking about failure. We try to forget about it and mostly like to share success stories. But the success stories are unique, while we fail 95% of the time… We do this while drawing, sketching, prototyping and designing. And according to Berkun in failure lies the biggest chance of learning and improving ourselves and the products we create.

So why do we fail? We seem to set the wrong goals and fail to meet those goals. One example Berkun pulled out of architecture is the design of a building by Koolhaas. It was a beautiful building everybody loved, except the people working there… Because all the visitors kept asking where the restrooms were. Somebody forgot to design good wayfinding… And since there was no room for solving this problem, the people working there hang up their own signs… How could this have happened? Why didn’t anybody notice this during the design proces? According to Berkun this is because designers have no failure analysis. We don’t check up after delivering a design… We fail to have a feedback proces, while other disciplines do have this. Like a doctor having an autopsy, and the airforce holding a mission debrief.

So his message is: let’s start checking how things went and learn and improve. If you can’t solve a problem, redefine the problem and solve that. There is nothing wrong with this. As an example Berkun refers to the Newton, the failed PDA designed by Apple. Everybody laughs about it… But it probably gave Apple good knowledge about designing that type of products, causing them to create the iPhone as it is now.

During Scott’s talk I had to think of a book that I consider my personal bible: ‘It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be’ by Paul Arden. In the book Arden states that if you want a problem to be solved, you have to make it your own problem. Because as long as you are pointing to others causing it and needing to solve it, you can basically do nothing about it. And this is something Scott also talks about by stating “Own your mistakes” You must study the failure you caused and learn from it.

Today and tomorrow Malmö will host From Business to Buttons 09. Sweden’s leading event on interaction design. And since Johnny Holland is the proud media partner of this event we’ll be delivering a day-to-day report of the main talks.

It’s been a great day full of talks and workshops. People met, talked Swinglish and shared a lot of insights. On the conference floor people could play around with new technologies and a very interesting Microsoft Surface game, created by Ergonomidesign. I would definitely recommend you to watch the videos of all the talks below and the workshops, which are available to watch at the Bambuser FBTB09 channel.

Garr Reynolds – The Zen of presentation design & delivery: Why it matters now more than ever

Reynolds had the honours of doing the opening keynote on From Business to Buttons 09. And he did a nice job sending shivers down the spines of all the speakers having to talk after him. In his talk he showed us the power of presentating in a good way (+ why Powerpoint sucks).

As a big fan of jazz Reynolds first refered to the relationship between jazz and presentations. According to him they should both be structured, but leave room for freedom. Presenting is not about reading up bulleted lists or bringing across as many facts as possible, it’s about story telling. You have a story to bring across where you want people to feel energetic about and interested in.

When you want to give a good presentation there are three things you have to keep in mind: restraint, simplicity and naturalness. Restrain yourself from bringing across too much or too complicated stuff. Simplicity is important in the story and design of the presentation, keep focus. And the presentation should have a naturalness in it, both in timing and flow. According to Reynolds the zen master of presentations is Steve Jobs. He makes it look so easy, but that’s mainly because of the great preparation. Jobs’ presentations are very visual and aesthetic which attracts the right attention. You should have slides that support your story, not trying to bring across the entire message in itself.

Reynolds showed some examples of good and bad presentations. Comparing Bill Gates’slides from the past and present, showing a major difference in the design. (from the 90’s lollipop slides to design slides nowadays). Another great example is Al Gore’s presentation on ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ A real recommendation if you want to see a good presentation.

We aren’t blamed for using bulleted lists, since Powerpoint kind of forces us in this position. But Reynolds does want us to forget about this way of presenting. He quotes:  “Learn all the rules, then forget them” – Basho.

Lessons:

• It’s not about the tools, it’s about the ideas
• Start in analog mode, with sticky notes or sth like that
• Take a risk – child’s mind/beginners mind (In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, in the experts mind there are few – Shunryu Suzuki)
• Put yourself in the shoes of the audience, it’s their time. (Hara hachi bu “Eat only until 80% full”)
• It’s not about the thing, but about the story of the thing
• Embrace simplicity: maximum effect with minimum means

Dave Malouf – “What’s going on” to “We’re not gonna take it”

Catriona Campbell – How do we really create and show Return on Investment from social media?

In her talk Campbell touched a lot of different points, but two really stuck out:

Micropayments

The most interesting quote Campbell threw at us was “Advertising is dead. We must start monetizing social media.” According to her there are a lot of commercial possibilities that lie within social media that we haven’t touched yet. She calls this field social commerce: using social media to earn money.

Campbell is a great believer of micropayments. She says this will be the next great thing. People will start exchanging small amounts of money for content on a huge scale, like for good tips or music. We already saw this trend unfolding in Second Life and even the app store, but now it will become a general theme.

One of the more interesting new initiatives in this field is TipJoy, a way of giving small amounts of money to people you like on services like Twitter. When you’ve set up an account you can tweet an amount of money to the person you like (as small as $0.01). These kind of payments seem small, but when you’ll have enough people doing this it can become something big. I think it’s really interesting… Every day we give away a lot of interesting content and data, even links. But why shouldn’t we reward people for doing this? I can understand people don’t want to pay $25 a month for a subscription on a digital newspaper or a Twitter feed. But giving a tip of $0.10 for a good article or $2.00 for somebody who’s showing you nice sites all the time does seem fair, plus the amount is small enough to consider. It’s what made the app store big.

EEG

The technology of the day was definitely electroencephalography (EEG). This “is the recording of electrical activity along the scalp produced by the firing of neurons within the brain.” (thank you Wikipedia). With this technology it is possible to measure the emotional engagement a user has with a product or page. It is able to measure: cognitive attention, visual attention, emotional attrection and emotional engagement. And the technology has developed so far that it has become very mobile.

In line with this Campbell talks about the different modes a user can be in, which are very interesting to explore. In general people are browsing the web in a task mode, searching for information or doing their e-mail. But with, for example, social media they are more in an explorative mode. Understanding these modes is key in designing good experiences and knowing when to present what kind of interaction. As an example she says Facebook puts people in an explorative mode, but as soon as they are in the mailbox of Facebook they change to a task mode. Really interesting stuff, and definitely worth researching how people feel. Especially when you can use a cool technology such as electroencephalography (I admit I copy-pasted that word…).

Matt Jones – Designing personal informatics

Recently Matt wrote an article for us about personal informatics, which holds the main part of his talk at this conference. So instead of repeating his words I’d like to focus on a small, but still very good, part of his talk: the importance of playfulness. Matt states that playfulness creates fun and thus engagement. It’s the icing on the cake that makes otherwise boring data interesting. One of the examples he gave was the interface of the Toyota Prius, which gives you an account of the consumption of the car. It does it in such a way that it almost becomes a game to drive more efficient. By integrating this kind of playfulness into a product you are able to engage people in a way they would normally not think about. The common becomes new and energizing again. When it’s about points, it’s a game.

Another example he gave is called ‘delighters’, which are things you place in order to create delight deliberately. In the physical world this could be a beach ball that is placed on your hotel bed on a sunny day, putting a smile on your face. In the digital world this could be a compliment for keeping your mailbox spamfree or the product Matt created: the Dopplr personal annual report. In the annual report they translated otherwise boring data in a playful way, like translating your carbon print in the number of hummers you’d drive (so 2.1 hummers instead of telling 42.299kg CO2). Another thing they did was translate the amount of kilometers you travelled into an animal with a relative speed. This way numbers were suddenly something funny and relatable, like being a mouse or a wombat. This approach really appeals to me. Being able to look beyond the data and to translate it into a story people love is briljant. The way they made the year report made people realize how they traveled. And people who didn’t have or didn’t update their Dopplr data realized they were missing out on the fun, which caused them to start keeping track of their accounts…. Thus bringing in more valuable data for the company. Brilliant.

Some other lessons from Matt’s talk:

• Personal informatics: don’t steer it all the way, but keep the data open enough for interpretation by individuals
• Data Gifts: give the users something back… this became the annual report.
• Don’t forget to test the outliers (the extremes)
• Matt Locke: Data + Time = Story
• Add video to presentations. Integrate video in the presentations. Not fullscreen. Why? It looks impressive.

UX, experience designer, experience strategy … as far as words go, right now everything around UX design is still up for grabs. However, by focusing on the process ‘The Project Guide to UX Design: For User Experience Designers in the Field or in the Making’ by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler neatly sidesteps these sticky issues to deliver a fantastic handbook on the topic.

The (digital) experience designer

What initially struck me about this book is that, unlike other books that focus on techniques or the field, it focuses on the process and thus the role of being a UX designer (the UX of UXD, if you like). I haven’t seen a description of a UX designer before, and loved theirs:

Curiosity, passion, and empathy are traits that user experience designers share [along with] a desire to achieve balance … most notably between logic and emotion ….To create truly memorable and satisfying experiences, a UX designer needs to understand how to create a logical and viable structure for the experience and needs to understand the elements that are importance to creating an emotional connection with the product’s users.
- p6

Though UX designers can in theory do anything ranging from software interfaces to installations, the authors focus on “‘the design of digital experiences”. This specifically means websites (which they define as falling into six categories: brand presence, marketing campaign, content source, task-based applications, e-commerce, e-learning, or social networking applications), so expect chapters on SEO rather than interfaces.

A project guide, with all the realities

Ah, the realities of being a designer. Often many of the issues you have to deal with are nothing to do with design, and little things can make or break your project. This book goes a long way towards spelling out this reality. Along with the expected things you might read about (the different hats you have to wear, making up personas and wireframing), it covers less talked about topics such as writing proposals, dealing with team friction and what happens after a site is launched.

I have to admit I was surprised to find several pages dedicated to sloppy mistakes in wireframes. However, this attention to detail could well be justified, given a point made by UX designer Dante Murphy that inexperienced designers often suffer from “below par …. polish and aesthetic quality of their deliverables”. Other than that, I found all the other sections varied but relevant. I was however surprised that they didn’t touch on accessibility.

Read, browse, surf, snorkle, deep dive

‘A Project Guide’ achieves the difficult balance of being both a useful reference and easy read (even in such arcane moments as explaining the nuances of SEO). What’s more, each chapter is full of pointers to more in-depth resources (in case you miss the introductory text , they’re coded as ‘surf’, ‘snorkle’, or ‘deep dive’ depending on the length of the article) – including a paper by fellow Johnnie Steve Baty. Thankfully, they’ve put all the links up online.

The verdict

‘A Project Guide to UX Design’ is a must have for those starting out in the field of experience design as a brief but comprehensive guide to realising a web design project. For experienced practictioners, it’s a useful compendium of techniques and other resources. The only thing I’d add is a mention about accessibility standards.

Book details
A Project Guide to UX Design: For User Experience Designers in the Field or in the Making
author: Russ Unger, Carolyn Chandler
published: New Riders, 2009
details: 288 pages, softcover