Using Google earth, I can soar like a bird above mountains and continents and then zoom right down to my own bedroom window with a simple, relatively intuitive interface. So why do I navigate my social world using a Twitter client that looks like a command line interface, and assumes I read every update? I think personal online tools need to do a better job of understanding different levels of network scale, and as our social world become bigger and more noisy, they should make it easier for us to find and jump through proximity wormholes to move from macro-scale networks to micro-scale intimacy and back again as seamlessly as possible.

A physical social world

Once upon a time, proximity was rooted in the physical realm, and apart from traders, warriors and explorers, most people’s social world was largely inherited at birth and governed by economic or social status. But by the twentieth century, at least in richer countries, social mobility was such that an individual could maintain work, friendship and other relations across multiple countries and continents, not just neighboring towns and villages.

Now, in the twenty-first century, time and distance feel much less linear. We are simultaneously closer together and, in some ways, further apart than ever before thanks to the uneven spread of globalization. In London, I feel closer to Paris and Amsterdam than to small towns that surround my city. Within the city, the reverse is also true: we can pass somebody on the street every day without overcoming the invisible barriers that separate us by culture, status or worldview. We can be physically close but worlds apart.

Proximity

Proximity in social relations used to be crucial to the norms that governed business and trade, as Doug Rushkoff explored in his book Life Inc about the history of the corporation. But this form of proximity did not scale as local commerce gradually gave way to global trade. The post-industrial era of specialization and exchange, global trade and the rise of multi-national corporations achieved great economic advances, but at the expense of some of the social checks and balances on how business is conducted. The industrialization of communication, customer relations and engagement led to call centres, segmentation and CRM, which sought to manage customer relations as cheaply as possible. Scale was therefore in inverse proportion to proximity and intimacy.

The social web

More recently, we have seen the emergence of businesses like Zappos, Threadless and others who regard contact with their customers as part of their mission, rather than simply as a cost to be minimized. Even incumbents such as Dell, Citibank, Comcast and British Telecom have started using Twitter and other social tools to embrace customer feedback and communication. This trend looks set to continue. The question is, can this more direct, personal approach scale beyond the Twitter early adopters? Probably not with our current tools.

The social web means we no longer have to choose between intimacy and scale – we can have both – but we lack tools to help us deal with signals and flow above the oft-discussed Dunbar’s number, which has been posited as an upper limit on the number of people with whom an individual can maintain stable relationships at any given time. The limits of the basic sequential update mode of email, RSS and Twitter-type tools are already painfully obvious, and these tools demand far too much attention to be useful at higher levels of scale. Also, in order to mitigate against the potentially alienating effects of large-scale networks, we might also focus on creating more opportunities for empathy and connection based on network relations, shared connections or interests and more tangential concepts such as Dopplr’s notion of coincidensity.

The emergence of ambient intimacy

I think one clue to how improved tools might work lies in the fact that communication and contact need not always be direct. For example, the emergence of ambient intimacy, which Leisa Reichelt described as the ability to “keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible,” is one way that we can think about pushing the limits of Dunbar’s observations. By routinely sharing status updates, photos, observations and ideas with a network of weak ties, we create more and more opportunities for intimacy, without the investment of time that would be required to do this entirely in the physical realm. This has fascinating implications not only for social relations, but also for what we regard as knowledge and how we acquire it. I think the kind of ambient knowledge that geeks hold about each other due to their propensity to share in public, and which informed Leisa’s ideas about ambient intimacy, gives us a taste of the future. The human brain has a huge capacity for processing ambient signals and spotting useful patterns and cues, although the way we currently work with apps assumes full-focus attention on one task at a time. But it also presents design challenges for the products and services we use in an increasingly information-rich and attention-demanding world.

Can the user experience of our tools help us cope with these new behaviors and with the fact that technology evolves so much faster than both our biology and our habits?

Can the user experience of our tools help us cope with these new behaviors and with the fact that technology evolves so much faster than both our biology and our habits? Rather than think of user experience in terms of an individual’s relationship with an interface as a route to task completion, we perhaps need to broaden our horizons to think about how people interact with each other via systems (that may or may not have a visual interface), and how this works at different levels of scale and depth of relationship.

In social networks, we often classify network relationships into three broad categories:

• strong ties (friends, close colleagues);
• weak ties (your wider network);
• absent ties (others we interact with).

When we think of network scale, we tend to think about an intimate level (about 5 people at a time), team (15), company unit (50) and friends (150 – Dunbar’s number), and then successive levels of weak or absent tie relationships (usually asymmetrical) at 500, 1500, 10k, 100k and 1m people.

Cruising altitudes

In fact, we can probably simplify these scales of online social activity into three basic ‘cruising altitudes’ that cover the majority of an individual’s online social behavior, and of course, these networks and groups will intersect at various levels with those of our friends, colleagues or strangers:

• micro: strong (sometimes weak) ties with 50 people or less – e.g. collaboration;
• meso: strong or weak ties with 50-1500 people – e.g. sharing;
• macro: weak or absent ties with thousands of people or more – e.g. discovery.

At the micro-level, maintaining contact, keeping up with group activity and finding information are simpler problems to solve, and existing tools do a relatively good job of this, and will doubtless improve. At the meso level, basic flow-type tools (e.g Twitter) are becoming a dominant means of sharing, which they do quite well, but they demand a level of attention to real-time data that the majority of people cannot afford. At the macro level, we have search, search alerts and broadcast media (including Twitter, when used in asymmetrical celebrity mode with hundreds of thousands of followers), but discovery remains hit-and-miss.

It is on the macro level that we need to do better. I think we need to start by designing better flow tools and filters to do much of the discovery work for us. Creating opportunities for us to jump through proximity wormholes to the more intimate sharing or collaboration levels when we discover something (or somebody) interesting. As more people and machines come online, this will become more important if we are to cope with the huge fire hose of status updates, activity streams, links and other signals that surround our work and that of our colleagues, company, markets and ecosystems. A bigger world of data need not mean that we feel increasingly small and insignificant if we focus on opportunities for connection and intimacy, rather than risk drowning in aggregate data.

The macro level is mostly about discovery and spotting patterns in aggregate data, but usually with no significant network ties to those whose signals we are monitoring. Dropping down to the meso level, we are often dealing with some form of weak ties, which are maintained by simple network ‘grooming’ activities such as link sharing, micro messaging, ‘likes’ and other signals. This helps us maintain our personal networks and reduces the ice-breaking time needed to switch into collaboration or conversation mode when we zoom in to the micro-level of high intimacy and small scale. Weak signal shared flow creates just enough contact to maintain relationships, and then we can jump through a wormhole to be ‘close’ to that person whilst we get something done, and zoom out again back to the macro level of our social world.

On each level, the amount of cognitive or identity surface area we expose can increase our findability and create openings for proximity wormholes. For example, social objects such as Flickr photos, Youtube videos or games can act as attractors for intimacy, by establishing common ground, in a way that connecting by more generic methods such as email or LinkedIn does not. People are more likely to connect via a common object than by  formal introductions.

We already have some design patterns for zooming in and out between different levels of scale, whilst receiving useful information at every level. Google maps on multi-touch interfaces are one example of this. In terms of devices, the iPad looks like a better candidate for a social network cockpit than the desktop right now, but the solution will probably not look like more and more vertical columns of sequential updates. I hope in future we will see flow tools that allow us to manage the macro, meso and micro levels of proximity and scale with the same ease as we are now able to navigate our physical environment.

The Web & Beyond 2010

Want to know more about Lee Bryant’s thoughts? He is one of the speakers at The Web & Beyond (June 1st), a one day event held in Amsterdam.

top image: left-hand / CC by-nd 2.0

The conclusion of the Nielsen Norman Group’s April 2010 study of iPad usability is that it has problems and more standards are the solution. Yes, the iPad is imperfect, but resorting to standards as the solution is an antiquated reaction that fails to consider how interactive systems have evolved. We’re not Usability Engineers anymore (not most of us, anyway); we’re User Experience Designers. Experience is more than just usability.

I’ve covered this ground on Johnny Holland before. Just after I got my iPhone I came to many of the same conclusions Nielsen did about the how the iPhone is difficult to learn. But here’s the thing; I didn’t stop there. I talked about how some of the factors that made the iPhone difficult to use also made it fun to use, which is why it has flown off shelves since it was introduced. As I got used to it I began to think more about how playfulness was more delightful than pure usability in some contexts and vice versa. Something I use occasionally for very specific tasks delights me if it is simple and usable. But something I use often or for more amorphous tasks that is simply usable will either provoke no emotional response or, at worst, will become tedious. In that context, a more playful interaction style will keep me engaged and might even lift my mood a little.

This is the perspective from which I’ll look at what Nielsen found, identify where it’s valuable, and point out where it’s a little myopic.

“Wacky Interfaces”

Wacky. Yes, “wacky.” As in, “Isn’t it cute how kids these days are trying to create beautiful experiences.” Beauty does not require an unusable interface, but a beautiful experience might ask you to engage with it a little more deeply through a lack of obvious affordances.

For more than a decade, when we ask users for their first impression of (desktop) websites, the most frequently-used word has been “busy.” In contrast, the first impression of many iPad apps is “beautiful.” The change to a more soothing user experience is certainly welcome, especially for a device that may turn out to be more of a leisure computer than a business computer. Still, beauty shouldn’t come at the cost of being able to actually use the apps to derive real benefits from their features and content.

He almost gets it. No, the iPad is no business computer, and that’s exactly why beauty is an asset. People will, much of the time, interact with this device in order to have an experience rather than complete a task. Nielsen’s wholesale discounting of beauty fails to take into account that some apps will be experiential and content based while some will be functional and task based. Engaging with a system is not what people want to do when they have a task to complete. That’s when basic usability is more delightful.

Long-standing GUI design guidelines for desktop user designs dictate that buttons look raised (and thus pressable) and that scrollbars and other interactive elements are visually distinct from the content.

The iPad does not have a Graphical User Interface but a gestural one. GUI design guidelines do not necessarily apply when users can interact directly with the content.

For the last 15 years of Web usability research, the main problems have been that users don’t know where to go or which option to choose — not that they don’t even know which options exist. With iPad UIs, we’re back to this square one.

The iPad is also not the Web. Interacting with apps is completely different from interacting with websites. Most apps have far fewer options than the average website, lessening the potential for confusion. On top of that, people use apps in a much more focused way than they use a website. Users can access the entire Web when they open their browser, but when they open an app they choose to focus on that app’s content and functionality only. In that context, a more deeply engaging, exploratory design can enhance the user’s experience.

“Inconsistent Interaction Design”

I take issue with this finding because Nielsen evaluated multiple applications. That’s like saying it’s bad that Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop are inconsistent. They allow completely different audiences to accomplish completely different tasks. He considers it confusing that the same gesture affects the same type of content differently in different apps. When there’s a limited gestural vocabulary (and there has to be) and a diversity of contexts, it’s easy and usually risk-free to experiment with figuring out the correct gesture if you get it wrong the first time. And because it’s gestural, it’s inherently playful and fun. It’s not a chore like trying to parse Word’s menus or toolbars.

Nielsen says that iPad UIs suffer from the “triple threat” of low discoverability (non-obvious controls), low memorability (difficult to remember inconsistently applied gestures), and accidental activation. I agree with the first and the last, mostly. Non-obvious controls can encourage exploration and playfulness in some contexts, but they can be frustrating in others. Accidental activation is certainly annoying, but it’s usually easy to deactivate whatever was activated. That problem in particular I think is due to the absolute newness of the apps and the platform. At least two iPad developers I’ve heard from indicated that they changed the design of their apps once the iPad was released.

The second problem he identifies, low memorability, I completely disagree with. My pre-literate two-year-old daughter knows how to unlock my iPhone & iPad, navigate to her favorite drawing app, launch it, draw with it, and change the various options. It took very few demonstrations before she learned this. If you look on YouTube there are videos of small children expertly navigating iPhones and iPads. You show them how to do it once, they do it, and they remember it.

The link between physical motion and cognitive development (especially in children) is well established in cognitive research, making gestural UIs much more easy to remember than your typical desktop GUI. On top of that, the number of gestures that are possible is pretty limited. Even if you don’t perform the correct gesture first, it won’t take long to figure out what the right one is.

“Crushing Print Metaphor”

Nielsen again complains that iPad apps are not like the Web.

The current design strategy of iPad apps definitely aims to create more immersive experiences, in the hope of inspiring deeper attachments to individual information sources. This cuts against the lesson of the Web, where diversity is strength and no site can hope to capture users’ sole attention.

My friend Pete Barry likes to talk about the value of experience. The reason people choose to consume content through these “limited” apps is because the experience they provide is valuable to them in some way. That experience is a benefit rather than a drawback. Besides, the open Web is just two taps away.

“Card Sharks vs. Holy Scrollers”

Nielsen references Jef Raskin’s differentiation between “two fundamentally different hypertext models,” Cards and Scrolls, indicating that iPad apps mostly fall into the Card model. On a Card, all the interaction occurs on a fixed size canvas that is swapped out to provide access to more content or functionality. And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what a Scroll is.

Nielsen said:

There’s no real reason we can’t have both design models: cards on the iPad and scrolls on the desktop (and phones somewhere in the middle). But it’s also possible that we’ll see more convergence and that the Web’s interaction style will prove so powerful that users will demand it on the iPad as well.

If I read that right, I actually agree with him. The iPad doesn’t have to force all apps to subscribe to one model; each app can use whichever model is most appropriate for its context of use. I’ve even seen some apps that mix the models, like Early Edition. This newsreader arranges RSS feed articles like a newspaper, with a home page and different pages for each individual feed. Wherever an article appears on any of these pages, you can actually scroll in place to get a sense of what it’s about! Granted, this is something users are likely to discover accidentally, but it’s a pleasing, delightful interaction nonetheless.

Nielsen’s Recommendations

This is what really gets me going. And not in a good way. He has four, but they really roll up into three:

• Make iPad UIs look more like GUIs
• Make iPad interaction design more like the Web
• “Abandon the hope of value-add through weirdness.”

And yes, that third is a direct quote. In 2010. Beauty isn’t weird. Compelling interactions aren’t weird. Both of these are critical components of modern interaction design, where designers seek to go beyond simple usability and create positive emotional experiences that build loyalty and emotional attachment. What is perhaps most confusing about these recommendations, though, are the first two. Jakob Nielsen is a smart guy, and clearly the iPad exists within entirely different contexts of use than a desktop GUI or a website.

What I really want to know is this: why does Nielsen feel that iPad apps should be designed for contexts they won’t be used in?

—–

Header image by nDevil /CC 2.0

Next week, Josephine Green will be delivering the closing keynote at The Web and Beyond 2010. I was able to chat with Josephine to get a sneak peek into her closing presentation and learn more about her experience performing Strategic Design over the years. 

Could you please give our readers some information about yourself?

JG: I have always been fascinated by ideas, in truth I think ideas are really sexy. I believe that the imagination, thought and ideas  are what truly make a difference and help us to positively think our way to the future; They are the stuff that inspires us to action. For me thoughts and ideas are as strong as actions. This is why I very much liked being in Design at Philips. The Culture of Design is about imagining, conceptualizing and creating. The difference today is that it is less and less designers in splendid isolation and more and more designers and stakeholders working together, This reflects the shift away from doing things for people to doing things with and eventually by people.

Tell us about some of the work you are doing at Phillips. What are some trends that you are seeing?

JG: I joined Philips Design in 1997 and much of my work has been around imagining and thinking about the future, based on research into  society, cultures and people. At Philips Design we promoted new thinking and new knowledge in the field of social foresight which in turn fed into company knowledge,  innovation, strategy. This is a period of unprecedented change and transformation and while it is scary it is also a golden opportunity to re-address the kind of society we wish to live in. Is it the old Pyramid society of top down command and control through large organizations and based on economies of scale or is it a more Pancake society based on customized and contextualized solutions, enabled by the new technologies, and sustained by all the stakeholders involved in those solutions on a continuous basis. I believe there are two powerful trends that will re-shape our societies. One is a more human scale and intimate view of society and economy based on smaller and more local economies and the other is a much greater participation by the stakeholders in the ownership and outcomes of these economies.

What has Phillips done historically with regards to Strategic Design?

JG: Design has increasingly been positioned strategically in Philips. This means that Design has and is an integral part of the innovation and branding approach and process. This was explored back in the nineties when Philips Design carried out a number of Vision projects for Corporate and the Business to explore the next ten years and the implications for Research,  Innovation, Branding and Business; Throughout Design in Philips has emphasized putting people, rather than technology, at the center of our thinking and at the center of our main Functions and Processes; This is now the established approach . I left Philips in 2009 to return to live in the UK.

What is the one thing you want attendees to take away from your keynote “Engaging with the Future Differently – From Pyramids to Pancakes”?

JG: The one thing is that as we go Pyramids to Pancakes we need a new way of perceiving, of being and of acting in the world if we wish to prosper and flourish in the future. People are now able to be the creators and innovators , through the connectivity and diffusion of the new technologies. In the Pyramid world innovation was the responsibility of experts and the process was a linear one where ideas were fed into the front end and a ‘product’ emerged at the other end. Now, in a more messy and chaotic approach,  people are increasingly creating their own content, films, music, extended networks etc . This is mirrored also in the real world by growing grass roots movements to re-design how people wish to live and love in their communities.

What do you consider to be one the biggest impacts of social networking?

What’s the biggest hurtle of going from a world that has traditionally been driven by linear thinking to one driven by system thinking?

JG: The biggest hurdle is ourselves. Many of us were brought up in the linear world and so we have those mindsets. There are no rule books for the future and this is frightening for people who believed that the world was more linear, predictable and controllable. We have to learn how to embrace complexity, continuously learn, act intelligently in the now and trust in letting go. Unless we begin by changing ourselves we cannot let the world go where it needs to go.

What are some examples of new patterns of demand and supply?

JG: I believe demand will go from finalized finished products or services to more ‘open’ solutions based on the context of place and time and activity. We can talk of a Context Economy in which we live in and are enabled by an ecosystem of products, services, solutions and experiences that change over time. Another change in demand that will mark the 21st century is that we can talk of a Social Economy, meaning a shift towards a social demand rather than a consumer demand. We face many challenges in the 21st century e.g. health, care, ageing, pollution, etc. Which means  that we need to think about Social Innovation which, unlike product/consumer innovation, must involve all the players in the system if the solution is to be meaningful and work. This means more empowerment for more people.

How can the people in leadership roles prepare for this coming shift?

JG: If everything is changing then so is Leadership. I believe that identifying change agents is as important as identifying leaders. They may in many cases be one and the same. I think, Women, GenY and the so called Cultural Creatives are powerful change agents as they, for one reason or another, are less tied to the Pyramid system. If we think in terms of Transformational Leadership then these leaders need to have one thing and lots of it: courage. Courage to maximize a vision and mission that makes sense to society and not primarily to shareholders and financial elites. Courage to create the space for longer term investments and returns, courage to enable the change agents I have mentioned and courage to let go. Perhaps the role of our leaders today is to enable the change agents and then hold the ship steady while those agents do what they do, namely change things.

Are there any organizations you know of that are best prepared for the future? Why?

JG: There are some examples of first steps. Rather than a single company, there is evidence of different ingredients for the future in a number of companies. At Philips we did research on what we called Pancakish companies and some of the examples were interesting. Examples such as abolishing job titles and ranks, of re-thinking the role and mission of the CEO, of creating self-organized teams to drive innovation and results, all examples of greater freedom to decide and act .

What kind of dangers do you see in a world where innovation has been decentralized?

JG: As the capability to innovate spreads then we can innovate for the good or for the bad. Take for example the latest news about the first creation of artificial life, the first artifical organism. This  means that we can have many possibilities and benefits, for example in the health arena, but also it means that we or someone also has the possibility to be destructive by for example creating a threatening microbe that could wreak havoc across the world. The danger is that we become stronger and weaker at the same time. We are certainly introducing more fragility in the system. I think the only thing we can do is to try and ensure that there are a lot more goodies in the world than badies, but how, one way is by raising the learning, capability and responsibility of all of us, and then keeping our fingers crossed.

The Web & Beyond 2010

Want to know more about Josephine Green’s thoughts? She is one of the speakers at The Web & Beyond (June 1st), a one day event held in Amsterdam.

On the third day of the conference we got another series of great UX workshops. They varied from hands-on sessions to speaker presentations, but everywhere the quality was high. It were three thought provoking days and I hope next year will be at least just as good.

Joshua Porter – Designing for the Usage Lifecycle

In this workshop, Joshua dived right in and started with a number of examples on how a “ton of tiny improvements” will make your design a lot more effective. He states that one of the biggest challenges of running a website with a sales objective is to have more people sign up, start using the product, and eventually coming back.

Enter: the usage lifecycle. Joshua introduces a number of stages of usage and quickly recognizes that the migration between these stages is where the real challenge lies. He calls these hurdles.

Improving usability will increase conversion. Joshua gave some pointers, like:

• Best bet is just to get rid of screens in registration/ sign-up processes. Keep it simple;
• The proper use of microcopy in forms can vastly improve conversion;
• Don’t have users make definitive decisions (“you can change this at any time”).

However, Joshua states that the biggest challenge is no longer the bare usability of the website. It is about understanding the value of the product that we try to sell. And so he quotes Engelbert saying “If ease of use were the only requirement, we would all be using tricycles.

This is why Joshua moved on to a couple of psychological observations:

• The problem is not in the form, but getting people motivated enough to care;
• Value is changing and shifting. Free is no longer differentiating;
• Create room for communication aimed at the people that are the least motivated.

This has an important consequence for the role of the designer. It changes with different user lifecycle stages:

• The interested user needs selling;
• Trial users need teaching;
• Customers need support and maybe some teaching still.

Joshua did this really great thing of asking the crowd to offer a site with sign-up and do a real-time user test/review. Xing.com was the case that was offered.  Quickly it was apparent that the main proposition of this site was unclear.  He described several ways to improve sign-up performance, among them:

• Immediate engagement – what benefit can you give people before signing up? Netvibes is a good example. Start building first, save later. Joshua went to at least a dozen more great cases;
• Write to reduce commitment – make signup and the product feel easy, fast, low-cost.

Stephen P. Anderson – Demystifying concept models

What is a concept model, why is it useful, and how do you go about creating some? To put us into the right headspace, Stephen Anderson started his workshop with a gallery of some of the amazing concept models he has created. (If you haven’t seen one, have a look at Stephen’s website before you start reading).

Concept models make sense of something complex. They can serve as good instructions that people actually use – like the concept model Stephen created to make sure that printing his Mental Notes cards did work out.They visualise what people are talking about and focus discussion – like the concept model Stephen created to help him and his wife make sense of the Christmas shopping (doing this when you have four boys is far from easy).

Concept models serve a purpose. Use them to:

• Understand
• Inform, e.g. JJG’s Elements of UX;
• Converse, e.g. Experienced Based Differentiation Diagram, Forrester Research;
• Reveal patterns over time, e.g. Movie Narrative Charts, xkcd;
• Simplify, e.g. Adaptive Path’s ‘designing from the outside in’ visualisation;
• Inspire;
• Persuade, e.g. the Facebook privacy diagram;
• Teach;
• Capture attention;
• Aid in recall, e.g. Kathy Sierra’s Featuritis curve;
• Simplify choices;
• Make people laugh.

So, are concept models charts, graphs or infographics? Here is how Stephen thinks about concept models. They:

• Use visuals and texts to make complex things simple;
• Are more about concepts than about data;
• Are about relationships (incl. processes, proportions, changes over time);
• Often static;
• Different form narrative explanations;
• Not graphic note-taking;
• Far more than mind mapping;
• Not the same as a chart.

A main aspect of building a concept model is research, for getting started, and throughout. A concept model needs a frame of reference and a purpose. For our group activity, clearly defining the purpose of the model we were about to create was essential: “Create a concept model for [audience] to make sense of [problem] in order to…”

After defining this mission statement, Stephen summarised the visual elements of a concept model. Shapes can be used and combined to create anything. The visual elements you choose imply meaning. Circle or square? Spiral in, or spiral out? A great example for how meaningful combinations of very simple shapes can be is Jessica Hagy’s thisisindexed.com.

Common patterns include mapping things out on axes, stacks, layers, swimlanes, the ‘Strategy Canvas’ (Google it to see different examples), the honeycomb (only use it if your data fits in. If you have more than 7 elements, it won’t work).

Metaphors are powerful because brains are visual, we learn by association, naturally chunk information, process visuals more quickly, understand through stories and find delight in the unexpected. Choose metaphors that are (mostly) timeless, universally recognised, and supporting the message. For inspiration, look at nature (e.g. roots, caterpillar), toys (e.g. lego bricks, puzzles) or familiar/nostalgic objects (swiss army knife, stool, hourglass).
Turning words into metaphors is challenging, but worth the effort. Good concept models need to be refined, and moved through different fidelities (from pen-and-paper sketch to digital diagram to graphically designed version).

Stephen shared useful tips for demystifying concept models:

• Simplify, e.g. by visual reversing;
• Embrace accidents;
• Explore different perspectives;
• Sketch ideas with a pen;
• Get feedback, test, iterate;
• Play – don’t settle on the first idea;
• Use a consistent visual language;
• Ask: can a 5 year old understand this? Do the basic ideas work without words?;
• Replace or reinforce labels with icons or visuals;
• Look at it from 10 foot, and from 1 foot distance.

James Box and Cennydd Bowles – Universal Principles of UX

Unfortunately, I was only able to see the second half of this workshop. From what I heard, the first half started out somewhat slow and theoretical, but ended up with a great Lego based exercise in bringing the Gestalt theory to practice. The second half of this workshop also contained some very useful insights to aid in making design choices. They were brought in quite a verbose way, not so much packed with sexy cases and examples as we might have come to expect.

The first insight is that of chunking. Chunking is the process of using lessons from your long term memory to create chunks of a complex stimulus. This helps to decrease the number of items to remember in short term.

An important effect of this is that we as experienced designers might find it hard to really understand novice web users, who cannot rely on their experience to chunk web sites and applications into patterns and known components. This insight should be the major driver of using standard UI patterns as much as possible.

The talk continued with defining a couple of information seeking behaviors.

1. Known item search – The user searches for a specific item, finds a search result, darts into and out of the site that contains the item. A search box is a very good interface to enable this kind of searching;
2. Exploratory search – Good content strategy is key to capturing these users. This includes effective use of long neck terms, or trigger words;
3. Driftnetting – A good ontology, or structure, is what helps these users most. Heavy and relevant cross-linking also helps users to discover what parts of the subject that they are interested in;
4. Information scent – Many things on the web are not what you are looking for, but get you closer to what you are looking for. Items that communicate very well what’s behind them have strong information scent;
5. Berry picking – This search behavior results from the fact that user needs and insights evolve from getting results.

Thirdly, a brief explanation was given of the well-known Fitts’s law. The larger of closer the target, the faster it can be pointed to. This leads to the design pointer to give more important buttons different sizes and shapes, and space them apart enough.

Affordances were up next. This strong notion, first introduced by Donald Norman, is about designing things in a way that evidently matches our body, thus eliciting predictable behavior. Examples are body-sized chairs, hand-sized levers, finger-sized buttons. Common user interface design examples are embossed mouse grips to drag elements such as window corners, and embossed buttons.

A more social type of affordance, recently introduced by Don Norman, is that of signifiers. Signifiers are social cues for behavior. Traces of others behavior that elicit that same behavior, such as a crowd that indicates something good is going on.

The workshop ended with a fun UX treasure hunt in the hotel. Participants were challenged to make photo’s of patterns that were discussed in the workshop. The results will be online on Flickr.

Yesterday was a day of listening, today was a day of acting. UX London day two was split up and attendees could join workshops in the morning and afternoon. With the full-is-full philosophy in the back of their heads people rushed through the building to catch a seat at their prefered workshop. We managed to check out six of them for you.

Good Design Faster – Leah Buley

Wireframes are among the most used deliverables in our field. We use them for good and for bad. They are used for documentation and even in the brainstorming phase. Buley correctly states that wireframes are good for documenting, not envisioning. That’s why she created a workshop to learn her peers “techniques to generate new ideas and solve tough problems of interactivity, flow, and form.” And in short this comes down to learning us techniques to sketch, which is a skill that a lot of designers are afraid of… and that’s a sad thing.

There are three steps Buley points out:

1. Sketch and explore ideas
   First of all you’ve got to start sketching out ideas. You pick a specific part of a flow and start creating possible solutions, and these don’t have to be detailed. They have to be good enough to understand the basic idea. It’s really important that you keep challenging yourself, because most of the times it’s not the first idea but the third of fourth that’s the best. When you’ve got all the ideas you can select the best one and start adding detail to this one.
2. Bring ideas together
   After you’ve sketched your ideas you bring them together with the ideas of other team members. Yes, with the ideas of others… Having a team instead of working alone is really important.
3. Share and iterate with the team
   After you’ve brought the ideas together you start talking to each other. Along the way you come up with new sketches and comments on each others sketches. The danger of this phase is that you look and the sketches and will only compliment on them, while being critical can be much more valuable. This is something that a lot of designers don’t dare to do, because they feel they are attacking the other person, while in fact you are together trying to make it better.

The steps above are closely linked with a technique called Sketchboarding. This is a way of creating ideas and grouping them in a flow. When you put your sketches on the board it’s important that the board is filled in both breadth and depth. If there are holes in de breadth it means you haven’t created enough ideas for a part of the flow and if the depth misses it means you haven’t generated enough ideas for a certain part of the flow. This forces the team to come up with many new ideas and not go for the obvious, and often not optimal, solution.

Below you can see a video showing the creation of a sketchboard:

The last technique I will share is called a ‘Black Hat Session’. This is a way of generating critique. What you do is give the entire team sticky notes and let them write down all the questions and concerns that they have regarding the generated sketches, in total silence. It’s important that they start sharing their insights, for otherwise the client will. It’s interesting to see how at first people are very hesitant to put up a ‘negative remark’, but as soon as one starts the rest follows. Really interesting group dynamics.

Having been thrown back to a workshop of second preference in this action packed day 2 of UX London 2010, this one turned out to be much more spicy than I expected. Liz made no secret of the fact that she was there to improve our interviewing skills, and was willing to shift gears as our differing experience levels would require. She succeeded very well.

User Interview Techniques – Liz Danzico

Liz started out with an interesting quote from Malcom Gladwell: “Everyone has a story. When people start talking about what they know and do well, they’re always interesting”. This notion helps interviewers to be genuinely interested in the broad range of relevant answers any interviewee might give.

The first applied part of this workshop was all about interviewing techniques. This part was somewhat basic, but contained all the essentials to interviewing most effectively. Liz covered different question types that you might use, gave tips on posing open questions and using body language, silence, and managing the relation between the interviewer and the interviewee.

The second part of her talk was about setting up an interview properly. What preparation is needed, how many people should do different roles of interviewing, what makes a good ‘screener’, and how to do recruiting. Some interesting heads-up she gave:

• Not every interview has to be completed. If you get off on the wrong foot or for some reason things are not working out, just end it in a friendly fashion.
• Go interviewing on location with two or three people. Bringing more is likely to be intimidating. If you go by yourself, you are probably going to miss out on a lot of valuable verbal or non-verbal feedback.
• Preferably, do only two interviews a day. Your head fills up quickly and you need to save capacity to process.
• Realize that your set of questions is probably iterative. After the first or so interview, you will want to adjust.

Thirdly, Liz gave us a bit of a field guide, sharing tricks such as when to pop up the consent forms, how to distribute observation rules, and what’s the best moment to start writing down the most memorable insights (which is to say: immediately).

She closed with some very practical pointers to transcription services. She left the group with the energy to really get going and improve our interviews.

Knowledge Games: Design practices for systems thinking and co-creation – Dave Gray

Dave Gray kicked off his workshop by introducing the concept of Gamestorming. Gamestorming combines workshop facilitation and participatory design techniques with games. It is simple, reliable, rugged and lightweight – Gamestorming sessions can be run under time constraints, with tools available in any office.

The goal of Gamestorming is to open the black box of ‘design done by designers’ and involve ‘non-designers’ by an engaging, collaborative activity. As Dave puts it, “Design is too important to be done only by designers.”

Facilitating workshops is challenging, even more so when the goal is to bring multiple disciplines together. The techniques we use have to support improvisation.

Processes and games both have rules, outcomes and boundaries. Processes are good for clear goals; business processes are repeatable engines. When we are trying to innovate, clear goals are limiting, as are rigid processes. Games are flexible and have fussy, undefined goals, which we can adapt and refine as we go along. Games are possibility generators, system simulators, and allow us to isolate an aspect of reality that we’d like to explore in a creative way.

Dave shared his ’10 essentials for meeting ninjas’:

1. Opening and closing
   Opening is idea generation, valuing quantity over quality. Closing is prioritising, finishing with tangible outcomes. Always close what you open, so people walk away with a sense of achievement and come back for iterations. People can’t open and close at the same time, so don’t mix the two.
2. Fire-starting
   Energize people by asking open questions. Use the right questions at the different phases of a workshop:Opening: eg What has been keeping you up all night?Examining: eg How does it work?Experimenting: eg What if this technology didn’t exist?Navigating: Is this a productive thread?Closing: Who will take responsibility for this?
3. Artifacts
   Flipcharts, sticky notes, index cards, play money, or tabletop items – make sure you have materials to make things tangible and visible.
4. Node Generation
   A node is anything that’s part of a system. The more you generate, the better. Put ideas out there and in motion, move them around.
5. Meaningful
   Space Games use boards to define a space – a grid, cycle, or snake-like journey. When putting together a Gamestorming workshop, think about the box, the frame. After opening a space and establishing common ground, organize the nodes. Use a wall – “the wall is the new desk.” (Dave) A meaningful space is structured and organized, eg by borders, axes, circles and targets, grids, landscapes and maps, or metaphors.
6. Sketching & Models
   Combine basic shapes, use the visual alphabet. Practice drawing symbolically, think about how you would communicate something rather than how to make it pretty. Sketches can be abstract (the head), practical (the hands), or metaphorical (the heart) – all add value.
7. Randomness
   Games shuffle the cards, roll the dices to prevent getting stuck and to keep the gameinteresting. Introduce serendipity to innovate.
8. Improvisation
   Act out system behaviors, role play, body storm. Combine sketching, models/prototypes and improvisation into a playful, insightful activity. We are comfortable playing games like Charades at home – in a work environment, it’s crucial to establish a safe space to get people into the improv mindset.
9. Selection
   Kill your darlings. Prioritize and vote on ideas to ensure tangible, actionable outcomes.
10. Share
    Make sure to allow time to compare, reflect, discuss and iterate.

My team tried to apply these essentials, and after getting stuck over processes and clinging on to familiar ways of brainstorming and organizing sticky notes (think UX folks affinity sorting like in the research lab), we experienced a breakthrough by making the conscious decision: let’s play a game, have fun. ‘Scenario battle’ is a brainstorm game. One team member role-plays a persona in a scenario. The other members form two groups. One group comes up with a challenging problem situation, the other group has to generate as many ideas to address this problem as possible. Suddenly we were energized, had fun, and were all keen to develop our knowledge game further.

Balancing creative chaos and the need for order is tough. The group exercise empathized Dave’s take-away message at the end: Just step in, try things, immerse yourself – and step out if it doesn’t work, try something else. Gamestorming is a mindset. Dare to start playing, and prove that collaborating and having fun is good for products and teams. And check out Dave’s upcoming book.

Content Strategy: The Missing Piece of the UX Puzzle – Karen McGrane

Karen’s story started off with a fairy tail about a city that wanted to build an art hall. In a wonderful way she told a captivating story where the people in the city build the most beautiful art hall ever. They designed every little detail and thought they created the perfect setting for art. But the moment the artists arrived they got really angry because nobody actually checked what kind of art they made and were going to make. And it is the art that should be in the lead, defining the way the art hall should look… not the other way around.

The above situation is a great metaphor for the current situation the web is in. We are all talking about form follows function, while it should be form follows function which follows content. Karen showed a great quote by Rahel Bailie that says it all “Organizations invest tremendous resources on developing the framework for a great user experience – fabulous design, robust content management infrastructure. Yet when it comes to the content itself, there’s often a gap. The end result is that the value proposition for customers can’t be delivered because of the insufficient, inadequate, and inappropriate.” And when you think of it; people don’t come to your site because it looks nice, but because of the content.

So how to approach this? It’s important to note that you can’t just start creating content. You have to create a solid strategy what you’ll be doing with the content. Often companies just set up a blog with the thought that it will be a great way of getting in touch with their audience, what they don’t realize is that they need to dedicate time to fill the blog. They also have to think about the tone-of-voice, frequency among other things. So beside creating content, content strategy is also focusing on publication planning and governance.

During the workshop we had to walk through the different steps needed to set up a good content strategy:

• Planning
  What content do you need to develop? What categories or topics do you need to cover? What do you want to say about the product? What addition content features do you need to develop?
• Analysis
  What current content exists? What content do you want to keep? What content do you need to create? Do you know everything about the content you need to know?
• Creation
  This is the phase where you actual start to develop new content, collect the existing reusable content and start planning the launch of the content.
• Governance
  After everything is done you need to work on the governance, so how will you keep it in control? How do you make sure you can maintain the quality of the content and keep generated newly needed content? What needs to stay up-to-date? Who is responsible?

This workshop was really interesting. Karen did a great job of keeping a tough subject light and fun. When taking the different steps defined above you can easily start to work on a Content Strategy. The main challenge in most organizations is to create the awareness that this is an important task. A lot of clients have the feeling that they are responsible for the content and that they only need a new shell. It’s our task to make them believe that content is king.

Karen’s previous presentation about content strategy:

Real-World Agile User Experience Design – Jeff Patton

In this three-hour workshop, Jeff took it upon him to sketch possibilities for UX people in the development-dominated field of Agile. He didn’t warn us, but it was not going to be a workshop. Despite Jeff’s own attempts, it turned out to be a 3,5 hour talk. But what a talk! He miraculously managed to keep almost everyone present engaged until the very end.

He had a lot to offer. Let’s start with just a few of the many inspiring quotes:

• Process is a placebo. Quality is not about following the rules. It is about caring for the end result;
• Companies with documented methodologies tend to be less successful (Jared Spool);
• Processes are like haircuts. Trying somebody else’s rarely works;
• The biggest danger of following a process is falling asleep at the process wheel (Jared Spool again).

Hands on, Jeff presented a liberating view on the creation of personas. He calls this the assumption based persona. Clearly departing from the data-driven approach he stated Cooper has promoted so much, he made a plea for quickly and efficiently creating good-enough personas. And no one less than Donald Norman is at his side there, stating that “people can often mine their own extensive experiences to create effective Personas…”. I think the most innovative touch about the template that Jeff presented is the way that the design implications are integrated.

A hot topic turned out to be the formulation of user stories. A user story is an almost impossible thing to do right. Some pointers: it must be seen as a token for a conversation, not as a definition. It acts as a boundary object: a common denominator between disciplines. More on user stories at presentation slides 57 and further.

Did Jeff really deliver on the title of his talk and did he discuss Agile User Experience Design? I personally think not.
According to Jeff, the home of the UX guys and girls in the Agile process can be in a number of places. Perhaps it’s at the side of the product owner, in an advisory role helping to gain understanding of users, and help decide on prioritizing user stories. Perhaps also it’s somewhere near the scrum master, working on making user stories more concrete by crafting designs before the stories are ready for sprint.

Perhaps the biggest difference between my own practice and the one depicted by Jeff is that he suggests that from a methodology standpoint, you have to do something special to combine UX design and Agile Development. Once you get to the point that you realize that design and development are just disciplines that can be effectively integrated by a set of rules such as Scrum, the model shifts and becomes more clear.

All in all, this session contained as much good stuff as any Agile experienced UX practitioner could handle in one afternoon. Maybe more. At any rate, more than I can do justice to in this place. Luckily, Jeff has put everything online at his website. Go check it out. I especially recommend slides 5, 58, 64, 89, 99 and 100. I’m sure you have your own favorites.
top image: Wootang01

Despite menacing ashclouds, London traffic and the current state of the European economy UX London managed to once again fill a room full of practitioners. 250 fanatics pulled out their Moleskines and Sharpies to pen down a great amount of superb insights from the speakers.

This years event is being organized in The Cumberland, a beautiful hotel near Hyde Park. Over the coming days we’ll be enjoying talks, workshops, lunch discussions and many parties. With also the UX Bookclub, the UPA London UX Clinic and Edward Tufte’s talk it feels like London has become this weeks UX capital.

Design for Engagement – Jesse James Garrett

The day started off with a keynote by Jesse James Garrett. He states that it doesn’t matter whether you design websites, shopping malls or mobile phones. In any case it comes down to designing for people. That’s why he wants to move away from specified terms like webdesign and product design and move towards design thinking. But how do we do that?

Before we can start designing for these many different situations we need to understand what an experience is. Garrett defines it as being subjective, ephemeral and tangible. It’s something that doesn’t exist, but at the same time it does. And it’s in our work as UX practicioners where this becomes important, because in contrast to the design field we design for users. And what we create can’t be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ independent of use. “Use gives meaning to our work.”

So how do you define a good experience? According to Garrett it begins with the notion of engagement. Great experiences, regardless of medium, engage the users. So in order to define experiences we need to get a good overview of the different types of engagement:

• Engagement of sound
: Music artists ask for the attention of the audience. Their goal is not to make a nice sheet of music, but to create an intangible, ephemeral experience of music. In Garrett’s mind Ludwig von Beethoven was an early version of an experience designer;
• Engagement of touch
: Tangibility is a powerful thing. You can design stuff so that people really want to touch it;
• Engagement of smell
: He links this to the novel Perfume;
• Engagement of taste
: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xizttM_Cbuc
• Engagement of movement: 
The way something moves and responds is very important in for example game design. The responsiveness of the system has to be well balanced. A game like Halo 3 isn’t realistic in it’s movement, but gives a better feeling than for example: Mirror’s Edge (which made people puke because it moved too realistic);
• Engagement of body
: Here the example of the Wii comes to mind, where the system draws physical responses from people;
• Engagement of the heart:
This is all about the love for a product or service. Garrett refers to Donald Norman’s related book ‘Emotional Design’ and the juicer designed by Philippe Starck.

After naming the different types of engagement Garrett continues by mapping these in four different dimensions. According to him you’ve got both external (perception & action) and internal engagements (cognition & emotion)..

Finally he closes his talk by stating that you may not be able to control the capabilities of users within the four realms of engagement, but you can at least try and understand them. Users bring capabilities, constraints and context into the experience.

Search Patterns: The Future of Discovery – Peter Morville

Peter’s talk came to a somewhat slow start but ended up being quite inspiring.

In the first part of his talk, Peter laid out some principal search patterns and placed them in different contexts, such as desktop, mobile and kiosk. These can be found at his Flickr “Search patterns” library.

One of the patterns that received special attention was faceted search. In my humble opinion this is actually more of a browse-pattern than a search one. However Peter pointed out rightly that faceted navigation is one of the most powerful and complex patterns out there today, much underestimated by UX designers. It is hard to do right.

Peter briefly touched upon a couple of important emerging search paradigms.

• Question and Answer (Like Wolfram Alpha);
• Helping decision making (Like Hunch);
• Helping understanding the world (Like Oakland crime spotting);
• Search by singing (Like Midomi).

Half way, Peter made a switch to search design for emerging media, such as augmented reality. He observed an interesting split between the inspiring but often superficial realm of cross media advertising on one hand, and touch point integration on a deeper, product related level. He mentioned Nike+, Zipcar and Redbox as great examples.
He predicts an interesting combination or even collision between “classical” service design (utilizing service blue prints, et cetera) and user experience design. The outcome is happily uncertain

Peter closes by admitting that he likes search so much because “it’s so damned hard”. And it is. You really need all disciplines to line up and work together to make for great search. “Use a microscope. Use a telescope. Most importantly, don’t forget to use a kaleidoscope”.

Metrics-Driven Design – Joshua Porter

In the design spectrum you’ve got intuition and data driven design. Intuition driven is mainly about gut feeling and based on previous experiences, which can cause innovative ideas., but it’s also risky. On the other hand you’ve got data driven design, which causes very small but safe improvements. The problem is that not one of these ways of designing will cause a solid base, so you basically have to find a good balance between the two. This is an obvious, but nonetheless good, observation since almost all companies I know don’t have that good balance (which is actually very hard to have).

“Radical innovation requires both evidence and intuition” – Jane Fulton Suri

So in an attempt to solve the puzzle Porter came up with a Metrics Driven Framework:

1. Identify Business Objectives/Goals: Make sure you really understand the business objectives, sometimes they are not what they appear;
2. Map out the UX lifecycle: What specific action do people need to do in order for you to meet your business objectives?
3. Identify Core Metrics: Metrics fall out of the UX lifecycle. Focus on the biggest and emergent hurdles over time. Current analytics software don’t give good feedback, it is mainly vanity metrics that make you feel good.

One of the things I liked most about Porters talk was his overview of actionable and emergent metrics. Actionable metrics are the type of tests where you measure customer satisfaction over time and I was especially impressed by the cohort analysis. In a cohort analysis you measure success over time for groups of users that entered the service in different time spots. Its a great way to see whether changes done were a success.

Joshua closed with a very profound observation. In order to be successful in using metrics to improve our products, we have to adopt a continuous improvement lifecycle. This lifecycle is based on early release, test, adapt, retest, re-adapt, or….revert.
Joshua proved today that in an environment of creative design, health discussion and evidence based decision making, testing can be great fun.

Designing for Improvisation – Liz Danzico

Liz’s talk on UX London 2010 was equally simple and complex. She made a plea to embrace improvisation in UX design processes, and drew from many examples from music, arts and architecture to make this point. For instance, the way Miles Davis, amongst other artists, has revolutionized musical notation by leaving room for improvisation, thus departing from the very descript notation that was used in the classical days.

She pointed out that improvisation is not primarily about freedom but just as much about constraints. More often than not, these constraints are our own. They regard the use of products, services, and interactions. Liz calls these sets of perceived and culturally accetpted constraints Frames. More and more however, these frames are shifting, and designers need to find ways to design products that allow for improvisation in newly emerging frames.

 To make things a little more tangible and applicable in design practice, Liz stated that improvisation consists of four elements:

1. It is present and real time. A specific improvisation cannot be rehearsed (however, improvising a lot may give you some practice at it;
2. It is detectable. There is no pre-knowledge required and improvisation can be easily detected as such;
3. It is responsive. Improvisation sets new parameters as it is done;
4. It is additive. Accept all offers, that’s a basic rule that keeps improvisation rolling en growing.

Liz has shown a couple of cases to get to grips on what designing for improvisation can mean. These are the two that we found to be most inspiring:

• In Drachten, Netherlands, there is a cross-road with no traffic lights, no lanes, no lines on the road. This throws the users of this cross-road back at improvising, measuring each others intentions, giving room, and crossing only when possible. So by removing constraints, people started using their built-in improvisation skills, and traffic safety was ultimately improved.
• Kickstarter.com is a startup that encourages people to post images or footage of all kinds of initiatives. Visitors may make a pledge to invest in these projects. In this manner, Kickstarter promotes creativity and improvisation.

If there was one point that Liz wanted to get across, is that we as UX designers have to find a better balance in sharing control with consumers over how our designs might be used. If we allow for improvisation and thus help create these new Frames, we can definitely create more meaning and value in the user experiences we design every day.

The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions – Stephen Anderson

“I’m a great app…if people would get to know me.”

How to get to the first base with our users? In his talk, Stephen P. Anderson explored how we seduce users to sign up, interact and engage with the products we design.

If you want to experience a seductive sign-up process, take a look at iLike. ‘Liking’ artists is fun, and after being done with the first page, you want to continue and will click on the ‘see more’ link. While you are being seduced, iLike is collecting data about your taste in music. User and business goals are met. Stephen explained the ingredients that made this work:

• Feedback loop: instant feedback;
• Curiosity: what artists will they show me on the next page?
• Visual imagery: a visually engaging design;
• Pattern recognition: do the artists shown change based on my choices?
• Recognition over recall: understanding how to use the site is zero effort.

To keep users engaged, iLike introduced the iLike challenge. By identifying a song, you collect points, beat your own high score, and compare your music knowledge to those of other users. More fun – generating more data. What seduced users this time?

• Feedback loop;
• Sensory experience;
• Status;
• Appropriate challenges;
• Need for achievement.

Usability removed friction, but it wasn’t solely usability that made these experiences great. Applying what we know about human psychology increased motivation and made iLike fun.

In what I thought was a genius exercise, Stephen asked the audience to spend 60 sec brainstorming what we know about people. We know quite a bit: people are curious, lazy,visual learners, seek out patterns, and don’t like to make choices, but like choice. But, are you using these observations in your designs?

People’s curiosity and need for belonging are powerful motivators. Stephen shared how his sons will always go for the HotWheels mystery car – you will only find out what you got after you bought it.. LinkedIn seduces us to sign up for a ‘Pro’ account by showing that someone from Apple checked out our profile – and we desperately need to find out if it was the UX HR person, begging us to join the team. Invitation-only private betas are seducing us using social proof. Factors such as reputation, rewards, status and limited duration encourage participation, e.g. to leave co-workers feedback on Rypple.com.

Stephen finished off by pointing out the delighters that make us love dopplr: how the logo colours change based on where you’ve been, comparing personal velocities, and the annual report you receive for free. A gift.
Gifting was applied by all attendees at UX London, as we traded Stephen’s Mental Notes cards. If you want to know about how to design seductive interactions, check out www.getmentalnotes.com or read Stephen’s earlier articles for Johnny.

Experiencing Comics – Scott McCloud

Scott McCloud squeezed his knowledge about comics into 45 minutes to discuss how people experience this visual medium.
A powerful concept of comics are the spaces in-between – people fill the ‘gaps’ between the frames with meaning, interpret and add context. To illustrate this, Scott gave research by Russian cinematographer Koulechov as an example.  Comics are a way of arranging images to tell a story – cartoons are a way of seeing and communicating the world.

Especially faces, and the emotions we detect in them, influence what sense we make of a sequence of images. All emotional expressions are based on the main 6 emotions, eg combining anger and joy creates cruelty. Comic artists know this, and it’s these simple but unknown facts that add to our visual literacy. An underdeveloped literacy, as Scott pointed out.

How can we get people to feel immersed in a story? Books fill our world by filling our field of view, focusing our attention. But is the metaphor of the book, the page, the right way to create immersive comics on the web? Before there was print, adjacent moments were always adjacent spaces. Print changed visual storytelling, and in different media, we still apply print constraints and formats.
Since the 1990s, Scott has been exploring treating the screen not as a page, but as a window, through which we look at a bigger canvas. While there is interesting work playing with this concept, the page is dominating the comics we read on digital devices. However, in the mobile space alternatives are evolving.

The major questions still lie ahead: is the page paradigm an artifact of an era long gone or a solution to our own time-place linked thinking? What is at the absolute core of a cartoon in terms of illustration, animation and narrative character? Will discovering this core change the way we look at and design for other media? I guess time will tell. In the meantime, check out Scott’s TED talk and this brilliant sketch note animation by RSAnimate.

Scott McCload at TED

Making Movies is Hard Fun: Building Tools for Telling Stories – Michael Johnson

Then finally, the Pixar Guy. Well chosen by the UX London organization to close this massive first day, this talk featured lots of sketches, clips and other art work. The aim of the presentation was to give a glimpse of how a Pixar movie comes about.

Michael left it up to the audience to draw parallels between the Pixar methodology of making stellar feature films, and our day-to-day UX work. And there was plenty to work with.

Michael painted the picture of a playful but ambitious organization. Pixar is a “director driven” organization. Still, producers are there to be the adult.

A pixar movie is built up out of three basic levels that are detailed one at a time:

1. Design a believable world;
2. Design compelling characters;
3. Tell a story.

Now if there are problems on a certain level, say there are doubts on the actions of a certain character, people at Pixar go up a level and check the character design.

A useful strategy on gaining influence in the 1,100+ employee organization, is to take a two-way approach: convince the politically important higher management of the quality of your work,  and at the same time, service the end users on the work-floor extremely well. The middle management, often a difficult group to convince, will then follow.

Michael pitched a large number of quotes by Pixarians. Some of the best were:

• Quality is the best business plan;
• I want to fail as quickly as possible. 
(This refers to smart iteration. Feedback should be timely and actionable.)
• At Pixar, art is a team sport.

top image: conorwithonen

Day three was a binge of amazing keynote speakers. I definitely expect that everyone’s head was completely filled by the end of the day. Besides the amazing talent that was there, UXLX in its association with the brand new Want Magazine presented clips of the newest videos that were launched that very day with the online magazine itself.

Jakob Nielsen: video

As noted above there were 3 videos during the course of the day. The first was by Jakob Nielsen. The clip selected had Jakob speaking about the state of usability practice today. He discussed how there have been two growth paths for usability professionals, but more importantly stressed that it is non-usability professionals who should be doing more of their own usability testing. This point of multi-disciplinary individuals gets highlighted at the very end of the conference as well.

Peter Merholz: Upgrade Your Mandate: Elevate User Experience Within Your Organization

Peter demonstrated through specific case studies how the following points are the key to success as a user experience professional:

• Engage across functions
• Engender empathy
• Use design tools to define problems
• Align values & vision
• Articulate experience principles
• Build from the outside in

As you can see these points resonate nicely with Luke Wroblewski’s workshop, Panu’s talk and Sarah’s talk from earlier in the conference.

Bill Scott: Designing with Lenses

Bill has been creating structured models for designers for a long time. He created the Yahoo Pattern Library (and word has it he and other former Yahoo cohorts are back at curating it again) and his book Designing Web Interfaces is an amazing resource for applying patterns to web design work. In this instance he showed us how to apply a new structural model to design challenges. This time borrowing from game design instead of architecture he talks to us about lenses as a tool for guiding design decision making.  This in essence was a deeper dive into case studies and specific examples of how to use lenses as design principles. Design principles themselves have been a constant thread throughout the conference.

Dan Saffer: Designing For New Technology

Many of us are beginning to work with new technologies in our day-to-day design practices. Dan wanted to offer his experience with gestural interaction design to express some general learnings that would be practical to any designer regardless of the type of technology the person may be designing for. Before jumping in though he started by defining “new technology” as any technology that is new for those whom you are designing it for and new for you to be designing with.

So help us all out he offered several key considerations when designing with new technologies:

• It takes a lot more time than you think.
  One of the biggest time hits is that you need to learn the limitations of the new technology within the specific contexts of your project.
• Prototype to get a sense for how people will behave with this new technology.
• Help sell it internally & externally. This will actually help you later in figuring out how the new technology can add value to the project.
• Words matter – How you describe your work will affect how people relate to it.
• Testing is hit & miss.
  It is difficult to test how people will react and be able to use a disruptive technology.
• Expectations: People expect things to work the way they have always worked. When this is not true they don’t know what to do.
• MAYA: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable (Raymond Lowey)
• Pattern Recognition
  People look for patterns to understand in everything they do. New patterns are harder to discover, but once discovered and used often they eventually become old patterns.
• The “Of Course” factor
  Most companies are looking for a “Wow” factor, but the true win is when someone says, “Of course, this is part of my life.” Thus, never being able to imagine a life without it.
• Affordances are key. People need to know what they can do and how it will behave. They also need clear signs as to how to know when it is behaving.
• Metaphors are also key. This is best way to help people understand what it is that is new.
• Personality: What is the figurative voice of the designed artifacts?
• Emotion
  If we have an emotional connection we will be most likely to engage and keep it longer.
• Emotion is almost always found in the small details
• Emotional resonance
  Some gestures had a weird emotional weight of its own.
  [matches my thoughts about motion aesthetics]
• Sound Design (big issue)
  Web almost ruined sound design with overkill and inappropriate use.
  Important tool to give personality
• Meaning
  What is the deepest reason people will use this new product?

Donna Spencer: Design Games slides

Donna took us through a series of game examples that are used to help with the design process. Games are a fun way to get people engaged in the design process without even knowing they are playing games. Playfulness gets us thinking in new ways. She is suggesting we use games because they are fun, engage people, and is a good way to communicate.

After going through a ton of great examples of games to play in a design context, she offered these considerations when playing design games.

• Determine outcome you want
• How do you expect it t0 run?
• What are the rules?
• What are the outputs?
• How will everyone be involved?
• What happens to “winners” & ‘losers’
• Make sure it isn’t a waste of time? (how will it move to a next step)
• It’s ok to use existing games and then modify them to fit your goals.

When creating games Donna suggested the following helpful hints:

• Make existing stuff more fun/game like
• By making it silly
• Creating a sense of urgency through a deadline
• Add an element of light competition
• Have instructions

Luke Wroblewski: First Person User Interfaces slides

Luke starts out summarizing the current state of information technologies with the following quote:

“We can get people closer to things they care about through the new technologies that are out there.”

Luke then offers us a history of the user interface of computers that has progressed by hiding more and more of guts of computers moving from punch cards to command line interfaces to graphical user interfaces, the current excitement around natural user interfaces (gestural interfaces) and finally what his talk is about is, what he calls, First Person User Interfaces (FPUI).

What I find interesting in this talk as an interaction designer is his use of the word “abstraction”. The history he gives interprets human interfacing with computers becoming more abstracted from the workings of the computer. But as that happens, what is more interesting as a designer, is the relationship between the human and the activity they want to achieve is becoming less abstracted and more direct.

He goes on to define at length what an FPUI is. It is basically the use of sensors for understanding the user’s position, movement and orientation to then use input usually from a video to overlay data on top of that video stream in near real time to augment what is seemingly the user’s view (through the device). There are earlier systems like GPS Navigation systems for the car that create abstract models of that world and present them as if from the angle of the user. Today though, tools like Yelp Monocle and Google Goggles are creating tremendously interesting tools that overlay their information over screen views of the world as we see it in real time.

This is very early and the uses of the tool are very emergent, but tremendously effective. For example Yelp’s Monocle was meant to be for fun (an Easter Egg) but it has helped increase sustained traffic on their properties by 40-50%. Currently though our biggest issues are around the small screen sizes we are designing this functionality for (it implies a mobile solution) and further how awkward the interaction models are. Really quickly “Point & Scan” becomes a “Nerd here!” marker.

There are solutions in the making, but even these feel a bit extreme to me like heads-up displays and nano-LED displays inside of contact lenses. The one solution that seems pretty helpful and around the corner is using near field technologies like RFID tags as the gesture to engage with them is more subtle than the point & scan required to engage with barcodes.

Eric Reiss – The Web Dogma

Eric did a smart and entertaining job of explaining his 10 Basic Rules or Creating Web Communications. Don’t judge till you get to number 10.

He starts out trying to differentiate between User-centered design and user-driven design. To be honest, I found this part of the talk to be unclear so I’m not sure what he means by driven and how it is difference from centered.

Then he discusses innovation. There are 3 bad reasons to innovate:

1. to differentiate your product
2. to be different
3. to satisfy your ego

But he clearly states that the only reasons to innovate is to solve a problem. Innovation itself though has a lifecycle where it is best done when it starts on the previous efforts of past innovations which have previously been converted into best practices. Best practices though could become habits and innovations can turn into fashion or style which can lead to old-fashioned. I liked this insight a lot. I think it explains how AOL was innovative, but turned into yesterday news to MySpace which is fighting that same fate to Facebook.

With this background he jumps into his Dogma (or set of rules). They are a good set of design principles to be used on any project. I think limiting to the web is unnecessary.

1. Anything that exists that is not for the end user should be eliminated.
2. Anything exists only to satisfy the ego of the designer should be eliminated.
   [I don’t think this one is black & white.]
3. Anything that is irrelevant within the context of the page should be eliminated
4. Any feature or technique that reduces the visitors ability to navigate freely should be eliminated
5. Any interactive object that forces the visitor to guess its meaning must be eliminated.
6. No software, apart from the browser itself, must be required to make things work necessary
   [HTML 5 Advocacy]
7. Content must be readable first, printable second, downloadable third.
8. Usability must never be sacrificed for the sake of a style guide.
9. No visitor must be forced to register or surrender personal data unless the site owner is unable to provide a service or complete a transaction w/o it.
10. Break any of these rules sooner than do anything else.

He then closed with this wisdom:

“We’re not just here to prevent bad things from happening, but to make wonderful things happen.”

Susan Weinschenk – Neuro Web Design

This talk felt like a short version of her workshop. It was so effective proven by the way everyone referenced her talk throughout social events until the very last moment. I’m sure the jokes are all old to Susan, but for us they were fun banter that just helped reinforce her excellently communicated pitch about the need to design for the realities of the human brain. The crux of the short talk is that we all need to design for all 3 brains (Old, Mid and New) in order to be effective. you can’t only design for one aspect and think you’ve gotten it nailed.

• She urged us to maintain a relationship to research old and new by stating clearly, “Technology changes but we actually don’t.”
• Some of the great insights follow:
• We are very open to suggestion through the use of framing and anchoring.
• We make a great deal of decisions based on “social elevation”. This is where a person will be effected by peers who are clearly human over edited content that clearly states quality differences of options.
• Things that are scarce are more attractive. For example, a cookie in a jar by itself tastes better than a cookie that comes from a jar that is full.
• Listening to a story about emotion engages the neurons related to that emotion. For example, telling a story about human pain may make you wince as if you have suffered the same wound.
• Pictures that include elements of our primal needs (food, danger and sexuality) are better at grabbing and retaining our attention. Pictures of people generally are powerful. It helps even more if they are attractive and in some way relate to you.

Larry Constantine – Design for User Performance

Larry started out by stating his background, which is primarily focused on mission critical systems. He admits that it is a bit different than what his peers do.

For Larry User Interface design, user experience design and even experience design were all interaction design. And he defined interaction design (the only speaker who actually took on interaction design in this way) as “How users interact with the designed artifacts in the context of their activities.” Further he is not focused on users, but more specifically on their performance. He is not user-centered by activity-centered in a similar fashion as how Donald Norman declared a few years ago when he said, “Focus upon humans detracts from support for the activities themselves.” The discussion that followed led to the need to “pay attention to the contexts in which activities take place.”

The rest of the talk tried to center on how to do this work by using “model-driven design” where the use of abstract models based on some kind of “sound theory” are used to represent data that is captured. The steps of the method are capture, carry, organize, explore, evaluate and trace. The objects of the system are stated as tool, actor, purpose, rule, community.

These can then be organized in one of three ways:

Roles < > Transformation < > Outcome
Activity < > Action < > Operation

Purpose < > Goal < > Condition.

What ends up mattering most for the interaction designer are the activities, the level of participation in that activity and the level of performance. These all come together to create maps & profiles.

The combined methods run though the following process:

• Model Driven Inquiry
• Structured & Visual brainstorming
• Compile, organize
• Focused, efficient, limited field inquiry
• Rinse, repeat
• Large scale architectural models
• Design

Larry then summarized his entire talk down to the following:

• Don’t put users at the center
• Support human activities
• Use models
• Use the power of abstraction

Jared Spool – The Dawning of the Age of Experience

Jared started out his talk making it clear to everyone that CEOs get it. They know that something is different and looked at 2 amazing examples of success based on total experience design: Apple and Netflix.

He then outlined the following points that through his research of successful experience design as a means for achieving successful business goals. A lot of what he states is mentioned throughout the above presentations but no single presentation put all of these together.

1. You have to equally understand the customer (or user) and the business
2. Really good experience design is learned but not open to introspection.
   He related a story about research he did regarding the Wall Street Journal and then hearing a creative director separately without any methodical research come up with the same conclusions and executed on them effectively. The creative director in question was not able to describe how they achieved their design. They could explain why, but not how they got to why.
3. Good design when it’s done well is invisible.
   He then asked the question, how do you do a portfolio of invisible success?
4. Experience design is multidisciplinary people doing multidisciplinary tasks.
   There are less people in organizations taking on more activities.
5. There is a coherent vision that everyone can agree to and relate equally to others in and out of the organization.
6. Everyone has access to getting direct feedback regarding their products and services.
   Has everyone seen someone use the design in the last six weeks? It is not the number of users that makes a difference as much as the number of hours each team member is exposed to direct user feedback.
7. The culture of the organization rewards failure in a big and positive way.

Jared gave everyone his usual performance complete with humor and wit and closed the conference with the reality that we are all still learning about this stuff every day.

Conclusion

UX-LX was definitely a very successful first time conference. I hope that Bruno Figueiredo, who organized the conference single-handedly, decides to make this an annual event. It was definitely worthy to belong among the must-see user experience conferences of the spring season. The venue was great, the content was well curated and the diversity of the sold out crowd were on target.

–

Header photograph by Pedro Moura Pinheiro

Day 2 of UX Lisbon included presentations on seduction, creative uses of Twitter, and the secret sauce of design.

Sarah Morris: Design for Seduction

Having missed the morning workshop because I needed time to work on my own workshop for later in the afternoon so that meant my first session of day-two would be Sarah Morris’s 20-minute talk on “Seduction Design”.

Sarah said that she learned a lot of what she was going to tell us from her reading of “Casanova,” the womanizer who would seduce women just to leave them when he got bored. Here’s here take of what she called his 3 acts:

1. Find an attractive woman w/ a problem he an solve & have her become grateful.
2. She succumbs to his charms.
3. He gets bored and leaves her.

She called him the first UX Designer if only we can change act three.

She then outlined 6 points for designing for seduction:

1. Invest quality time into your relationships.
   This boiled down to a touch strategy. Discover where and when others will touch your content and be sure that they know it is yours.
2. Security & comfort: Be sure to make your relationships feel secure and comfortable.
3. Balance dependence and independence by discovering the sweet spot between undivided attention vs. continuous partial attention and snacking  vs. binging.
4. Be sure to reassure your relationships how lucky THEY are to be with you.”
5. Be sure to actively listen and respond when appropriate
6. Make the extra effort.

Sarah has a very particular angle in her talk which didn’t really become fully apparent until she started talking about her own work as part of an advertising centric user experience agency. So she then talks about how to be more effective as a UX designer in the environment of the advertising agency.

• Huddle often to align ideas.
• Have a creative brief that includes the functional, the user scenarios and the experience planning.
• Continuously learn from other disciplines.
• Merge your understanding of UX principles with the concepts of trending.
• Great design is polygamous and not monogamous. Work with others.

Panu Korhonen: Interaction Design Leadership Lessons Learned

Out of the 3 20-minute presentations I saw this was the most succinct once it got going. Further, it had a feature that I’ve never seen before. Panu for each slide had a tweet sent at that moment that had the explanation for the otherwise curt slide. As a note taker this was really great. It also made for really retweetable content.

His experience where he got these lessons comes from years of design management while he was at Nokia working on projects like the S60 operating system. He broke down his talk into 3 categories: Design, Process and People. This talk ended up being a great talk for designers and managers a like.

Design

• “In the beginning, write down short and clear design drivers”
• “When directing design, you don’t want the design that you ask for. “
• Pick the battles that lead to the designs that are most relevant for the user.
• Stay too near and you’ll bore the audience. Go too far and you’ll alienate the audience.

Process

• Create first concept in a small team. Then start splitting the work. As a design leader your focus will move to the boundaries between teams.
• Milestones are good
• Design something I know will work (then move on)
• Get basic designs approved first. When you have a fallback plan, you can free your mind to explore further
• Difficulty of UX reviews
• 1 picture can’t really show you enough. (ok)
• UX is not skin deep. Review it by experiencing it, not by looking at it
• Time is a heavier commitment when reviewing UX than graphics or industrial design
• Good UX needs good SW (play nice!)
• Demos are not just for demoing the design. They are a design tool for revealing areas of concern.
• Tools of trade
• Your design tools leave marks in the UI.
• Tools need to change to do this well.

People

• Skills is everything: Interaction design is like music. You must master your instrument before you can make art.
• The most interesting design happens between the disciplines, not within.
• You’ll spend most of your time with the inexperienced designers.
• You’ll end up spending most of your time in the least relevant parts of your UI, b/c you give that work t/ the inexperienced designers who need more help
• Tacit Knowledge
• You can’t write down the soul of a design
• The soul of the design cannot be documented. Designers must grow into it.
• Stress leads to bad judgment. Take care of yourself.

David Malouf: Sketching: The Secret Sauce of Design

As this was my workshop, I’ll break this down very quickly. This was a very hands on workshop that asked participants to put down their laptops and take out pen & paper. Here are the core elements of the lecture:

What is design?
Design is the intentional creation of the conditions that allow for serendipity to happen. Serendipity are happy accidents. Designers do this in many ways, but the process and accompanying artifacts and use of space associated with sketching alone or in a group is a fundamental aspect of allowing this to happen.

Abductive Thinking
This is analysis through asking the question, “what might be”. It favors exploration over hypothesis validation and uses the critique as a means of knowing success instead of rational criteria.

What is a sketch?
By heavily referencing Bill Buxton’s “Sketching the User Experience”, we focused less on sketch as a specific type of artifact and more as a relationship between Intentionality, Form (artifact), and Implications.  A proper sketch is a suggestion more than an answer. It asks for more input, instead of validation. To do this a sketch must have several properties:

• It needs to happen quickly.
• It needs to be cheap enough as to be disposable (materials & time).
• There has to be an extreme multiplicity to have broad comparison & juxtaposition.
• The visual vocabulary needs to be well understood by all stakeholders who will be looking at it.
• It can’t have a higher quality than what is truly complete.
• It needs to communicate in a material that gives the sense that it is rough.

There were lots of exercises to practice these ideas within a few different contexts. The last exercise highlighted a group activity where sketching is used as a tool that allows for collaborators to “riff” off of each other’s ideas. By constantly building off of ideas, we saw how the core of an idea can be expanded on again and again to have a design progress.

The environment where you work is key. There needs to be lots of wall space where you can hang up materials so that everyone involved can constantly view every sketch. Nothing should really be taken down. Walls should be removed from a design space to allow for interruption and butting in. It is preferred to use chart paper instead of whiteboards for this type of work so all artifacts get preserved in a material that can be hung up right away.

Lastly, we talked about a specific type of sketching that places people in the situation of using interfaces. By drawing quick comic strips early experience prototypes and stories can be put together.

It closed with a call to all UX Professionals to sketch every day.

-

Header photo by Pedro Moura Pinheiro

UXLX or User Experience Lisbon[i], was the brain child of organizer Bruno Figuierro. Bruno put on an amazing event. It was clear from the moment I stepped off the plane and was greeted by Bruno[ii] (and Donna Spencer) that Bruno was putting out all the stops. His team crafted an experience that was one of the best conferences I have been to.

About UXLX

Getting set for UX-LX

The format of the conference was an interesting one, based on other UX conference experiences, but reconfigured to be all new. The first 2 days were end-capped by 3-hour workshops. These were opportunities to dig deeper into our practices. They were led by some of the best practitioners from around the world. In between the 2 workshops each day were short presentations from presenters who submitted abstracts for review and selection.  The last day was a binge of presentations by thought leaders of user experience. Each one could have been a closing keynote all its own. The nights were always filled with networking opportunities where at any given moment you could hear 4 or 5 languages being spoken around you. With about 25 countries represented from as far away as Australia & Brazil and as near as around the corner, this was truly an international conference.

Lisbon is a beautiful hilly city in the spirit of San Francisco or Rome. It had 7 hills like both with great views here and there. It felt much more like San Francisco with a big pay, long bridges (even 1 modeled after the Golden Gate) steep hills, and trolly cars that take you up and around them. Of course, it had an energy and culture all its own.

The night before the event, there was an ice breaker of wine tasting and fado (the local music of Lisbon). It was a first chance for people to start making people. I can say that the people I met that night, even though there were just a few, stuck with me. It was a nice touch with little fan fare.

Day 1

Luke Wroblewski (@lukewdesign): Influencing Strategy by Design

Luke’s workshop was one of my favorites of the conference. It was less a workshop than a great seminar on what it takes to influence strategy as a designer being a designer. This leads to Luke’s core thesis is that designers do not need to become business people to influence strategy, but our skills and thought models are a great complement and add value to the business strategy side as designers being designers.

• Don’t be a victim. Take responsibility and be ready to respond to needs as they arise. This will put you in a position to influence through co-ownership.
• “Leadership is not a position; it is action.” Donald McGannon
• Designer’s unique thinking processes is a wonderful complement to business analytical processes. This is best underscored by 2 dichotomies:
  • Risk averse vs. Failure open
  • Deductive/Inductive vs. Abduction (or referencing the past vs. looking to [& envisioning] the future)
• Design’s core competencies break down to: insights, synthesis, means and meaning
• Translated to pattern recognition, storytelling, visual communication and Empathy
• There are so many data sources out there for designers to access and then use to tell stories with the goal of visualizing to create empathy.
• Business looks for incremental growth. Design creates geometric and exponential growth.
• It is important to enter the conversation and create artifacts at the right level of the problem being worked on. “Where you start the conversation is where it is going to stay.”
• Framing: Design redefines the challenges facing the organization.
• Problem Solving:  Design finds new opportunities by solving existing problems.
• Function & Form: Design makes things work better.
• Style: Design: Design is the gateway to be hip & cool.
• No conscious design: Design value isn’t recognized. This attitude fosters design by default – however things come out is fine, because there are more important issues to deal with.
• We are in a world of metrics. We need to stop being scared of data and embrace data and understand that we have the power as designers to bring life to data in new ways that business people can’t as they are mostly locked into the visual & limitations of Excel.
• A high percentage of the hard work of having influence is being able to present with confidence.

I would say that one of the flaws of Luke’s presentation is his lack of understanding of the audience he is speaking to. It was even clear during the question and answer that some people were overwhelmed by an expectation of having to be expert visual designers, as Luke’s examples were a brilliant master class in visual communication. Most usability professionals, information architects and even many interaction designers are not formally trained or otherwise have experience in visual communication of this sort. I would further argue that many are even further on the continuum of Deductive/Inductive to Abductive thinkers than business people. They use scientific methods as grounding to the work they do. This dichotomy became dramatically apparent among the different speakers. Scrolling through the #uxlx twitterstream can give you insights to this.

Marcos Silva – How NUIs are changing HCI

I was very excited going into this talk, but must admit I came out less than thrilled. From the title I expected us to be told we have to do a serious re-think about older HCI principles in order to design for NUIs and that NUIs themselves are challenging HCI principles even more generally. I’m still waiting for the big challenge to Fitts Law. But this didn’t happen. Instead we were just given a history of interfaces and what NUIs were and why we should care. While the speaker only had 20 minutes, he did not use his time wisely to make a case for or teach his audience anything they either don’t already know or couldn’t figure out quite simply for themselves.

The one major take away I got out of this talk that I didn’t go in with is how the nature of gestural interfaces means that much of the interaction model is hidden and it is up to us all to share what we know and learn to others in order to make it work. While I never said it that way before, it has been noticed by myself and many others the Apple way of putting in subtle instructions of using their products in the very commercials that cause us to buy them.

Conference issue

Timing was a big struggle.Yes, we were late a lot, but what the problem really was about is that there is no slack so that this struggle with time could be better managed. In this case on Wednesday I was not able to make it into the second 20min. talk and because I left the room I was in I couldn’t go to the talk that was in the room I was supposed to be in.

Susan Weinschank (@thebrainlady): Designing Usable and Persuasive Websites

This was a beautiful master class on the psychology of behavior. Susan never missed a beat in telling us the great story of the mind. She separated the mind into 3 simple units of understanding: New, Mid and Old and explained what each meant and how we could be taking advantage of the strengths of each to create more usable artifacts, but to also create artifacts that are more persuasive. She did caution that not all uses of this information is ethical, so it is up to each designer to figure out how to use this information.

I really appreciated that Susan started out with the dichotomy of issues in design that deal with “can do” vs. those that deal with “will do”. She did underscore that sometimes design decisions can lead to both and further that sometimes they are in opposition with each other.

Then Susan listed different core behaviors of people and how we can optimize our designs for them:

• People don’t want to work or think more than they have to
• Progressive disclosure: only display what you need now, but have easy access to what is need (with easy ways out without loosing context)
• Path of least resistance: users will always choose the path that feels easiest.
• Examples: We always like examples.
• Affordances: We interact with things when we can tell what it is we can do.
• Only the features they need (and nothing more).
• Defaults: We like when others make decisions for us, or fill in the obvious data (so long as we can override).

Visual Systems

• Color can be used for imply associations (but be careful about color blindness)
• Don’t use colors like red & blue that don’t work well together because they are on opposite sides of the light spectrum.
• Grouping through use of white space. Nearness implies association while distance implies disassociation.
• To make icons more recognizable use the canonical perspective (always from the top a little and from the side)

Typography

• Most standard fonts are just as readable whether serifed or not, normal case or all caps are equally readable. Size is more important. Too small is bad, for everyone.
• Things are hard to read on a screen (backlit like LCD and OLED) because of the higher luminescence.
• Break it up into chunks
• Use proper fonts at proper sizes.
• White background with high contrast color/shades
• Oh! And make the content worth it!
• Line length: People read faster with longer line length, but prefer shorter.
• Keep density (aka clutter) to a minimum.
• People CANNOT multitask regardless of age. Everyone takes a productivity hit when attempting to multitask.
• Human memory is fallible, complicated and reconstructed.
• Chunk things
• Give strong landmarks and other contextual markers
• Group things into 3 to 4 items.

We Are Social

• We look for social validation
• Will look to peers before making decisions

Reciprocity

• We will do activities when there is a perceived sense of debt.
• Bonding: We prefer to do things synchronously with others in person.
• It is inconclusive whether or not really being in person matters across all types of online social activity, but synchronicity definitely matters.
• Laughing releases hormones that make us feel good. (Typing LOL doesn’t work.)
• Strong ties/weak ties:
• There are a maximum number (like less than 7) of people in your network (who ARE near you) who can be strong ties.
• Weak ties can have 1000’s
• Mirror Neurons
• You feel similar effects watching someone do something as doing it yourself.

Attention

• Inattention Blindness: People are blind to the things they are not paying attention to.
• Tendency not to notice when things change outside of our visual field
• Need to make it quite obvious that things have changed.
• Ways to get people’s attention:
• Cyan/magenta
• Big words
• Use fun & novelty: pay attention to what is fun & novel
• Things that are different stand out
• People are easily distracted
• People Crave Information
• Dopamine Loop: Dopamine causes us to look for things.
• We wouldn’t look for food if we didn’t have dopamine
• Searching for information creates more dopamine which causes us to want to look for more information (the loop)
• We want more choices to keep searching. However, this leads to paradox of choice:
• We want more choices
• However when we are given too many choices we act less often
• When searching we need feedback to corroborate requests happen.
• Unconscious Processing
• Commitment
• Get people to make small commitments and then loyalty grows and kicks in to allow for bigger commitments and stronger loyalty.
• Emotional events get processed differently than unemotional events.
• The Old Brain reacts to the big 3: food, sex and safety
• Using appropriate imagery and contexts can be very persuasive.
• Advertising has been doing this for years.
• Scarcity: When we perceive something to be scarce we begin to crave it.
• Habits are very powerful. They tend to hold across different contexts.
• Being used to turning on a light switch as up is hard to unlearn.

Framing & Anchoring

• This is a type of suggestion that sets in motion a specific type of meaning. 
This is probably one of the most powerful forms of persuasion because it is unconscious and because it usually works best with enough critical mass of people involved.
• People make mistakes. Be ready for it, in all its contexts.
• Use confirmations if the consequences are severe.
• If you know it’s an error then correct it for them.
• If the task is error prone then have people do things one at a time.
• You make mistakes too:
• Iterate your design.
• Test your designs.
• Susan uses http://usertesting.com to pilot her scenarios for in person tests.

It holds 5 liters of beer with a tap on the bottom.....

The networking party w/ 2m beers

On the 1st night of the conference we had a great party at a local micro-brewery right next to the event. They had the above “draft pitchers”. Beer was flowin’ for sure.

[i]Lisbon was originally called Luxboa and so they still use the abbreviation LX. Seriously, it was everywhere in the city.

[ii] I was an invited workshop leader for the conference.

Set up picture by Pedro Moura Pinheiro , beer picture by Dave Malouf / CC BY-NC 2.0

Have you ever needed a user manual to sit on a good chair? Probably not. When we see a good chair, we almost always know exactly what to do, how to use it and what not to do with it. And yet, chairs are made by the thousands, and several challenge these base assumptions to become classics in their own right. The chair is one of the most universally recognized archetypes known to us. In light of recent events in the mobile realm, I believe that the stage is set to probe notions of archetypes in the mobile space.

Archetypes

Archetype: An archetype (pronounced /ˈɑrkɪtaɪp/) is an original model of a person, ideal example, or a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated; a symbol universally recognized by all. (wikipedia)

[Note: There is a deep philosophical definition of archetype as proposed by Carl Jung. This article is not based on that form of definition.]

The word archetype has its roots in architectural theory. It also deals with cognition at its most basic level. In a very generic way—points, lines and planes are archetypes in graphic design. Columns, walls, floors, roofs are archetypes in architecture.

When we see a flight of stairs, our cultural memory and experiences kick in. They teach us that stairs signify climbing, doors represents portals between zones and chairs are (usually) something you sit on. We seldom think much about them. Experience makes us learn, encode and remember these archetypes, making us react spontaneously to them. The degree to which archetypes are understood varies greatly between cultures. Interestingly, archetypes can always be deconstructed, challenged or probed since they merely act as starting points of reference. There are innumerable examples of archetypes that have been reintroduced to us in the most puzzling ways in order to question our own understanding of them; for example Escher’s illustration below, which turns the stair archetype on its head.

… archetypes can always be deconstructed, challenged or probed since they merely act as starting points of reference.

Escher deconstructs the chair archetype

Archetypes vs Metaphors

With all the press that metaphor gets in UX, it’s worth pointing our how it is different from the archetype. Metaphors are analogies between two objects or ideas, conveyed by the use of one word instead of another. In interaction models, metaphors are different from archetypes in the sense that they are the conceptual transference of an idea/archetype into another more tangible form that becomes more easily understood. The archetype is the original idea/model in itself.  An obvious example of metaphors in industrial design are when chairs are inspired by nature.

Tulip Chair inspired by an obvious metaphor

Further Reading on Archetypes

For more information on archetypes, the book Form, Space and Order by Francis D. Ching is a good introduction to archetypes in architecture (for lateral understanding). My graduate research thesis in architecture also dealt with archetypes, and it is this understanding that motivated me to seek and understand archetypes in interaction design.

Mobile UX Archetypes

Our ever-increasing mobile interaction with our World implies that we are creating, consuming and sharing content constantly on the go. We already have about 1 billion net-enabled cellular devices, according to the Hammersmith Group report on the Internet of Things. We’re checking mail, updating statuses, sharing personal data and browsing constantly using little computers in our pockets. Over time, one could expect a certain familiarity to set in with the different mannerisms and modes with which we find ourselves interacting. Can we look at a user interface and guess what it’s going to do for us? If the answer is a tentative yes, it probably means its interaction model is based on a common archetype.

Can we look at a user interface and guess what it’s going to do for us? If the answer is a tentative yes, it probably means its interaction model is based on a common archetype.

A few months ago, my experience of mobile archetypes at a macro-level appeared predictable. The iPhone and its subsequent ‘cousins’ seemed to be what you’d expect from a mobile operating system. Without any qualitative leanings to its effectiveness, the recent release of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 series and Kin phones inspired me to examine the differences in mobile archetypes that I’d encountered.

In the absence of academic definitions, one could define Mobile User Experience (MUX) Archetypes to be ‘prototypes’ that are or might rapidly become models for future everyday mobile interaction behavior. They are overarching experience patterns that we, the Mobile Generation, will have poked, prodded and swiped countless times during our lives. Over time, these interactions would most likely have formed cognitive roadmaps in our cultural memory, paving the way for more thought-free acts while using technology. We would expect interactions to occur in certain ways, and would be surprised and often annoyed when they would not meet our expectations.  When someone reinvents an archetype (like Facebook did to email), it makes us pause, think and readjust our behavior.

My criteria for selecting these archetypes were:

1. These are archetypes on the foundations of which a part or whole mobile user experience can be conceived.
2. Most exist out there on mobile devices, while others seem destined to enter this space soon.
3. They are mostly screen-based interactions (for now).

The groups and examples chosen are sub-sets as well as super sets. For example, Facebook is by itself a super-set of many smaller metaphors and archetypes. These would be subsets of the Facebook family, but might have UX archetypes of their own.

Archetypes as subsets and supersets

The MUX Archetypes I propose are:

1. Application Centric
2. Activity Centric
3. Timeline Centric
4. Context (Location) Centric
5. Process/Task Centric
6. Emotion Centric
7. People/Identity Centric

1. Application Centric

In such a MUX archetype, the applications make the interaction experience. The OS of the software are predominantly engines that can run and manage applications or ‘apps’. These ‘apps’ become the tools with which the device is made useful to us. App-centric OS’s like the Apple iPhone/iPad platform result in the interaction being likened more to a Swiss-army knife. The ‘start experience’ or the archetype that one is greeted with most while using these app-centric platforms are usually some form of smorgasbord of the apps that are on the device.

iPhone

G1 Android Phone

Samsung bada

(Examples: Google Android, Samsung bada, Microsoft Surface)

2. Activity Centric

In activity-centric MUX archetypes the focus shifts to the activities that one intends to perform with the interaction. The activities make the interaction experience. These are usually represented visually and placed in an easily accessible sequence. The most obvious example in recent times has been the Windows Phone 7 series, which advocated a direct ‘content-first’ approach. It mapped the most important activities of the user on its ‘start experience’, with a secondary emphasis on ‘apps’.

Windows Phone 7

(Examples: Windows Phone 7, Zune, the original iPod, Sony PS3)

3. Timeline Centric

Timeline centric MUX archetypes focus on time as a material. In these archetypes, the user is invariably manipulating, tweaking, dragging and experiencing data with time as a prime focus. The latest example is the release of the Microsoft KIN phones where the stripped user interface focuses on timeline centric features like the Loop and the Spot.

MIcrosoft KIN

The Whale Hunt by Jonathan Harris

Nike+ stats

(Examples: Microsoft KIN, ‘The Whale Hunt’ by Jonathan Harris, Nike+ stats, Mint, EDI monitors, MIDI-channel mixers etc.)

4. Context (Location) Centric

Contextual/location centric MUX archetypes ride the wave of GPS and its interweaving with social networking. In these archetypes, the user is invariably ‘checking in’ (or actually checking out) places based on GPS mapping and other ways of stitching locational data together. A great example of this is the Photosynth, which takes a user’s photos, mashes them together and recreates a 3D scene out of them that anyone can view and move around in. Applications like Layar use information about your location to augment the real world as seen through your mobile phone.

Gowalla

Photosynth

Layar

align=”alignleft”
(Examples: Foursquare, Gowalla, Photosynth, Layar etc.)

5. Process/Task Centric

These MUX archetypes enable a user to achieve certain tasks by describing the process in a sequential way. These archetypes invariably carry a ‘trail of breadcrumbs,’ enabling the user to journey back and forth through the process while following instructions. These archetypes would usually resort to a tying element of some sort during a process of educating the user. This thread would lead the user by the hand (or eye!) through the process.

20 minute meals

Popular Science+ iPad app

(Example: Jamie Oliver’s ’20 minute meal’ app, Tutorial section of the Popular Science+ iPad app etc.)

5. Emotion Centric

Jonathan Harris’ We Feel Fine project epitomize an emotion-centric interaction archetype. Even though this model has not (to my knowledge) been implemented on a mobile platform yet, it seems loaded with potential. Jonathan Harris describes the interface to the data collected on ‘We Feel Fine’ as “a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual.”

We Feel Fine

(Example: ‘We Feel Fine’ by Jonathan Harris etc.)

6. People/Identity Centric

This MUX-archetype is most familiar with users of any social networking platform. Your identity and the identities of the various contacts in social networks to which you belong to are the prime focus for such an archetype. They are almost invariably centered around ‘status updates’ of some kind, leading to a stream of news about different identities.

Vodafone 360

Twitter API (as used in TweetDeck)

(Examples: Vodafone 360, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc.)

Why do these archetypes matter?

It is not as important to debate the accuracy in grouping these archetypes as it is to imagine the possibilities of interchanging an expected archetype with another. Thinking in archetypes gives us a unique overview of interaction models and their intrinsic behavior patterns, making it possible to ask interesting what if questions and examine consequences. Archetypes and the overview they provide also help us critique experiential bottlenecks when they occur in designed interactions. Thinking laterally, if the form of a chair did not entice a user to sit on it, then perhaps the form or the formal archetype needed rethinking.

Thinking in archetypes gives us a unique overview of interaction models and their intrinsic behavior patterns, making it possible to ask interesting what if questions and examine consequences.

Our interaction experience of a product or service can vary drastically with the chosen archetype. For example, Twitter status updates are predominantly people/identity centric. What would happen if this archetype were to be inverted to say an ‘emotion-centric’ Linked-In? It might yield a very different experience of how our professional networks are feeling over time.

These are early days in the field of interaction design (especially in the mobile realm). Several MUX models are hugely successful, while most fail to remain relevant. The discussion regarding mobile interaction archetypes must be an ongoing, iterative process with a hope that experience models will mature and stabilize with time and refinement.

I believe that, in the near future, complexity, diversity and an almost ubiquitous presence of mobile interactions are certain. With mature, universal archetypes our designed interactions cold become more intuitive, leaving user manuals obsolete and making experiences more joyful for everyone.

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Images:

Escher print: Meridian ; Tulip chair: Design Heaven;  IPhone: GeekWhat; Android:  Blogoscoped; Samsung Bada: Gadgetvenue; Windows 7: All Touch Tablet; The Whale Hunt: Jonathan Harris via Andy Polaine; Nike: Electronica; Photosynth: Architecture Blog; Layar: Layar; Jamie Oliver iPhone App: CBS Interactive; Popular Science: 144Apps; We Feel Fine: We Feel Fine via Change the Thought; Vodafone 360: Geeky Gadgets; Twitter: The D’Alesio Blog