To most customers, packaging is a means to an end. A way to transport newly acquired goods home and then a way to fill the garbage bin. With the exception of Apple, who takes care in the aesthetics and method of packaging, packaging generally goes unnoticed and not kept (but I still have my iPhone box). Carnegie Mellon professor Steve Stadelmeier once mentioned a different perspective on this. To paraphrase, Stadelmeier posed the question “When designing a package, how does the product see the world? Is it blocked off or through a window? How is it exposed?”

_{Image: The Balvenie Forty}

This has always resonated with me. How does a product view the world? A watch in the box, is it waiting to be on someone’s wrist, seeing every passerby as a potential owner? And does an onion loose on the shelf see the world differently than the bag of a dozen? Childish and silly thoughts, I admit, but it raises the question of an artifact’s personal life.

When designing a package, how does the product see the world?

TheDieLine.com showcases some remarkable packaging. A combination of student work, limited release products, fashion and household goods some of the most unique samples are those that recreate the product entirely. How does a shirt appear if it’s made to appear as a loaf of bread? Differently than a shirt looking like your daily vegetables or a piece of red meat? It does not change what the product it, but it alters how you approach it.

Bring this into technology and what do we have? Leaps in marketing have seen enticing and engaging displays capturing attention from down the block or across the hall. Can this be translated to the more common, and mundane, desktop experience? How can applications be restyled to be more engaging while still falling to the background when not needed? Can an application’s homescreen be informational and reset expectations for the rest of the experience? A product and technology could be the best in the world, but if a user’s impression is dull or misguided before entering the task, how does that alter success rate or simple appreciation of the technology? How can the detail paid to industrial design translate to a digital realm and what might be done to affect the initial engagement with a system?

_{Image: Sod T-Shirt Packaging
Top Image: TheDieLine: Cooked in Barcelona, Jeans}

EuroIA is about community, and about learning and sharing knowledge. So it wasn’t a surprise that attendees showed up energetic and ready for the second day of EuroIA after a long, fun night in the city of good food and wine. Again, the balance between practical talks about core IA topics, and inspirational reflections on opening up our design process, the role of UX, and how we work with data worked well. Excellent lunches, the IA Jam, the treasure hunt and enough breaks created opportunities to get to know fellow attendees. And the talks were great, so read on.

Lean IA: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business – Jeff Gothelf

In the beginning, we needed deliverables to define the practice of information architecture. A lot of value has been placed on the deliverable itself – practitioners have become experts for wireframes, the go-to person when you needed a comp or diagram. Put beautiful deliverables are worthless if the good design they describe is not carried through to the live experience. Additionally, static deliverables are not doing interactive, multi-platform experiences justice.

Lean IA is inspired by Lean Product and Agile development theories. It’s a transformative practice of bringing the true nature of our work to light faster, with an emphasis on experiences rather than deliverables.

This is what the Lean IA process looks like

Concept > Prototype > Validate internally > Test externally > Learn from user behaviour > Iterate
(this is just the UX design process)
Get your designs out there quickly, in public, for everybody in your organisation to see and comment on.

What Lean IA is:

Control: The design team drives the design, and opens it up for feedback and input. It’s important that the decision how feedback is incorporated remains in the hands of the designers. The UX designer is the keeper of the vision – the greater goal of the design is your responsibility.

Momentum: Everyone on the team is engaged and motivated, and everyone is moving forward. Don’t design in a silo, share what you’re doing and show your progress.

Quality: Don’t race for the third place, but champion the best experience that you possible can create for your customers and your business.

Alignment: As you move forward with the design, show it to others, to get their buy-in and to ensure everybody is on the same page. It’s not your design or my design, it’s something we created together. Make sure the stakeholder team sees their ideas in your design, helping you advocate your solutions.

Feasibility: Lean IA allows you to ensure the experience can be built well – at the core of this is prototyping the core flow. Demo prototypes to the development team, discuss and iterate. The prototype is documenting the most important functionalities.

Fill in the gaps: There’s always something you didn’t think about. By talking about your design, you stand a chance of getting all pieces of the puzzle together.

So, can it be done?
After defining his concept of Lean IA, Jeff took some time to talk about culture.

If you’re working in a software/web design shop, with a multi-disciplinary teams, you can implement Lean IA very easily. You are in the problem-solving business, so you don’t solve problems with design documentation, but with working software.

If you’re in an interactive agency, it’s a tougher sell. Agencies are in the deliverables business, this is how they make money. Deliverables are handed over to clients or development shops, deliverables are specified in the statements of work. Adopting a Lean IA process is a fundamental change in the agency business model:
Concept > Validate with client > Iterate > Validate with client > Prototype > Learn from user behaviours.
Show rough ideas and concepts to your clients, at least every two days. Get your client’s buy-in. Show confidence you have in your work and your approach.

Is this good for every project?
Use this approach where it makes sense. Lean IA works well for functional, task-oriented projects, eg experiences with a core purchase flow. Highly experiential marketing projects, such as very interactive websites with brand interaction and exploration as a goal, will struggle.

How to get started with Lean IA?
Jeff shares his experience from implementing this way of working at The Ladders. To kick things off, everybody gets together in a collaborative design session – the core execution team of the project sketches ideas together. Designers, developers and product managers engage in a design-and-critique workshop. This facilitates early team alignment, collaboration, and a sense of ownership.

Lean IA isn’t a revolution, it’s an evolution, taking us back to the experience design business. Collaboration is the smarter way to do good work. If you liked Jeff‘s talk, get it here and have a look at his blog.

Agile and UX: Stories from the Trenches – Matt Roadnight & Jane Austin

(This talk took place on day 1, but in the context of Jeff’s session, this experience report on agile UX fits better in here.)

Jane is head of UX at IG Index, where she and her team tackle the challenge of doing agile UX. Matt is an agile consultant, who was called in to help Jane’s team to get things working. In their talk, they shared both their experience of working at and with IG Index, but also their personal perspectives on agile UX.

For Jane, agile is more an attitude than a canonical set of processes you have to follow. For Matt, agile is all about communication and collaboration, with Scrum as a framework to facilitate this collaboration. Every agile team has to agree not only on a ‘definition of done’, but also on a ‘definition of ready’ that works for their product and context. For Jane, this is more important than sticking dogmatically to the notion of ‘working one sprint ahead’. Don’t rush into agile development, it’s possible to start too soon. If you need more time to set a vision for a complex project, take time for it. Jane’s team works in the financial space, so up front research to communicate what the product is about was valuable. Experience wheels visualised the client lifecycle, personas created empathy.

Matt helped the team to move from these materials to a product backlog. In collaborative planning workshops, the UX, business and tech team got together to create an overview structured by features and contents. Everybody discussed the upcoming work, and voted on high-risk or high-priority areas.

An important concept of agile is to create flow, to ensure stories are ready for development. When it took the team longer to get the navigation right, other elements moved up in the backlog more quickly than expected. This ended in fragmentation of interactions – to mitigate the risk of an inconsistent, incoherent design, Jane had to change how she did her work. She stepped back to adopt more of a leadership and creative director role, and the team put together patterns.

Additionally, Matt encouraged Jane and her colleagues at IG Index to work as a product team.The product owner isn’t a role, but a set of responsibilities and skills. There’s rarely one person who has all information about user and business needs, and is available to questions from the team. A good product owner team has a member from the product, the tech and the UX/design team. Jane found it challenging to wear both the UX lead and the PO team member hat. Tools such as collaborative product discovery workshops and retrospectives facilitate creating the team spirit.

Matt has published a whitepaper with several case studies of agile ux teams, available for download here.

Start Anywhere – What Faceted Navigation Is (Not) Good For – Peter Boersma

Peter started his talk by defining faceted navigation:

• Facets are attributes of your content items;
• Navigation is finding your way in an (information) space;
• Faceted navigation is about selecting attributes of content items to navigate an information space.

A typical design has facets on the left, with content that matches the selected facets being displayed to the right of the navigation.

So when does it make sense to use faceted navigation?
Your content items have to be tagged appropriately. It’s useful when your facets and values actually distinguish content items, facilitating choice. The comparison website Kayak uses facets to provide more information about search results.

When should you not use faceted navigation?
Faceted navigation can make an unclear design and navigation even worse. If your users prefer search to browsing, faceted navigation doesn’t fit their needs. Amazon has facets in place, but search is the easy option of choice.
Don’t use faceted navigation if your content items have additional features. On the Dell website, a user goes through selecting up to 6 different facets, only to discover more additional options. A wizard could be a better solution at this point.
If you only have a small collection of content, faceted navigation isn’t for you either. Apple has a limited number of products, so they can just list them on their homepage.

If your users are in non-selection phases of the purchase process, faceted navigation is of no use to them.
Finally, faceted navigation isn’t suitable if you want to introduce serendipity and chance discoveries of content.

What are the alternatives to faceted navigation?

• Search
• Directory listing
• Product tables and comparison charts (for an overview of a small selection of products)
• Product configurators, wizards, advisors to select the right product (eg Audi car selector)
• Top X lists (to highlight popular content, eg on news websites)
• Fewer products to begin with

Tips & tricks

1. make sure that if you select one facet, the ones that aren’t relevant anymore disappear.
2. at some point, comparison charts may be easier.
3. for products that appear in many categories, it can make sense to group them uner a ‘general’ category
4. the order of facets determines how they will be used. if price is most important to your users, put it first.
5. Faceted navigation is hardly ever the only solution, but needs to combined with other navigation types.
6. ‘view all designs’ is not a filter
7. ask yourself: should we use faceted navigation for all content types?

Whispering in the Giant’s Ear: Designing Social Media Interaction for Samsung Electronics -Hendrik Sommerfeldt

Hendrik shared a case study of a project with Samsung. 9 out of 10 kids in the UK can identify Daleks and tell you a story about them – but if you show a photo of Daleks in the rest of Europe, only few people know what they are. If it’s hard to bridge the cultural gap within Europe, imagine how hard it is to design ‘something social’ in Europe for a South Korean brand.
To set the context, Hendrik explored the similarities between Korea and Germany, and explained the DNA of Samsung, a large company owned by one family. The Samsung Anycall Dreamer was a social campaign successful in Asia, targeting a young segment, promoting Samsung as an employer. Thousands of young people registered to get a chance for a placement as an intern at Samsung.

What did it take to adapt this campaign for Germany? The target audience was completely different, the project brief and KPIs had to be redefined. Samsung is perceived differently in Germany, and not known for listening to people, so the solution was a ‘voice of the customer’ programme. Applying the SUCCESS model from ‘Made to stick’, the campaign recruited young technologists to collaborate with them and advocate Samsung through buzz-marketing.

Hendrik reflected on his main insights from managing this project.
Firstly, communication was a challenge – the local Samsung offices had little power, it was necessary to communicate directly with the decision-makers in the South Korean headquarters.
Secondly, the client was keen to feel in control of the process, so daily reporting was necessary to establish a working relationship Samsung were comfortable with. Basecamp’s to-do lists and milestones were the tools of choice to facilitate this collaboration. Other useful tools to work together rapidly across time zones were Ning, Dropbox or Google docs.
Thirdly, South Koreans don’t consider contracts as set in stone, but as an adaptable agreement that vaguely describes the project. To handle this, Hendrik’s team set specific milestones, but allowed for flexibility and change.
Finally, Samsung was keen to see happy German customers experiencing their products. Instead of setting up costly events, the German project team took their ideas to barcamps and events such as Mobile Monday, reporting people’s feedback back to Samsung.

Take-aways
To identify the right participants for the campaign, careful selection, including face-to-face interviews, was necessary. Set up tools to support collaboration. Make milestones and progress visible through checklists. Ask questions and strip the project down to the core KPIs. Get Asian clients over to Europe and establish a relationship, otherwise it will be hard to establish trust, and engage in follow-up projects.

Keynote: Paul Kahn – Structured data: none / some / all

Paul started his keynote with a historical reflection. Between 1995 and 2010, gazillions of websites changed reading behaviour. Our design problem was an evolution of visual literacy. Readers were trained to find information in print publications, digital publications lacked physical context, and their location and scope were invisible. The main design task was to connect readers to content by adapting the graphic language – type, colour, image – from the page to the screen; to create navigation systems that helped users understand what they could find on a website; and to communicate the structure of the content in flexible repeatable units.

Now, in 2010, we live in a world of massive undifferentiated data. TeleGeography’s 2010 Global Internet Map captures in a visual form the amount of bandwidth between different continents, and the percentage of bandwidth that’s being used.
In 2010, users are

• convinced that they can find what they want on the internet;
• producing and managing dematerialised content: photos, videos, music, email, compound documents;
• creators and consumers with storage/creation and retrieval/consumption needs;
• looking for something all the time.

In 2010, users want to

• record, share, publish;
• be convinced, amused, in control;
• find, sort, shift, copy;
• mix, reorder, rearrange.

Users now have the experience of solving problems by manipulating metadata (even if they don’t know what that is).

As information architects, we work with data. So what is data like, in 2010?
Today, every IA/UX problem is a data continuum. Data has:

1. no structure | vacuum | raw
2. some structure | marsh | eatable
3. complete structure | field | cooked

Unstructured data
Data vacuum: no metadata has been added to items. Even data vacuums include content and context. There’s a trade-off between precision (finding only what you’re looking for) and recall (finding everything that might contain what you’re looking for). Information retrieval algorithms struggled to get the balance.

Take the name as an example of data. People have many names (legal names, professional names, etc), places and things have many names in different languages. As data, a name presents a major problem: it’s not unique. Finding the person you’re looking for on Google requires work-arounds, we add additional strings for context.

To retrieve information, we use implicit metadata, eg to find a file on your computer, you can look for document type, file name or the time/date stamp.
Google has made certain editorial decisions, eg showing you images corresponding with your search term.

Five ways to organise information for understanding and ease of use are on location, alphabet, time, category and hierarchy (LATCH (+) by Richard Wurman (in Information Anxiety 2)). But it’s also possible to organise on common focus.

Semi-structured data
Data marsh: some metadata without predefined language or requirements
Tagging: ad hoc uncontrolled keywords
Time/location stamps: where and when
each metadata dimension is flat (no hierarchy) and independent
Many kinds of relationships can be inferred

Structured data
data fields: where metadata has been explicitly added to items according to an agreed-upon structure
the content is made to fit a pre-defined structure
the required parts of the structure are complete
each metadata dimension qualifies and reinforces the meaning of content

Paul is known for visualising information beautifully, so he finished his keynote with examples of (interactive) visualisations of structured data.

The Alaska Nativce Collections catalogue is a great example for fitting content into an explicit structure to present a lot of information effectively.
Map of the Market
Newsmap.jp
NY Times Immigration Explorer
NPR Patchwork Nation
US Holocaust Memorial Museum Timeline visualisation
Pivot: tool released by Microsoft Live Labs

Without (an understanding of) structured data, these visualisations wouldn’t be possible.
Would the world be a better place if everything had a unique ID? If every digital object with a unique ID contained strutured data?
How does structured data affect quality of life questions?
This is the food for thought Paul left us with to ponder over.

For Europe’s sixth IA Summit, an international crowd gathered in Paris for three days of talks, workshops and networking. With a good mix of inspirational and practical talks, the recurring topics of the first day for me were service design,  what IA is all about and the relationships with business, development and marketing.

Keynote – Oliver Reichenstein: iA on IA

Oliver Reichenstein

Building upon ideas discussed over at his blog, Oliver started his keynote by sharing why he chose to be @iA and how his understanding of information architecture evolved. Oliver liked the sound and notion of ‘Information Architect’, but when he first encountered IAs on a project, he was ‘traumatised’ by jargon, dogma and self-importance. It didn’t match what he saw in the term:

• IA can be related to philosophy – philosophers are mind architects (Nietzsche), IAs are philosophical engineers;
• IA is about communication;
• IA is about seeing what works and how it looks, about (re)building until your initial vision has found its shape (this is fun – play Lego);
• IA is the recipe for cooking good user experience.

But, can information be architected?
Oliver addressed this question by sharing how things are done at iA. An information architecture evolves and refines itself throughout the product development process. It’s the first concrete result of user and client research that the iA strategy team molds into initial wireframes. Information architecture becomes tangible in the design sketches, and Oliver presents wires and information architecture next to each other to his clients.

IA is what programmers at iA do, moving from the flat lands of Fireworks into prototyping. It’s optimised through prototyping, A/B testing, studying user behaviour, fixing mistakes watching and evaluating user behaviour live. Everybody at iA contributes from their perspective – designers, product managers, developers.

Often at conferences, the Q&A at the end of a talk turn into boring comments everybody is forced to listen to. However after Oliver’s keynote, the topics triggered by questions from the audience where almost more interesting than his session:

On creating beautiful things
Beauty in interaction design happens through use, through experiencing. Writer doesn’t look spectacular, but it’s functional and beautifully useful. Die Zeit hired iA not only because they knew the outcome would look good, but because they wanted to make it functional.

On how he was influenced by his studies of philosophy
Philosophy is about understanding the development and organisation of motions. Studying philosophy teaches you to understand different perspectives, hence it’s a good training for understanding how a design is being looked at, and developed from different points of view.

On Japanese web design and business culture
To the western world, Japanese websites look cluttered – but we don’t grasp just how much content they contain, with each Kanji carrying a high density of information. Consider the different reading and information processing behaviour, but also the different notion of beauty. As a designer, it can be challenging to work with clients in a business culture that holds agreement from all parties dear. IA is a science, but to a certain point also art; IAs take directions that not everybody agrees with, and then test if these work. An approach that’s hard to sell to Japanese clients.

If all of this sounds interesting to you, take a look at Jeroen’s interview with Oliver.

Design beyond the ‘glowing rectangle’: user experience design and research implications of the internet of things – Claire Rowland and Chris Browne

(by Franco Papeschi)

Claire and Chris shared their considerations about the impact of connected smart objects on design and user experience. The ‘Internet of things’ is a promise yet to be realised, but there are examples that begin to show the potential, a potential that could bring between 22 and 50 billion of connected objects by 2020. Connected bicycles, umbrellas or prescription bottles, are already there. As part of SmarcoS, a multi-company R&D project, Claire and Chris have identified some key challenges for designers:

• Services and UI design need to scale and work across devices;
• Interoperability of data and objects;
• Privacy management of all the data generated can get complex;
• New research and prototyping methods to iterate and evaluate the internet of things (eg bodystorming, paratyping, wizard of oz prototyping, drama methods, and ethnography) to understand;
• New mental models and metaphors.

Examples and solutions for these challenges were one of the most important takeaways, including a story from a connected city in Korea, where one smart card gives you access to public transport, libraries and other services . Claire and Chris promised to publish their talk online soon, and material will also be available on the SmarcoS website. In the meantime, if you want to find out more, we recommend having a look at Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino’s work.

Confusion and Clarity in IA – D. Grant Campbell

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful.

Information architecture strives to make complex information spaces clear to users by anticipating user needs and selecting or suppressing details. Beck’s map of the London Underground is a pioneering example of information visualisation and IA: it serves a specific purpose, navigating the tube network, extremely well by showing you only what’s related to this purpose.
The web is no longer a place we make excursions to with an objective, but omnipresent. We can no longer rely on designing clarity by focussing on users’ purpose, as information needs are now often temporary moments in a longer process. Problematic information situations, eg when you’re bankrupt, unemployed, or have learned about a chronic illness, can be confusing and perplexing. How can we create oases of clarity?

Grant related this challenge to cities – places of seeming confusion, but when you look carefully the complexity turns into patterns. He argued that IAs need to develop their vocabulary to talk about patterns emerging from chaos. Using Charles Dickens’ Bleak House as an example, Grant discussed how descriptions of cities in literature could inform designing complex information environments.

IA is an oscillation between articulations of perplexity and the creation of coherence, trying to create oases of clarity. To do this, we have to acknowledge the confusion that’s there, and find ways to articulate the resemblance, the relationship between perplexity and coherence.

Sounds complex? 45 mins were too short to explore Grant’s ideas for new metaphors, so I shall read Bleak House and wait for Grant’s next publication on the topic to follow up.

The New, Smart Customers. How they really buy and how we can address this – Carmen Fehrenbach & Axel Roesgen

Carmen and Axel started their talk on designing for retail by reminding us that buying decisions are very individual, depending on the customer’s personality and attitude, the product, the circumstances and the culture. Pulling together research by Forrester, Sapient Nitro and the Consumer Commerce Barometer, the talk focussed not on spontaneous, but considered purchases.

Consider the purchase path:
Idea > Research > Decision > Purchase > after-purchase experience and opinion-building

For considered purchases, the idea is triggered intrinsically – the challenge is to make customers stay, and buy. Understand your users and design for relevance.

How people research depends on the product. While online reviews are a main information source when buying electronics, people like to look at clothes in store. But often research takes place both in the online and offline space. Have you ever taken a print-out of your online research to the shop, to make sure you find the right product and have all information to hand to make a decision? Have you ever looked up online reviews via your smartphone while in a shop? People go as far as taking photos of themselves wearing clothes in the shop, only to take home to get feedback and ponder over their buying decision. Make sure you understand, and address, customers’ information needs for different products.

How we can design for the cross-channel retail experience? While we often only get the chance to design one part of the retail experience, bear your customer’s journey in mind, and look at all the information on buying behaviour that’s out there.

Organisations often underestimate what it takes – it’s hard to align content, taxonomies, backend behaviour and billing processes. Service blueprints, touchpoint matrixes, visualisations of mental models and experience maps are tools to communicate the purchase flow and all of its touchpoints.

Besides the challenge to tackle the system that is the retail experience, it can be difficult to track conversion and get data how customers move between different channels.

Alignment diagrams: strategic ux deliverables – James Kalbach

Other talks touched on UX deliverables that visualise the complexity of a service or system, so it was great that James Kalbach put together a comprehensive overview of the tools to hand.

Referencing Jess McMullin (if you’re interested in UX and business, Jess’ work is a must), James introduced value-centered design, and defined alignment diagrams as diagnostic tools that allow us to identify how we can create value for our users, and for the business. It’s crucial to make value explicit to your design, business and tech teams through visualisation.

1. Service blueprint
   Check out this example of a service blueprint by Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer
2. Customer journey map
   At the top: phases of interaction a person has with a company, brand, product or service over time
   Each phase has different facets of information (interaction, paint points, ‘moments of truth’).
   The map describes customer experience and the business touchpoints.
   At the bottom: business SWOT analysis for each phase.
3. Workflow diagrams
   Map what a customer is doing against what business is doing. The diagram can be aoverlaid with painpoints and other information. It’s similar to the journey map, but a different visualisation.
4. Mental models
   An example from Indie Young’s book groups tasks into goal spaces. The model shows how the business can address these goal spaces, but also how it can benefit from the customers’ goals. Mental models are not about a strict chronology as the flow, diagrams, but visualisation based on hierarchies.
   “A mental model helps you visualise how your business strategy looks compared to the existing user experience.” – Indie Young
5. Behaviour matrix
   Using an example from his book, an behaviour matrix is a table consisting of: phase / actions / thoughts / feelings / features / business
6. Isometric map
   Take a look at Paul Kahn’s work

Benefits: Alignment diagrams create common understanding, show the big picture, provide a common language, create value, support continuity in vision (prototyping the end-to-end service design) and facilitate enterprise IA (visualise how needs to talk to whom to make the service happen).

Arguments: If you take these deliverables to non-UX folks, to business people, have good arguments ready. Alignment diagrams visualise business complexity (diagrams can bring an array of clarity), cross-channel experiences and help to find opportunities for differentiation, innovation and growth.

Business literature talks about service design, so there’s vocabulary we can use. Recommended:

• 1984 article in Harvard business review: G. Lynn Shostack: Design Services that Deliver. Pioneered service blueprints;
• 1992 Karl Albrech:t The only thing that matters. Value at the core of things;
• 2007 Ram Charan: What the customer wants you to know. Value chain.

Why is this relevant for IAs?
We can bring our skills to the table: research, analyse abstract concepts, organise information, create visual representations and communicate across teams.

Marketing departments and consultancies are taking over the service mapping space, but there’s opportunities for solving business problems through design.

What do to now?
Check out James’ Customer journey mapping resources on web
Read Indi Young’s book, Harvard Business Review, Ram Charan
Try diagramming

On why we should NOT focus on user experience – Koen Claes

(by Franco Papeschi)

Starting from Daniel Kanhemann’s consideration that “we actually donʼt choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences.”, Koen suggests designers should change their approach – decisions are made by the ‘remembering self’, rather than the ‘experiencing self’. Koen shared a series of design principles (and examples) for how to make something memorable. His recipe for designing SUCCESS:

• Simple;
• Unexpected;
• Concrete;
• Credible.
• Emotional;
• Stories.

Make sure your experience finishes strong. Endings are the most important part of a journey, as they have the bigges impact on your memory of an experience.

Implementing identity on guardian.co.uk . Challenges, deliverables and ethics – Martin Belam

The Guardian has 2.1 m unique users daily, 1.2m pieces of content in the database, tagged with 7000+ keywords, displayed in 150+ templates and just one IA.

This sole IA is Martin Belam , who shared an insightful story of a six month project tackling users’ digital identity on the Guardian website with us. While the Guardian knows a lot about content, there’s little knowledge about the site’s users. An identity platform would give people a personality on the site and help understand who is part of the Guardian reader community.

Martin started the project by making ‘an explainer’ – a presentation for pitching internally why the problem of users’ identities needed addressing. While users create public content, such as comments on articles, there’s also a need for a private dashboard, eg for information posted on the job part of the website. Besides recording and distributing his explainer, Martin visualised the problem using wireframes and sketches, carrying a ‘portable IA kit’ and collaborating closely with the design and development team. As he puts it:

Lots of my work isn’t deliverables designing the system, but deliverables to get the system built in the first place.

A key issue Martin addressed was reusing existing digital identities vs creating a new one on yet another website or service. Lanyrd is a clever example of a service built around an existing identity, in this case Twitter. Should the Guardian pull in rich data about their readers from eg Facebook? OAuth raises concerns: what happens if the service your customers used to register closes down? The recent OAuth implementation by Twitter isn’t acceptable, as the Guardian can’t control the information. Due to these considerations, the Guardian decided to get their own registration right, and then see where integration would make sense.

We see many websites integrating 3rd party services – be careful and only integrate social elements that make sense in the context of your site. Consider the Facebook ‘Like’ button next to sad or controversial news. Sharing would be more appropriate, but with ‘liking’ likely to replace sharing, this feature doesn’t fit the context of a news website.

Finally, Martin talked about his guiding principles for designing for privacy. It’s all about trust, and ideally you should tell your users what data you collect and how it’s being used. This can be a challenge to push for, as telling your users what’s going on can scare them, seem like too much information, and conflict with business objectives. Dark Patterns around privacy and sharing are emerging (take a look at Harry Brignull’s worrying collection ) – these patterns lead to mistrust, and won’t be accepted by users in the long run. Services like Webfinger or RapLeaf show were things might be heading.

To get now comments on a Guardian article, you have to write about geeky tech and IA stuff. Comments are often what makes articles most interesting. Martin shared a story about ‘gherkingirl’, who added a real-life story to an article about rape by sharing her own experience as a comment. Taking her anonymity away by connecting her Guardian profile to her identity on a 3rd party service would have made this impossible. Every user has an identity on the Guardian site – we need to allow people to define their identities in the context of each service, and don’t enforce one web identity.

Each week Mark will bring us the latest UX news from around the world wide web. This week the the most important news was the announcement by Intel CTO Justin Rattner on a future of context-aware devices. And there were some cultural bytes (or shall I say bites) by ethnographer Tricia Wang, who in her own way also talked about context.

Intel CTO on the future of context-aware devices

Justin Rattner, Intel CTO, talked this week about a future of context-aware devices. If you think carefully about how we live now with the devices we own and carry around, we have to admit that we still have to adapt way too much to them. Devices are dumb about the context they are in or the people that carry them. As UX researchers we know that many people complain about the overload of information and ask for simplification and real support. We know people want relevancy and Rattner provides an initial answer to that need, by imagining a future where devices become highly personal assistants or companions. His answer was initial and highly tech-centric, so it now needs to be worked on. This is our challenge, as user experience designers. It is not a minor job. In fact, it could turn out to be our key challenge in the coming years. It surprised me that hardly anyone in the UX community has reflected on the implications of Rattner’s speech – coverage was mostly in the tech press – and I hope this analysis will come in the coming weeks.

Culturalbytes

The other main inspiration for me this week was Tricia Wang, whose blog Culturalbytes I explored again with delight. I particularly like her determined eagerness to exposing the myth that free and open access to information, and in particular information technology, can create real social change, most of all outside of the United States. “Neo-informationalist policies, such as the new “internet freedom” foreign policy to ensure free and flowing information, compliment neoliberal practices in corporate welfare to keep markets free and open to the US and all of our allies who benefit from our work. But it’s not free for all when it’s just free for some.” Her analysis is daring and thought provoking, and I think quite on the mark. It makes you think twice about ITC4D and HCI4D initiatives. And thinking twice is always a good approach to follow.

Other interesting news

Intel: it’s all about the experience
source: techradar.com

The Intel announcements this week, particularly those by CTO Justin Rattner, are quite visionary. But also anthropologist Genevieve Bell’s approach is making waves in the community, such as this article by TechRadar.com.

Before the Experience Lab, [Genevieve Bell] was working with the Digital Home team; a job she jokes that she got because of her criticism of Intel’s ill-fated Viiv platform; while Intel engineers were promising to “unleash the PC in your TV” she was pointing out that people already had a screen in their living room and they didn’t want it to behave anything like a PC.

“We put up with things in PCs that we would never put up with in a TV. Imagine the first time the TV told you it needed a new driver or the first time your Tivo said it needed to defragment before you could record a programme – or the first time your TV blue screened!”

Instead, she says, Intel should have been asking “What is the essence of TV that people love so much? What is it that’s so compelling that we still organise our day, our time and our furniture around it?” The very un-PC answer is that “People love TV because it’s not complicated. It’s one button to a story they care about.”

The digital panopticon
source: O’Reilly Radar

In 2009 Joshua-Michéle Ross explored on O’Reilly Radar a series of questions on the value and function of social media (a.k.a. social technologies).

“I will not be arguing that social technologies are a bane or should be stopped. I don’t believe the former is true and I believe the latter is impossible… I will not be arguing against technology. Rather, I will raise questions about the potential abuse of social technologies and the steps we might take to remedy them. The more discussion this prompts within the Radar community the better.”

Part 1: The evangelist fallacy, social media and the new Age of Enlightenment
Part 2: Captivity of the commons
Part 3: The digital panopticon

Imagine a technology that, through a single sensor, enables a user to control an object or device simply by thinking about it. Nothing as extreme or big brother as mind reading or predicting actions, the technology acts as a binary sensor measuring concentration and causing a visible reaction to a physical artifact.

While some fun games such as Mattel’s Mindflex offers a practical gaming experience others such as Uncles Milton’s Star Wars Force Trainer offers a more hokey albeit attractive and fantasy driven interaction. Still, there is unmeasurable amount of potential in tapping our thoughts while interacting with the physical world. At a glance, there is likely hesitation to wearing a headband to interact with any gaming system (remember Virtual Boy?)

Imagine the hardware becoming more unobtrusive. Now what if a game’s difficulty is not chosen but earned? As a player becomes more complacent with a game, the system detects less concentration as they mindlessly go through the levels – now the difficulty could naturally increase. No longer do I need to choose novice or expert, but based on my level of concentration the game maintains a constant if not increasing level of engagement. Where else outside of gaming can this interaction be used? Zooming into a design file or browsing the internet? Scrolling articles? While the limitations of a binary interaction (more or less concentration) are confining, as various types of thoughts are interpreted what type of mental gestures might develop?

_{Top image by Neurosky}

Less than one year ago, most of my clients were requesting iPhone app design.  Today they are still asking for iPhone app design but many also say, “Do you do Android, too?”  Most of them plan to start with one platform, see how things go, and then decide whether to invest in the second platform.  This roll-out strategy is often tied into engineering costs.  Since few developers possess the coding skills required for each platform—Objective C for iPhone and Java for Android—it’s often necessary to hire two development teams. But what about design?

Would I, too, have to do twice the work when designing for the iPhone and Android?  And what will happen if the Windows, Palm, and Blackberry app stores take off?  Would I have to do five times the work?  This dilemma reminded of the “browser wars” back in 1996, when Netscape and Microsoft used to hire evangelists to teach design and coding for their respective browsers.  Eventually these proprietary standards were replaced with industry-wide standards but it didn’t happen overnight.

Many say the same will be true of the different smartphone platforms, that they’ll eventually be replaced with something like HTML 5.  This could happen at some point, but we’re not there yet.  HTML 5 works well for “web apps” and “hybrid apps.”  “Web apps” look very much like native apps but they can’t access device data and hardware such as the user’s contacts, the photo library, voice recording, and device movement. In contrast, “hybrid apps,” which provide access to web content through a web viewing area, can access the device hardware and include native user interface elements.  Companies like PhoneGap provide tools to simplify cross-platform development for hybrid apps.  Using these tools, developers can create apps that are nearly identical across platforms.  This may be effective for certain apps, e.g., games, but productivity apps, e.g., email, may want to customize the UI for each platform.

So we’re back to the dilemma: do designers have to do twice the work to create native apps for the iPhone and Android?  Based on my recent analysis, I came to this conclusion: the app definition and concept phases would be very similar regardless of platform, but the app refinement and production phases would require adaptions to create full-fledged native apps for each platform.  The remainder of this article discusses these differences based on these four phases: Definition, Exploration, Refinement, Production.

Definition

In the definition phase user research can help you acquire a deep understanding of your users’ needs and how these needs are currently being met.  With this research foundation, you may uncover opportunities for new apps and develop innovative solutions that improve upon existing apps.   Your user research methods in the Definition phase—diary studies, user interviews, shadowing— will be similar regardless of platform.  To learn more about these methods, consider reading Jan Chipchase’s Methods Blog.

In the Definition phase, you’ll also want to read each device’s technical specifications and UI guidelines (e.g., iPhone Human Interface Guidelines, Android’s User Interface Guidelines, Android UI Tips) Knowing what’s possible will help when you get into concept development. App designers should also learn about multi-touch gestures which are well-documented in the following Touch Gesture Reference Guide. The iPhone and Android have significant overlap but there are a few exceptions.

Exploration

Armed with your upfront research, you’ll want to start brainstorming and sketching app ideas.  Try to be as platform agnostic as possible since it will allow you to freely explore a variety of concepts without getting bogged down by platform differences.  This can be challenging if you have more experience with one platform since you’ll naturally gravitate to what’s familiar.  For example, given my knowledge of the iPhone, I instinctively include Back buttons in my sketches, but Android doesn’t use Back buttons.  On Android, users must tap the Arrow button on the device to go back.  As an alternative, a platform agnostic sketch could include arrows to illustrate navigation between screens.  Similarly, storyboards can work well if they highlight the user and context and place less emphasis on screen designs.

Once you start prototyping and testing your app concepts, it will become increasingly difficult to remain platform agnostic, though this may depend on the app.  For example, gaming apps tend to be self-contained so your prototypes may be very similar across platforms.  But apps like Facebook and Yelp have different navigation styles for the iPhone and Android.  If you test prototypes with users, they may be confused if the apps don’t follow platform conventions.  Notable differences between iPhone and Android navigation are summarized below.

iPhone and Android navigation differences

To illustrate these navigation differences, let’s compare Facebook’s iPhone and Android apps (see images below).  Notice how the iPhone app has one button that goes Home/Back whereas the Android app uses the Facebook logo to go Home and the Arrow button on the device to go back.  Tasks are also treated differently.  On the iPhone primary tasks (status update and commenting) are accessed directly on the page; secondary tasks (load new posts) are accessed by “pulling down” the screen.  On Android, status updates are treated the same way as the iPhone, however, other tasks are accessed through the Menu or by tapping and holding table rows.

Refine

Once you get into your app refinements, it will become increasingly difficult to incorporate abstract design elements.  Even if you have an app that’s self-contained, such as a game, you may have a sign up process, settings, or other features that require you to follow platform conventions.    In some cases, you may be able to embed HTML within your native app but these controls may be less ideal than their native counterparts.  For example, Android and iPhone have created widgets to make it easier to choose dates in the mobile context.  Native apps can easily incorporate such widgets but embedded HTML pages can not.  Below is a partial list of common UI controls for the iPhone and Android.  For a complete list of iPhone UI controls, please see the Application Controls section in the iPhone HIG.  Unfortunately, the Android UI Guidelines do not include UI controls.  You may need to dig into the Android Developer Docs.

Production

When you reach the production phase of your app design process, you’ll want to make sure your images are the correct resolution for each platform.  Unfortunately, not only are there differences between platforms but there are differences within platforms.  For the iPhone 4, the new Retina Display is at 640 x 960 whereas the earlier phones were at 320 x 480.  And with Android, the latest Droid X is at 480 x 854 which they call HDPI, but older phones are lower resolution and called MDPI.  Both operating systems will auto-scale high resolution images down, though some developers I spoke with don’t trust the quality.

To minimize the work involved with multiple platforms and resolutions, make sure all of your custom assets are absolutely necessary.  Aside from your company logo and/or symbol you may not have to create many assets.  Both platforms provide icons for common app tasks (take a look at the iPhone icons and Android icons) and there are a number of services that sell icons at a reasonable cost.  If neither of these options meet your needs, consider hiring a skilled illustrator for the work.

Summary

iPhone and Android are the current market leaders in the smartphone space but things are likely to evolve in the years to come.  We may see Windows, Blackberry, Palm or another competitor edge into first or second place.  Whatever happens, more and more designers are going to be confronted with the question: Will I have to do twice the work?  Five times the work?  Part of me would like to see standards evolve, mostly from a user experience standpoint but also from a business perspective.   Standards will make it easier for companies to provide smartphone apps on multiple devices.  As it stands now, they need to prioritize devices because of the costs involved.  At the same time standards could slow down the rapid pace of smartphone innovation, which would negatively impact everyone. And of course HTML 5 holds great promise but it’s too soon to tell if it will eventually replace the native app platforms. For now, I hope this articles helps you in your endeavors and perhaps you’ll only need to do less than 1.5 times the work.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Omar Younis,  Marty Picco, Jonathan Stark, Michael Mayo, and Emmanuel Carraud for sharing their insights on this topic.

Further Reading

• iPhone Human Interface Guidelines: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/userexperience/conceptual/mobilehig/Introduction/Introduction.html

• Android User Interface Guidelines: http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/index.html

• Android UI Tips: http://www.slideshare.net/AndroidDev/android-ui-design-tips

• iOS Icons Made in Pure CSS: http://blog.graphicpeel.com/post/740928981/ios-icons-made-in-pure-css

I have been meaning to write about Likes and users interests for quite some time. But the matter is complicated. So rather than wait to write the perfect post, I’m going to lay down some cornerstones, sketch a few concepts and maybe develop some key arguments.

I’ll begin with a bit of the raison d’etre. Likes are not just the core social gesture on Facebook. They are a one-click sign of interest used on many kinds of social services. Likes are like social bookmarks — a simple expression of interest in a bit of social data. That is, a selection of one thing among many things, an expression simplified in order to communicate to an audience.

Let’s break this down somewhat. For the Like isn’t a clear and direct expression of the user’s interest, or like. The reasons for this are several-fold. (I have written on this in the past, but a brief summary can’t hurt.)

One gesture is not capable of capturing differences in degree. Clearly, when we like something, our like varies by degree

A one-word gesture is not a linguistic statement. This limits the expression of interest. There will be ambiguity in the selection itself, owing to:

• The reason for liking is not provided;
• The kind of like is not provided;
• The purpose of sharing the like is not stated;
• The audience intended in sharing the like has some ambiguity (due to the medium);
• Any interest in soliciting conversation or commentary is ambivalent.

For example, liking a song is not the same as liking the band that performs the song. Liking a band is not the same as liking a genre, a time period, or a category of music. Liking a song online in order to save it for later, to share it with friends, to add it to one’s history, folders, or other collections, or even to solicit the interest of others — these are all differences.

We should be able to agree that the Like, as an online gesture of interest, reduces differences to a single degree. And there are yet more problems with the Like.

Liking online is a social act. Even when it’s an individual act of social bookmarking, it’s a act committed in front of an audience. Whether that audience pays attention doesn’t matter. Fact is, there are many individual Likes that are committed with the knowledge that others may see them.

If social action is intrinsic to the gesture of Liking, then we can agree that it is impossible to determine what’s intended by liking. The individual interest is compromised by the social action of sharing that interest.

This gets interesting if we think about the importance of social gestures to capturing and creating value in online social media. We have opted for the simplicity of user experience over the clarity of more differentiated symbolic system. That’s fine. But we need to now be aware of the consequences.

We have noted that the Like introduces ambiguities of intent, of degree, of relation (type), and of communication. The Like also introduce ambiguities into the quantity and quality of value created.

Consider that for many social systems, business models rest on capturing a user’s evaluation and selection of an object, or bit of content, such that user participation adds value to that content. That’s more or less the gist of most commercial social media. (It’s not the key value proposition of communication tools — their interest is in building habits of use, such that their activity can be paired to content experiences elsewhere or later.)

The value added, then, matters. Content is objective, has objective attributes that we can store and by means of which we can organize content (a store; taxonomies and categories, for search and findability). Social engagement with that content adds social evaluations.

These subjective selections and choices create taste. Taste is captured in trends — and can correspond to social groups and identities. Furthermore, popular tastes can be used to drive exposure to content. For better or worse, popularity alone is a reliable means of organizing and navigating content (and people).

I have seen — as have you — a number of systems built around interest pivoting. These use the interests captured from user participation to create navigation to users (e.g. members of a dating site); and to create contexts of interest for the purpose of advertising.

The notion of using interests (same as Likes) for social navigation would seem to make perfect sense. But there is the matter of: for what? If an interest captured says something about my taste, the next question must be: in what contexts do I wish my social interactions to be an extension of my interests or tastes?

In dating, for example, I may (not) want to find somebody like me. I may (not) want to find somebody who likes what I like. I may (not) want to find somebody who likes exactly this (book, song, band, movie, actor, tv show…). Where interests are used as pivots and views of a system’s membership, differences of degree and type matter quite a bit.

The dating site is but one example. I suspect that many companies in the social space are betting on the value add of user interests captured within a social context. The promises of reviews, recommendations, social and realtime filtering, social search, and more invest heavily in the assumption that social commerce trumps conventional commerce. Social commerce extracts the distinctions of tastes; non-social commerce relies on uitility, functionality, price, and other “objective” measure of value.

What’s more, any decent brand knows that it has no choice but to go social. For it’s in social commerce that branding communicates (socially); becomes socially relevant, and accrues the narrative and imagistic benefits of socialized taste-making.

I can return us now briefly to the gesture of the Like. We now have a more differentiated understanding of what the Like represents and means. We can see that it is a unique type of sign that signifies value and interest in ways mission critical to social media. We know, too, that the Like alone does not capture, convey, or communicate all of its distinctions.

We can see that some of these may be supplied by means of interactions and practices — in short contexts in which gestures of interest are captured or presented, used to organize results, to filter among content sources, or used to frame views of people and content.

We can see, in other words, that the gesture and expression alone are inadequate to either capture or represent a user’s interests. And we can see what we will need to explore next: the ways in which social interactions and practices may clarify the value of the value added.