When I tell people that I have a background in architecture, I usually follow that statement with “as-in-designing-buildings” because people often assume that means that I have a computer science degree and was a software architect. But no, by “architecture” I am referring to the years I spent hunched over a drawing board and building models out of balsa wood and cardboard.

UX and Architecture

I am sure that the connection between User Experience Design and Architecture is not an unfamiliar one; even here on Johnny Holland there is a post “Interaction Design and Architecture: A Video Primer” that highlights eight videos in which people talk about the connections between the two fields. But, as someone who studied architecture and worked as an intern architect, when people ask me what the connection is between them, my response is two-fold. Firstly, an important part of architecture is the design of the navigation, orientation and way-finding through and within spaces. User experience design also encompasses the design of those aspects; the difference is in in the materials used to embody those designs. To quote Christina Wodtke:

Much like our real world namesakes, we design spaces for human beings to live work and play in. The big difference is the materials we work with…

Secondly, as an architect, you represent the voice of the client throughout the design and build process. You are constantly mediating between the various engineers and tradespeople, while representing the needs of the client. Similarly, as a user experience designer you are representing the needs of the end-user throughout the product design and development process while mediating between the various stakeholders such as project management, development and quality assurance.

What Did I Do

I didn’t know what I wanted to do when it came time to apply for university. But, then I went for a visit to Carleton University that happened to coincide with “Kosmic”, an annual party put on by Carleton’s School of Architecture. The school had been completely transformed, through the magic of enormous corrugated cardboard structures and a lot of creative lighting, into a “Through the Looking Glass” themed-world. My mind was made up, that school was where I wanted to go.

After graduating from Carleton, I found a job in a very small Ottawa firm. As a part of the internship to become a licensed architect in Canada there is a requirement to log hours across the full-range of what an architect does, such as: doing design sketches and producing working drawings; running client meetings; conducting on-site inspections with the contractors and sub-trades; as well as producing any change requests or addenda as changes are made throughout the construction phase. Since our office was small, the two architects were able to let me get experience in almost every area that I needed to get experience in; until there was a recession.

How I moved into UX

Late in 1996, things really slowed down in the office, to the point where the architects had to let me go. I was making ends meet doing contract work, when I heard about a new Master of Architecture program that was going to be starting in the fall of 1997 at Carleton University. This new program was going to explore the relationship between “traditional” architecture and the design of “new” virtual spaces and interfaces. Unfortunately, this program no longer exists, but in 1997 I was accepted into the inaugural year of the Master of Architecture, Design and Technology program. After completing my first year, I went back to working full-time at the architecture firm for the summer. But, after receiving a phone call from a classmate about a summer position as a UI Designer at Corel, I went for an interview and was offered a contract for the summer. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I went and spoke to the two architects – they practically packed up my desk for me, right then and there. They told me that I had been working for them for over three years and had a clear understanding of what it was going to be like to “be” an architect, but I had no idea what it would be like to “be” a UI Designer, so they convinced me to take the contract. When the summer ended, I stayed on part-time at Corel through the fall and winter while I finished my thesis and then started full-time after graduation.

I stayed at Corel for eleven years.

What I Bring to UX From It

There is so much about what I learned from architecture that can be applied to User Experience Design, but here are a few of them:

1. Ideas aren’t precious.
   At Carleton, at various points during our projects we would hang-up our work for public display and present our ideas for critique from our peers, professors and visiting critics. Early sketches and quick massing models were presented and discussed, as were our final, laboriously rendered, drawings and meticulously crafted models. From all the presentation and discussion of my own projects, and those of everyone around me, I came to realize that ideas aren’t precious. Ideas are there to be discussed, debated and critiqued; but in order for that to happen, the ideas must be made concrete. It is through this transformation from idea to object where people display their design skills, by showing their ability to articulate their ideas through the material of their craft, be it a sketch or a model or a mock-up or code. It’s that concrete manifestation of the idea that can then be communicated to others and iterated upon, in order for it to improve and not be something that is coveted as a precious design artifact.
2. S**t happens. or Nothing ever gets built as planned.
   In school, as we worked back and forth (from sketch to model, then back to drawing, then back to model again) the models and drawings never matched each other, and we were criticized if they did. The goal of this translation back and forth was to have one manifestation of the idea inform the other, and to continually improve as you went from one medium to another. Once I started working in an architecture firm I quickly realized that the same held true for “real” buildings, nothing ever gets built as planned. These changes need to happen for a myriad of reasons: the requirements change; steel structure of the existing building isn’t exactly where the as-built drawing said it was going to be; and on, and on, and on. But it’s just a regular part of the process of translating a working drawing of a building into its built form. The same holds true for User Experience Design. Nothing will ever get built as planned. Changes need to happen for a myriad of reasons as the implementation is underway, but it’s just a normal part of the process for translating interaction designs and visual designs into products.
3. Listen to others, especially those that know better than you do.
   In my last year of my undergrad I had a professor, who told us, time and time again to listen to the tradespeople, because they all knew more than we did. For example, a drywaller with twenty-five years experience, probably has some pretty good suggestions on how to improve a bulkhead detail, they may have suggestions as to how to better anchor it to the ceiling, or how to support it in a way that would use less material and would therefore reduce its weight and cost. The tradespeople had experience and knowledge to be learned from, if we were willing to listen.  Similarly, as user experience designers we get to work with a wide range of people: clients, project managers, developers, quality assurance specialists, just to name a few. Each of them have their own area of expertise, or trade, and we, as designers, can learn from their experience and knowledge.
4. Seeing the Big Picture and the Little Details.
   In the architecture firm I worked in, by the time we were creating the design details in the working drawings for a building, we each had a clear image of the building in our minds. So, for example, if the siding contractor told us that the siding needs to be out 2” further than what was shown in the wall section detail, we would have been able to quickly consider the implications of this in all dimensions at both a macro (how will this affect the wall detail at the top, at the bottom, and where it joins the adjacent walls) and the micro (how will this affect the details at the window, door and louvre openings in the wall). Not to say that architects have a monopoly on this type of spatial thinking, but similar to industrial designers, architects can quickly understand the implication of one change across a variety of dimensions. As a user experience designer, the mental gymnastics that were previously required to mentally flip from plan to section to elevation at both a macro and a micro level are now used to visualize the relationship between the elements in a product. This helps me to understand the implications of a change to one element and visualize how it cascades through the inter-related pieces in the design.
5. Know thy client.
   At the early stages in the design process, the architects would go through a requirements gathering phase. For example, if it was a residential project, the architects would go and spend time with the client in their house. They would observe how existing spaces in the house were used and what worked and didn’t work for the client. Some of these observations came directly from what the client told them, and others were uncovered by being an objective viewer and seeing first-hand how the spaces were being inhabited. Only later, as a user experience designer, did I understand that what they were doing was a form of contextual inquiry, to help them gain insight into the living patterns of the client so they could design a space for them which would better fit their needs and living patterns.

What’s the Difference?

Aside from all the similarities in processes from requirements gathering to design iteration, to mediation and negotiation during the construction phase, the one obvious difference between architecture and user experience design is the lifespan of the resulting product. Compared to most buildings designed by an architect, the majority of products created by user experience designers are relatively ephemeral. In some ways, this is a good thing as rapid, iterative releases allows us to continually improve and modify our products in response to changing requirements and customer needs. There is no easy way to do A/B testing for the design of a detail in a building. But, as an architect, the implicit permanence of designing a building carries with it a sense of responsibility. Once that design takes its place within the built environment, its life span is typically much longer than the products we create as user experience designers. I can’t help but wonder if we would have better designed products if some of that responsibility and sense of permanence of architecture found its way into what we do as user experience designers.

As an architect, the implicit permanence of designing a building carries with it a sense of responsibility… I can’t help but wonder if we would have better designed products if some of that responsibility and sense of permanence of architecture found its way into what we do as user experience designers.

What I’ve Found About Moving Into UX

To do well in either architecture or user experience design, the ability to communicate well is key, and the most important part of communicating is listening.

As designers, we need to listen to our clients and their customers to understand their needs and requirements. We need to communicate our designs to both our clients and our development teams in a way that they will understand. Our ideas need to be translated into designs and made concrete, through user scenarios, workflow diagrams, mock-ups or wireframes so that they can be discussed, understood, tested and improved upon. Communication becomes even more important once those designs start being built. As I already stated, nothing ever gets built as planned. Therefore, communication is key in working with the development team to evolve and refine the design as it gets built, and to manage the expectations of the client throughout the development process as those changes are occurring. And, a lot of that communicating is listening.

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Picture from lightmediumbold

Day two of EuroIA had speakers hailing from Italy (actually they were pretty well represented) to South Africa. And amongst the talks we had not one but two different rounds of IA bingo. Who said IA was boring?

People coming in to the second day of talks were greeted with what were called “BS Bingo” cards. While it wasn’t quite a drinking game (yes, there’s an app for that), it did have a prize — a free ticket to EuroIA 2012, won by Jeroen Grit

BS Bingo (top left to bottom right): Google, Social Media, Behaviour, User Research, Information Architecture, Online Marketing, Innovation, Brainstorming, Content Strategy, Gamification, Multi-Channel, Communication Channel, Joker, Funnel, Behaviour Change, Evidence, Joy of Use, User Experience, Persuasive Technology, Persuasion, Usability, Next Best Action, Interaction Design , iPhone, Conversion.

Extending the Storytelling, Boon Sheridan

It takes a great talk to drag people out of bed and been in a conference room at 9am on the second day of a conference, but Boon Sheridan did that, with a packed room to hear his talk on blending IA and content strategy.

He’s noticed that the word ‘deliverables’ have become a dirty word in IA and UX (“don’t worry about deliverables, just do the work”). However, he feels that there are many good elements of deliverables that are useful for a project. Therefore, he proposes using blended deliverables.

Their benefits are:

1. Strategic approach: they’re not throwaway documents as they’re meant to encapsulate the big picture
2. Tactical focus: they help you get sign off!
3. Perfect brainstorming The documents are open for deliberation and easy to make.
4. Ideal for collaboration

He suggests implementing them through the following forms

• Audience personas: What comes before personas: Who are we speaking to? Key messages? What content do they need? Where? This is were audience personas come in. They’re your widest audience that you want to reach, and help you keep perspective
• Content flows: Where is your content going to come from? How are you going to host it? What functionality is needed? These are a great way to identify problems up front/periodically
• Building on it: the key concept behind blended deliverables is that they’re finished but changeable. You should be able to sign off your documents as done, but then be able to review them at a later point and amend them if the system has changed. They give the clarity and aligning nature of deliverables without the pressure of them to be ‘finished’.

The other key concept that Sheridan brought up was the idea of designing for disagreement. (Apparently it was an aside in a speech by Kevin Cheng about Twitter’s design process, even though he doesn’t even remember saying it). The idea behind it is that many of the problems in a design process happen because stakeholders think they’re all agreeing to the same thing when in fact they all have different ideas. Creating deliverables that actively cause people to disagree can help bring up any ambiguity between stakeholders and get them all on the same page.

Pervasive IA for the Sentient City, Andre Resmini & Luca Rosati

Storify curation

Resmini and Rosati gave a talk on the IA of cities based on their recent book Pervasive Information Architecture. Above all, they suggested that we need to consider an information layer in the physical environment, and as a living, resiliant ecosystem.

Rosati (one of many at this conference) referenced Marcia Bates’ methods for information seeking as an important way of understanding a structure for a city:

Marcia Bates's Information Seeking Model

One thing we need to do is change our thinking from top-down strategies to bottom-up ones.

• Top-down is ‘traditional IA’. Examples of this in cities are map and wayfinding systems,
• Bottom-up is a basic system that is adapted. Twitter is one such example:  a ‘stupid’ technology that has been adapted over time. In the physical world, these can be found as desire paths: a result of least effort and time.

Places are used as wax. Places are the site of a mnemonic palimpset

Resmini believes that a lot of the architecture/town planning research was done in the 60s/70s and hasn’t advanced much since then. (He’s also not that much of a fan of Christopher Alexander’s design patterns).

In terms of resiliance and the physical world, this is explored well in Stuart Brand’s How Buildings Learn. Here, it’s shown how change in building happens at different speeds (the outsides slowly decay, which you may redo your kitchen once a decade, your decor every few years and move around your furniture every few months).

Given that neither Resmini and Rosati are town planners (they are an architect and linguist respectively) someone from the audience did ask the inevitable question: isn’t that their job? The work of the IA isn’t seen as being one that takes over from a town planner, but instead collaborates with them to ensure that various offerings such as signage and communication systems are appropriate.

Designing Interactions that Help Customers in Decision Making, Stefano Bussolo

Storify curation

Bussolo’s talk was a breakneck (if beautifully cadenced) tour of the world of neuroscience and its relation to decision-making. His key point was that we should be thinking about chooseability rather than findability, and that different types of users deal with choice in different ways.

When choosing a product, consumers fall into one of three categories:

1. they know exactly what they want,
2. know their preferences for a product,
3. or only know the attributes.

More interestingly, while those two types who don’t know exactly what they want don’t like too many options (decision paralysis or fatigue), those who do like seeing all the others.

So, how do we understand and deal with this? Bussolo explained that it all comes down to heuristics. While we would like to always make decisions logically as it’s highly accurate, it also takes a lot of cognitive effort. Heuristics gives us more bang for our buck by being relatively accurate as well for far less effort.

The heuristic strategies he suggested:

• Elimination by Aspects (EBA): cut out what you don’t want.
• Majority of Confirming Dimensions (MCD) — e.g. opening up browser tabs of all the options for a car and comparing them
• Satisfying Heuristics (SAT): take the first satisfactory alternative e.g. finding a carpark or searching on Google
• Lexicographical Heuristics (LEX): sorting via terms.
• Equal Weight Mean: aggregating set of scores into a whole e.g. Trip Advisor ratings for cleanliness etc and the total score.
• Faceted Information: letting people drill down. Suggests looking at Peter Boersma’s EuroIA 2010 talk on this topic.

In summary:

• Facilitate both rational and heuristic decision strategies
• Divide the processes of decision making
• Design for different users (those who are decided, and those thinking of preferences and attributes)
• Give users some external aid (external cognition, suggestions)
• Categorise

Understanding the Nature of Resistance, Alla Zollers

Welcome to therapy. That was how Zollers introduced her session, and it was all about feelings: namely now to identify and deal with resistance from clients. As she paraphrased from Star Trek, resistance is not futile, but natural and a result of emotional processes that we can’t ignore.

Resistance is … well, you get the picture

Her steps:

1. Acknowledge it: if you have a feeling somethings wrong, you’re probably right (and it’s probably something far bigger than you know about).
2. Identify it: you need to talk this through with your client, in a non-threatening (i.e. therapy-talk) kind of way e.g. “you seem… I feel…” (One person in the audience pointed out that “you seem…” could still be considered aggressive, but as Zollers pointed out, if it helps bring to light the underlying problem).
3. Wait: silence is golden for bringing out the truth if you’re prepared to not fill up the space with chat.

Teaching Design Thinking, Jason Hobbs & Terrence Fenn

Storify curation

Based of their research (a project that was funded by the IA Institute) Fenn and Hobbs talked about how design education needs to change to accommodate the changes in design, with a specifically South African perspective.

Fenn asked: as design educators, are we applying the rules of UCD to design education? If Don Norman says that if someone can’t use a product, it’s most likely the product’s fault, then that suggests that failures in design education is the design education system’s fault.

Their project is specifically focused around the idea of indeterminacy. These days, designers are more than ever expected to be able to do a range of things. But if you send your interaction design students out to investigate transport, and they find that the problem is signage, do you let them do graphic design or force them to do a website? How do you train — and encourage — them to be able to work in areas where they don’t have core skills?

Complexities of Design Education

Fen pointed out that while design thinking is promoted by IDEO etc, it’s locked behind copyright and thus difficult to use in education.

So how do we teach these design wicked problems? As it turns out, IA could be a useful model.

• IAs deal with wicked problems (complex problems, multiple users, huge amount of data) every day.
• It’s very normal for us as IAs to start unpacking all of these aspects “scuplting with the data”, and use qualitative research
• IA problems are usually informational and especially digital, but our exploring problems usually leads to solutions beyond this context.

What was particularly fascinating about this talk was also it’s unique cultural perspective. South Africa’s liberation from apartheid in the 90s had some obvious repercussions, but also others that outsiders might not think about. Fenn and Hobbs highlighted how it has affected the local transport system : a formerly highly structured and thus easy to manage system (different races travelled on different buses and at designated times) has struggled to cope with the change in the overarching system around it. Similarly, when they used examples about designing out crime, it was easy to realise the complexities that they have to deal with ranging from the police to communication.

Fill in the IA Gap, Mags Hanley

Storify page

Industry veteran (and inspiration to many, including fellow speakers) Mags Hanley finished the day both ruminating on the mood of the conference, and the changes to the industry she’d noted since recently coming back.

I’m proud to call myself an information architect. Not an interaction designer, not a user experience designer … an IA.

Hanley still feels a lot of pride for and in the industry, but feels that IA had both narrowed and forgotten to teach a lot of its fundamentals. She told us that Louis Rosenfeld had confessed that he had workshop slides that were over a decade old … but she realised he needed them as people didn’t know what many core concepts of IA were.

And to test us all on whether we did actually know all our fundamentals, she got us to play IA Bingo (not related to the earlier BS Bingo from earlier today):

IA Bingo (top left to bottom right): Audience, Site map, product index, indices, price, subject, format, task, geographical, A-Z index, chronological, theme, topic guide, popularity, TOC, recommendations

(Eric Reiss may or may not have won).

She suggests all IAs should be able to do the following four things:

1. List organisation structures & be able to consciously choose “ya can’t defend it unless ya can choose”
2. Create models of the structures — navigation model, app model, data model — without information in it and be able to show content moving back/forth. One of the key phrases from this conference was around domain models. It’s clear that you need to be able to understand these completely when proposing a solution.
3. Understand deep IA — content objects, CVs and semantic web — at least enough to hire the right person. Deep IA may be a strange and specialised area of IA (like typography?) it’s one you can’t afford to not understand at least a little.
4. Understand how people seek out info (this is different from usability/UX). There is a whole field of research devoted to information seeking in the real world (for example, how women look for information in doctor’s offices). Look for it and draw out skills.

She urged us to tell our stories — junior IAs know methods, but IA provides value around methods — and shared her own from the BBC. She admits that the IA team back in 2002 “lived in their own little bubble”, and she learnt the hard way that your users may not always use your meticulously designed prototypes (BBC music reporters shunned the complicated music content type and just hacked the general one as its output was more pretty) unless there’s a reason (provincial rugby reporters started inputting their game results into the until-then neglected sporting post types as it automatically promoted their page on the website).

We also need to keep doing IA user research (which is more than just card sorting). Other ways of doing research include information seeking (look at search log etc.), hierarchy of infomation, facets, and task flows.

Conversely, be broad in our profession. We need to understand domains such as UX and cognitive psychology to do our job properly.

Be the glue with editors, business, stakeholders, and designers. We’re the people that understand what it’s supposed to be.

Much like the night before, the talks finished up with a call to action:

• Get IA equal standing as a UX field of practice. There’s too much talk about IA disappearing or being a part of UX. It is different.
• Data visualisation: we need to know how to do data visualisations for interaction (and getting decisions made).
• Make IA cool again. As Hanley admitted: “I was going to be a medical librarian … then I found out I could work with computers.”
• Find our voice — blog, talk, tweet, and take away — read, review projects, practice IA, and above all speak about it.

So ended an incredibly diverse (and unbelievably well documented) EuroIA. Next year’s “friendlier than IA Summit” will take place in lovely Rome on September 27-29.

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Image CC by Pedros

Nestled between ornate medieval and stark modernist architecture, EuroIA opened to a sold out crowd from twenty-seven different countries ranging from Japan to New Zealand. And of course, a lot of Europeans.

We’ve also done our first experiment in using Storify for curating conference streams. Love it? Hate it? Prefer it to these reports? Check it out and let us know in the comments. (Also check out the conference Lanyrd or Martin Belums “all your EuroIA slides are belong to us“).

Luke Wroblewski, Today’s Web

Wroblewski (who, organiser Eric Reiss was quick to point out, is in fact a Polish-born European, despite the American accent) kicked off the conference.

In short, tomorrow’s web is social, and mobile.

Social is big

Wroblewski showed how Britekite has changed from using the dreaded webform (after 20 years, you’d think that it would remember my name), to Facebook Connect, which both eases the transition of logging into a new app, but also encourages activity through people you know.

Wroblewski also decribed the 0-1-2 model: you’re twice as more likely to engage in something if two friends are doing it already than if only one is).

Facebook Connect boasts not only an 800m userbase from Facebook, but also that 500m of them will be logged in at any one time.

It’s also had huge pickup in use in 3rd party apps: ( 60m/17% in 2008, 100m/22% in 2009, 250m/30% in 2010).

all software will become social, because everything humans do is social.

The nature of social is also changing how people behave on the web. Mark Zuckerberg is quoted as saying “the best check on bad behaviour is identity”, and has been shown in Quora, which has only had to ban one person in their 250 million userbase.

Mobile

The mobile field is also increasing exponentially. For example,  Amazon has done >$1bn on it in the last 12 months and Best Buy doubles sales through it each year (now at 30m).

Wroblewski pointed out that while we hear about mobile first in developing countries (50% of primary access in Africa/Asia, and 45% in India), the developed world is not far behind: A… but developed countries too: 22% of  people in the UK are predominantly mobile, and the US is predicted to reach 50% by 2015.

This brings up interesting challenges: using a travel website on a desktop not only involves a different screen size, but usually a different context (the mobile may be checking in at the airport).

80% of the crap you design for desktop has to be killed off for mobile

Mobile first philosophies:
Growth = opportunity
Constraint = focus
Capabilities = innovation

The Future:

It’s going to be a zombie apocolypse. Seriously, it won’t be about a few devices, but a plethora of them. Because of this, Woblewski is part of a movement known as Future Friendly investigating how we think about devices in the future.

Today’s web is exciting and scary.

Beyond The Polar Bear, Michael Atherton

Who knew domain modelling could be so interesting? Perhaps when you have arguably one of the richest, and thus most complicated, datasets around to deal with. Atherton explained the process the BBC has gone through to clean up and standardise their vast web offerings, while still allowing for the customisation formerly done with microsites.

He used the concept of Disneyland’s domain system (everything, from theme parks to hotel food, is linked together in rich and non-hierarchical ways) as a great analogy, and one that can be reflected in some of hteir projects.

A Web of Connected Things

• The BBC Programming System paid a lot of attention to URIs. While Tim Berners-Lee tells us that they should be hackable, permanent, and persistent , the impermanence of the Beeb’s media (a series may change numbering when it moves overseas, have a mini-series extended to a full one, and may jump channel or even medium), means that they have have had to sacrifice hackability for the other two (for example, BBC1 programme Sherlock has the URI http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t4pgh ).
• BBC Food challenged what audience and medium you design for. The site wasn’t doing as well in Google as might be expected, because there was a lot of churn of content: chefs retain copyright of their recipes, so they tended to come and go, thus confusing Google (or as Atherton amusingly calls it, “splitting the Google juice”). However, they realised that people are more interested in finding a type of dish (entering via Google) rather than ‘the dish’, so came up with the idea of dish as canonical work — while recipes may come and go, the page stays. This, in combination to paying a lot of attention to mobile display (as might be expected, most pageviews were on a mobile device, presumably as people were in the kitchen) led to traffic doubling from 650 thousand to 1.3m, and much higher ratings on Google.
• BBC Nature is about unlocking and exploring, but also about finding way to managed vast arrays of content. Rather than have to create thousands of pages that might never be seen, the BBC team pulled information on animals from Wikipedia — and had their wildlife experts edit the Wikipedia articles if they weren’t up to par, thus improving the quality of the BBC site and the general information available on the web.

The overall takeaway was the importance of domain modelling (he called Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans “his new bible”):

You need to be able to define the thing to be able to point at it!

and that a shared model + shared language + shared understanding = consistent UX. In other words, the model should be consistent enough that anyone in your team can draw it.

And the web is changing:

design for a world where Google is your homepage, Wikipedia is your CMS, and robots are your users.

Users, Experience, and Beyond, Eric Reiss

Eric Reiss led the audience through a behaviour-centred framework that his team at FatDUX use.

The need matrix is a way to consider the different attributes to any experience (Attitude, Expectation, Schedule, Environment, Origin). Your behaviour when booking a trip is very different from calling the tax office!

Reiss stepped us through how to use the framework:

1. Do customer research
2. Create mental models (ala Indy Young)
3. Write scenarios
4. Tag the interactions throughout the process
5. Create snapshots
6. Do quantitative analysis. Reiss suggests weighting using 1-3 for primary, secondary, and passive interactions, and then coding responses from -3 to +3. The negative answers are important as they can be used to easily show problems.

He urged us to:

• Understand the ergonomics of need for key scenarios
• Consider user experience as the sum of a series of interactions
• Write and chart a scenario to identify, quantify, and prioritse key interactions (snapshots)
• Go out and make the world a better place.

The Information Architecture of Culture, Martin Belam

EuroIA veteran (we reported on his previous years’ talk) and conference reporter Martin Belam gave a refreshingly frank discussions of the bumpy road to implementing APIs at the Guardian.

One of the key ares the Guardian is looking at is how to move discussions beyond a small hallowed circle of critics and reporters. They’re keen to help “mutualise” the relationship between newspaper and their arts audience (as in with mutual funds, find a way for both audience and paper to be supported, a bit concern these days in the eras of paper closures and paywalls)

When you have a bigger audience, where do you hang these conversations?

They had some success with pulling in external content with a music project that pulled information from MusicBrains, and so decided to create a larger system with books. However, it wasn’t quite so simple.

Mistakes:

• Didn’t get API right first time up. The domain model for books is difficult, as ISBNs can change for editions, and are added to CDs, calendars, and even card displays.
• Ignored previous experience Person with library experience said that tried tagging with ISBNs in the past and found it difficult as they’re physical. It turned out that that was still true.
• Too few devs in too big a team. “Fifteen people can change their minds far more quickly than three people can build”
• Got obsessed with design details (45 minute discussions about start rating details!)
• Went for ‘big bang launch’. As there were still a few bugs to be ironed out, this damped a lot of interest in the product.

However, they did have some successes:

• Used an Objects/Properties/Actions Map. This also helped with later mobile first strategy.
• Giving the developers a chance to be creative again. The team was sent to SXSW11, and the developers made an app that scraped information on band members and made a site.  However, the big issue this brought up was the content’s quality and uniqueness (or lack of in both cases). Guardian readers balked at the content often not being up to the site’s usual standards … and Google penalised the entire site as it had a huge number of pages that was scraped rather than original content. They had to deindex the pages, emphasise the site wasn’t usual Guardian content, and create site specific ways to search it.)

He have the following tips:

1. Know what is important. What is the goal you’re trying to attain? And is new technology the answer?
2. ISBNs are evil. ["F**king evil . Worse than mini-bars, which are evil as they put terribly overpriced alcohol in your hotel room"].
3. Trust good developers. Engaged developers can be the most valuable asset on a project. “Coding is actually really creative. Don’t ruin your developers with boring and uninspired briefs.”
4. Listen to all of the team. Job titles and age don’t matter if they have the right answers or knowledge.
5. Get the model right. Lists (rather than ‘pages’ or ‘fronts’) were the key to success. The Guardian got everyone together to create a really strong framework. A good model makes the rest easy.

And a bit of fun: the Guardian was established in 1821. The developers used the API to serve up the news as it would have looked on the original broadsheet. “The developers were particularly proud of ‘Entweet this’”

Out of the Echo Chamber, into the Fire Jason Mesut

The day came to an impassioned end as Jason Mesut played truth or dare with the UX industry. Having been in the field for over a decade, he’s worried with a lot of the precedents and dogmas around.

The Dogmas:

• Mobile first: is confused as an always use strategy. He poined out that Luke’s view is balanced in calling it ‘a way’, but that others (such as clients) quote it as gospel without the nuance.
• The open web: open source and open web are not the only way. While our developer friends care about it, to be honest those in business don’t, so we need to maintain a critical distance. Sometimes proprietary is better!
• Agile: There is more to Agile UX than Sprint OS and Sprints ahead, this is only one aspect, doesn’t always work
• Service Design: most service design and design is a lot of talk and corporate entertainment. “All fart and no shit”.
• Responsive design: an old argument in new clothes (fixed vs fluid, separate access etc). Technology changes rapidly.
• Breaking down silos: this is naive. Organisations are complex, people better in small  groups, change takes too long. “You can’t reorganise people because the website is crap”

One of his most powerful statements is that UX is eating itself with its insular, rockstar centred culture. The picture (for those who’ve seen or at least know of the movie) is priceless:

The Human Centipede of UX Dogma

That said, it wasn’t all fire and brimstone. He challenged IA and UX people to map what they are and where they want to go, and provided a very useful way to show it:

Map Your Own Adventure: What Type of UXers Are You/Want to Be?

His some of his key truths and dares:

Truths

• There is no universal truth in UX. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar
• Sometimes the quietest people have the best things to say. As someone commented on a post by Andy Budd “the people doing the best work are people we’ve never heard of”. They’re not on the conference circuit or hawking a book, they’re just doing their job, and doing it well.
• There are no silver bullets in UX. Repeating them can weakens us. We need multiple weapons, and to know when and how to use them.
• Most UX people don”t articulate what they do and how they are different from others. If we don’t know, how will others? Already we have business and marketing taking on design thinking since no one is saying otherwise.
• Our bubble will burst unless we stamp out the greedy pretenders. There are too many freelancers with scant experience getting too much money and not hanging around. How about paying permanent staff more, and calling out the people who don’t know what they’re talking about?
• There are more non-UCD success stories than UCD success stories. Many business people are successful without UCD, so don’t push it.
• Most UX people are not built for strategy. UX people are nice. Do you really want to be like Jobs, Trump, or Sugar?

Dares

• Don’t tweet soundbites. Or in other words, don’t take comments out of context.
• Critique conference talks.
• Call bullshit on celebrity UX rockstars. Just because they’re charismatic and entertaining doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about.
• Map your UX shape and focus your future. Designer, know thyself.
• Get into the heads of others
• Try more designing, less researching. UX can get obsessed with research to the detriment of the actual product (just as marketing will focus on the marketing of it). The devil is in the design details, or in other words, execution.
• Commit to strategy, or focus on UX. You can’t do both.
• Share opinions & be prepared to change. Be passionate, but flexible. Don Norman has changed his opinion several times, but at least he has one to change

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Image CC by George M. Groutas

Not an Englishman in New York but an American in Denmark, Eric Reiss has been a leading figure in both developing and evangeling information architecture, but promoting European voices in IA through the EuroIA conference. In the lead up to its sixth event, this time taking place in Prague, Vicky Teinaki had a quick chat with Reiss about UX in Europe, IA back in the age of WAP, and his threatened Wikipedia page.

Given your Wikipedia page appears to be at risk of being taken down*, how would you describe yourself new to the world of IA and UX?

Happily, my career doesn’t depend on a mention on the Wikipedia, although it is flattering that so many people took the time to contribute to the page. Basically, though, I am simply someone who spends a lot of time thinking about how to make things better. Generally, if something doesn’t work well or a procedure is difficult, people just shrug their shoulders, sigh, and accept things. I don’t. I never did, even as a small child.

IA seems to always be under attack from other more interesting sounding terms, be it UX (with nods to Jesse James Garret’s “it’s all UX” back in 2008) or more recently content strategy. Where does IA sit these days?

The individual terms are unimportant. But UX is a good umbrella for a lot of skills, including information architecture, service design, etc. And the term is gaining a lot of attention; Scott Berkun calls this “The Golden Age of User Experience”. The problem is not so much the terms we use as those who promote them. But you can’t build a career by putting old wine in new bottles.

You’ve been organising EuroIA since 2005. Right from the outset that EuroIA has been very strong about its regionality (and specifically not being American). What are the challenges (and rewards) involved with catering for such a wide audience as all of Europe?

The challenge is that Europe is incredibly diverse. The cultures are unique, as are the languages. We have some countries that simply refuse to integrate for a variety of political reasons. But helping to build EuroIA, along with a fabulously talented programme committee, local ambassadors in over 20 countries, and the unswerving support of the American Society for Information Science and Technology has been incredibly rewarding.

When we started seven years ago, there were no IA or UX conferences in Europe. We realized the need to build pan-European relationships and respect the cultural diversity that makes us unique. For several years, we didn’t allow Americans to speak simply because they already had good conferences; we needed to bring unknown local talent to the forefront. And we did! Last year, about 25% of the European programme was reprised at the North American IA Summit in Denver. I am tremendously proud that we have been able to stand on our own feet.

Today, there are local conferences throughout Europe. There is a growing professional network.
We have played an important role in bringing this about.  Conversely, our conference perhaps less about information architecture than one might think. Our scope gets broader each year.

I notice you have country ambassadors (very Eurovision!). Can you give us any more information about how that works?

It’s very simple; we need people who know their local communities and can promote the conference in their local language. This is the primary role of the country ambassador. For the most part, people have simply written to me and asked to do the job. And I let them do it. Of course, we bring in new blood from time to time if we don’t feel the CA is pulling his or her weight.

I recently revisited your book on Practical Information Architecture. While a lot of things have changed since 2000 (I’d completely forgotten about the fuss about WAP!) a lot haven’t.

I’m currently working on a revision, along with a good friend and colleague in Budapest, Judit Ponya. We, too, were surprised at how much was still relevant so many years later. But then again, when I wrote the original book, I tried to focus on the generic aspects of the subject and not get bogged down in technologies. The WAP section to which you refer, was in the very last chapter, which dealt with future perspectives of the industry. Curiously, although WAP never caught on, my predictions regarding the rise of apps and such have proven remarkably accurate.

In your keynote for EuroIA “Users, Experience, and Beyond”, you’re promising to give us a framework for looking into experiences. Without giving the game away, can you give us any hints about what you’re going to be talking about?

Well, at my company, FatDUX, we’ve experimented with various tools to help define and quantify user experience. I’ve already blogged about this, but I thought it was high time to actually do a step-by-step run-through of some of our techniques. There’s no obligation for anyone to adopt these, but they work for us and ought to work for others, too.

Eric Reiss is a keynote for EuroIA, taking place in Prague, Czech Republic from September 22-25 2011.

————-

*Editor’s note: as of going to print, Eric’s article appears to be safe.

The key to designing social media well lies in designing it for a user’s social interests. Conventional software addresses the user’s task-oriented needs and objectives. But social media succeed when they engage the user’s social interests.

Social interests involve two psychological insights: that users are interested in others generally (social activities, or what’s going on); and users are interested in others particularly (another user).

Each of these is doubled up by the self-reflexivity of social action: users are interested in how they themselves appear to others in general (one’s self image, impressions made, the stuff of “self-presentation” common in social media); and another particular user’s relationship to him or her (e.g. their interest in us).

From this we can quickly see that social media are not a matter of straightforward goal-oriented interaction design. As users, we are aware (if not consciously) of what and how social activities proceed. We become interested in ourselves, in how we are perceived, and in the relation others take up to us.

Thus the interest captivated by social media is twofold: it’s a self-interest and an Other-interest. And the habits that engage users with social media engage users are not just the interaction between a user and the site, but between the user and other users. In the course of using social tools, reciprocity by others, and our mutual recognition of each other, deepens our interests and interactions.

the interest captivated by social media is twofold: it’s a self-interest and an Other-interest

Because social tools use a medium that works by representing our identities and activities, representations themselves become interesting. Klout is an example of meta data used to create social reputation that becomes motivating in and of itself. Many other representations that have become meaningful (for better or worse) include follower numbers on twitter, being listed, circled, commented on; or being retweeted, cited, tagged, and badged.

Activities that would normally pass by unnoticed in the daily course of work and life accrue different meanings when they are captured and represented online. We become extended. These extensions of ourselves (our social media presences) reflect on us. In turn, we become interested in an externalized and represented “version” of ourselves.

This is possible, as a motivation of action and habit, only because we’re able to form and sustain the ideas involved in extended presence. The idea of friendship, the idea of relationships, the idea of popularity, of importance and attention are all motivating and interesting. Social media can seem to make friends count for more than friendship. In some cases this is positive. In others, it is undermining.

To the social interaction designer, this doesn’t matter. All mediated activities that users may take an interest in become motives and those motives become habit — the ingredient, if you will, of successful social tool design and adoption.

The task of social interaction design is to capture and sustain user interest, even if it’s an interest in the abstraction and idea of accumulating friendships, getting noticed, becoming popular, and so on. Doing that requires successfully generating and feeding interests.

the task of social interaction design is to capture and sustain user interest

To the extent that these might produce meaningful and valuable information in the form of commerce, viral communication, social marketing or meta data, human interests are critical factors of social interaction design. A site or system that fails to captivate these basic social interests will wither on the vine.

The user may become interested in any of the following. Note that in each case we are talking about the perceived status of an interest and relation. Social realities are all subjective, interpreted, and can only be validated to the extent that communication provides truthful and sincere verification. Social media require neither to be successful.

Social and interpersonal interests grow from Self to include an Other in person; Others as friends, peers, groups; Others in general (an audience); and online social activities and pastimes.

The user’s interests develop around:

• his or her own self image as represented
• his or her image and presentation as a reflection of acknowledgment by others
• a particular person the interest that person has in oneself
• a scene or social activitysocial position, or who’s who
• an audience or community
• news and social facts, as circulated by known people

These personal and social interests become habits of use. Habits form not around needs and goals, but again, around the deeper motives that structure individual personality and sense of self. Habits are supported and extended by the tools themselves, and are ever evolving with change in the industry and technologies. Social technologies are simply the functional application of individual and social techniques, applied to identity, relating, interacting, and communicating.

User’s activities can include:

• collecting socially relevant items (including friends)
• accumulating socially relevant distinction
• sself promotion, brand promotion, site promotion, profile promotion (social capital)
• appealing to others through requests, posts (bog, video, audio), and comments, etc
• participating in collaboration (wiki, lists, tagging)
• extending daily activities such as shopping, bookmarking, keeping in touch
• avoiding risks, embarrassment, social faux pas and failures (real or imagined)
• work and work-related successes (admittedly more or less interesting)
• social games, including socialized games, and gamified social
• small habits, from instagramming to music sharing
• influence monitoring, projection of persona and reputation

To conclude, then, social tools can never be grasped from a technical or functional perspective alone. Granted, they are designed, architected, built and extended by means of current industry technologies and standards. But their use, and use is the central orientation of any user experience or interaction designer, is explained not on the basis of what tools do, but why and how they are used. The uses of social tools are not utilitarian — comprising of tasks, needs, or goals. Rather, they are intrinsically psychological and social. And as such, comprise of the relational interests people take in their own self and relations to others as represented and communicated online.

Research plays a vital role in UX, as we need to understand our users and their motivations in order to design products which meet their needs. Market research is all about finding out what people do and why. But how many companies have combined market research and UX teams? I’m going to outline what it’s like to work in this kind of team and share how my background in market research led to a passion for UX.

UX and Market Research: Why Can’t We All Be Friends?

There are a lot of similarities between UX and market research. David Kozatch noted many of them in an article he wrote in 2008 about breaking down the barriers between UX practitioners and market researchers. Earlier this year Richard Anderson wrote about the labels applied to user research and gave the example of Yahoo combining their UX research and market research teams. He argues that ‘it is important to understand that great benefit can be achieved when the two work together’.

I’m not aware of any well known UXers who started out in market research (or at least, who openly admit it!) but I’ve seen many talk or blog about techniques frequently used in market research such as Whitney Hess on user interviews. At the recent dConstruct conference, Kelly Goto’s talk was about the importance of understanding the emotional context in which people are using products through ethnography and other research techniques.

Doing Market Research

Few people actively plan to work in market research and my career planning was, in retrospect, a bit haphazard! I went to a talk at university which described market research as being a suitable profession for those who were nosy interested in people. There may also have been a prize draw involving champagne, and with that I was sold.  More seriously I had always had an interest in psychology, communication and analysis so I thought this might be the right path to follow.

Having graduated with a degree in English, I started my career working for a large market research agency in the continuous consumer panel division. This involved analysing a large set of data about people’s purchasing habits in order to provide insights for clients. Many hours were spent trying to be creative in PowerPoint! I then moved to another agency which focused on ad hoc consumer research. My role there involved managing the whole research process from taking a brief, working out how the sample should be structured, designing a questionnaire, analysing results and presenting them to clients. The purpose of much of the research we conducted was new product development; clients wanted to gain a deep understanding of customer behaviour and attitudes in order to develop appropriate products and test them out with real prospective customers before launch. Often we tested different mock ups of concepts and packaging to see which resonated best with the target audience. Although I didn’t know it at the time, there were some similarities with UX research.

As is common in large research companies, the interviewing was done by a specialised fieldwork division so I wasn’t actually speaking to users very often.  I began looking for a new challenge.

How I moved into UX

I started in my current role as a member of the research team for a b2b media company 4 years ago. We conduct surveys and interviews with professionals in different sectors in order to provide insights to shape the development and marketing strategy for a range of magazines and websites. As the delivery of information digitally has become increasingly important to the company, the focus of our team expanded to include UX. We’d been conducting usability testing for several years, seeing it as a natural extension of qualitative research like depth interviews, but it was the emergence of User-Centred design that really struck a chord. It just made sense and seemed to sum up things we’d been trying to communicate in all our work. Now we build personas, conduct UX reviews and user testing on wireframes, prototypes and live sites, alongside more traditional market research activities. I became so interested in UX that I’ve been completing a part time MSc in User Interaction Design over the past 2 years to really get up to speed with the theory.

What I Bring to UX From It

During my research agency days I learnt how to distil large amounts of data about people’s attitudes and behaviour down to the most relevant insights, which I think is very important in UX roles. I’ve also had a lot of experience giving presentations to different stakeholders and fully understand the value of simple and clear communication, which has also helped me in my current role.

A thorough grounding in research methods is really useful for UXers too, as you need to know when to use a survey compared to a depth interview, and how not to ask leading questions. Representing the voice of the user also comes naturally as I feel I’ve spent my career aiming to do that.

What I’ve Had to Work On

As you might guess from my background, I’m not naturally a very technical person. Since I’ve been working in UX I’ve become much more interested in technology which has resulted in significant investment in Apple products. But I recognise a better knowledge of how websites work would help me communicate with developers. I have very little knowledge of coding, so this is something I’m working on. I’m also not trained in graphic design so at the moment my recommendations go as far as basic wireframes and sketches using tools like Balsamiq. I have picked up some best practice design guidelines but I’m still learning.

Tips for Those Making the Move

I’d advise anyone working in market research who is considering making the move to UX to go for it! You have a lot of transferable skills and if you’re interested in how people interact with technology, it could be for you. Try to immerse yourself and read as many of the books and blogs as you can. There are a lot of great free and useful events you can go to such as UX book club and UPA meetings. These are excellent ways of meeting other UXers and learning about the field. There are also training courses and conferences (for example, UX London) if you can find the funding to go. One of the best things about UX is that its practitioners are from a wide variety of backgrounds and are generally very willing to share their knowledge and experiences.

One of the best things about UX is that its practitioners are from a wide variety of backgrounds and are generally very willing to share their knowledge and experiences.

What I’ve Found About Moving Into UX

I’m happy to have found my way into UX as it has opened up a new set of opportunities. People’s behaviour and needs change as technology moves forward, so the challenge of designing products to offer great experiences is always fresh. It is a growing field and there is a vibrant UX community to learn from. I hope that sharing how I made the move helps others to join us.

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Image CC by bixentro

Day 2 of UXI Live 2011 was a day of talks in Tel Aviv’s Kfar Maccabiah. Four morning keynotes and one closing keynote were the wholesome bread around the tasty meat of the four-track afternoon talks.

Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX—Whitney Hess

Whitney started out her talk by explaining that UX is establishing a philosophy about how you treat people (just as visual design is establishing a philosophy about making an impact). And just as visual design has principles (contrast, emphasis, variety, balance, and so on), so user experience design has principles.

She went on to lay out her ten principles of UX design. They are in the slides below, so I won’t waste space by repeating them here.

Are these enough? Probably not—each organization and each project needs its own principles to supplement these. She gave some interesting examples, ranging from Charles and Ray Eames to Starbucks, and gave some guidelines for creating your own design principles:

• Look at what your competitors are doing.
• Gather business goals, user needs, and brand attributes.
• Brainstorm across functions/capabilities.
• Limit your list to ten tops, preferably no more than seven.
• Make sure they do not conflict or overlap.
• Make them pithy and memorable.

She recommends using Jared Spool’s checklist to evaluate your design principles.

OK then. Now you’ve got a set of design principles. When should you use them? According to Whitney, always. But they are especially useful in project kickoff meetings, for prioritizing features, for brainstorming, for stakeholder presentations, and for resolving conflicts.

User Experience for Websites Designed for Smartphones—Barak Danin

Barak gave an insightful and entertaining talk about designing websites for smartphones. He started out by giving some statistics about the changing landscape of Internet use, and in particular the place of smartphones in this landscape. They are getting cheaper all the time (you can get a Chinese Android phone for $80) and the number of people using them is rising commensurately.

He talked about the stereotyped “mobile context” and how it is a mistake to make assumptions about context. (There are usually multiple contexts of use.) He advised looking at what smartphone users are doing right now on your regular site before thinking about building a site for smartphones.

When designing for smartphones, you have to prioritize carefully because of limited screen real estate, and bear in mind the many limitations (for example, no hover, finger size, availability of gestures, platform-specific expectations, etc.).

He finished by showing us Old Navy’s regular and mobile sites, pointing out the mobile site’s flatter hierarchy, lack of ads, store locator prominence, search box location, and link to the full site. There are a number of things here that are becoming conventions and we need to be aware of them when designing such sites.

How to Make Them Click—Amir Hardoof

How do we get people to do what we want them to do? How do we persuade them to part with their money in return for the product or service that we are offering?

According to Amir Hardoof, it is a process. And there are things we can do to to make it smoother. First off, a confused user will not buy. So we must not offer too many choices. People buy want they want, not what they need. He spoke about AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. He referred to a three-stage process:

1. We need to catch their attention. To do this, we first need to figure out what they want.
2. We need to decide what the one action is that we want them to take (and only offer this one option).
3. We need to figure out how to lead them emotionally from desire to action.

People act emotionally, not rationally. Amir explained that the most important motivating emotions are love, pride, fear, guilt, and greed. And that we need to be asking questions like:

• What is the user afraid of that will disappear when they click that button?
• What guilt can they assuage by clicking?
• What can they get for free or save by clicking?
• What are others saying? (Success stories)
• How many other people are doing it? (Herd effect)

People will pay good money if they believe that clicking that “buy” button will eliminate a negative emotion or increase a positive one.

He finished by contrasting two forex sites, FxPro, which appeals to the rational, and Etoro, which appeals to the emotional.

The Psychology of Decision-making—Dr. Chaim Shapira

Dr. Shapira is a brilliant man, a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University, and an expert on game theory. But above and beyond all this, he is a comedian. As one person put it, he is “a stand up comedian for the intelligentsia”. For a full hour, he regaled us with hilarious stories and anecdotes from the worlds of economics, psychology, and current affairs. The only problem with his talk was that we were too busy laughing to pick out the serious points that he was making. Here are just a few:

• People tend to trust those that they consider to be “above” them (though this trust is rarely justified).
• We ignore events that do not support our existing beliefs and find proof that confirms them in insignificant, unrelated events.
• The less people know about an issue, the clearer and more obvious the solutions seems to them.
• People are very bad at thinking long term. Ditto for organizations and states (because they are run by, you got it, people).
• People are under the illusion that they are in control, even when they are not.
• People lack vision.
• In negotiation, to be rational when your opponent is not rational is not rational.
• People are prone to giving quick answers from intuition without actually thinking.
• People often mistake correlation for causality.
• The media are as guilty of these as anyone else, and they exacerbate them. They also concentrate on the negative and ignore the positive.

What can we take away from this as UXers? Apart from the need to be aware of these traits in ourselves, it’s the importance of keeping an open mind and to be willing to seek and accept advice.

UX Design for News Sites: Behind the Scenes at the BBC—Tammy Gur

Tammy Gur is a senior creative director at the BBC and is responsible for UX for the BBC World Service website, which has 127 million users across the globe, with content in 27 languages and 8 different scripts. The website is predominantly a news site. The challenge is to generate UX for a constantly-changing environment in a generic way that will fit each day’s news. The content is not separate—it is and must be an integral part of the design.

She took us through the recent major redesign of BBC Mundo, BBC World’s Spanish language site, serving the whole of Latin America (except Brazil), and which has fierce local competition in various different countries. This started with an “understanding phase”, where they gathered new business requirements, performed a deep competitive analysis, interviewed both journalists and users, and established a vision that was consistent with the BBC’s existing goals and values.

From their research, they concluded that the site must be up-to-date, include video, have clear navigation that exposes additional and related content, incorporate improved picture navigation, have an improved layout that allows for easier scanning, and reinforce the brand.

They also carried out a content hierarchy workshop with journalists, which resulted in the site’s structure hierarchy.

The site design had to fit into the same universal grid that all BBC sites use (part of the organizations’ Global Experience Language (GEL), which also includes things like typography). The final homepage consists of a main title, the current top story, rolling news with time stamps, video, in-depth articles (if any), popular articles, and topics. Exactly the same content is available via mobile (mostly not on smartphones in Latin America)—the content areas are ranked by importance, and the mobile rendering is based on this. The design and flows were validated against the needs of research-based personas.

The most important conclusion from this whole process? You must know how the content is written and published. For more, see Tammy’s recent Johnny article, User Experience and the design of news at BBC World Service.

Being John Malkovitch: Getting Inside the User’s Head—Ami Rotter

We don’t have a magic tunnel for getting into John Malkovitch’s head. But according to Ami Rotter, we do have tools like GotoMeeting that let us get into our user’s head, at least to some extent.

He showed us how at MediaMind they have used remote usability testing to test various new features and proposed interface changes. Most UX practitioners will already be familiar with this stuff, but it provided a good primer for the many attendees from other disciplines.

One interesting point that Ami made was that in addition to finding problems that you can then fix, usability testing sometimes generates positive feedback, which is great for team morale.

Future UX Trends that Will Affect the IT Space—Adina Hagege

Adina is director of information experience for Windows Server at Microsoft. She distinguished trends from enablers. Enablers are the technology behind the trend. A trend itself is an area where specific growth is taking place that is attracting sustained attention from our target audience. The trends she highlighted are:

• Gamification—using traditional aspects of gaming to make routine tasks more fun and engaging. (Principles: achievements and goals, competition, ongoing feedback.)
• Better together—the power of many people to share and co-create content. (Principles: shared content, simultaneous work, instant answers.)
• Power to the person—dynamically adapting a design to the user and not the other way round. (Principles: natural user interfaces, context is king, fun and productivity, identity.)
• Anywhere—do anything from any device, anywhere. (Thanks to cloud computing, powerful personal devices, and universal connectivity.)
• Insight not information—increasing quantities of information create a need to reduce cognitive load by providing processed and visualized data that can actually be taken in. (Principles: visualizations, decision engines, relevancy sorting.)
• Experience economy—people have learned to expect more from their purchases. (Principles: beyond point of sale, genuine interaction, customer care (people, not machines).)

How to Design for Facebook—Oren Shamir

Oren Shamir of McCann Erickson Israel talked about the research they have been doing about user behavior on Facebook. He started by giving us some statistics about Facebook usage patterns. For example, the average user has 130 friends and spends more time looking at pictures than anything else. They only create content once or twice a week. (But beware of averages! They can be misleading.)

Less than 28% of users have liked a brand page. But a small segment of users like lots of brands. Users who do like a brand usually do so to get discounts and coupons and to give feedback.

He went on to explain what companies can do in terms of fan pages and applications. In a fan page, more of the page is taken up by Facebook itself, but you get the wall and five tabs (which, unfortunately, are easy to miss). In an application, you get more screen real estate, but the user needs to authorize it, which is a barrier. And the longer the list of actions that the application needs to be able to do, the fewer people authorize it.

Their research was based on eye-tracking followed by immediate debriefing interviews. Some of the findings:

• In their feed, people mainly look at the feed itself. For an individual item, they read the text and only glanced briefly at the avatar.
• In brand pages, people are very content-driven. People looked at the tabs a lot, but usually because they didn’t understand them. apart from that, they focused mostly on the wall.
• Facebook search is terrible. People found the search box just fine, but often ended up on fake brand pages. It is hard to find a brand page and just as difficult to re-find it.
• There is a lot of inconsistency between different brand pages.
• There are lots of distractions, which makes it hard to complete tasks.
• Lots of people ignore the notifications.

There are several strategic questions that you need to be asking:

• Should you have a Facebook fan page, a regular site, or a mini-site?
• A tab or an application?
• A new page or a tab on the main page?
• How are people reaching us?
• How does it look on mobile?

He finished by giving some specific advice and recommendations:

• Keep flows short and focused.
• Use pictures wisely.
• Keep the order of your tabs consistent.
• It’s better to have a number of sub-pages than one brand page with lots of tabs.
• Give people content that they can share (short content, pictures, videos, etc.).
• Be social—respond immediately, look for friends.
• Put the value that you provide to the user front and center.

Oren finished up by showing us some examples of brands that are doing a good job on Facebook: Coca-Cola, Asos, Starbucks, and Samsung Mobile IL.

For more, see our recent interview with Oren.

The Right Way to Wireframe—Russ Unger

Russ’s started out by stating that unlike visual designers, we don’t usually show our work (specifically wireframes) to each other, at least not in public. And that this is a bad thing. We all have a lot to learn from each other, even if it’s just “Hey, that looks just like what I make. I guess I don’t suck after all.”

He went on to talk about a challenge that he took on with three other designers: Fred Beecher, Todd Zaki Warfel, and Will Evans. They took a good-cause site, Lend4health.com, which helps people lend money to people who need it for autism-related medical expenses, and which was being run with no budget and no design help, and designed the flow for making a loan. Each designer based his design on the same personas (researched and created by Gabby Hon) and found a visual designer to help him.

Each one selected a different tool to work with, and got to work figuring out the IA, creating a sitemap, sketching, wireframing, and then handing over to the visual designer to work their magic. They were not allowed to talk about the challenge until they were finished. Three of the videos that the designers created to show their process are available here.

Russ ended with some important principles:

• Sketching is thinking.
• Critique is essential.
• The best tool is the one you know.

See you next year!

Recently we returned from UX Australia 2011 in Sydney where critical and inspirational themes emerged in presentations, workshops and hall way discussions with people including Kim Goodwin, Rachel Hinman, Janna DeVylder, Steve Baty, Jon Kolko, Samantha Starmera, Whitney Quesenbery around topics including context, culture, change, global thinking and our role in community and leadership.

It got me thinking more about our role as User Experience Designers in all this towards driving change in delivering great products and services in the places we work.In a recent piece on “User Experience Design in Asia” Jo and I wrote -

People are starting to ask themselves: How am I perceived within my organization? How do I perceive myself? How am I and the work that I do positioned within my organization? People don’t always have clear answers to these questions. And some people feel powerless to make any real change through their UX design roles and the products they work on.

We also recently read this thought provoking piece in a Melbourne, Australia newspaper titled – “Jobs made Apple great by ignoring profit” saying:

I have come to the conclusion that what has made Apple so different is that instead of having a profit motive at its core, it has something else entirely. Many big companies like to pretend this is the case — “we put our customers first” — but very few truly live by that mantra. When the pressure is on and the CEO of a big public company has to choose between doing what’s best for the customer or making the quarter’s numbers… most CEOs will choose the numbers.

Apple never has.

As paradoxical as it is that the pursuit of profit is what causes the long-term failure of companies, I believe that Apple’s lack of focus on profitability has actually made it one of the most successful companies in the history of capitalism.

To refocus, this is not an article on how to be Apple, rather we believe that we all need to better understand our tools, beliefs and values at deep personal levels in the places we work, live and breathe in order to understand our place to lead change and the soft skills to do that.

So one may naturally ask – what has this got to do with me?

One may be happy enough doing the task or activity on an assigned project i.e. wireframe, usability testing etc. Why should one be prompted to think about personal characteristics needed to lead positive change?  Further, why does one need to look beyond team, organisation, community and my city, my country and the world to create positive change?

Under current …

We walked away from UX Australia 2011 thinking perhaps there is an under current of soft skills we as Experience Designers need to be more self aware about to get better at helping the people we work with “move” to a new place and to work on projects that really matter and truly add value.

So … why change?

People usually want to change when they are not happy with the current situation and either recognise or are introduced to a better future state. They may not always know what the future state looks like, be able to articulate it or even know how to get there. They may also think there is no great motivation to change as its just too hard to do.

Change usually signifies movement or something different to people as they look to people to help show them the necessary and relevant elements to make change happen. Who should do this? Perhaps its our role to help people get there and to create tactics to move people and thinking. Perhaps its our role to help and mentor people to experiment and iterate to nudge change along in themselves and the places they work. An example of this is a unique event that took place in Israel in August 2011 called Lean UX Machine. Lean UX Machine was born in a surprising way and VCs identified a need for UX mentorship for Israeli startups from 12 local and international UX mentors,. It was the first time in Israel that people asked UXers to take the lead and mentor them.

What are some factors we can think more deeply about and recognise if we want to understand the places we work, towards changing them as part of creating better experiences?

Places & Projects

<strong>Its important that we recognise our role as “Design Facilitators” and get better at recognising the projects and places we work to see if they are in fact receptive to change. So what do we need to be aware of? (in no particular order)

• Recognition: do people recognize that the current situation is not working and that there can be another option?
• Alternative future states: what does it look like? Who is going to help design the future state?
• Open to learning: are there beginnings or evidence of an attitude that is willing to look at other ways to work? What will be the evidence of this?
• Leadership: is there a person in the business who is willing to help you outline a “User Experience Roadmap” and help invite the necessary people towards understanding and defining a plan as part of bridging new thinking into every-one’s hearts, minds and souls in the organisation.
• Places: what does the space people work in look like? Is it designed to encourage collaboration and open discussions? Do people look like they are energized and focused on improving the products they work on?
• Time: are people given the right amount of time to both attend to current products but also given time to help plan forward, improve and envision?
• Tone: how do people describe their work, colleagues, projects and the business they work for? Do they sound energized or deflated? Are there openings for change?
• Rewards: are people rewarded or punished for coming up with alternative ideas, bringing in needs and opinions of people from other parts of the organisation? Does the project plan provide the space to help design and iterate on problem sets?
• Team: how is the team structured? Are people with different skill sets and perspectives working together or is it left to a few people to own improving on the experience design?
• Management: does management encourage new thinking or does it crush it?
• The business and its legacy: What legacy exists in the current business? Is it useful, motivational or constraining? Where does it come from and has there been any signs of change that indicates the business is open to more change?
• Business models and goals: do you agree with them or do you see opportunities to help the business continue to profit in positive ways or is there also opportunity to design alternative options? Think of a business who disrupting traditional ways of doing things.

Your Takeaway — So if “culture” was a physical product, what does it look like and how do you get people around you to help design for it?

Your Role

We need specific skills and attitudes to help create change in the places and projects we work. So what are these? (in no particular order)

• Planning & facilitation: we need to stand in front of groups of people to provide activities that work on both tactical and strategic issues.
• Communications style: we need to embody the change we are aiming for. How do we want people to feel after they have worked with us? How do we want this energy to transfer to their colleagues and people outside of their team? How can our style teach people about how to create change in their work, products and onto the customer?
• Solutions not problems: we should listen carefully to existing problems as part of learning about how we can help. But we also need to be good at presenting possible solution states to help people shift their thinking and ultimately to help the business achieve their goals
• Shifting and challenging the status quo: its important to teach people to question and discuss alternative ways of doing things. Not for the sake of it, rather towards something better for all.
• Empathy: we work in a human field, so we should embed this in the way we work, in business and across every part of our engagement. How do people learn by our example

Your Takeaway – Identify the gaps in yourself that need to be supplemented with further learning to help create change in the places you work.

Spaces to play in

Recently we were invited to facilitate a workshop in Beijing to help bridge design research findings into design concepts. We were assigned a room and opportunity to not only deliver designs but an opportunity to show how teams can work together towards bigger goals.

Having a space that embodies a new way of working, learning and thinking is critical. It becomes the embodiment of the culture change you are creating.

So what should be in this space? Note – Will Evans has a wonderful article on “Design Studio methodology” that talks to some of this.

• Paper, pens and other goodies: materials for people to express thoughts publicly. Photos and other visuals to get people to think beyond the confines of the room.
• Music: music is a lovely tool to use in breaks and to relax minds.
• Food and drink: feed people so they have good energies to do great work.
• Breakout areas: as places to relax and look at the view. Its an opportunity to step away from the work focus and take a breather.

Your Takeaway – have a space for people do their best work

A future world

To facilitate change we need to show people the place they are moving to. What does the old world look like? What does the future world look like? What do we need to do as a team to get people to both think and behave on the journey to the future world? So how do we do this?

• Time: give yourself and the team time to help them envision the future world. This can help create ownership in the journey to get there.
• Visual: the future world should be physical and something people in the team and outside of the team can see and point to as you walk the path.
• Realistic: include realistic activities that are visible so that the rest of the team can experience the journey to this future world. Map it to design deliverables that show movement and improvement that should in effect talk to success metrics for yourself, the team, business and community.
• Heart & soul: check in with people in the team to see how they feel about the journey to the future world. Are people still upbeat and energized? Do people need to stop for a rest? Do we all need to check again on where we are all headed?

Your Takeaway – know what your future world looks like and find simple ways to communicate it.

Or … from Roy Luebke, Innovation and Strategy Consultant in an article titled “Linking Design, Marketing, and Innovation” -

Innovation is a result. Achieving innovation requires a combination of user research, competitor research, and market driver research (i.e. social, technical, economic, environmental, and political/legal evolutions) and analysis of these elements to make sense of the customers’ world and then creatively solve the challenges people have while operating in these worlds. Effective solution development and delivery requires the skills and talents of both marketers and designers, not to mention engineers, accountants, and customer service people as well. It is marketing and design people, though, who should be on the leading edge of opportunity discovery and customer problem framing.

In conclusion … Be water my friend

Conversations in our recent travels suggests the following characteristics at both an individual and organizational level:

• Flexibility
• Openness
• Creativity
• Humanity
• Empathy
• Humility
• Global Thinking
• Selflessness
• Objectivity
• Connectivity
• Add your own

Perhaps these characteristics and others not in the list speak to UX Values or Design Principles we want to live by and that talk directly to our practice, the people we work with, the businesses we run, the future business leaders we want and and the long term behaviours we want to change sustainably and persistently in people and places.

Bruce Lee summarizes:

Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

—–

Thank you:
Tom Wood, Ray McCune, Tim Loo, Neil Pawley, Gill McIntosh, Rob Findlay, Jin Zwicky, Raven Chai, Will Evans, Tomer Sharon, the Ekkli team, Bas Raijmakers, Geke van Dijk, Steve Baty, Whitney Quesenbery, Marc Rettig, Diana Adorno and Michael Davis-Burchat for your contributions and thoughts over time in the writing of this article.

Picture CC by Ian Mutoo

Day 1 of UXI Live 2011 was a day of workshops in Tel Aviv’s Kfar Maccabiah. Russ Unger and Whitney Hess from the US were joined by a raft of local experts for a packed day.

Guerrilla User Research—Russ Unger

Russ led an extremely fast-paced workshop that really took us out of our comfort zones. He started out with a brief presentation in which he outlined the benefits of guerrilla research:

• It’s faster, less rigorous, and LESS EXPENSIVE than regular research.
• It provides sufficient insight to make informed decisions.
• You can fit it into just about any project.
• Some research is always better than none.
• It is a gateway drug to “proper” research.

He went on to give some examples of the kinds of testing you can do guerrilla-style, like man on the street, Rapid Iterative ProtoSketching, user/browser role-playing, A/B testing, unmoderated testing, mobile testing, and more. Then the fun really started. Russ had us (in groups) do a pitch and critique exercise, where each group had to come up with an email interface for grandma. Then he picked one group and its leader had to pitch their idea to the room, who then critiqued it. The next exercise went much deeper. Each person was tasked with sketching out ideas for a system for a hotel that would let guests check in, check out, order room service, etc. Then we pitched and critiqued in pairs. Each group then pooled its ideas and came up with a design, which we then went out and tested. With real people. We had to go out and accost people on the street and ask them to look at our designs (in return for chocolate). We also recorded what happened using our smartphones. (In this case, the whole group was there and saw the problems that the users had, but in real life, this would be invaluable for showing to stakeholders.) It was simply astounding how much this simple activity revealed. With just a couple of real people, we found several problems with our design that we never would have discovered without this research. Thanks, Russ!

Landing Page Design—Tamir Cohen

Tamir started out by asking the audience to define landing pages—what are they? We concluded that a landing page has a single goal, gives one answer to one clear question, and is usually part of a marketing campaign. Users reach them via search results, banners, or email marketing campaigns. In the first exercise, we had to define the audience for an imaginary site by creating ad-hoc personas. Knowing our audience is crucial if we are to meet their practical and emotional needs. Tamir stressed that it is very important to establish good communication with the marketing person who is responsible for the campaign—they have the information that we need (product information, audience, competitors, page objectives, etc.) The goal of a landing page is conversion, whether that is the user making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter, downloading something, or whatever. And we need to have a good idea of the number of conversions we will get for the money we have invested. We were tasked with designing the skeleton of a landing page in just ten minutes, keeping in mind that you only have a few seconds to capture the user’s attention and get your message across before they decide whether to stay or leave. To do this, the page must be relevant, clear, inoffensive, and not confusing. You shouldn’t:

• Try to be too clever, with teasers or plays on words.
• Use flash intros—you will lose the user’s attention.

But you definitely should:

• Keep it simple.
• Focus, focus, focus—minimize distractions.
• Provide just enough information.
• Keep it clear and clean.
• Focus on the user’s needs and the value you can provide them. (Don’t focus on your offering.)
• Talk about the results that your offering will provide for the user.

Tamir concluded by explaining what a landing page is made of:

• The main area of the page should be dedicated to addressing the user’s feelings. It should arouse curiosity. If it asks a question, the answer should be “yes”. Use positive language.
• Secondary text should include more detailed information.
• If the page requires information from the user, the form should be as short as possible and make it hard (or impossible) for the user to make mistakes.
• Testimonials should be short and real. They should include the name of the person and some details.
• The text of the call to action button should be phrased as a clear action, and if possible it should incorporate the benefits to the user. It must be emphasized visually and look clickable.
• Use known marks as trust builders (e.g., ISO9000 mark, padlock icon, PayPal icon)
• Video has a huge impact, but not always in a good way. Unless used wisely, it is not recommended.
• Stick to no more than two or three colors. Use it for emphasis only where needed.
• Use only one font, and minimize the number of different sizes. Avoid decorative fonts—they reduce readability and are not always found by search engines.
• Be sure to say thank you if the user converts, and do it on a separate page. This page will help you accurately measure the number of conversions, and can be used to offer additional products/services.

Web Analytics—Assaf Trafikant

In the world of old-fashioned advertising, measurement was hard. But on the Internet, you can measure everything. And analytics tools allow to us not just measure and collect, but to analyze, report, and hopefully understand and then to use this understanding to achieve our goals, whatever they may be. But as Assaf explained, the available analytics tools give us our analytics data so nicely pre-packaged and presented that it is all too easy to just use the dashboard that we are given and look at it regularly, but no more than that. He advises taking a different approach—first to figure out who your (internal) audience is, find out the questions that they want answers to, and only then to start thinking about how analytics can help answer them. He stressed the difference between passive analytics (the ones that you can’t do anything about, like users’ screen resolutions and the percentage of people using smartphones to access your site) and active analytics (where you actively match the analytics to your questions). For UX specifically, the questions are usually concerned with user behavior: what do users click on? Does this feature work or not? How much time do they spend on different things? Do they scroll down this far? Analytics can answer all of these questions and many more besides.

Creating a Culture of UX—Whitney Hess

If an organization doesn’t have a culture of UX, your methods and professionalism don’t matter—it will be very difficult to push UX there. So we need to be business strategists, to broaden our focus beyond just our part of the outcome. We need to plan our moves carefully and work on convincing the right people. Negotiation and persuasion are core skills. Whitney presented five case studies that represent the different roles that UX practitioners typically have (sole UI designer at a small tech company, UX VP at a large marketing company, independent UX consultant, and so on). We organized ourselves into groups according to which of these roles we most closely identified with. Then Whitney had us do an exercise where one group member tried to convince the others of their case.

Whitney talked about a number of negotiation techniques from two books that she recommends: Getting to Yes and The Psychology of Persuasion. There are a number of different negotiating techniques that people can use, and it’s important to identify which they are using with you. She suggested several advantageous approaches:

• Work alongside the other person to attack the problem together.
• Don’t make assumptions about their opinions.
• Act differently from what they expect.
• Show them that you are able to shift your position.
• See things from their point of view and adapt.
• Focus on interests that are shared by both sides, not positions.
• Generate many possibilities before making a decision—creating solutions is a different process from making decisions.
• Make it easy for them to make the decision.
• Decide the criteria together in advance.

Then she gave us an exercise in which each group was given a real-life challenge tailored to the group’s persona. Each group was tasked with preparing a pitch to give to management in an attempt to improve our position and promote what is important to us, making use of the negotiation and persuasion techniques we had just learned. When we were done, Whitney told us how each situation had actually played out in real life. She concluded by revealing one last weapon that we have in our arsenal—if all else fails, we have the ability to say “no”. Stay tuned for our report from day two.

As an IA/UX designer, there are many experiences and skill sets that have contributed to my success. While I have always had a passion for and been involved in design, many of these other experiences have involved working with people, ranging from the military  to sales. However, one that stands out for me was being involved in social work, namely working with delinquents in a halfway house. Working with young people is extremely challenging, especially when they are engaged in criminal activity and believe they know everything.

How I Got Into It

The social work was basically a full to part-time swing job (based on the season) for me as I was continuing my education in design/business and working towards entering the design field full-time. Most of the staff who worked as social workers also had other goals that they were working towards that had nothing to do with support working as a full time career.

I got in the field because a friend of mine from the military was already involved and  asked if I was interested in working with him (he was able to pull a few strings to get me in). We hadn’t seen each other in about 5 years so it was good to re-connect with him and find a job working with people.
Being in the military, I had developed thick skin and knew what it was like to be surrounded by various temperaments of people; so I jumped at this opportunity.

After getting hired and going through extensive on-the-job training for Crisis Prevention Intervention & Dealing with Difficult People, I was ready to fly solo.

What I Did

I managed a halfway house and developed relationships with delinquents who were released from the system based on various criminal activities, and were making their way back into society. Duties included managing a schedule for the youths to adhere to, encouraging them to find jobs, conducting open discussions on problem resolution and basically leading a group of aimless youths to work together and become better human beings.

Remember, I was hired to do all this and much more with a group of teenage boys who didn’t want to work, or remain inside the house, and most of them simply wanted to sleep in, fight, break the rules and stay out late or not come home at all.

Needless to say, this was an uphill battle, and I believe very strongly that it was this consistent resistance to both authority and change from these delinquents that became my greatest takeaway from this field and followed me into the UX industry. To sum it up, that takeaway was the age old task of designing circumstances & interacting with people to solve problems.

What I Brought Through With Me

1. A backbone of steel, and a fearless stance to look someone in the eye and not back down.
   This has helped me many times when dealing with difficult clients. In the beginning of my design years, I was way too bold and direct as a result. Over time, I have learned to turn that down a bit and execute soft approaches when dealing with difficult clients.
2. Empathy and the ability to listen
   Many of these youths have a story. There is usually an unfortunate set of circumstances that have been compiled and dumped on these youths which explains why they are the way they are now. It is important not just to execute authority, but to be a role model and earn trust. This is done by placing myself in their shoes and imagining what it must be like for them. At the end of the day, I go home, these youths are still in their unfortunate situations.
3. Diplomacy
   How I relate to these youths is very important. Everything that someone says from a position of authority is interpreted as a threat or an attack. Even though these delinquents may be wrong in a situation, there is a certain tac that is involved when trying to lead someone to see the error of their ways. You can’t just point it out to them, you have to paint a picture where the error is clearly visible for them to see. This technique has helped me greatly when presenting my findings regarding a review or a new design vision. You just can’t tell the client their wrong and that you’re right. You have to perform a gap analysis and show them areas of improvement and sometimes allow them to figure out the vision themselves and take credit for it, even though we as design professionals already know the answer.

What I’ve Had to Work On

Over the years, one of the main things that I have had to work on would be soft skills. How to delicately approach clients, bite my tongue, not receive credit, and remember that it’s not about me. It’s always about the end user and the final design.

Working with delinquents have made me tough. But you can not display that toughness all the time. You can’t come across as a tough guy because these youths will want to challenge you and will never trust you. On the other hand, you can’t be a soft nice guyperson as well- and for the exact same reasons. They will try to challenge you and run the show. Throughout my employment as a youth worker, I have had to learn the balance of being in between. This has helped arm me when working in the professional design industry.

Tips

Like the theme “Anyone can cook!” from the movie Ratatouille, I say the same for design. “Anyone can design”. Don’t grade yourself against others, compare yourself to your last design. Learn from best practices and view websites and apps that get good reviews. Ask questions and immerse yourself with people who know. Be humble and try your best to contribute to the field. Contribution brings reciprocation.

What I’ve Found About Moving Into UX

The biggest thing I’ve noticed is the tremendous amount of people time that is included when designing. In order to kick off a project, you’re meeting with people. When leading Conducting meetings, you’re meeting with people. JAD sessions and going through the iterative design process, you’re meeting with people. Conducting interviews, focus groups and testing, you’re meeting with people. And finally when re-visiting the design for stats and results, again, you’re meeting with people.