What caught my attention was how the writer reflected upon the social impact and relevance Sassoon had made through design:

Instead of styles that took an hour to blow dry, women [and] men could have stylish functional, yet beautifully designed haircuts that didn’t require half your morning to style. He did this by putting the emphasis on the process and technique of cutting hair, clean sectioning, precise geometric shapes, fastidious attention to detail and an awareness of shape, texture, tone and form that was unheard of before then.

This also came at the time of the “sexual revolution” of the mid 60′s when women started to aspire to something more that cooking and cleaning, they wanted the same freedoms that men had enjoyed, careers, independence and their own lives, laborious and bloated hairstyles had no room here.

In some ways, it didn’t matter what “specific” technique or process Sassoon used to create the look. It was the idea behind the work that made the difference. Or to put it in an analogy closer to home, it doesn’t matter if one device has a touch screen or not – it’s what one chose to do with it to change people’s lives.

It also points out how society has a way of proclaiming their latent needs and desires of the time (in this case, women wanting greater autonomy), and how observing and understanding society as a whole has a direct relationship with design. We would do well to look beyond just the digital world.

Hack to the Future:
Fabian Hemmert

The charming Fabian Hemmert  (not only a TEDxter, but a Johnny as well) wanted to be either a magician or an explorer when he was a kid. If he’d known what a designer was back then, he might have chosen that, as he believes that the discipline brings the two together.

“we make the impossible a reality & we explore the future”

After an enviable job history working at Nintento and Marvel, he moved to Deutsche Telecom “it was just as fun, because it’s the real world” and then began the PhD studies on embodiment. He’s investigating the topic with ‘research through design’ which he calls a very designer-friendly research approach.

Topics he’s interested in include:

• How do we embody physical aspects into the digital on phones? Results for this include using vibration, shape changing, weight change. It might even have personality.
• How can we make telecommunications more emotional? Letting callers feel the hand or breath of the callee digitally is on the border of what people can take, sensing moisture (using sponges and material) well and truly invasive.
• How can we take interaction design to the streets? The Streetlab project spent four weeks with teenagers investigating the future of mobile. The results included that status is importance (expected), privacy (unexpected: when you share a room with your brothers, it’s the only thing that’s yours), showing off (conflict, also about creativity.)
• How can we make mobile phone calls more polite? Tactful Calling allows calls to be filtered by importance—though Hammert acknowledged that what a caller considers important might be very different from a callee.

Hammert finished by urging the crowd ”to hack for the future … establish design as knowledge producing discipline.”  As a child who adored Peter Pan, he insists that designers, just like that boy “must never grow up”.

Ethnographic animation: using 3D animation as a UX tool for business and education
Kate Ertmann

Kate Ertmann’s sparky stage presence was explained in her introduction, where she described her parents’ work in American network television that led to her own initial career as a child actor. Immersed in the world of television the young Kate quickly learned about broadcast technology and the important role of the client – lessons she now brings into play in her work as owner of ADi 3D animation studios.

Reviewing the history and growing impact of animation as an artform, Kate highlighted how Steamboat Willie is now legendary while the movie it premiered alongside is forgotten (‘Gang War’ trivia fans) and named ADi’s lead animator ‘The Don’ as the big gamechanger in animation today as he, and all the millennial Generation Y-ers like him, no longer differentiate between forms of media – you don’t go and see an ‘animated movie’ any more, it’s just a movie.

Citing the wealth of research that has evidenced animation’s ability to boost conceptual understanding, comprehension and learning, Kate moved on to describe the potential of its application as an ethnographic and research tool. Pitching video against animation, she countered each of the former’s strengths with the potentially greater benefits of animation: Video connects with real people in real situations, but with animation you can use a representative human form to neutralize any identification (or lack of) that might colour your view of what you’re seeing, leaving you free to make connections you might have missed and develop a clearer understanding of presented experiences. Video can of course let you show off your shiny new product in a glossy commercial, but with animation you can do the same with a product that doesn’t exist yet – and continue to tweak it so that it remains looking fresh years later Questions from the audience suggested that the perceived timescales involved in producing such animation are still deterring agencies from using it as a development or ethnographic tool rather than a presentational one, but with assurances from Kate that quickfire work is possible (and can always be used as a starting point and enhanced further down the line) maybe there’s aspace in the UX toolbox that could be filled by 3D animation in the future?

Biomimicry Data
Peter Denman

While many a designers will get out into nature to get inspired, Peter Denman of Intel talked about his experiment to take it one step further and use nature as a way to structure interfaces.

Copying nature — in other words, biomimicry — has led to a number of innovations in materials technology, be it flow without friction (from the trunks of elephants), cleaning without cleaners (how water rolls off leaves), or antibacterial skins (based on the germ free skin of sharks). But how could it be used in interaction design?

Denman saw that it could be of use in infographics (or information dashboards). While infographics can help communicate information, they also run the inherent risk of only reflecting the designer’s viewpoint, and are one off. He believed that nature might help show complexity without losing clarity.

His case example of using fractals to give an overview of diabetes patients’ health over time initially didn’t have much of a reaction with nurses. However, he found that those higher up the medical care chain—those who need to identify problems rather than treat them—found it useful in comparing patients not only over time but against each other.

Denman sees his project moving in next few years towards moving using “beautiful mathematics” fractal forms: be it the Golden ratio, Vogel’s model, or the Fibonacci spiral.

Denman also made a (now common across the conference) point about designers and coding: he had done “some bad coding” in Actionscript 3 to make the prototypes, and had become a strong supporter of prototyping in code.

Critical Design: Restoring a sense of wonder to Interaction Design: Dr. Michael Smyth & Ingi Helgason

What was the last product that made you go wow? Smyth and Halgason, working on design research at the boundaries—”where the interesting things happen”—of art/design/technology shared a number of projects they’ve worked on through Napier College.

He notes that there’s a tension between the problem-solution culture of design and the meaning focus of ethnography: while the latter is interesting for designers—”is ethnography the new black?”—and uncovers meanings, it doesn’t provide problems or solutions.

Instead, like Anthony Dunne the day before, they see critical design as a way of exploring the problem space.

Some of the projects they talked about include:

• This Pervasive Day Edinburgh 2010: in an installation commenting on privacy and sharing: people walking past a screen had their picture imposed onto fake Facebook data and presented to them as a profile. Responses to it ranged from the serious to the playful, “which is fine”.
• Exploring a city’s issues related to time: in a project with a Croatian school, the students made outdoor projections throughout the city that juxtaposed present day concerns (“should I go to the gym?”) as speech bubbles from classical era statues.
• Prekham Morst: How much can happen crossing a bridge? Everyday people crossing a bridge in Slovenia were presented with a digital camera and asked to take photos over the time it took them to cross. Pictures ranged from capturing others in the project (creating a sense of kinship), or commenting on society through small details (snapping a flower basket holder that was empty thanks to municipal cuts in spending).

Aristotle’s Storytelling Framework for the Web
Jeroen van Geel

Building on his 2011 article of the same name, our very own Jeroen van Geel presented his translation of Aristotle’s classical rules of story and drama into a framework for the creation of compelling online user experiences.

A really special story is one that you don’t even realize you’re reading, and really special writers may be blessed with talent but need to follow a process in order to get the best results. The cautionary example here was George Lucas: clearly talented, but guilty of screwing things up (you can guess where) by getting wrapped up in creating spectacle and comedy and neglecting the real process of crafting a story.Aristotle dissected the art of storytelling into six key elements, all of which can be applied with minimal adaptation to the world of the web: plot, character, thought (or theme), fiction, song (or rhythm) and spectacle, all of which are listed in order of importance (take note Mr Lucas).

The central layer of the framework is Plot, which for a website can be defined as product goal + user need.

The second layer is made up of Characters and Theme. Characters can be divided into primary and secondary, both of whom are necessary to any story. Using the example of James Cameron’s Titanic Jeroen identified Kate and Leo as the primary characters whose action defined the story – but pointed out that without the evil Billy Zane for Kate to escape from, there would have been nothing bringing the lovebirds together in the first place. Theme is what’s possible (or not) in the place where your story is happening. If your story is Brokeback Mountain, it’s Wyoming in the 60s and men are expected to be masculine and defiantly straight – which clearly affects what can happen to the characters. If your website is a transport site like 9292.com in a world branded ‘Just do it’ or ‘Think different’, those brands will influence what can happen in your online experience.

The third layer of the framework, which Jeroen described as the ‘most boring’ and also the most overemphasized in
design education, encompasses diction, rhythm and spectacle. Diction is the language your site uses, rhythm the patterns it adopts and how they spread across all its platforms of communication, and spectacle lies in making things look beautiful.

In summary Jeroen explained that the central layer of the framework (plot) involves strategic decisions, the second layer (characters and theme) tactical decisions and the third (diction, rhythm, spectacle) operational decisions – and that choosing the right layer on which to focus, and the right seniority-level of staff to work on them, was the crucial thing.

While Jeroen may not have got the hugs he was angling for in his talk, he clearly ignited the thinking of a great number of designers in the near-capacity audience and gave this designer/writer a fresh perspective on how the techniques of narrative can be utilized in interaction design. (And his Brokeback Mountain translation-fail was an absolute classic

How to lie with design thinking
Dan Saffer

First up in the main hall lightning talks session was Dan Saffer. Having never witnessed his presentations before I was informed that it would be a must-see, and (the alleged) Dr Saffer didn’t disappoint. Making a superhero entrance sprinting down theaisle and high-fiving, Dan announced his delight at being here amongst his own people: the passive-aggressive alcoholics (that’s IxDers, not the Irish).

Thanking the organization and conference he founded for giving him a whole ten minutes out of their three-day schedule, Dan proceeded to unleash a gleeful slaughtering of the industry’s holy cows in the form of an interaction design cheat’s manual. First of all, give up the hard work of design and start selling design thinking – it’s the fun part where all the easy money is! (Dan gave credit where it’s due for this one: prostitutes worked it out a long time ago). Next give up the wireframing, after all nobody reads them (not even you) and nothing else says ‘we’re working hard’ like a wall full of (illegible) post-it notes or a whiteboard full of (incomprehensible) conceptual models. Now do some ‘research’ to help you invent your invisible friends (Dan’s name for personas) and if you absolutely must present anything make sure it’s nothing more than a cute whimsical little movie. If you want to build stuff it’s time to move to China.

Naming each of Interaction 12’s sponsors as the perfect suckers to try this snake oil out on, Dan exited to thunderous applause as the group seated next to me confidently informed each other that ‘Dan Saffer’ was in fact a fictional persona created purely for the purposes of writing books and whipping up controversy. After all, a real speaker couldn’t possibly have said all that stuff! Right? Or could he? I watched them hitting Google with bated breath…

Ritual in Interaction Design
Matt Nish-Lapidus

IxDA board member Matt gave us a whistle-stop tour of ritual and the part it has to play in the work of interaction designers. Defining ritual as ‘a set of intentional actions with symbolic rather than logical meanings’, he presented its fiery roots in religion before moving on to the rituals that now make up our daily lives: from the breakfast rituals that get us into the right mindset for the day, to cultural rituals like weddings whose trappings communicate so much more than just the act of getting marries, to the community-creating rituals of sport that give value to something essentially meaningless.

Ritual can also be found in our interactions with consumer products. iTunes isn’t ritualistic, but dusting off the vinyl and turntable certainly is and there’s a whole subculture of those who stick stubbornly to traditional rituals like straight-razor shaving and the use of manual-wind watches. By undertaking these rituals we’re making would could be simple tasks much more complicated to achieve, but with added effort comes added significance.

Matt signed off by asking us to consider how we might create more meaningful and significant products and services by engaging the ritualistic instincts and behaviours of our users.

The craft of UX
Leanna Gringas

Leanna compares the practice of UX to guilds for bakers and metalsmiths, and that we can use theapprenticeship model to develop and grow junior UX designers. Guilds are serious about growing talent, and it can take 6-8 years for apprentice bakers to reach the rank of a master, where half of that journey solely focused on learning the foundation and core skills. Apprentices benefit from a high standard of training and good opportunities to tap into valuable networks. Practice is where the bulk of learning happens, where exposure helps uncover unique ways of problem solving. There are clear expectations set by the masters, who act as mentors throughout an apprentice’s tenure. These expectations also extend to the hiring process, where guilds seek candidates with passion, curiousity and humility before bringing them on.

IA heuristics
Abby Covert

In this lightning talk, Abby the IA took a stab at updating a list of heuristics (best practice, rules of thumb, common sense, intuitive judgments) as an attempt to facilitate design critiques more effectively with non-designers. The creative directors she used to work with used to say about UX work, “does it have legs?”, which was a way of saying “is this stable, effective and stand on its own?”. She argues heuristics need to be teachable, business friendly, consider cross-channel, and be easy to implement. Many of the common UX heuristics (Nielsen & Molich, Morville, Rosenfeld, ISO9241, Resmini & Rosati) lack some of these elements and are in need of an update. Abby proposes an updated model of 10 principles, based on 50 existing heuristics from the four aforementioned ones:

1. Findable
2. Accessible
3. Clear
4. Communicative
5. Useful (includes usable, which isn’t enough anymore)
6. Credible
7. Controllable (error tolerant. not the same as personalization)
8. Valuable
9. Learnable (predictable, consistent)
10. Delightful

In addition to that, we need to apply three rules when using these principles, which is to put our user shoes (don’t get hung up on our job) and goggles (the user’s context) on, and not to assume we “are” our users. Finally, while heuristics can be powerful tools to facilitate design critiques, they should never be used as a substitute for good user research.

Bananas,technology and magic: breaking the clichés of user-centred design
Adrian Westaway

Presenting the IxDA Award-winning project ‘Outside of the Box’ to a crowded room eager to find out more, Adrian spoke to the importance of creativity in research as well as in the implementation of final design solutions. Describing a childhood letter to magician Paul Daniels asking for help in making his teacher disappear, which directed him first to the library and from there to a career in engineering design for magic, Adrian comes across as something of a real-life Jonathan Creek – explaining his perfect understanding of the importance of surprise and delight.

Given a commission by Samsung and the Helen Hamlyn Centre to design a new mobile phone for older people, Adrian’s studio
Vitamins took the innovative step of focusing on their users’ capabilities rather than disabilities, and nervously approached their corporate overlords to ask if it would be alright if they didn’t actually design a phone at all? After giving older people money to buy their own phones they’d discovered that the point where frustration with their new product emerged was when they took it home and opened the box. While younger users tend to trust implicitly that a product will work, tossing the manual and starting to play straight away, older people have come from a different tradition of learning. Wanting to make sure they used their phones properly, they would turn straight to the manual – finding them singularly unhelpful, which ultimately lead to a lack of engagement with the product.

Having convinced Samsung that older people didn’t want another ‘special phone’ with scary red SOS buttons reminding them
they could die at any moment, Vitamins set out to discover how their users learn. At workshops in the UK, Norway and Italy they gave older people bananas to customize any way they wanted in order to represent their ideal phone, and then asked them how they would teach another person to use their banana-phone. The most inspirational example came from a professional novelist, who wrote his instructions as an adventure storybook. Realising that a phone manual has nowhere to live, Vitamins final (and award-winning) design solution was phone packaging in book-form, with layered cut-out pages that introduce each feature of your new phone in stages – neatly avoiding information overload and giving you permission to store your manual neatly on the shelf and refer back to it whenever you need.

It was fantastic to hear that Adrian is free to describe this project in detail because the Helen Hamlyn Centre is dedicated to the creation, and more importantly the sharing, of new design methodologies – a rare thing to hear at a conference where the usual statement seems to be ‘I’m sorry but I can’t talk about that’.

Why we share: motivations at the heart of sharing
Angel Anderson

Angel sought to illuminate the human motivations behind the like/post/favourite viral sharing behaviours we exhibit online, in an age where ‘volume of sharing fostered’ has become a key indicator of design success.

She identified three distinct motivations of bragging, complaining and reaching out, and from these distilled a range of
social design characteristics that designers should explore when seeking to provoke sharing behaviour:

• Landscape: in a sea of social media platforms, people tend to create a ‘social layer cake’ by using different platforms to share in different ways, like Facebook for friends and LinkedIn for business. Where are you choosing to share your information? And if you’re making new platforms, where will they fit in?
• Frameworks: people who don’t fit in your social layer cake (not close enough for Facebook, not business enough for LinkedIn) are actually falling outside of your self-imposed frameworks – into what Angel called ‘friend purgatory’
• Social objects: social media platforms are giving us new forms of social capital, turning details like your current location into share/tradeable information
• Social privacy: with the Facebook privacy statement now longer than the US constitution, it’s crucial to give your users value in exchange for the privacy they may be surrendering through sharing
• Friction: without which, sharing loses meaning. If sharing is automated, an involuntary act that sends out our information without requiring our thought or input, it becomes devalued – what are ‘happy birthday’ messages on Facebook really worth? And if sharing becomes autosharing then the real task for the designer becomes curation.

Angel closed by reminding us all that in this ‘age of UX enlightenment’ our industry is still in its infancy and it’s critical that we share because the next generation of users is already out there and interacting with us online.

Designers as Change Agents
Jonathan Kahn

In an ambitious, deeply referenced,  and somewhat controversial talk, Jonathan Khan urged interaction designers to become linchpins and be prepared to design change rather than interactions. For tips to do this, he looked to five different disciplines:

1. Service Design: has the concept of front and back door, we need to understand both elements.
2. Cross Channel UX: we’re moving beyond the mouse and screen to a range of platforms
3. Content Strategy: considering the role of content on a site and its lifecycle. Criminally ignored by interaction designers until 2009, but now has at least three must-read books on the topic.
4. Data Governance: not perhaps known so much in interaction design circles, data governance takes the opposite approach to content strategy, asking “what happened to the organisation to get it to this point”
5. Agile
6. Lean UX: telling us to “ignore the startup part” in Eric Reis’s Lean Startup book, Kahn pointed out Reis’s five principles of lean startup (Entrepreneurs are Everywhere,  Entrepreneurship is Management, Validated Learning, Innovation Accounting, and Build-Measure-Learn ).

One of the stunning factoids was that organisational structures (summed up at its worst in the infamous Microsoft organisational chart) were designed to limit information flow rather than encourage it: they were devised in the age of trains as “a means of minimising embarrassment”, and are effectively one way. ‘This is bad because it means the system can’t take feedback and learn.” (In comparison, the Toyota-founded Lean UX was all about sharing, though I’d argue that could equally come from its basis in Japan). This was a prelude to Genevieve Bell’s comment about technology always being related to morality.

Rage against the machine? Designing our futures with computing
Dr Genevieve Bell

After the announcement of Interaction 13 in Toronto next year, Intel’s director of user interaction and experience Dr Genevieve Bell brought Interaction 12 to a close with a talk that she described as a ‘provocation’, and one so freshly-distilled that it could well have a lingering odour of new-car-smell.

As one of the first social scientists at Intel, Genevieve’s somewhat daunting remit was to help the company understand two things: women and ROW (as in Rest of World, or everywhere but America). With just these few billion people to focus on (!) Genevieve set out to investigate what she described as an emerging thread of anti-technology discourse’, with the aim of understanding our changing engagement with machines. One woman she spoke called her technology a ‘backpack full of baby birds with open mouths screaming feed me’, symbolizing the high-maintenance relationships we have with our devices (relationships we’re probably only in for the internet).

Documenting the historical rise and fall of our love affair with technology from the 18th century fascination with ‘uncanny mechanicals’ (tea-serving Japanese dolls and defecating French roboducks) to the Industrial Revolution of manual labourers destroying the machinery that was attempting to replace them, Genevieve highlighted how the romantic notion of outlaw revolutionaries pricked the imagination of the emerging Romantic poets, who took up the cause of championing the human over the mechanical in their work. This sentiment has continued into contemporary writing and drama, and there still exists today a persistent belief that machines are either ‘subservient to us or will kill us’ (see all variations of Terminator, past and present).

Genevieve posited that, rather than designing technology with the intent to deceive or fake, we do better when we begin with the notion of grace and wonder. When electricity was first introduced to consumers, it was a hard sell to get them to rip up their homes for wiring when they could already get warmth and light from candles and oil lamps. What finally persuaded them to get on board was the Electric Fairies: by running a charge through women clutching lightbulbs and having them skate around a high society party, electricity suddenly became fun, safe and desirable.

Today it’s hard to imagine our lives without our digital devices – indeed, in Japan paper replicas of iPads are burned ceremonially to ensure that the ancestors don’t have to go without in the afterlife (with new upgrades being sent up in smoke every year). We increasingly want our devices to stop making demands upon us and instead to maintain themselves while providing us with nurture and care. Genevieve’s closing call to arms came in the form of a question: what will it take for us to imagine relationships rather than interactions?

Closing Party

Interaction designers took over the Guinness Storehouse, and stunned band of the evening Ham Sandwich by demanding an encore. Whether all the movement on the dancefloor (both to music and the Kinnect) were as terrible or not is up for argument, but  as one audience member told the band “this is what happens when nerds go out”.

Keynote—Jonas Löwgren: Exploring, Sketching, Other Designerly Ways of Working

Jonas’ keynote is reminiscent of Bill Buxton’s sketching user experience, beginning with the quote “IxD is about getting the right design and the design right”. He encourages designers to explore possibilities while we can, sketching cheap and fast, and thinking beyond storyboards. Storyboards are limited because interaction is temporal with many unknowns, a major one being the user.

Instead, sketching (in the broad sense) allows you frame and shape the problem in parallel, and understand through the problem solving process. No more trying to establish requirements before designing. This is especially true for unique experiences where interactions are not idiomatic, in which case he argues you need to prototype with higher fidelity materials. He gave the example of Body Synths – you had to prototype it with sounds and sensors as a full body experience in order to know what it was.

In instances where designers don’t understand the domain, subject matter experts are needed as co-designers, especially since most knowledge is mostly oral. Doing a show and tell in moments of work becomes crucial in the design process, such as an intensive care ward with hundreds of machines and a few experts to needed to operate a machine.

Other projects he talked about include:

• Pinpoint: a directory for a large organisation
• Avatopia: getting students involved in the community

In conclusion, he calls on all designers to treat sketching as a continuum (which runs through the execution phase) and to keep a sketching mindset while prototyping

Building a Better Starship: Scaling Design Systems into Humanity’s Future
Scott Nazarian

I suspect at least a few people thought this talk was going to be about sci-fi and space-travel. They were in for a shock. Nazarian’s talk reminded me of some of a combination of Bruce Sterling and Ezio Manzini’s discussions. Fast paced and challenging, it’s one that I’ll be reviewing once the videos come out.

He had one key aspect we need to consider in our digital future: the relationship between data and energy. (Without power centres, the data is effectively dead).

Moving down the futurist rabbit hole, he transposed the UI designer’s stack to a more fundamental one: (humans, environment, systems etc), and posed such questions as fidelity, subliming information, and capacitant futures where we have stored memories so that we can survive 1000 years of sleep during space travel.

Hacking Space Exploration and Science
Ariel Waldman

She had us at ‘f**king teddies in space!‘
Equal parts entertainment and education, Arial Waldman made space seem as exciting as it did during the space race. Speaking of space races, she pointed out that 1969 is the year not only of the moon landing, but also the first virtual connection through APRANET. “It wasn’t much. It sent the message ‘L O’, or ‘log on’, to another computer—which crashed”. Still, from these inauspicious beginnings, now it’s the net that has far more wider impact than space travel.

Her frustration at the lack of takeup of NASA’s Open Data happened to be heard one day by Jeremy Keith, and as a result he helped form Science Hackdays where designers, developers, and scientists come together to hack fun things—”Hackdays are not about solutions, they’re about getting inspired and having fun, using space as a material”—ranging from a synesthesia experience made with a scary looking gimp mask, to listening to the sounds of particles colliding, a typeface where each letter has the same wind drag, or making an electronic canary for quakes using electronic devices ”I worry that people would game the system by all jumping at the same time”.

She also touched on opening up space exploration to the masses, if not by actually going to space, but by discovering universes and being recognised for it (hello Green Peas Galaxy).

And going back to history, and making data open: just because it’s open doesn’t mean it’s accessible. While NASA has had their transcripts online for a while, it’s only recently that Spacelog has actually made it engaging.

Beyond Gamification: Architecting Engagement
Dustin Di Tomassio

Mad Pow’s Experience Design Director Dustin spoke on the somewhat maligned topic of gamification, filtering self-determination theory through games in order to get beyond badges and leaderboards to reveal the human traits and values that gaming exploits. Dipping into the motivational psychology beneath games, we discover that they provide safe environments in which to undertake our lifelong pursuit of ‘the sensation of mastery’ – we all want to be better at something at some time, and gaming builds on that need. There’s an addictive sequence of tension and release in exerting effort and achieving a goal, and by scaffolding tasks to keep those goals ever so slightly out of reach we keep users in the pleasurable state of challenge. However that state can’t go on forever without risk of user burnout so it’s important to build in moments of reflection, allowing them to look back and revel in their growing mastery. ‘Juicy feedback’ that gives users huge rewards for small actions was a game technique Dustin felt designers could make better use of, and asked for examples of long-term gamification techniques he encouraged us to tap into people’s over-life goals, such as the desire to improve their education, health and wellbeing. In closing he also pointed out that good game platforms are never really complete – once your user achieves the ‘epic win’, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and build them a whole new game.

Why is no one using your product?
Julie Baher

The second stream of afternoon lightning talks kicked off in a jam-packed Liffey hall 1 with Citrix’s Julie Baher on finding the right users to inform product development. While designers can make their products completely adorable, they are still puppies in a window waiting to be adopted until a user takes them on – like TiVo when it first hit the market. While it’s pretty easy to get feedback from experimental early adopters, they’re unlikely to become your mass market. Recognising this Citrix are sending free products out to ‘real people’ – the slow steady pragmatists who would usually avoid trying something new without a heap of recommendations from existing users. By removing the barriers of price and access Citrix get more useful feedback from appropriate user groups, allowing them to tighten their design cycle and iterate products faster.

Designing the mobile wallet experience
Jonathan Rez

Seren Partners’ Jonathan Rez discussed the consequences of our smartphones transitioning into mobile wallets, containing by necessity all that is currently in our physical wallets: from primary, secondary and emergency cash cards to forms of ID, warranty and cashflow control. He outlined the very different risks of losing a mobile wallet – with all the data and credentials it contains stored in the cloud, and the mobile wallet itself capable of being de- and re-activated remotely, you might think it a much more secure alternative. However this depends on whether you trust your mobile wallet provider, which could be Visa, Google, Tesco or even your local corner store. Jonathan closed by asking us to contemplate a future where our Google cash card posts details of purchases to a Twitter feed, as a means of perpetuating the status symbol denied us when we can no longer have a platinum card to whip out in restaurants.

Input/Output: Interaction design at the intersection of city and its interfaces
Sami Niemala

In his work at Nordkapp Sami Niemala has discovered that cities are lumbering beasts on the brink of waking up. The blinking blue charging points still waiting to be used are at odds with street furniture contracts that run for 20 years – an eternity in the life of the interactive touchscreens Sami’s team were looking to create. The practical challenge of designing devices that would survive the extreme Helsinki weather (as well as general drunken city shenanigans) were matched by the challenge of creating truly urban touchscreen interfaces, which Sami likened to designing for mobile but at much lower resolution. He summarised the key learning from this project by calling on his fellow designers to aim as high as possible aim when designing devices anew, and cited the example of architects who, when invited to propose a new building for Berlin, instead envisaged a mighty mountain to be placed right in the middle of the city – an idea whose ambition has since become a cultural symbol.

Sculpted! Using Sculpture as a Design Lens
Rachel Bolton-Nasir

Inspired by an interest in sculpture, Rachel Bolton-Nasir took a refreshingly physical approach to interaction design by showing how principles from sculpture could be applied to interaction design.

She walked the audience through six principles of sculpture, and their application to interaction design:

1. Form: as sculpture is divorced from function, as it’s not a means to an end, you focus on elements more.
   In interaction design: what happens if you remove the functions from the page? Is the visual language strong enough to work without it?
2. Multiple viewpoints: sculpture unfolds over time & experience.
   In interaction design: think of multiple touchpoints (e.g. Zipcar has the site, the key, the car ….)
3. Physical parts: devoid of function, the different materials and how they are changed give meaning.
   In interaction design: do the materials in your designs feel familiar?
4. Bodily empathy: imagining yourself to be what it is your making
   In interaction design: Do physical interactions ring true, to they mimic natural actions?
5. Multi-sensory: can’t always touch, but you can move around etc.
   In interaction design: Does it require or inspire a physical engagement (e.g. zipcar fob)?
6. Context: interacts with space & vice versa.
   In interaction design: How does this interact with  its environment? is it flexible?

Your Users are Hobbits: How classic quests can inform your next design
Abi Jones

The Quest Cycle is a story that transcends culture (it’s been detailed by story expert Joseph Campbell) and helps people reach fulfillment. Abi Jones illustrated the elements of this story using Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. It’s worth noting that neither example appeared to fully capture all the elements—how can it be that that Frodo never becomes a Master of both worlds?—but it was still a good romp through story craft.

The quest cycle is based around an archetype: the hero is us and who we design for.

• The story starts with a call: (Frodo been given the ring, Luke being called to fight)
• And a refusal: (both turn it down)
• They need mentors and helpers (Gandalf and Sam; Yoda, Millennium Falcon crew). “Mentors don’t need beards or wands or anything, but they need to know the tools you need to be of help”
• Each involves crossing a threshold (getting past ringrwaiths with elves help, or escape w/ Millennium Falcoln). While this is exhilarating, it also means a point of no return for the hero.
• There are a series of trials and ordeals: be they trial of the dragon (an unknown enemy) or trial of the brother (a known enemy,  either in self—e.g. the ring—or outside, such as Boromir)
• There’s always a meeting with a goddess (not necessarily a woman, but beautiful e.g. Galadriel). They show hero good and represent love: not romantic love, but idealised love.
• But there is Temptation: (the ring to Galadriel; or the Dark Side). Giving in would be to become less than whole.
• his comes with atonement (e.g. Aaragon, or Darth Vader’s eventual apology).
• The adventure finishes with apotheosis ”often in movies with change of clothes!”; a change to whole person. (In LOTR, it’s with destruction of the ring). The help from an unexpected place (e.g. Gollum).
• However, there’s a Refusal of Return, (Luke and Frodo both delay going home); needs a Rescue with Without. In the real world this is from parents when a child, mentors when an adult.
• Ideally, the hero becomes a Master of Both Worlds: returning to your old life with the knowledge of the new  (Sam gets this, but Frodo doesn’t).
• It finishes with Freedom to Life (becoming a teacher; as Luke does).

Core Principles of UX Management
Michael Hawley

Michael Hawley gave practical tips on UX management, with three tenets:

1. Educate: build expertise , be pro active, budget for it
2. Mentor: enhance creative thinking.  Juniors struggle at selling ideas, getting over stumbling blocks and a number of other skills. Mentoring helps.
3.  Motivate: inspire best work. Money seems helpful, but it isn’t (Dan Pink reports on research that shows that monetary rewards helps with physical tasks, but not cognitive ones). People are by far motivated by intrinsic value (internal guides). e.g. give autonomy, enable progress, alignment

For me, given the current general discussions about mentoring, the most interesting question for me is what you should be as a mentor: you should not be the solutions person. Instead you should be encouraging your mentee to be able to find their own solutions.

People are Software — The Story of Project Interaction
Katie Koch

“Our kids are ‘of’ design, but they aren’t aware if it” —Takeo Onishio

Concerned with how high school kids can find out about design as a career, Katie Koch and Carmen Duke are part of an initiative (whilst stil having full time jobs!) teaching a group of New York girls about interaction design. They shared their experiences of running Project Interaction over the last few years.

1. High school students ‘get’ interaction design. They were born in 1995, have only known a world with tech. (Koch laughed at the results from one exercise they do with their students, where they have to try doing an everyday action in another timezone. When it came to finding an alternate subway route in the 90s “their mime for using a payphone was very funny as they’d never used one before”)
2. Young people are full of creative ideas, and they’re ready to share them. When given sketchbooks, they love them and fill them with observations from their lives.
3. Students learn design through a clear, repeatable process. 

They’ve also found that they use a cycle for teaching, as well as with students:

1. Entry: students invariably think of fashion and product design when asked about design, but they get it with real life examples like subway ticketing systems.
2. The make/test/reflect cycle:
   Make: using all sorts of materials, be it paper wireframes, post-it notes (really useful with students as it allows them to commit but also move, rip off page) even lego/cardboard
   Test: iterate (the students didn’t like being told to throw stuff away at first!), try different ways to tell a story (ranging from simple presentations to comics, dance)
   Reflect: compare feedback to expectations (have students critique each other right throughout process, which is new and hard for them “they’re used to just handing something in and getting a grade”)
3. The showoff stage: sharing final work in presentations; having a presence on project website; just getting their thoughts out of their head

There were also some interesting questions from the floor:
Why interaction design rather than some other form of interaction design? Is it just because of your background? 

We all know that user experience designers come from a range of different backgrounds. But what do these experiences bring to UX? In our first of a series of articles, Boon Chew reflects on his start in computer science.

Human-Computer Interaction has strong roots in Computer Science, and user experience design is almost exclusively a technology-focused practice. How much does UX design share with its engineering-focused sibling? I’m going to share some thoughts about my experiences from making the transition from software engineering to UX, and how my past career has made an influence in my roles as a user experience designer today.

Computer Science to User Experience — a strong legacy

A number of notable UX experts have come from a strong CS background. Alan Cooper, founder of interaction design company Cooper and author of the seminal book The Inmates are Running the Asylum, is also widely known as the Father of Visual Basic. Jared Spool, who is one of the industry’s most prominent speaker and usability expert, also had his beginnings as a software developer and programmer. I also know many UX practitioners who were formerly web developers, most of them specializing in front-end programming. A handful work in hybrid roles, juggling UX and software development in their day-to-day work.

Needless to say, UX is a natural route for CS practitioners keen on improving the user experience of interactive systems and beyond.

Why?

I pursued Computer Science because I wanted to work with computers. I was also excited about the web and in particular web design. I never got into design very seriously, feeling that I needed to start from scratch to learn the fundamentals – and engineering school was demanding enough. Still, I grew to love software engineering and found developing for the web very interesting and fulfilling, so that became my focus of my career for several years.

What  I Did

In my eight year career as a software developer, I worked primarily on web applications. While my first job involved developing Java applets for a NASA research project as a Computer Engineering student, my first ‘real’ job got me building web applications for a telecoms solutions company. It was the early 2000s, and the big Internet boom meant almost every software developer in the world were involved in building software for the web.

I started off working on many projects where I was the sole web developer, and I grew acquainted with many web frameworks and web technologies, both front-end, back-end, as well as rich internet applications. In short, I was a generalist developer for the web, and for many years, I was responsible for translating requirements from project managers and sales executives into usable websites.

I increasingly worked with teams of other developers, but my teams were fairly small and grew no larger than 5 people. It was a very business-like environment and long hours in the office were very common. Despite the challenging nature of the job, I continually pursued a deeper interest in the craft of web development across several different industries – first in telecoms, then in a technology startup, then as a prototype engineer in a research division of a large Fortune 500 company.

Interestingly, it was business innovation and research that sparked my interest in user experience. I already had a strong love for web and graphic design, but I couldn’t have predicted being in the UX field – it was like a whole new world had opened before me.

How I moved into UX

In 2006, I was hired into a research team specialising in developing prototypes with the aim if generating innovative and creative ideas for a large Fortune 500 company. There was a big buzz around business innovation and design thinking, and I poured myself into as much literature as I could to get a handle on the creative process. But it wasn’t until two years later that I came across About Face 3 by Cooper et al, which completely changed my perception of running software projects. The book provided me a practical methodology to apply user-centred design into my work and it made so much sense, it was very hard to go back to the way things were.

Also, one of the main motivations pushing me towards UX was my desire to create better digital experiences. I constantly struggled to influence design decisions as a developer, partly because I was so far removed from any business or design context. I also lacked the necessary skills and design experience, which often left me frustrated thinking that my contributed a part to the overall experience influenced only part of the solution.

One of the main motivations pushing me towards UX was my desire to create better digital experiences. I constantly struggled to influence design decisions as a developer, partly because I was so far removed from any business or design context.

At the end of 2008, I enrolled in a Masters program in Human-Computer Interaction to kick-start my career in UX. It was a difficult transition, and after I graduated I still continued to work as a developer cum UX designer before making the leap into UX full-time — initially as a contractor, then finally as a full-time UX designer at SapientNitro.

What I Bring to UX From It

It’s hard to pin down specific things that bring to UX from CS. A lot of it I probably take for granted, such as understanding the intricacies of web technologies, complex software practices, and how design and technology can feasibly work together in one seamless whole. Often times, UX seems like an extension of my overarching goal as a technologist to deliver amazing experiences. I’m also not unaware of how poor implementation can happen when designers don’t understand how even the best ideas still need to translate well into engineering. These days, it takes a lot of different skills to deliver complex solutions way beyond the ability of individual engineers, designers or entrepreneurs.

Often times, UX seems like an extension of my overarching goal as a technologist to deliver amazing experiences.

I’ve also noticed that I’ve developed good practices as a developer that benefit my productivity, especially when it comes to using complex production tools, managing digital artifacts, multi-tasking, and prototyping. For example, I’m as comfortable using visual design tools such as Omnigraffle, Fireworks, InDesign and Illustrator as I am using the Eclipse IDE. I keep a healthy trail of artifacts using version control systems, dropbox, and other means. The tools seldom get in the way of my work, and I pick up new tool skills very quickly.

Finally, I think that all that software problem solving has come in handy. Some design problems are extremely complex and require some heavy analytical work. I seem to have developed enough patience to break down complex problems into manageable chunks, structure it in a more coherent solution, while putting my information architect hat on.

What I’ve Had to Work On

All the benefits I described have not come without a price. I obviously lack experience and exposure in many aspects of design, such as the design process, visual literacy, creative savvy, and working in creative teams. I’m learning a lot of this on the job now, but I can’t say it’s been easy – I sometimes struggle to comprehend my teammates who have worked in the field for much longer, as part of me silently begs for more answers on “how things work around here”.

I’ve had some experience facilitating teams in brainstorming sessions and running meetings, but I still feel I have a long way to go in running a full-blown workshop to generate compelling ideas and solutions. There’s a lot to learn here, too – some professionals dedicate their entire lives to this one craft.

I’m also fairly new to a role that involves more client-facing opportunities. This requires a lot of savvy, preparation, good people skills and good communication skills as well. I don’t think UX can exist in a bubble (unlike some software roles), and as a designer, I’m constantly required to take a stand and provide compelling reasons for my decisions, while considering the business and user goals. That’s one hard task!

UX can’t exist in a bubble (unlike some software roles), and as a designer, I’m constantly required to take a stand and provide compelling reasons for my decisions, while considering the business and user goals

In addition to this, I have to have a firm handle on what the overall experience should be. I’ve learnt from others and from my own experience that no single UX method rules them all. Things can get overly complicated and overwhelming very easily, and I’m still developing my own personal style and approach that works best for me.

Tips for Those Making the Move

UX is a very subjective, diverse, and inclusive design practice. It pays to be intellectually curious, to prefer problem solving through collaboration, and be comfortable tackling complex problems. As a UX designer, you will gradually have to dig deep through social, behavioural and technical layers to ensure your designs can hold up well in specific contexts. And since no single person can provide all answers, you’ll have to be resourceful and be thinking on your feet a lot.

I would also encourage stepping completely away from the computer for a while, at least until you’ve developed a personal approach to practicing UX. Start by putting some methods into practice and learning from that. Generate designs prolifically and with the assumption of throwing away much of what you’ve designed through rapid iteration. Don’t be afraid of starting from scratch with your designs repeatedly and testing them – it will build confidence in your ability to research and design.

Also, force yourself to design with others. This will help build a richer perspective of the world and how to design for it, and you’ll learn a lot about collaborative design in that process.

And while you’re at it, keep a journal of every lesson you’ve learnt. Not just written, but artifacts, concepts and sketches too. These will go handy in preparing a portfolio when you’re finally ready to hit prime time.

What I’ve Found About Moving Into UX

While the transition hasn’t been easy, I don’t regret the decision I made to switch. There is a lot of demand for UX designers of diverse backgrounds, and CS represents one of the primary foundations for UX as a domain. While it isn’t necessary to code while doing UX, a strong CS foundation provides a real world basis for UX problem solving. As technology gets even more complex, the role of a UX designer bridging the gap between technology and people is becoming increasingly important. I’m grateful for the opportunity I have now, and see no end to the possibilities ahead.

This is the first of a series of Johnny Holland articles on the different stories and skills people bring to UX. Have your own to add? Please contact us.

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Photo: NC-by-CC-2.0 by deltamike