50 people. 9 hours. 1 design challenge.

The first Design Jam, supported by Mozilla Labs, took place in London on Saturday, 20th of November, at City University London.

Design Jams are one or two day design sessions, during which people team up to solve engaging UX challenges. While conferences and talks are very popular in the UX community, we don’t have many events for actual collaboration, like the ‘hackdays’ enjoyed by the development community. Only a few UX designers participate in hackdays or open-source design initiatives –  how can we change this and get UX designers more involved? How can we introduce them to open collaboration formats? The idea of an event to get designers together to learn from each other while working on actual problems was born. Design Jams champion open-source thinking & sharing and are non-profit, run by local volunteers. The London team are Desigan Chinniah, Johanna Kolllmann, Joe Lanman and Franco Papeschi.

While the primary audience for Design Jams are UX designers, everybody who wants to learn with and from others about UX is welcome. The 50 people at Design Jam London were UX professionals, developers, visual designers and students, all with different levels of experience and skills.

Participants writing their cards and sticking it on the grid

The team grid

After forming groups facilitated by a ‘team grid’, 9 teams started tackling the design challenge. A Design Jam isn’t a competition, so all teams were given the same challenge, and encouraged to help each other, eg by grabbing a person from a different team for interviews or guerilla usability testing. Picking a suitable design problem was the hardest task for the organisers. Here it is:

What is the ideal interface to track and trace relevant online content?

Every day people consume megabytes of web content – on a myriad of internet-enabled devices from varying locations. This content is typically re-located through:

• history
• bookmarks

Some things to consider:

• What are the typical cues for people to remember and retrieve online content (e.g. colour, keywords, prices, pictures, surrounding context etc.)?
• What are the current pitfalls? Where do users have most problems?
• How can people annotate visited content with additional information (e.g. mind-maps, tags, date/time visited, urls, search engine terms used, group around themes like going on holiday etc.)?
• Can activity be clustered automatically (e.g. time, location, people etc.)?
• Do 3rd party services (de.licio.us, Twitter & Flickr favourites, Facebook likes etc.) have a role in your idea? How do these interact with the rest of the service? Can previous saved content be connected or suggested?
• How can this work on single or multiple devices?
• How does location influence the interface?
• How do you want to expose the service (built-in browser UI, add-on/extension, web-based tool, widget or app, etc.)

Teams started tackling the challenge with a Research & Explore phase. It was great to see the various different approaches, including several brainstorming techniques, guerilla interviews or twitter surveys.

Mindmapping ideas

Desk research

Personas

At hackdays, the only time when outcomes are being shared is during the (often very short) presentations at the end of the day. At a Design Jam, the process is just as important as the outcome. How did you get this idea? How did you approach the problem? To allow teams to compare their processes and bounce ideas off each other, the groups shared what they had done so far before lunch. Articulating their ideas and getting questions from the audience helped teams to focus, and seeing how other teams had taken completely different steps got everybody reflecting on the many different ways to explore a problem.

“Seeing what the other teams had been doing made us see our idea differently and helped us focus” – Jeff van Campen

Show & tell

One of the interim presentations

After collecting tons of insights and coming up with some great concepts, the rest of the day was dedicated to the Design phase. The biggest challenge for the teams was to decide which aspect of their idea they wanted to focus on. Personas, guerilla research, sketching and storyboarding helped to prioritise and refine the design concepts. Design Jam mentors Leisa Reichelt and Ivanka Majic helped teams to make decisions and start visualising by looking at the concepts from a different perspective, asking the right challenging questions, and offering Jelly beans.

Leisa chats with a team

Ivanka helps a team

Sketching out a flow

Wireframes

In their final presentations, each team shared what they had done during the design phase, and presented the concepts. Outcomes included personas and scenarios, sketches and paper prototypes, diagrams explaining what the service does, and flow charts explaining what users do. The teams also talked about their design process. It was interesting to hear about the different approaches to sketching, with teams using techniques like the ’6 up’ template to have many ideas, or personas, storyboards and tools such as Stephen Anderson’s mental notes cards to have different ideas. It was also fascinating to see how people ‘winged’ the final presentations, using elevator pitches, iPad sketches and great stories to communicate the value proposition of their idea.

mindSTORM - final presentation

Bucket 9 - final presentation

Stachs - final presentation

You can find more information and see details about each team’s design process and outcome on the Design Jam wiki, check out the photos on Flickr, and videos of the day will be up on Vimeo.

What’s next?

The London Design Jam was a first attempt to try out this new format and understand the key aspects that will allow teams to collaborate, learn from each other, and walk away with a tangible design concept. Participant feedback and general interest confirmed that there’s definitely an appetite for this kind of event – an opportunity to share knowledge through creating and doing rather than talking. The aim is to have regular Design Jams in London, the UK, around the world, really. The London organisers are busy turning their learnings into a Design Jam organisers handbook, to make it easy to put on future sessions. If you’re interested in organising a Design Jam, add your name to the Design Jam wiki.

Thanks to Mozilla Labs, City University London, and Johnny Holland for supporting Design Jam.

Questions, suggestions, doubts? Thoughts on getting UXers to collaborate? Done something similar, and have advice? Share your thoughts.

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Header image under Creative Commons by E1

All photos by Design Jam London. The outcomes of Design Jam are shared under a Creative Commons license.

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

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

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

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

This is what the Lean IA process looks like

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

What Lean IA is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter started his talk by defining faceted navigation:

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

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

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

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

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

What are the alternatives to faceted navigation?

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

Tips & tricks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2010, users want to

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keynote – Oliver Reichenstein: iA on IA

Oliver Reichenstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(by Franco Papeschi)

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

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

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

Confusion and Clarity in IA – D. Grant Campbell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alignment diagrams: strategic ux deliverables – James Kalbach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(by Franco Papeschi)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joshua Porter – Designing for the Usage Lifecycle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen P. Anderson – Demystifying concept models

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

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

Concept models serve a purpose. Use them to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen shared useful tips for demystifying concept models:

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

James Box and Cennydd Bowles – Universal Principles of UX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Design Faster – Leah Buley

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

There are three steps Buley points out:

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

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

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

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

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

User Interview Techniques – Liz Danzico

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dave shared his ’10 essentials for meeting ninjas’:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karen’s previous presentation about content strategy:

Real-World Agile User Experience Design – Jeff Patton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design for Engagement – Jesse James Garrett

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

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

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

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

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

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

Search Patterns: The Future of Discovery – Peter Morville

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Metrics-Driven Design – Joshua Porter

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designing for Improvisation – Liz Danzico

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions – Stephen Anderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Experiencing Comics – Scott McCloud

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

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

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

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

Scott McCload at TED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

top image: conorwithonen