After a morning of familiar discussions on classic IxD topics, the afternoon sessions broadened the discourse to include a new range of audiences and contexts from further afield. These fell into one of two tracks: design from the inside out, and design and branding.

Stream — Inside Out Design

Design for the Developing World (Susan Wyche), Growbot Garden (Carl diSalvo) and Tacky
Proud: Brazil’s Tecnobrega Audiences (Ana Domb)

Chloe Gottlieb (R/GA)

The four speakers explored the impact of design within environments where it works as a disruptive force for change; from a new innovation lab in Kenya to techno dancehalls in Brazil.

While all speakers touched on examples of crowd-sourced innovation, the environments they are working in have varying degrees of access to the technology, tools, and materials that most of the designers in the room probably take for granted.
Susan Wyche, Computing Innovation Fellow at Virginia Tech’s Center for HCI, used her research on white collar workers in Nairobi to remind us of the dangers of imposing existing design values on different cultures, . She encouraged moving beyond assumptions to ‘Intentional Interactions’ which do not assume ‘access, anywhere, and anytime’ is always possible or culturally appropriate.

do not assume ‘access, anywhere, and anytime’ is always possible or culturally appropriate. – Susan Wyche

Carl Disalvo showcased growBot Garden (also see our earlier Johnny article), a series of workshops that bring together designers, researchers, artists, farmers, and gardeners to collaboratively explore how robotics and sensors can be used to support small-scale agriculture. In the role of Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Carl’s R+D team has five years of funding to explore this emerging space. He discussed the challenges of co-creating with non-designers and how important it is to use materials that are native to the environment, as in the case of constructing a pesticide-detecting robot with a farmer who did not want to use pesticides on his land. He also highlighted the nature of “cultural imaginings” — the unspoken values that we use to frame how things such as technology should look — and like Wyche, emphasised the need to research specific situations rather than use blanket assumptions.

In contrast to earlier talks in the day about usability driven-design, Erik Hersman set the stage for the necessity-driven innovation emerging in Africa. What happens when invention comes directly out of need? Rather than having five years to conduct research, the Ushahidi team of mostly-African programmers may have no more than a few hours to roll out an open-source platform for crowdsourcing information. Ushahidi is a web application originally created to map incidents of violence happening during the post-election crisis in Kenya, but has been adapted for crises in Haiti and Chile.  In many respects, the technology constraints have given African countries the opportunity to leapfrog developing countries, especially in the mobile sector. Africa is the fastest growing continent for mobile subscriptions and as seen in the cases below, for mobile innovation (with such companies as iYam, MXit, medicine quality app Pedigree and M-Pesa).

Finally, From the city of Belem, Brazil comes an example of social innovation in the form of Tecnobrega (translation: ‘cheesy techno’). Local DJ’s and musicians were willing to forgo copyrights in favor of an open-source system which allows fans to customize music and participate in its distribution and profit-sharing.  As opposed to business driving design, in this case, the business model responded to the community. Ana Domb’s MIT master’s thesis was an ethnographic exploration into the symbolic currencies and the value of audience participation in this Tecnobrega movement. It’s an interesting example of the creativity that emerges when design and technology are built from the bottom-up as opposed to designing from above.

Stream — Design and Branding

While the design for the Inside Out stream looked at different societies, the branding strand looked at the wider corporate reach of interaction design, from Flash to iPad apps.

Keynote Lisa Strausfeld

Pieter Jongerius (Fabrique)

Lisa Strausfeld, partner in Pentagram’s New York office and long time “interactive information designer” presented a highly personal talk, showing much of her work from as early as mid-nineties until today. It gave an inspiring insight in the motivations and emotions of Lisa as a designer.

Some of the work she presented was truly inspiring in terms of simplicity and effectiveness, such as the virtual 18th century dining table  in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Other highlights included work for Time magazine, such as a visualization of terrorist activity, such as Open Source Spying.Lisa went on to present a number of Flash-designed sites that clearly dated back a while, ending with the recent and refreshing GE Power Consumption Data Visualization.

Lisa tried different ways of categorizing for the work she presented, such as the powerful acronym LATCH, which gathers 5 ways of organizing information: location, alphabetical, time, category, and hierarchy. Ironically, the clear and normalized structure of her data visualization work stood in stark contrast to her rather fuzzy selection of design properties and messages, as well as her hasty explanations of the underlying concepts to her work . Because of this, the audience might have just been left with a very strong portfolio presentation and the question: now what?

The Visual Interface is Now Your Brand – Nick Myers

Patrick Sanwikarja (Fabrique)

Amidst all the talks about interaction design there was a refreshing presentation that focused more on visual design of interfaces and its importance to brands. Because design has become more strategic, this will be a bigger challenge for us as designers.

Nick started by defining what a company’s brand is: it is the primary source of its competitive advantage and a valuable strategic advantage. This means that often heard characteristics such as ‘intuitive’ and ‘simple’ are not going to be enough anymore. Companies and designers can influence their brand, but in the end the customers define what a brand is. Considering that for many brands, most contact moments are now digital, Nick concludes that the visual interface is in fact the brand.

With software, it’s more difficult to apply branding, compared to with traditional media. This is because software is not fashion. The development of software can take a long time and the software itself should last long too, so software needs to feel timeless. Therefore, the identity of a brand is in the details. The visual identity cannot be judged on its own, but should always be explored in context.

To me, the most important learning of Nick’s presentation is that strong brands should have ‘signature interactions’: interactions that can differentiate and add delight. This means we should not use design patterns; they are not memorable. Nick showed a nice overview of examples of signature interactions that included Apple Cover Flow, Google Street View, XBox Kinect and the Playstation XrossMediaBar. The interaction doesn’t necessarily have to be very advanced or special. As long as the visual design is of high quality, the interface can be memorable and distinctive (such as with Playstation).

Nick ended with a quote from Apple’s Jonathan Ive: “Its easy to be different, but it’s difficult to be better”, which nicely illustrates the challenge for interaction and visual designers. Is it possible for all brands to develop their own special signature interaction? It would be nice, but I doubt it. And even if they could, I can imagine that with many different ways of interacting, this wouldn’t benefit overall usability. On the other hand, this can be an argument for not just focusing on the interaction itself, but just as much on the visual quality. Nick has made clear that visual interface designers need to be involved earlier and more often in the strategic phase, if a company wants to make a difference. The examples of signature interactions that Nick showed were by big, resourceful companies. Can they develop signature interactions because they’re big, or are they big because they have signature interactions?

Leaning Back With NPR: How We Created A Relaxing Experience For The iPad – Scott Stroud

Patrick Sanwikarja (Fabrique)

Scott Stroud from NPR (National Public Radio) talked about the challenge of designing and developing an iPad app in less than four weeks. When research showed that 5% of NPR customers were planning to buy the (then unreleased) iPad, the company made a (near) last minute decision to make an app.

The extreme pressure of  the time frame (as half of the four weeks was needed for development, the design phase was limited to two weeks) meant that he had to use counterpressure i.e. committing fast to core assumptions. Next was deciding the method. NPR had already been applying Agile methods, which works very well for ‘tactical design’. For conceptual design however, Agile does not work well. But Scott couldn’t afford to start from scratch, either. So they relied on Apple’s human interface guidelines for the iPad to design a good usable interface, such as: physicality/realism, stunning graphics, handle orientation changes, support gestures appropriately and restrain hierarchy.

Their first concepts were indeed usable, but mundane: it looked like a massive iPhone app. So other than not meeting the deadline, he uncovered a less obvious risk: being too conventional. They therefore decided to focus on a “leanback experience”: a relaxing iPad app, with enough “NPR-ness”. They had a nice way of expressing this: they wanted the app to be like Michelle Norris’s (a radio host for NPR) relaxing voice. He went on talking about more things that were critical in making the app, effectively and efficiently:

• Don’t have secret handshakes: make sure it is obvious to the user how to use the interface.

• Reuse what you have. Because of the limited time, they ported some (less important) functionality from their existing iPhone app.
• Negotiate to deliver. The developer wanted to use the initial design, but showing that iPhone code could be reused helped.
• Consider future cross-platform use (e.g. using cards)
• Do user tests, despite the timeline. They managed to do quick user test (e.g. paper prototyping) and improve the final design from the insights.
• Trust reactions from smart people. Videos for the NPR iPad app featuring users’ initial response showed how it has maintained the brand: serendipitous, deep, curious.

I admire Scott’s ability to not cave under the pressure. Instead of just getting a functional app on the iPad he stayed true to what the NPR is to its customers: a way of relaxation. To me, the end result still feels a bit conventional to me (I haven’t used it myself), but judging from the video testimonials, I’m sure it worked well for them.

—-

Top image from Growbot on Flickr

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