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

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

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

Extending the Storytelling, Boon Sheridan

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

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

Their benefits are:

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

He suggests implementing them through the following forms

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

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

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

Storify curation

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

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

Marcia Bates's Information Seeking Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designing Interactions that Help Customers in Decision Making, Stefano Bussolo

Storify curation

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

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

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

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

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

The heuristic strategies he suggested:

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

In summary:

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

Understanding the Nature of Resistance, Alla Zollers

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

Resistance is … well, you get the picture

Her steps:

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

Teaching Design Thinking, Jason Hobbs & Terrence Fenn

Storify curation

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

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

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

Complexities of Design Education

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

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

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

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

Fill in the IA Gap, Mags Hanley

Storify page

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

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

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

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

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

(Eric Reiss may or may not have won).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

Image CC by Pedros

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

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

Luke Wroblewski, Today’s Web

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

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

Social is big

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile

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

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

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

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

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

The Future:

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

Today’s web is exciting and scary.

Beyond The Polar Bear, Michael Atherton

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

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

A Web of Connected Things

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

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

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

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

And the web is changing:

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

Users, Experience, and Beyond, Eric Reiss

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

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

Reiss stepped us through how to use the framework:

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

He urged us to:

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

The Information Architecture of Culture, Martin Belam

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

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

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

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

Mistakes:

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

However, they did have some successes:

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

He have the following tips:

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

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

Out of the Echo Chamber, into the Fire Jason Mesut

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

The Dogmas:

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

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

The Human Centipede of UX Dogma

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

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

His some of his key truths and dares:

Truths

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

Dares

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

—
Image CC by George M. Groutas

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

Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX—Whitney Hess

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Experience for Websites Designed for Smartphones—Barak Danin

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

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

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

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

How to Make Them Click—Amir Hardoof

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Psychology of Decision-making—Dr. Chaim Shapira

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Design for Facebook—Oren Shamir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He finished by giving some specific advice and recommendations:

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

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

For more, see our recent interview with Oren.

The Right Way to Wireframe—Russ Unger

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

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

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

Russ ended with some important principles:

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

See you next year!

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

Guerrilla User Research—Russ Unger

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

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

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

Landing Page Design—Tamir Cohen

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

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

But you definitely should:

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

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

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

Web Analytics—Assaf Trafikant

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

Creating a Culture of UX—Whitney Hess

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

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

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

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

Trading cards of UX luminaries was well under way by day 2 of UXLX. Today, we had topics ranging from site strategy to comics.

Strategic User Experience – Leisa Reichelt

In this workshop Leisa Reichelt takes on a huge challenge: she tries to clarify what strategic UX actually involves and how it can help us as designers create better experiences. One of the first challenges she needs to take on is the explanation of strategy itself. For a lot of people this is a very vague thing, even for those high up in organizations. Too often making a profit is seen as the strategy of a company, while in fact this is only a possible result of it. To know what the strategy of a business is we have to look at its purpose, which should always lie outside of the business itself.

Strategy is often mixed up with tactics, so Leisa gives us a very simple example:

• Strategy: we need to take the hill, men
• Tactics: fat guys go behind rocks, skinny guys behind trees

After this she continues and gives her definition of strategic UX: “UX activities focusing on achieving a significant organizational goal where a digital interface is a significant aspect of the product or service offering.” So when we really want to make a difference as designers and not only want to design the shell we should start getting involved on the correct level and try and talk on a strategic level. But before we all get enthusiastic Leisa warns us that this is very difficult to do, since a lot of managers in high positions only want to talk to people who (in their eyes) understand business and they don’t believe that designers can do that. One tip is to move away from our solution and design based position and move towards becoming facilitators. We are great in listening and translating what others think, want and need and formulate it in a clear way. And if you are able to introduce UX attributes in the process to help clear things up that is a win-win situation, especially when the managers feel that it’s actually a business attribute.

During her talk (the session didn’t really turn into a workshop, but was actually a 3-hour presentation) Leisa showed us the different levels in the process where we as UX designers can get involved. She described three levels:

• Business strategy: value proposition/experience strategy, product description, target audience, business model
• Customer experience strategy: experience map & touchpoints, personas, design principles, KPIs & metrics
• Tactical execution: prioritization, strategy led design, design evaluation, methodology

Leisa took on a challenging subject, but really managed to bring an important message across. At the same time there is still so much we need to learn and understand that you can fill a book with it, and fortunately that is something Leisa is working on at the moment.

Know Thy User: Personas — Steve Mulder

Anyone who’s come near a Cooper book (and a lot who haven’t) will know of those famous yet much debated method known as personas. Steve Mulder’s informative presentation got down to the nuts and bolts of using them, from large scale surveys to life-size cutouts.

Mulder stepped through the foundational reasons that we need personas (business results depend on satisfying users, you are not your user, learning about users requires direct contact, knowledge about users must be actionable, decisions should be based on users) and then suggested that personas are defined by three things

1. goals
2. behaviours
3. attitudes

The session was filled with useful tips for using personas. Some of them included:

• Surveys — aim for 100+ completios per segment, make it less than 15 minutes long, ask about behaviour (not importance), clear, familiar language…. use scales (not y/n), randomise answers when appropriate, don’t avoid open-ended input fields, break up into pages.
• Competitor analysis pages can include how they relate to various personas (i.e alongside all the other checklists have ones for the personas).
• Persona pages should have realistic photos (cheap or free sites for images include http://www.sxc.hu http://morguefile.com http://istockphoto.com). Other interesting ideas include writing the mini-story in first person so the persona is talking to you.
• My favourite tip was about the roll-out of personas. While you can do the standard one page summary, other more creative methods include making cards, life-size cut-outs (not for everyone but interesting), making a persona space where you deck out a cubicle as it would be for a persona, newsletters, and having the persona faces in the top left of all your wireframes to remind you who you’re designing for!

There was also a lot of discussion about how to bring in personas into a workplace not particularly amenable to them — much like Leah Buley’s talk the day before, the answer given was to quietly start using them and then air them if they show success.

Site search analytics – by Louis Rosenfeld

One of the morning workshops was held by the renowned Louis Rosenfeld in his role as “ information therapist” as he put it. The topic was site search analytics: what to make from the stuff people type in the search bar of your website. That ‘stuff’ can be quite interesting, because it indicates what users want, as opposed to what they need from a stakeholders’ point of view. If you bring those two together, you can greatly improve on your content as well as your search.
Search queries, because they are peoples’ own words, are semantically rich data. To get a feel for that he did an exercise and let the audience play around with a query data file in Excel to see what could be extracted from that. One group came up with an impressive correspondence analysis. What this really showed was that with little effort you can start making quite a difference.
After the break he presented an interesting case study from Vanguard which showed how multiple metrics can back up a feeling that something could be wrong with your new search engine. He rounded up with some practical tips on how to make site search better and get others in your company involved as well. All in all a great introduction on this fairly new subject.

Lessons from Bill Hicks — Ian Fenn

Ian Fenn beat the post-lunch slump with his entertaining — and more insightful than you might expect — video-packed ode to great comedian Bill Hicks. Fenn actually had the fortune to inverview many years ago in his then role as a BBC radio reporter and was impressed with ever since, but realised many of the skills that made him a great comedian could be applied to UX. His Lessons from Bill Hicks were:

1. Be honest. “Sometimes you have to tell stakeholders your baby’s ugly.” Hicks’ could be outrageous, but he was always honest.
2. Do your research. Get your facts straight, and above all be clear rather than dumbing down. (Hicks could also do devastating political comedy since he did his research and pulled no punches).
3. Actively listen. Change if the audience isn’t listening to you. Hicks was a master at reading the audience and changing his tack on the fly if need be.
4. Switch perspective. Comedy is about the unexpected, and Hicks could easily make fun of both sides of a particular issue, such as smoking.
5. Refine your work. Comedians work at their act for a long time — Hicks’ “How Tall Are You” skit was refined over 30 years!
6. Tell Stories. Great comedians know how to spin a story, such as Hicks painting a vivid picture about how weed should be legalised!
7. Have a vision. Jared Spool talks a lot about this in UX. Hicks usually finished his show on an inspiring note, with all his ideas about how we might have a better world — having that dream can inspire others too.
8. Leave a legacy. This has also been talked about in UX — what will you leave behind? Hicks died in 1992 age 32, but even now there’s eleven thousand clips of his on Youtube, and he’s mentioned on Twitter every 15 minutes. To top it off, a documentary on him was released last year. His legacy lives on.

Fenn talked about sharing the stage with Hicks, and part of the fun was (usually NSFW!) clips. Check out the Hicks’ movie trailer for a feel for them.

Product Personality — Jeroen van Geel

Our very own Jeroen Van Geel but the lightning in lightning talks as we went through a fast paced presentation about cars, cigarette ads and Craiglist .
Product personality is more than just Henri the vacuum cleaner. Many products have a strong personality — be it an HP laptop and the OLPC or the new VW Beetle — but in all too many cases on the web, all pages in a specific category look the same (be it travel sites or car ones).

Why use product personality? Van Geel recommends reading The Media Equation to understand just how important the connection is, but the key reasons are:

• Humans automatically attribute human behaviour to everything
• People prefer like-minded personalities [and products] (there is a famous computer test where people were asked to use choose between two identical computers, one named Linus and the other Max. People chose the one that was most like them).
• Undiluted product personalities are more trusted than contradictory ones (having a defined personality and sticking to it makes it seem more reliable)
• People judge on first impression

Some good examples come from the branding world. Cigarette brands often had very strong personalities (the Lucky Strike personality is very different from Malboro), and cars have a long history of it as well (take the Alfa Romeo and the VW Beetle). These products have values that are used everywhere.

But there are examples from websites.

• Whitehouse.gov in the Bush era was formal, authoritative, traditional, old fashioned; the new one is still authoritative and traditional, but is now also more caring.
• Ebay’s colourful new site is personal, confident, fun. Craigslist, on the other hand, looks very different and comes across as pragmatic, independent, no-nonsense, unorganised, a friend helping you out. It’s key to realise that though Craigslist site looks cheap, the company has made an active decision to have it that way, and benefits by thus appealing to a different audience.
• Finally this can be applied on a micro-level, Amazon and Woot’s sign up pages are very different — the former uses formal language and red text for required fields, the latter chatty and understated text.

There’s a whole area that this can step off into — a question was asked about the personality of interactions — but it was yet another reminder of the importance of meaning and storytelling in UX.

Sell yourself better – by Jason Masut

This really was a lightning talk as no second got wasted as Jason ran us through his UX Portfolio tips. Drawing from 10 years of experience and seeing lots of bad portfolios (80% of recent ones) he sparked the discussion about improvement at IA London and came up with some tips.
His tips in short:

• a proper introduction of yourself, at least descriptive and well structured, if possible enhanced with things like a visual design touch, quotes from others or an infographic about yourself
• demonstrate how you work, which means the process and not only end results. To do so photograph your workshops, keep some of your sketches and outputs and edit some video, e.g. on paper prototyping.
• share your project experience, with attention to all phases of the design process. Don’t do an exhaustive summary and show deliverables as well.

A good portfolio is always useful, not only if you want to look for a new job. It can help you to remember and improve on what you’ve done before and can be helpful for others as an example.

To get you started: Jason’s tips are available on www.betteruxportfolios.com

See What I Mean: Communicating with Comics — Kevin Cheng

Comics are a great tool to communicate concepts, visions and other complicated stories. They are easily understood by people and can depict a lot of detail in just a few tiles. Drawing comics forces a designer to really think about the message that he wants to bring across. They force you to think about what’s the essence of the message you want to convey and at the same time it’s possible to leave a lot of details out and still get a clear image. This last part is because people automatically fill in the blanks. During the workshop Kevin showed us several examples where these techniques were applied and he had us draw stick figures, facial expressions and in the end an entire comic.

But the main message of Kevin’s presentation is not aimed on drawing techniques, but at the message that comics can bring across. In a series of slides he shows us examples of comics that are focused on product features, introduced entirely new products and attempted to explain very complicate technical issues to a non-techy audience. One of the more interesting examples here is the Chrome comic which was used to explain the benefits of the Chrome browser to a broad audience.

Chrome

Depending on the role in the company that you have there can be different reasons to use comics:

• CEO, decision maker: distill a vision and share it across the organisation;
• Marketer, sales, business development: get the attention of potential clients and customers;
• Engineer, design: crystallise problem and solutions and get team feedback;
• Product manager: compact reminder to keep focus on vision.

With sun, sea, and a tropical 30 degrees C outside, no wonder people kept  saying that UXLX felt like a vacation. You might think it a pity to be indoors. Luckily day one of the conference kicked off with some cracker material that justified staying inside.

Storytelling for User Experience – Whitney Quesenbery

One of the first workshops of the day was kicked of by Whitney Quesenbery. In her workshop she tried to teach the audience the importance of telling stories during the design process, both to clients and team members. One of her main messages is that stories aren’t a broadcast transmission, but always create a connection between the audience and the storyteller:

• the storyteller shapes the story;
• the audience form an image;
• the storyteller and the audience affect each other;
• the most important relationship is between the audience and the story.

When a UX designer did research and shares his knowledge with the team stories can be a great way of doing this. When done right the storyteller retells the important parts of the stories the users told him, thus creating a connection between the design team and the user.

In order to become good storytellers we first must learn to become active listeners. We need to really be willing to hear the story people (users) are telling us and understand what’s it all about. Being an active listener means we have to encourage the story to be told further, by asking open questions and giving non-verbal feedback.

During the workshop Whitney actively involved the audience by giving several tasks. She focused on the following subjects:

• Story structure: structures give the story a shape and help the listeners/readers to understand it better. Is it a me-they-me structure, do you want to turn it into an adventure structure or should it be a contextual interlude? The way you set the story up can help engage people in the right way and lay focus on the right part of the story (like the product, the user or the process);
• Story context: context grounds the story in a specific place and time. You may want to emphasize (or change) the location, time, history or something else to help the listeners to understand it better.
• Purpose in UX: stories help drive UX work in several different ways. Do you want to share a success story and share what made this product so great or is the focus of your story to facilitate a brainstorm and do you want people to think in a different context?;
• Format of the story: there are many ways to tell a story, you can decide how. Is it written or drawn like a comic? Should it be a formal presentation or a light conversation starter?
• Imagery: imagery gives the story emotional resonance. By adding details about the sounds, smell or motion of the environment or a specific person you can pull the listeners into the world you are creating.

These tasks were closely linked to the book she wrote with Kevin Brooks called Storytelling the User Experience., so if you want to know more I would definitely check it out (also check out our excerpt). All in all it was a very interesting workshop with loads of stories. And as Whitney said: “what is design but a story?”

Become a UX Team of One – Leah Buley

UXers may know about being asked if you’re an innie or an outie, but if Leah Buley’s research catches on, you might also be a giraffe, bee, beaver, or penguin. Confused? They sum up the types of people that might be described as a UX Team of One. In her interactive and workshop with a lot of new material (such as I can’t find pictures of the gorgeous icons she used for each animal), she took the group through planning their futures, and thinking about ways to combat issues as the lone UXer.

However, her outstanding and memorable takeaway (including beautiful icons sadly not caught on camera but bound to end up on badges) was that of the four types of UX Teams of One. She sees them as a spectrum (most of us start at number one and move down), and classifies them as the following:

1. The Crossover (giraffe) has recently come over from another field. (Their long neck is from foresight).
   As their challenge relate to focus, access and skills, the strategies are to do with collaborating and DIY research. A key point to remember is that clients won’t allow for research do it should just be built in or ‘done on the sly’ (our podcast with Sam Lader on design research also talks about this).
   Some methods include using MAYAs Heuristic Markup, The Five Second Test, and competitor images (even getting the clients to collect them as homework!)
2. The Doer (a bee) is a knowledgeable person in a company without a UX department — they usually have to do things beside UX or move departments a lot. As they are held back by being brought on too late, or not valued, they need strategies to focus on professional relationships, visibility, and ROI.
   Some relevant methods included Liva Labate’s UX Health Checkup, product definition workshops (stakeholders repeatedly draw and disucss their product vision, as after a couple of rounds they’ll be far more aligned) and “Lunchtime UX” listening dates with other key team members.
3. The Builder (beaver) has been in UX for while on point of starting UX team.
   As their issues relate to relationship management and politics, the strategies are to align with business and build out a team. Methods included ongoing internal surveys, case studies and pre-meetings (1-to-1 reviews of docs with each key stakeholder before a key design review)
4. The Independent (lonely penguin): those that are freelance etc. Literal team of one
   They need to promote themselves, be legally savvy, and set their own terms (e.g. using a project brief). What’s more, they need to be known for something (as Leisa Reicht has blogged about).

Buley has been evangelising the UX Team of one for a few years now, but those who saw her talk a while ago (or looked at the slides) should definitely see it again as there is a whole lot of new information in preparation for her book-in-progress of the same name.

Skeuomorphs: The Good, The Bad, and the Silly – Andrew Watterson

Skeuomorphism is the act of using cues from the old to make new things feel more familiar. It has been applied for a very long time and can in our practice be a great way to introduce people to new technology and interactions. Some of the better known examples of skeuomorphs are the sound of digital cameras when you take a photo and the fake engine sound electrical cars make so that you can hear them approach.

When launching a product with a totally new way of interacting, like the iPad, you see that skeuomorphism can be an easy way to let people get used to the device. Watterson gives examples like the bookshelf in iBook and the old fashioned look of the contacts page. But at the same time he points out that there is still a lot of debate whether this approach is really the best way to go. There are a lot of people who have strong opinions for or againts, like our writer Rahul Sen is the recent article ‘The IxD Bauhaus: What Happens Next?’  I believe that there is a balance and that skeuomorphism can definitely be a good thing, but that we should always try to keep challenging ourself to also look at different ways of approaching the interactions. It’s just one way to reach what we want, but surely not always the only and best one.

Watterson’s conclusions regarding to this topic:

• Use skeuomorphs to add a satisfying and nostalgic emotional effect;
• Bridge gaps between what people are used to and a new method with skeuomorphs;
• Question whether you’re skipping the opportunity for innovation by using a skeuomorph;
• Don’t mismatch your functionality with a skeuomorph.

Picking your Neurosurgeon’s Brain— Susan Dybbs

For most of us, the closest we get to seeing what happens in an OR is through TV shows. However Susan Dybbs showed us not only what a surgeon sees when they’re carrying out telesurgery, but how we can use participatory design methods to understand highly expert and tacit processes.

Starting with Terry Winograd’s observation that designers have limited time to process things like how something feels like is in the tacit domain, Dybbs pointed out the issues that designers have when trying to create interfaces for highly expert systems such as telesurgery interfaces — the designer can’t get anywhere near the understanding that the users have of what happens and what is working. She resolved this by reating a toolkit of a mockup process with clipping (words, chunks of information, pictures of xrays etc) and then got surgeons to talk/make through their experience of surgery.

One of the most interesting insights from this method was being able to show the difference between what users say they need and what they actually use. In the case of surgeons, this might be documentation that is for legal reasons but never used in actual surgery, information they didn’t actually need (surgeons thought they needed to see the room view but actually didn’t) and vice versa (e.g. sideness — which side of the body you’re operating on, is a minor but key piece of information in helping a surgeon orient themselves with telesurgery).

Her tips for best practices:

• Create a toolkit (nothing is more scary than a blank piece of paper)!
• Do your research (sort original themes)
• Precondition your participants (e.g. photojournal, or just storytelling/pre-interviews)
• Keep it rough + impermanent
• Think aloud (helps show mental models)
• Be flexible (e.g. meet people at their comfort zone — help them make collage if they don’t want to do it).

Creating the Ultimate Experience: UX + CX + CRM — Stuart Cruickshank

Can you have a relationship with your oven? Stuart Cruickshank argued that you could. How? Through a combination of acronyms: UX, CX (customer experience) and CRM (customer resource management).

CRM has traditionally looked at strategy, business, and technology, but thanks to social media, a new branch of this known as Social CRM has emerged that also looks at engagement and conversation through empathy, emotion, authenticity, transparency. A great example of a company using social CRM is Zappos — their model means that their customers have a great experience and feel empowered, while the company gains advocates and profit (they have no marketing budget!)

On that oven? The Art Home Electrolux project attempts to do this (an exciting restaurant in Paris uses all Electrolux products, and the cook provides tips about cooking, meaning the customer could go home and cook what they got at the restaurant, as well as continuing the conversation through social media.

After a lot of conferences talking about service design, it was refreshing to have an alternate take on service systems UX could get involved with. As Cruickshank pointed out that the end of the talk, while CX and CRM have more visibility at the corporate level, at the end “experience is the goal”.

For those interested in the topic, he highly recommends Paul  Greenberg’s CRM at the Speed of Light (4th Edition).

Effective Design Documentation Without a Fuss — Dan Brown

Despite the growing interest in living prototypes for UX, it looks as if design deliverables won’t be going away any time soon. Dan Brown (who we interviewed earlier this year) tried to trick the attendees into saying it might be or otherwise, but most UXers know to always say “it depends”!

What is design documentation? Brown defines them as “an artefact, defined by a team, to create a project, whose purpose is to move a project forward.”

He suggests that many designers forget to think about purpose and progress (at worst making some projects stand still), as above all, documentation should inspire action.

Brown breaks down design documents into different types: clarifying approach, justifying decisions, comparing multiple approaches. Each of these should be handled differently, just as your structure should change if you’re writing for a different audience (e.g. developers vs C-level).

He finished up with a look through the Eight Shapes Unify system he took part in creating. His rationale for the system is that most existing templates in Word etc are a waste of time as they force you to fill in blanks.

The best takeaway in regards to writing was to “be a journalist not a comedian” — in other words summarise first rather than having it at then end (common in comedy but in journalism known as burying the lead).

Designing by Doing: Bringing Agile Thinking to UX Practice – Anders Ramsay

Agile development is one of the hot topics in todays UX scene, so several talks at the conference today focused on this topic. In Anders Ramsay’s workshop he didn’t jump into the agile process itself, but used the approach of agile thinking and showed how we as designers can use it in our day to day practice. He did this by giving several tasks:

• Paired interviews: this method comes from paired programming, where two programmers sit behind one screen and together write the code. In paired interviews you let two users interview each other instead of you interviewing them one by one. According to Ramsay this is a great way of getting insights you would normally be unable to collect, since the users themselves know what to talk about and what is interesting to know. By letting them conduct the interviews and write down the interesting material you can collect great amounts of raw data in a short time;
• Agile personas: in agile development you don’t design all the details at once and you try to minimize the amount of documentation. The idea behind agile personas is to create very light-weight artifacts out of research data (like you collected through paired programming). By letting the entire team check the raw data and detect trends you are able to share with them important insights. When you after that write the agile personas (real name, main characteristics and quotes) you have a great starting point for your future discussions;
• Story flows: use some of the user stories you collected in your user research and prioritize them. After this you can start adding tasks to each story and prioritize these as well. Even when you are not doing scrum you can still use story flows to get a good overview of what you want to create and especially what’s the most important thing to do first.

Ramsay’s workshop was very engaging, although a bit chaotic. He was well able to show everybody the power of agile thinking, although there are still so many other things to agile thinking that would have been worth sharing… one of the aspects I find most interesting is the daily standup with the entire team, to get a good feeling of what the current progress is. You don’t need to scrum to have the benefits of this way of working together as a team.

Day Two started bright and early with a full day of talks, panels, and workshops. With Dan Willis as the morning keynote the room was crowded with coffee–and–ipad–in–hand designers.

Keynote, Dan Willis

Technology is the application of scientific thought to practical application

Dan (aka @uxcrank) opened day two with All You Really Need to Know About Users You Learned in High School and his presentation was anything but traditional (and there is video proof). He introduces this as the Hangover Keynote, being day two and the show didn’t stop there. Before starting beach balls fly through the room and a dance party starts getting the entire room moving and shaking. And after a few minutes of displacement, Dan starts his talk or as he puts it, his Sermon on Demystification.

Dan demystifies UX and our profession and shares that a lot of what we do we learned in grade school. This includes:

• Hall passes are bullshit, control is an illusion.
• The cool kids liked you for your car.
• You can’t trust new friends, online friends are not ‘move your couch’ friends.
• You’re wearing what? People group and act like sheep.
• People go to parties to get drunk and have sex with strangers, sometimes superficial is good.

Dan closes his talk debunking myths of runaway technology, the cutting edge, Web 2.0 and human to human connection, and mobile web. He drives up to be a designer and to have meaningful goals with our products as well as to drop the adjective adjacent to design and to focus on the work as a holistic problem solving process.

Agile’s Secret Step: Discovery, Lis Hubert

Lis opens by defining what she means by Agile as a project execution method that is, simply, different than waterfall. Then, after a quick survey of the room level sets that we have all had some form of exposure to the methodology. She moves to discuss that Agile’s secret steps are discovery and planning. Sharing her stories with a large financial services company nicknamed The Titanic and others she discusses the challenges of UX fitting into Agile.

Lis Hubert

Lis reminds us Agile is not the enemy and communicates how we can have UX coincide as a defined element within the Agile process. Lis equates a product backlog to the bottles of beer coming down an assembly line and the need to be informed what is next to run an efficient system. This comes not from an iteration zero but rather a strategy team in charge of the overall plan. Agile must continue to move forward and balance of discovery and appropriate planning can keep UX involved and balanced throughout the project life cycle.

Influencing Business Using a Wall of Knowledge, Heidi Mucn and Derren Hermann

Heidi and Derren, working at Nationwide Insurance, share their methods and experiences influencing business. They step away from corporate samples though and share personal stories that use their methods.

What is the Wall of Knowledge? In Nationwide, its the large spaces to hang up and present information relevant to the current discussion. Much like an affinity diagram, it collates and organizes in a fluid manner information for the team to be aware of only unlike an affinity diagram it can include facts, inspiration, and any other form of content. When in practice, the Wall is used to obtain unified by in and collaboration earlier on so that the large stakeholder meetings are more around head nodding and less around discourse of a direction and decision. Make the information public and social and everyone is more engaged.

Taming a Nine-Headed Stakeholder Monster, Geoff Alday

Geoff defines the nine headed stakeholder monster, its a shared challenge that we all face, and it is our responsibility to synthesize and understand stakeholder needs and opinions. He immediately arms us with his tips on how to manage the beast and defines nine archetypes:

1. User. The myth is they don’t know what they want but they do.
2. Customer. The myth is the customer is always right, but they really want goals to be accomplished.
3. Sales. The myth is all they want is more sales, but address their pain points.
4. Marketing. The myth is all they care about impressions, but they truly do know how to market a product and ask marketing for content support.
5. Support. The myth is they only hear complaints and they can offer a unique understanding of users.
6. Executive. Geoff admits all these myths are true.
7. The Others. While not stakeholders the myth is their opinion doesn’t matter and is dismissed.
8. Developer. Debunk the myth that developers can’t design. They might not have the visual skills but they can contribute conceptual and functional designs beyond a designer’s skills.
9. Designer. The myth is the designer is they can only make it pretty, but there is more thought behind it.

Geoff close with tips to speak to the monsters language and to not use jargon for jargon’s sake, to listen to the stakeholders, and to consider all angles before disagreeing with something. His final thought is to admit mistakes and to get over it, don’t take everything personally.

Winning Big in UX: Changing the Problem–Solving Culture in Organizations, Jay Morgan

Jay defines his cognitive science background as his kung fu grip. He discusses how we can succeed more in UX by interpreting motivations and behaviours, not only of users but of stakeholders. Jay shares a few heuristics, is A like B (representativeness, Start here, get to there (anchoring and adjustment), and How likely is that to happen (availability). Ultimately Jay charges that we as designers must do more than design and must leverage cognitive and social sciences to be ambassadors and to build relationships more than build things that simply look good or behave well.

Working Lunch: Every UX Person Needs a Portfolio, Abby Covert

The UX community discusses a lot around how to present work, what level of a portfolio is needed, and how to best present work, especially given constraints around NDAs. Over lunch Abby had the audience go through a series of exercises intended for self reflection to understand how we can communicate what we do. Abby communicated three key criteria a portfolio should have:

• Pride not Proof — have pride in your work.
• Quality not Quantity
• Passion and Process — what you do, how you do it, and why.

Abby stresses the need for an ‘About Me’ that is real and tangible. Ignore buzz words and companies, focus on what you do in layman terms. She continues to discuss format (readable, presentable, printable) maintenance and growth, and distribution. In the end the audience left with new contacts to continue the exercises and a completed workbook with the building blocks of their own portfolio.

Abby Covert

“This Product Sucks!” A Sampler of Product Design Issues, Darren Kall

Darren tells a story of a product he created that, after conversations with a client realized that parts of it sucked. Darren communicates how to tell if products suck and then, if they do, how to mitigate the issue. What makes a product suck is not if it is unattractive, broken, or tasteless but rather if there is a conscious design or business decision that reduces the ideal experience. We conclude with a series of different non web-based samples of sucky products and what, from our UX toolkit needs to be done to avoid the issue. Comical and lightweight, Darren reminds us all of what not to do and how to approach design.

The Nature of Information Architecture, Dan Klyn

IA/UX is a dated term and IA should stand alone. As a professor with the University of Michigan Dan communicates how IA needs to and deserves to stand alone and that it is not an IA slash UX (IA/UX) connection.

They learn about this thing Information Architecture and they enter a world that does not have IA by itself.

Dan breaks down the ontology, taxonomy, and choreography of things and reframes what information architecture is at a root level. Using the iPad and Apple’s taxonomy as a basis for the conversation, we analyze language and how different product are organized well or poorly, and the resulting effect on the overall experience. Taking a step back away from the deliverables (site map, product map, etc) we are left to evaluate where IA fits as a larger part of design and an equal level, not a slash to UX.

Thinking with Your Hands, Karl Fast

“An experience designer walks into a bar…” And with that Karl opens up with the simple observation that we all talk with our hands. But why? Our gestures help convey additional information about our story. Sharing research around how and when people talk with their hands Karl discusses the learned habits around gestures, and the rate and reasons for gestures.

Karl describes the three types of gestures: adapters emblems and gestures, and the different use cases for each of them. He realigns the meaning of gestures and by introducing the term emblems aligns the audience to what we actually mean by gestural interfaces. Tying the conversation to affordances Karl stresses that we need to understand and design for the implications and details around gestures. They are just as important as the details of a door handle, and it is our role to understand the connection between what we do with our hands and how we interact.

Destroying the Box: Experience Design Inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright, Joe Sokohl

Joe uses Frank Lloyd Wright as a basis to discuss design. It is not the material and tools we make but what is the experience and purpose. Joe references memes that came out of Interactions 11 in Boulder and by discussing architecture addresses the framework of design.

The reality of the building odes not consist in roof and walls but in the space within to be lived in. — Laotse

Some main theme Joe covered:

Content. Frank Lloyd Wright destroys the box and brings ‘the outside in and the inside out’. How can interaction designers break the bounds of the technology we use and still work within the constraints of our technology.

Clients. Frank Lloyd Wright knew what his clients needed and built homes specific for the people who would live in that space. As designers we must know our audience and design for them.

Ultimately Joe’s talk takes us beyond the screen and reminds us what is important when we design, and that other disciplines have much to give to IxD.

Keynote, Jesse James Garrett

Jesse’s closing can best be seen as a reflection with a call to change perceptions. Sharing popularized samples of web design Jesse paints his vision of where design and interaction across all media is moving. He communicates that UX can be applied to anything, not just the web and we need to continue to push those limits.

The user experience mindset is an acquired condition for which there is no cure

As we move forward with design we are challenged to answer how UX can capture so many different media. But what Jesse defines as design as is simply a mastery of a media, or mediumism. We are too focused on the tools and should not define UX as specific to a tool. Instead we should design beyond medium at which time we can focus on experience and engagement.

Jesse moves across emotion, interaction, and brings the conference to a close as he discusses perceptions of design and our need to get out of the interaction design echo chamber and to seek for more inspiration across all artistic tracks.

——–

_{Top Image: Stephen A. Wolfe’s photostream.
Youtube Clip compliments of brevadude.
Additional images compliments of @ixdiego}

UX Techniques is a new iPhone App designed to act as a pocket guide for UX practitioners. Built along the same vein as IDEO’s Method Cards UX techniques shares simple and concise definitions of 45 common UX practices.

UX is predominately about digital interface design, whether online or via an application, but it is also how an interface behaves and understanding user needs and behaviour.

While the design of the application leaves a lot open to the imagination as far as visual appeal the cards themselves are quite helpful. In my review of the application, I came across a few methods I was less familiar with or had forgotten about entirely. The real benefit comes from the supporting links. Each card has a link to additional information viewable from your iPhone, whether it is a link to UIE or Boxes and Arrows, the authors have located a valuable and more detailed source for further investigation. This is an added detail not provided in all other UX reference guides.

While far from perfect, the application is a nice reference when on the go. This won’t replace your stack of books at home, and won’t replace practice for a particular technique, but it can help in some sticky conversations with clients and coworkers. While some might say this adds another set of definitions to a field with many differing opinions already, this application doesn’t define their stance as the end all be all and instead offers more places to look. UX Techniques can act as a catalyst for further conversation and investigation.

Still not convinced? UX Techniques allows you to email the content of the cards with a single click (though unfortunately this, like the additional content, leaves the application). Similarly, UX Techniques Lite is offered with a subset of the cards for a try-before-you-buy test drive.

Had you been paying attention? Bruce Sterling had, and wove together several strands of topics from the conference into his closing plenary, whilst also giving the audience a scathing wake up call. Also up included a galvanising Brenda Laurel, Jason Bruge’s inspiring ambient architecture … and the revelation that the Windows 7 Phone interface is actually pretty darn cool….

This daily report wouldn’t have been possible without the writing skills (and energy) of Pieter Jongerius, Anna Offermans, and Patrick Sanwikarja.

The Neuroscience of Usability — Charles Hannon

Our brain likes patterns. Especially patterns which we have seen before and which behave the same as they did the previous times we used it. The brain cant help looking for patterns because it is rewarded by the chemical dopamine when it finds patterns that lead to success. The pleasure is repeated each time we recognize the pattern, and the pattern recognition proves true. According to Charles Hannon, the validation of these patterns is not the only thing that gives us the delightful feeling. The dopamine is also released when we only see a pattern of which we think it will lead to success.

What happens if we don’t recognize a pattern? The App Store, for example, presents the price in a button, which has to be clicked to go further with the purchase. This isn’t a pattern many people are familiar with, since most web shops use a buy button next to or below the pricing information. We are not sure about what to do and get the feeling of frustration.
And what if something looks like a pattern we know but it doesn’t behave like we expect it to do? It gives us the feeling of panic: “oh s%&t!”. Of course we want to prevent the users from that feeling. The good thing is that this also leads to better learning about what patterns lead to success and what patterns don’t.

So, to give people a delightful feeling while using our products, we should use patterns people are familiar with. This leads to a dilemma; how can designers introduce new patterns which at the same time people are familiar with?

Charles concludes with saying that computing can be very invigorating, frustrating and emotional. Let’s hope it will stay like that in the future since it means that we as designers apparently keep on trying to introduce new innovative patterns which in the end will make life more easy!

Up with Complexity! Challenging Users for Fun and Profit — Josh Clark

Complexity is not a dirty word, it gives our lives texture. We shouldn’t just aim for ‘Dont make me think’, but also embrace ‘Make me think’. Our job is not to eliminate complexity, but to make it uncomplicated. According to Josh, there are a couple of ways to do that:

• Just enough is more: Instead of ‘less is more’, we should design ‘just enough is more’. We should hide complexity, but we shouldn’t patronize users by hiding too much. As an example he talks about ‘Umbrella’, an iPhone app that anwers just one question: will I need an umbrella today? But most people don’t want dumbed down apps. They want uncomplicated apps, so there should be weather apps that offer more detailed weather forecasts, too.
• Manage complexity through focus: The app Momento is a microjournal, that allows the user to capture ‘moments’. Most part of the screen is taken up by controls, so there is not enough room for the actual moment. The Twitter iPhone app, however, use a “hidden door” for access to more feature, to make room for writing the actual tweet. The trouble with secret panels is that they’re secret. Josh proposes to uses animations to reveal the hidden controls the first time, or better: to keep showing them until the user demonstrates that they got it. So it’s not about secrets. It’s about giving the user information and tools when asked for.
• Manage complexity through conversation: One of the biggest challenges in managing complexity is that people think: more features is better. It’s up to us to guide them. Tap quality is more important than tap quantity. People don’t mind having to tap more, it’s about the effect of the tap. To Josh, buttons are a hack. They’re an abstraction, an extra layer between the user and the content. Touch will help sweep away decades of menus, folders and controls, and lets the user work with the content directly. So to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan: ‘the message is now the medium’.
• Manage complexity through exploration: Until now, software has mostly been a tool to get things done. Now, software is an accessory. It’s content, not just utility. People are looking for distraction. Because of that, people are more open to complexity than we think. Apps like Runkeeper and calorietrackers are videogames for narcissists: they encourage people to slow down and find the story in data. Exploration is the killer app.
• Create friction: Finally, it’s alright to create a little friction now and then. Josh tells the story of the six year old daughter of his friends, who drew a detailed plan to trap her grandma, involving a cake to lure her into the trap. The bottom line: complex schemes take a lot of thought, so spend time to find ways to uncomplicate complexity.

Applying Film Making Tools to Interaction Design — Adam Connor

The way film makers try to grasp the essence of the story they want to tell is inspirational and useful for our field. Adam Connor recognised this and jumped into the fold of film making, trying to discover interesting connections between it and interaction design. He found several

• Beat Sheets are a way for film makers to capture all the important aspects that should be in a movie. It is a scene-by-scene outline describing plot points, actions and the effect on the audience. The way this is captured might be very interesting in our field as well, since we don’t just want to draw screens, but want to think (and capture)the emotions of the audience and the effect we want to achieve.
• Mise en Scene is all the aspects a film maker has that aren’t dialogue, such as lighting, staging, acting, set design and costumes.
• Motion is (obviously) important in film making: the way the camera, people and other things move largely define how things are perceived. In Western culture we see movement from left to right as progress and vice versa as going back of against the stream. Film makers use this by letting bad guys enter on the right. Movement from top to bottom enhances the feeling of inevitability and anticipation, while bottom to top is struggle.
• Another aspect of motion is rack focus. By changing the focus on screen film makers can force viewers to look at different parts on the screen. What if we could use this technique in interaction design? Could we change the focus on a screen?

I really enjoy the approach Adam takes. He has the feeling that there is an interesting connection to be made and dares to present it as a starting point. I look forward to the next steps.

Marketing is not a 4 letter word — Megan Grocki

People moved to get out of the room at the start of Megan Grocki’s talk. Grocki, (head of Mad*Pow’s marketing team) indeed warned us that we had some highly controversial generalizations ahead. So, we put on our flight goggles and sat tight. It turned out to be an interesting ride. We guess it’s fair to say that Megan made some strong points in the interest of marketing and design.

Marketing, of course, isn’t just about cold hard sales driven by the classic 4P’s. It’s about ads, packaging, social media, word-of-mouth, PR, and much more. In a sentence: it’s about companies establishing & growing relationships with customers. Duly noted: companies may be non-profit, governmental or otherwise. Also customers may be other end-users, such as patients or citizens.

Marketing has come a long way since Philip Kotler and is helped forward these days by people like Seth Godin. Megan acknowledges however that marketing has its bad apples. And some of those have been very bad indeed, like the selling of cigarettes even when health consequences became apparent, the use of incorrect health claims for products, or the selling of expensive or addictive items to people who really can’t afford them. Those practices have given marketing a very bad reputation indeed.

“You ARE a marketer. Deal with it” – Kathy Sierra

It is high time though that we realize that marketing and design have a lot in common. Designers and marketeers share the dream of creating delightful cross touchpoint experiences. In this quest, one discipline can not do without the other. Megan gave some great examples of this: the experience in and around Disneyland, the integrated approach to various Netflix services and Zipcar. In all of these cases, a strong notion of brand, fair business propositions, great design and compelling copy come together in a powerful way.

“I’m a matchmaker”, Megan closes, throwing at us one of her charming smiles. She suggests that both designers and marketeers could use some good conversations around the campfire. Get together. Talk. Understand each other. We feel she is right. Designers need market reach for their products. Marketeers need great designs to sell and do their work effectively. Marketing deserves our attention and, most of the time anyway, our respect.

Designing Immersive Online Environments for Kids — Debra Levin Gelman

What better way to start off the day than with Alice in Wonderland? Debra Levin Gelman used this analogy to great effect in her fun and useful talk on some of the unique issues with designing experiences for 6-8 year olds, which come down to three areas:

• Identity:
• Self-expression: Offer the right tools, allow permanent object creation, make it a game .
• Community: broad ground rules, privacy, collaboration and safety.

Gelman finishes with results from a study that suggest US kids are less creative now than they were 10 years ago, based on an experiment on things a person can do with a spoon (kids came up with far less examples than they did a decade ago) But while it’s easy to blame technology, she believes these can be catalysts for activity if we learn how children think and  process.

Computer Engineer Barbie: How Interaction Design can entice a new generation of women — Cheryl Platz

Many a girl geek (and a lot of guys) were in the room for Cheryl Platz’s impassioned talk on getting girls into interaction design.

Beginning with the recently released Computer Engineer Barbie, Platz highlighted that girls have been driven out of the computer science (CS) workplace since 1982 because of stereotypes. And in a Mean Girls world, perception is everything.

Girls picture CS as the guy in the room at 2am, creepily looking at his mouse!

What’s interesting is that while not many girls are in computer science (10%), many are  studying related fields: visual design is 48% female, cognitive psychology 71%. Many of these women could be interested in interaction design. Giving the example of her own CS class (proudly starting with a record number of girls that quickly dropped out), Platz also pointed out on of the turn-offs: the material is taught in the abstract rather than in context, removed from society. What’s more, a recent study shows that many female — and male —students capable of studying computer science don’t take it up because they “would rather be more people-centred or work with computers in another field”.

In other words, many girls who don’t study computer science could be interested in interaction design — if only they knew about it, which often they don’t. Platz advocates for us to make interaction design more visible by talking at career fairs, hosting job shadows, set up workshops, helping educators show the societal benefit of CS, and proposing interaction design additions to existing programmes:

spread the good word about IxD to students and education in your community — you might just save a life!

Photoshop.com 2.0—the making of an experience ecosystem — Ethan Eismann and Geoff Dowd

Dowd and Eismann ran us through the (naturally very good looking) Photoshop.com experience, They summed up their ecosystem redesign with 6 principles:

1. Know where your user is going, not where they’ve been. (i.e. look at disruptors, and how to prevent shift). They looked at competitors such as Aviary, and tried to anticipate why users might want to move to them in the future, and how to design around this.
2. Paint an Ecosystem Picture. Also including the choice quote “No Lorel Ipsum. Ever.” The team looked to understand all the touchpoints of the website — a previous failing with the earlier version, which had locked customers out of upgrades such as Lightroom — and looked where it would be used (e.g. in-the-browser for Facebook pictures).
3. Tell a great story with great detail. From the beginning. The redesign always used high-fidelity mockups to understand the experience — they did risk premature sign-off with this strategy, but felt it worth it.
4. UI is brand. Despite this being a free product, the team took pains to make the language the same as the paid-for Lightroom, to allow for a seamless experience if users moved up.
5. Apps are better than billboards. Free is good (if you can afford it).
6. Beauty runs deep. Above all, draw the product you want.

Adobe’s talk was unusual in that it was from a mature brand with a history of design (they do sell high end design products after all, so in a sense, like Apple, have the advantage of designing for themselves), but still with interesting elements to take to any project.

Personal, Relevant, Connected: Designing Integrated Mobile Experiences for Apps and Web — Mike Kruzeniski

AKA the “OMG the Windows 7 phone UI is actually pretty cool!” talk, Mike Kruzeniski talked through Microsoft’s new UI strategy — and, much to people’s surprise, won over the audience. Microsoft is looking at “how you remove the chrominess of the experience”, which is already evident if you look at the Kinect (removing the interface) or their Futures 2019 concept video.

In today’s “apps are everything!” era, it’s a hard task to encourage ongoing use — most are downloaded only once, and only 1% are used on an ongoing basis in the long run. What’s more, they’re almost a rebuilding of the web (even 2/3 times for each platform), For apps to be meaningful and longlasting, Kruzeniski suggests they must be (as the talk is titled) personal, relevant, and connected:

1. Personal: “mine, cares, knows about my stuff”. Examples, contact aren’t just contacts, also info about what they’re doing, gallery stripped back w/ typography.
2. Relevant: “I’m always somewhere, sometime, doing something, with someone.” Allowing people to get back to life — how can we bring information to the surface? Trying to use smart info e.g. searching for Bouldher hotel in Boulder – maps. The Windows 7 Phone brings up location based information by default, assuming that since you’re here you don’t want to read about it.
3. Connected: “give me everything where I am”. Making sure everything (e.g. avatars) connects easily between devices to create stories. Gruzeniski pointed out that the XBox poses an interesting challenge — how goes a game go from a console to the PC to the TV? — answering that it won’t be the same, but about a thread, with a hub and spoke model (e.g. jumping from music to last.fm). Above all, it’s important to be appropriate for different contexts — he pointed to Evernote as an exemplar for doing it right.

Gruzenski put forward the wonderful concept of weaving — being able to pull things up to the top that are important to you — in order to create a greater story, an integrated seamless experience. For example, weather has untapped potential to be woven with other information e.g. weather (nice day) + social (see that a friend has free time) + running (you both like to run). People left the talk both excited about the talk, and the Windows 7 Phone examples used to show the exemplars. Eat your own dog food indeed.

Healthcare interfaces: How interaction design can help fix medicine — David Cronin

According to David Cronin of Smart Design, we are at an inflection point in the history of healthcare. We know enough for most people to live long healthy lives, but we have become concerned with people’s health far too late. The most common and expensive diseases are preventable and controllable by lifestyle choices. We need to decrease costs and increase quality and access of healthcare. Interaction designers can help in three ways:

• Encourage healthy behavior It all starts with information. People need to understand the correlation between their actions and the consequences on their health. We can redesign lab reports or design products that help people track their behavior. FitBit is nice example, but the feedback experience is too far removed from the activity. Knowledge is the enabler. Emotion is the motivator: Nike+ – trash their screen
• Bring home care delivery We should help people to do part of their healthcare at home. A great example is a new syringe by Smart Design that magnifies the force so thatpeople with rheumatoid arthritis self can confidently self-administer. Are androids the future of home care, such as the Japanese Actroid-F? An important part of healthcare is not medicine, but face time, the personal touch. If we can reduce time of routine visits, doctors can have more personal time with their patients.
• Improve care in clinical situations Medical informatics is like enterprise software 10 years ago: the UX is really bad. Even the most advanced systems don’t offer good tools for documentation, communication and collaboration. So there’s a big opportunity for interaction designers to help clinicians there. It’s big challenge, because clinical data is incredibly complex, but in the end it will save costs. Another field where we can make a difference is remote care: surgeons operating at one locating, while the patient is in another. We can help by designing better decision support and better data display. Again, if tele-health can be as good as the real thing, this will have a huge saving in costs.

To me, David’s talk was hugely inspiring. It’s upsetting that there has been so little attention to good user experience where it is needed most: in healthcare. Especially now that more and more people need it. I really do hope that interaction designers can play a much bigger role here. As David said: “we’re not just talking about abstract interaction design principles. We’re talking about the health of your friends, family and children”.

Afternoon Keynote —Brenda Laurel

We should have expected something extraordinary to happen. However, Brenda Laurel’s keynote caught us a little off guard. While we were expecting to get nostalgic about the classic designs that came to form our industry, we got more than we bargained for.

In a very personal and candid review of her professional life, Laurel shared some of the major innovations that she was involved in. She started out by showing us a convincing chromatography of technical innovations, with in it’s spectrum ‘dimensions’ such as impact on technology, actors, culture, nature and emergence. She coupled each innovation to what she calls a Hinge. Each hinge she then defined along the dimensions of her model.

So starting in the mid 70s, she told us the story about Cybervision, a computer and television based concept that would allow for gaming, but was way ahead of its time. She continued with the now classic 1976 Atari game computer and presented the early 80s Atari 400-800 which could do games and also ran some educational applications and music programs. She believed this to be a great innovation. Much to Brenda’s frustration, this concept was criticized as being “a fad, just like jogging”. Luckily, she got a lot of help from Alan Kay, who defended her within Atari by explaining to some that Brenda was “okay, but just a little misguided”.
Brenda went on to show decades of inspiring cases, such as Dynabook, Hole in space, Habitat, early nineties VR, along the line not suppressing her gripe with Mattel Inc (it acquired her computer-games-for-girls company Purple Moon and then killed it). Referring to her experimental work without any sign of regret, she elegantly stated that she had been “a crash dummy more times than I can count”.

And while she continued showing these key innovations, slowly but surely, a more profound social and ethical theme emerged, consisting of two intertwined parts:

1. A great call for great authoring, driven by the strong notion that we as humans don’t have the luxury to see technology as something other than us. We created it. We use it. We are it. This comes with responsibility.
2. Technology has evolved from serving single users, to dual users, to small groups, mobs, and now masses. Brenda shared her vision that this can only lead to the next great hinge, which is sure to be a true Gaian hinge.

In a dramatic closing, Brenda called upon us to start authoring for the whole of earth. Create a symbiosis at the level of our dear planet, our home, as seen from space. Great applause. Standing ovation. Some tears. And a mission.

Making mistakes fun: Game mechanics are not a panacea, but they are kinda useful! — Paris Buttfield-Addison

Loads of people see gamification as an easy way to create great experiences, but during this talk Paris Buttfield-Addison tries to give us a reality check. It isn’t just about adding badges and playful aspects. As a designer you need to move beyond adding fun and start thinking about engagement. The thing you want to do is create a relationship. One of the examples that stood out here is Bottle Bank

Pass it Back! Kid Apps on Grown Up Devices — Nina Walia

Long After the Thrill: Sustaining Passionate Users — Stephen Anderson

Stephen started his presentation by asking the audience who is in a longterm relationship. Many hands went up. And then he asked: would you like to stay in it? Obviously, no hands went down. Unlike his previous presentations and his Mental Notes, this talk was not about getting people to fall in love with your applications, but about getting people to stay in love with them. Or as Stephen calls it: sustaining passionate users through delightful challenges.

He made an analogy to teaching. Having been a teacher himself, he sees three attitudes to teaching:

• Apply it yourself. This stuff is boring, but you have to learn it anyway.
• Sugar coating. This stuff isn’t all that interesting, but layers of fun are added. This is what ‘gamification’ is.
• Mastery. Something is inherently interesting or fun, so that you really want to learn it.

To Stephen, a game is fun when there is play & challenges + goals & rewards. This means we should find the game that is inherent in most things rather than sprinkling it on. Designers should consider whether the user is after a performance goal (i.e. getting an A in French) or a learning goal (i.e. wanting to learn French). As an exercise, Stephen asked the audience to think of characteristics of an existing game and then use them to make a time tracking application more fun. His own example was: what if you would add status? Then time tracking would not only be something you need to do, but also something you can get good at, either compared to others or to yourself.

But in Raph Koster’s words: delight, unfortunately, doesn’t last. Sustaining passionate users takes more than delightful experiences. When asked about why people use applications they have been using for more than three years (Gmail, Facebook etc), they answered such things as ‘because it works and continually improves’, ‘reliability’ and ‘friends use it’. But where is the love? The apps that are most used aren’t the fun and sexy apps, but the ones we need to use.

So in the end, Stephen presented the Kano model, which he thinks can help us to design applications that satisfies both on a basic level and on a delightful level. The model consist of two axes: high satisfaction vs low satisfaction on the vertical axis, and not (or poorly) implemented vs fully implemented on the horizontal axis. The more we can get an application into the upper right quadrant, the more sustaining its usage will be. We need to combine delighters with satisfying the basic needs. So: buy flowers on Valentine’s day, but don’t forget to close the lid of the trash can every day.

Stephen’s presentations are always fun and engaging – he does a good job of involving his audience. It would have been nice though if he had elaborated more about the Kano model and how to get people to stay in love. That part still felt a bit rushed. Guess we’ll have to look out for another opportunity to see him talk. I personally look forward to it.

Afternoon Keynote — Jason Bruges

Jason Bruges brought both a change of perspective and country with inspiring case studies (this year’s Dan Hill?) from his London-based eponymous studio. Showing rather than telling, there were none the less themes of ambient environments and tangible interaction in his myriad examples, which included:

• The wonderful and award-winning WWF Panda Eyes exhibit
• Exploring the ‘off-grid’ and ‘on-grid’ design, such as Phosphor Fields, Ropemaker (“scavenging energy”), Wind to Light, and Aeolian Tower
• Engaging the public, such as the Memory Project (as it turned out, people gamed the installation to get pictures of themselves, someone Bruges loves), or the Narcissus inspired V&A Mirror Mirror , or wonderfully tangible Dotty Duveen
• Tower Bridge for Switched on London — a visualisation of people’s Bluetooth consumption going over the bridge (this decade’s Live Wire?)
• Physical pixels with the Sunderland Train Station’s Platform 5 (glass tile ‘pixels’ feature looping videos of volunteers — “Lots of people think there are people behind the wall.”)
• Current and future sporting work: Oregon’s Game Show and Fast, Faster, Fastest for the London 2012 Olympics

Above all, Bruges believes in learning through failure (i.e. from pushing the limits) and proving through prototyping: both important as they’re often challenging technological constraints with their ambitious pieces.

Accessibility is Not a Checklist — Jimmy Chandler

Chandler gave a insightful and practical guide to designing for computer accessibility (aka A11Y ). He is wary of accessibility ‘checklists’, comparing it to site validation — many well-designed sites do not validate, and vice versa — and so instead gave a checklist of accessibility practices:

• An iterative process is the best way to implement accessibility. Developers probably haven’t been trained in accessibility, early feedback is key, as this means accessibility does not become a painful and expensive add-on at the end. “When people say accessibility is expensive, they’ve done it wrong.”
• Design for mobile first (ala Luke W’s post on this topic). The constraints that are imposed in designing for mobile first are also helpful for accessibility.
• Include people with disabilities in your usability research. Chandler couldn’t emphasise this enough, as it’s key to understand how disabled people use your product. Shawn Lawton Henry’s ‘Just Ask‘ has a wealth of advice on methods.
• Don’t assume people with disabilities don’t want to use your site. A blind person may use a driving site to help their children get their licence.
• Don’t punish your customers to solve your business problems. Captcha may stop spam, but is more likely to make users abandon the form (this can particularly affect dyslexia users)
• Get people to drive themselves. If you design with awareness of iOS’s built-in Voiceover & Speak Auto-Text, you can do blind and many other disabled users a huge service. Glenda Watson, a woman with cerebral palsy, has blogged about how the iPad has changed her life [and the site in general is an eye-opening and inspiring read].
• Have people define their own time. Don’t use auto-advance or time limits — this disadvantages older users or those with reading difficulties.
• Protect your audience. The more people can access your product, the better!
• Accessibility is not just about blind people. It can be about temporary disabilities, other disabilities (again, dyslexia is far more common than we realise), and even cellphones!
• Provide help in an accessible manner. Increasing contrast and esp adding texture helps with vision difficulties (and printing in b/w!) Accessibility is not just about blind people.

If there was one major takeaway from the talk, it was to test your products with at least one disabled user (Chandler said that “if you do that, I’ll have done my job”). For more information, check out his comprehensive list of accessiblity resources.

Closing Keynote — Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling was a cracker pick to finish. For those not in the know, he’s renowned for provocative talks, and having been around for the entire conference, he took no prisoners when giving his own spin on themes that had popped up over the last three days (diginity, our discipline, empathy).

Sterling chastised designers for being overly empathetic to their users (“you’ve got user Stockholm Syndrome”), challenged them to consider what it means to be an a moral designer

You don’t do morality. We talk about it, but don’t go there. You’re no better than engineers or computer scientists … Raymond Loewry pleased his clients (Coca-Cola, Lucky Strike) with great design that killed people later on. If you designed cigarettes now they’d be individually wrapped, with a thumb space … Our successors will reframe what we did and subject us to the same judgements we do to Ford.

Amidst discussions of critique and craft, he pointed out that the former is useful but not necessary, and that Steve Jobs succeeds because he isn’t afraid of anything, even death: “Critique won’t make you a better designer. What will make you a better designer is a fanatic dedication to craft and no fear of failure”

He challenged the place of the IXDA (or “icks-da”) both as an institution (“IxDA is a social network formerly known as the design profession”) and alongside institutions such as CHI (which was flamed by a couple of speakers:

Look at your white haired relations in ACM SIGCHI, and learn — they have history, regulations, decades of effort, and research. Don’t just viscerally react to those that came before you, otherwise you’ll disappear sooner than they did as people move towards another social network.

He finished with a thanks to Boulder (“because examples trump abstractions”): “It’s like Austin but paler and more zen walking around. I’m sure the thinkers of the world wouldn’t be impressed with Boulder. But it has a forgiving lapserian sleeziness about it that took lots of iterations to form. And a quirky charm.”

Perhaps his most inspiring quote was about being an interaction designer:

I can’t give you everything you need, and you can’t give me everything I need. Because I’m an adult. So stop trying. You could take an oath not to ruin my life. (But if you did, I wouldn’t believe it). The best you’ll come up with is a morality in permanent beta, which might be a good thing.

Many on twitter complained afterwards that he’s a science fiction writer rather than a designer, but as he said himself: “I’m your victory condition — an outsider who drank your kool-aid and joined you.” And I’d argue that, in a discipline sometimes overly obsessed with DTDT, sometimes it takes an outsider to tell it like it is — Emperor’s New Clothes anyone?

——

And so rounded up IXD11 (well, apart from the Microsoft party later that night with both a Kinect and absinthe — a deadly combination). Next year the conference goes across the pond to Dublin. For more, check out the IXD12 site.

Thursday November 18th, 2010 marked the beginning of a new event in the Philadelphia design and technology community. Over 500 attendees descended on the Kimmel Center, a performing arts theater located in Center City, for the start of TEDxPhilly, where the X stands for an independently organized TED event. The overall theme of the event was Right Here, Right Now and showcased a variety of local educators, technologists, artists, and culinary experts.
While the overall themes at this TEDx might not be unique to the TED community, with a Philly spin they had a consistent flavor that everyone in the audience was able to respond to. Below is a recap of the TED talks as they were presented throughout the day, split over four sessions.

Session 1, Systems and Society

The first session most directly spoke to the theme of an individual’s passion, finding what inspires you and pursuing those goals. With artists, educators, and more sharing their stories, TEDxPhilly kicked off with a very strong start.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Author

Be bold, love what you love, chase your biggest dreams

Cristin opened the day. Nine in the morning, just after the attendees were asked to leave their coffee outside the theater, Cristin opened with trivia – and presidential trivia no less. She went on to share her passion for writing and her journey from a cubicle job in corporate American that, as a stepping stone, turned into an eight year hurdle. She shared with us her desire to write for herself, and the scary, thrilling, and necessary move that is to leave a stable job and to pursue what you truly want. Cristin reminded us that day jobs are not the enemy and that we should all be bold, love what you love, and to chase our biggest dreams.

Chris Lehman, Technology driven school Principal

Chris followed Cristin and within the first few moments made a clear point known. An opening slide that read high school stinks, he expressed the common purpose of school to ‘make sure you don’t suck so much at the things you are bad at’. This is inherently wrong according to Lehman. Schools should teach how to learn and open minds up to critical thinking, to teach kids to be citizens and not just workers. In the modern world of smartphones any child can look up a piece of information before an instructor can write it on the board. Lehman’s school program focusses not on rote knowledge but on the creation of whole systems. Teach for now, build real things, and share it is a theme Lehman stresses and his students don’t take midterms and finals but instead find ways to express knowledge and to teach the instructors. This active engagement allows students to find what they are good at and to ultimately pursue their passions.

Nic Esposito, Urban farm activist

Stepping away from formal education, Nic Esposito took the stage to share his thoughts on green initiatives. He made it clear. He was not going to spend 15 minutes scaring us with statistics and fear facts and the last five describing ways to save the world. Instead he focussed on what we are doing – locally and globally. Esposito believes humans are the most just, most humane now as we ever have been and that technology has encouraged our being green. Esposito described a variety of green farming initiatives happening locally to Philadelphia and how their impact has grown beyond a local community and has started to effect policy and a broader perspective. At the end of the talk we weren’t asked to change the way we live, but to change the perspective. Awareness, a key theme of TED talks, Esposito embraced the audience to share with us what is going on, and not to harp on what still needs to be changed.

Human beings are the most just, most humane as ever

Jay Coen Gilbert, Founder B Lab

Jay Coen Gilbert – if Nic Esposito wore a suit and tie and were approaching the green initiative from the corporate level – would look like this. Gilbert founded B Lab, an organization that awards certifications to organizations that meet specific social and environmental qualifications. It is not enough to purchase fair trade coffee if the employees in the shop are treated poorly and similarly the best office conditions are useless if items are manufactured in sub par conditions. The words green and eco friendly are tossed around so frequently that they lose meaning. Gilbert is hoping to bring meaning back into those words by creating standards to strive for. He continues to point out that this must be a for-profit initiative. While non profits are great for creating awareness and getting places government can’t, the scale of a for profit company can reach that much further. For actual change to occur, businesses must shift from shareholder goals of increasing profit to shareholder goals – what benefits those involved, those purchasing and using your products.

Session 2, Culture and Meaning

After a brief break, surrounded with local music and artists, we fell back into our seats for the second session. Culture and Meaning, each of the speakers shared not just what inspires them, but how they instill that into others. The importance of sharing a passion and making sure that everyone can follow a dream and can have a challenge to continue to move to the next level – physically, emotionally, mentally, or any combination wherein.

Stanford Thompson, Music Teacher

We came back from the break with a dozen chairs set up on the stage. Not a normal site for a TED talk, where the speaker stands on stage, pacing across sharing their thoughts. Stanford Thompson came on and discussed his goal to use music to inspire youth. Speaking how successful adults set goals, have patience and break up a task into small achievable goals, Thompson discusses how many underprivileged children don’t learn these skills. Tasks that seem to overwhelming or complicated are passed over in favor of quick achievements – video games, drugs and alcohol, and simple jobs. Thompson’s program, Tune Up Philly strives to change this – by engaging students with instruments at a young age and continuing to challenge them with new skills, Thompson looks to open their minds to their own potential. Now the dozen chairs he had on stage? It is not enough to speak to what children can do with music over a six week program. The final moments were spent with a group of students playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Not Beethoven’s Fifth, but they played three variations, with three different key components being shared. These children who prior to Thompson’s program never touched an instrument and, all are able to play better than myself. To set appropriate levels of challenges to encourage a continued engagement with a task – Thompson looks to encourage challenges for individuals to learn how to problem solve and strive for more.

Tanya Hamilton, Filmmaker

Tanya Hamilton followed Stanford. An independent filmmaker, she recently completed Night Catches Us, a study of the Black Panther movement in the Philadelphia community in the 1970s. Hamilton did not focus on her film though. Instead, after a brief excerpt, she shared with us the story of the White House sit-in protest, the first of it’s kind, and the inspiration she has found from those that went through that ordeal. Hamilton spoke more of the human struggle to pursue a goal and how that strengthens one resolve and her film acted as the channel, but not the focus.

Zoe Strauss, Photographer

People don’t walk under interstates expecting art. But that is where you find Zoe Strauss who, for the last ten years, has made an installation under I-95 in Philadelphia. Starting into photography with the support of her family and friends she strove to capture people, nothing more. To make art accessible and to share her, and her subjects’ emotions. There is a certain connection Strauss has to each of her photos. Each image she shared she knew the name and location of the subject, but they were all strangers. We all bring emotional baggage to situations and it is here that the truth lies. Strauss talked not of the meaning these images have to her, but instead of the meaning to others as it becomes accessible, as these stories become human.

Michael Solomonov, Chef and restaurateur

That’s a good way to create peace, with chocolate sauce

Michael Solomonov, owner of Zahav, an Israeli restaurant in Old City of Philadelphia shared with us not his cure for peace (though his quote might lead you to think otherwise) nor was he looking to inspire us all to be chefs. But he shared his story- how he became a cook and how he found cooking connects him to the things that he loves. Michael shared how his younger brother, in the final days of his military duty in Israel, was killed by a sniper. It was this stimulus, along with years of travel and exposure to different foods and cultures that lead Michael to create his business. It is his way to be connected to Israel, his family, and his brother. It is not a political soapbox, it is his personal achievement and comfort. As the final speaker before lunch, he closed the second session well as all four speakers presented their passion, their lessons, and how those might affect others are not created as their specific paths for everyone else.

Session 3, Incredible Machines

Return from lunch, and let’s zoom out from the personal goals and inspiration. The next set of speakers shared their thoughts and interest into full systems and ecosystems. Educational systems, beer brewing, architecture and research; how their development and growth incites change and inspires on a personal level.

Simon Hauger, Hybrid X team founder, Teacher

Simopn Hauger’s turn. He relates high school to torture, how we all need to find our passions. “Intelligence is not one size fits all but school is one size fits all”. Much like Stanford Thompson, Hauger looks to challenge students and to help them uncover their passion. Creating the Hybrid X Team, Hauger leads a group of high school students who have successfully built and competed against large corporations, universities, and startups in creating high efficiency hybrid vehicles. It is not enough to move students from room to room, class to class. Until they are challenged with a situation and variables vital to success, critical thinking and inspiration cannot occur. To paraphrase one of Simon’s students ‘it is a critical situation building the car, what if something goes wrong and the car crashes, or my teacher dies…’ It is not enough to teach lesson plans and facts without context and understanding the value. Simon Hauger looks to bring that to the classroom on a whole new level.

You can’t teach critical thinking without critical conditions

Robert J. Moore, Technology data researcher

Over five exabytes of information were created between the dawn of time and 2003. But more importantly over five exabytes of information is created every two days. Robert took the time to present this information to us. It is not the fact that data exists but more that with the size and scale of storage it may all be captured. “Digital exhaust” as he refers to it. Robert shared his thoughts for where he sees the potential of all data being universally captured for progress across all domains and verticals. How data enables progress and how with every credit card swipe, bus pass purchase, and vending machine transaction we build a larger network of data. Robert left us with impressive figures and questions as to how this might all be applied.

Evan Malone, Engineer, entrepreneur

The sustainment of American culture as an innovative culture. Evan Malone shared his perspective on how America has always been a place for people to come, build a business, a dream, or a process, and to continue to iterate and develop over time. Evan discusses how the commoditization of manufacturing has led to outsourcing for cheaper goods and the effect that has had, not on the manufacturing within America but on the process of innovation. Evan shares his thoughts on how feedback loops of innovation are critical to a country and how it has been on a decline in America in recent decades. He outlines the trend and the need to encourage the feedback loop that is education, technology, and design.

Bill Covaleski, Beer Brewer

“I’m going to talk about beer but I haven’t a drop of beer to give you,” is how Bill Covaleski, co-founder of Victory Brewing Company, opens. Bill shares the history of brewing in America, from over 1400 breweries before 1900 to fewer than 100 in the 1980s. He describes the political and social influences beer brewing has had on America and the return of the craft brewing movement. As far as machines go, Bill does not discuss the process of brewing but the focus that brewing has taken – from mass production with little flavor to select beers with unique tastes. Food and beer are on the same level, and Bill shares with us the ‘return to normalcy’ that is rich full flavored beer as the same return to home grown, organic foods over processed breads and ingredients.

I should note, that while Bill did not have a drop of beer to share at the talk, the reception to close out the day was full of Victory Brew draft.

Billie Faircloth, Researcher for sustainable architecture

Materials are not simple, and neither are buildings. Billie Faircloth discusses the relationship of lumber to a building, and cords of firewood to trees. She shares her childhood misonception that construction timber and firewood are two different things. And she relates them all together for us. If wood is the fundamental building block, and there is immense problem solving in cutting and measuring timber for optimal output, how does that translate to a foundation? how does that translate to an entire building? A two by four is in fact 1.5*3.5 inches. How is that change measured and how does it come to pass? Billie doesn’t discuss how to create sustainable buildings or the need for green initiatives. She discusses how the different pieces fit together and how scale and complexity of problems are not one in the same.

The 2*4 goes into the buidling but problem solving goes into all scales. Design goes into all scales.

Session 4, Between the Ears

From the enormity of incredible machines back to the individual scale of oneself. The final session of the day focussed on the human mind. Individual’s challenges and investigation with technology on the brain level, and artists’ description of themselves to the world. The day closed on a more personal scale, bringing the sessions back to the participants in the theater.

Iyad Obeid, Neural prostheses researcher

Iyad’s goal is simple, through Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) to reanimate the body with brain control of prostheses or paralyzed limbs. Ok, that is not a simple goal, but it might be broken down simply. Iyad explains the technology around measuring brain activity and translating that into quantifyable measurements to control a system or environment. What is more fascinating the the mind is moldable. A BMI does not have to be 100% efficient – it has to be good enough to function and the brain will create workarounds for the rest. Iyad shares his thoughts on the future of brain interface technology – if machines can become more human then can humans become more like machines? The cognitive processing we as humans are experts at (recognizing faces, images, etc) and the mathematical processing machines are built for – are there ways using this technology to merge the two and create more efficient systems. Is there a time, in the not too distant future where computers come not only with a silicon brain but a neural network to help additional processing? Iyad shares his thoughts for the potential of computing on human and system levels.

You don’t have to build the best Brain Machine Interface but one that is good enough

Stephen Powers, Graffiti Artist

Graffiti is a visual crime, nothing more

Stephen Powers, graffiti artist turned studio artist. But that is a matter of perspective. Are you asked to create your art or must it be completed in the dark of night, under a veil of secrecy? Stephen talks to change to context of graffiti, to expose its true form and the framework it is often created in. Sharing stories of painting the Philadelphia “A love letter for you” series and his work in South America creating graffiti to inspire a community, Stephen talks not of creating a tag or a mark for rebellious reasons but to communicate a story and a passion.

Ursula Rucker, Poet

Ursula closed out TEDxPhilly. Not with a speech on why she performs her art, or how to encourage others to be poets. Instead she introduced herself and her work and shared a collection of her poems. It is important to note, during the entire day TEDx speakers were accompanied by Johnny Goldstein, of Envizualize, where he created visual sketchnote representations of their talks. It was during Rucker’s that the audience had a chance to watch his visual interpretation be captured as Ursula opened herself to the audience. Themes of personal struggle and triumph, themes that made her what she is today. The day closed with a selfless display as Ursula exposed herself through her poems in front of the room, inspiring the audience to do the same in their own way.

Poetry is how I speak, and able to be sane

Top image: Kimmel Center