Christian Crumlish on play rather than gamification in digital experiences (from UX Lisbon 2011).

Duration: 38 minutes

Here’s Luke Wroblewski’s talk from UX Lisbon about first-person user interfaces, which remove layers of abstraction and allow people to interact digitally with the real world.

Duration: 41 minutes

Here’s a wonderful talk about how our unconscious mind controls our online behavior, from Susan Weinschenk of HFI. (From UX Lisbon 2010.)

Duration: 36 minutes

The final — and main conference day — for UXLX saw 450 people from 32 different countries flock to the the Lisbon FIL centre to hear Don Norman, Christian Crumlish, Kristina Halvorson and more.

Beyond User Research: Building an organisational brain — Louis Rosenfeld

The first talk of the day really put a mark on the presentations that would follow. It was a talk about the elephant in the room in practically every design case I currently work on; big companies are usually chopped up in little departments and those departments do NOT communicate with each other. Lou held a strong plea that those departments should start working together in order to create a better user experience and outweigh your competition.

• Silos —Lou is a consultant in information architecture and visits lots of companies who need his help with getting their act together. Whenever he asks about search analytics, the voice of the user via the callcenter or usability research reports, most busineses have to ask three different departments about these things. There is nobody who connects theses “silos”, as Lou likes to call them. So if there is a Usability Research Silo and a Customer Support Silo, do you think they should be talking to each other? Or at least connect their findings in some way? Hell yes. And this is not only the case with research and analytics departments. Most of the time, the “brand strategy” is created in Silo A and the persona’s for the screen designs are written in Silo B. And these Silos also do not communicate with each other.
  These silos are missing out on the combinatorial effect: together they are better than the sum of both when viewed apart.
  So do we do with these silos? Well, let’s blow them up.
• Getting there — So how do we blow up these silos? First off, Lou tells us, you have to get out of yours. Visit some other Silos and find out what they know. Work together.

Lou concludes his talk with a few pointers you need to keep in mind when establishing a decision making organ. First off: blue sky it. Ask yourself, if you’re going to build a dicision making apparatus, what would it look like?

Next: Ban loaded terms and crutches from the discussion, like “omniture”, “user testing”, “market research” and so forth, because these words tend to take the discussion on roads your company has been walking on for too long.

And the bottom line: blow up the silos and put people together.
“Companies that integrate their silos of insight will outpace their competitors.

Playful Design/Design for Play  — Christian Crumlish

Play, like design, is both wonderful and available for multiple interpretations – something Christian Crumlish took full advantage of in his wide-ranging talk.

Starting off with the analogy of how print designers bemoaned the web’s lack of control, Crumlish suggests that we should be using the concept of play — its original meaning is ‘to dance’, which is apt as we should be thinking about allowing space. Play gives us masks, the chance to have an assumed identity, and the change to carry out re-imaginings (one entomologist is a dedicated participant in Civil War re-enactments to the point that he brings in era appropriate bugs to attack the troops!).

He gave a quick overview of what makes games work.

1. Starts with an invitation to begin
2. Boundaries [magic circle], what will happen
3. Rules are key — what is fair and what is not?
4. Goals — what is the end point you’re reaching out for? (Gamification is based largely on this)
5. Competition — we naturally compete, so that type of environment can help with play. But  it’s not only option — collaboration is also a important alternative (the board game Pandemic is a great example of this). The leaderboard can draw people to that and neglect experience — people also like to work together!

Moving on to playing in the musical design —he believes we  can turn our users into maestros, as an expert Illustrator user is much like a musician! — Crumlish provided a range of analogies (frameworks set up the rules, you need a bit of chaos for creativity, as in jazz). However, for me, his utterly inspired point was that of creating tunable experiences:

You don’t need to create a perfect experience, but instead one that’s tuneable.

A great example of it is Twitter—you keep tuning it to get what you want (more/less). Extending the metaphor that musical ensembles are about “getting in tune” (choosing what key), he suggested that we choose to “ensemble play” in the key of a certain hashtag.

And for those who know anything about Crumlish — he’s known as an avid amateur ukulele player — yes, he finished up the talk with a tune.

Critical Thinking for UX Designers – Stephen Anderson

After sun- and T-shaped thinkers Stephen Anderson decided that it was time to introduce a new type: Z-shaped thinkers. According to him these are people who think beyond the obvious, people that dare to turn the challenge around and take it a step further. “When everyone zigs, zag.” The point that Stephen wants to bring across is that it’s not about the tools, it’s about the thinking process itself.

When looking at existing examples Stephen mentions people like Negroponte who dared to embrace the limitations of creating a laptop for children that would at max cost $100. Instead of being blocked by the constraints he managed to turn it around and create a really interesting laptop. Another hero of Stephen is George Lucas. When he started with the Star Wars movies nobody knew how they had to make it, but George Lucas simply said that they had to aim for the result they wanted to have and would find a way to reach it. This way of thinking makes it possible for us as UX designers to really take challenges on and make a difference. But what’s the way to do this?

As an example Stephen gave the audience a simple task. First he asked everybody to “Design a vase.” When people did this he turned the challenge around and showed everybody how you should look at the challenge: “Design a better way for people to enjoy flowers in their home.” This simple task really showed everyone what the right approach is. The question that follows this is whether or not a lot of designers ever get the room to rephrase a challenge like this… often the business has a clear description of what they want and it’s difficult to change things around. But that doesn’t mean we must avoid it. It means we need to understand the importance of it and should try and talk to the right people in the right language. And this is where Leisa Reichelt’s workshop on Strategic UX fits in perfectly.

Z-shaped thinkers…

• reframe the problem;
• explore many perspectives
• synthesize information
• embrace constraints
• challenge assumptions
• appreciate details

… in order to envision unseen opportunities.

Content Strategy — Kristina Halvorson

You know that world of junk that WAL-E lives in, picking up the odd interesting trinket? That’s the way content is these days on the web. Halvorson says that those odd trinkets are the occasional piece of good content she finds in her travels as a content strategist.

With that sobering metaphor in mind, she talked us through the realities of content and content strategy these days:

• The elephant in the room of any conversation is where the content for a site will come from and how it will be maintained. To make matters worse, web writers are normally brought in far too late into the picture.
• Content is not copywriting, The content goes into a messy ecosystem, and has a lifecycle.

So what is content strategy? He colleague Melissa Rach has the following definition:

Content strategy helps figure out how content will help you meet your business objectives

Halvorson sums Content strategy  up as plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of content. (Note, it’s a verb, not a noun). Or the below diagram:

She points out that while the field has been around for fifteen years, it’s only been recently that UX has started to pay attention to it, perhaps because it never seemed relevant. Even now she points out that UXers may think they don’t have do deal with workflow and governance. However, they do have to ask the right questions.

• Demonstrate — hold a mirror up to their pain. She showed an example of  history.com showing Valentines Day content on the 16th of February, and a paralysing data-dump of all categories.
• Recognize the life cycle of content — there are a whole lot of models as to the hoops content has to jump through, but it’s most important to understand which must be changed regularly, and by who.
• You need strategy and tactics. As Sun Tzu says in The Art of War “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”
• Quoting  some well known professionals goes a long way to supporting your arguments.
• Draw — pictures are good.
• Envision. Decide the picture you want to aim towards.

Discussing the conundrum of CMS’s (and their somewhat failed promise), she recommends the blog CMS Myth.

The Cross Channel Experience – Nick Finck

Ninety percent of businesses say the cross-channel experience is critical to their business success. Nick Fink talked to us about definitions, methods, tools and examples to help us create a seamless customer/user experience (he believes the names don’t matter as the goal is the same). We need to answer the question: “What is it that we need to do to (sell a bike/let people enjoy a conference)?” and create a seamless experience for our products and services.

Businesses and also UXers tend to think in channels, but customers don’t. They don’t think in the silos that businesses create and perceive one business through different channels or touchpoints. So it’s important to craft a coherent cross-channel experience.

But how can we do this? Of course we need to gather insights on how people use our products and services. We have to pay attention to detail and look for hacks: e.g. what do people add to a product to enhance the experience. And we need to follow the experience through to the last point and learn the business process behind it. Once you’ve gathered the insights you can create a customer journey map, an experience map or a service blueprint, all of which help you to visualize the cross channel experience.

Finck takes Netflix as a good example, because they have matched the different touch points in such a way that the system is pro-active: It knows when you’ve had a problem with its service and proactively compensates you for it. It informs you when it sends a movie or received one back from you and will allow you to engage with its services on any device (iPhone, iPad, TV, laptop, …) This is a sign that Netflix has aligned its stage and backend to serve their audience a seamless experience.

The question of businesses is: ” How do we do this?” We need a strategy.

• Break down silos;
• Different disciplines need to work together and co-create the experience;
• We need to have a unified vision of what we’re trying to do.

It’s great that Nick Finck talks about the experience beyond the screen, and the theme of breaking down silos is definitely a recurring theme at UXLX (see also Louis Rosenfeld’s talk). As UX’ers we have the skills and tools to help break down the walls, so let’s go out and do it.

Cage Match: Mobile web vs Native Apps — Josh Clark

Let’s get rrrrready to rrrrrrrumbleeeeee!

I was getting really excited when I heard the title of this talk (rescheduled from Jeff Veen because of illness).Josh’s presentation was really set up as a match— from the premise, right through to the imagery of each slide (each with some old skool wrestler, boxer or luchadore in a position that reflects the context). I always like guys who put something “extra”, some delighters, in their presentation.

The presentation is not backed up by statistics or real life examples, but consists of observations and temporary technical restraints that both contenders inhabit.

Josh shows the audience two different commercials. One for the iPhone 4 app “Facetime” in which we see smiling people sharing emotions with each other:

Then he shows us the commercial for the DroidX phone, in which astronauts find a strange device in space. Within this device they find a phone that kinda integrates with the astronauts arm and forms itself into an Android phone. Did I hear a nerdgasm?

The different cultures couldn’t be clearer —  iPhone is about emotion, Android features and technology. So making an app for iPhone or Android can be based on your marketing strategy or the way people would want to use the app.
Then there is the mobile web. “It’s webtastic. Everybody loves her”. That is because you only need to make one app and your done. You have an instant reach of everyone who owns an iPhone or Android phone (Josh briefly addresses Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7, but they are irrelevant to the point).
So, if everything is a match, there has to be a winner, right? No.
There is no winner. Both contenders have their strengths and weaknesses, so it’s comparing apples to oranges.
But Josh has a very strong point of view that in order to be something in the world of mobile devices, you should at least have a mobile website. And on top of a mobile website you could, for example, create an app for your most precious customers; an app that provides them with something handy and unique.
Josh declares a winner that, in my opinion, is no contender in this match, but plays a whole different sport: the API. True, when you have a good API, building a mobile site and native apps is a breeze, but for me, this outcome was a bit disappointing, given the premise of the talk.

• Apps need an appstore, websites do not.
• Apps can make money pretty quickly, websites not so.
• Apps have great UX, websites not so.
• Apps have to be downloaded, websites work right away.
• Apps need to be updated manually, websites can be updates as much as you want without having to bug the user.
• Apps are about doing things, websites are about reference.
• Apps have great word-of-mouth, websites not so.
• Apps can speak with each other, websites not.
• Developing an app is a pain, building a website is not; in fact, prototyping a mobile website is a breeze.

So both have their advantages and weaknesses, no shocker there. But why not make an app that hold a frame which hold a mobile website? These Hybrid apps can work and you would have best of both world… right? Not exactly. The problem with an app is that is has to feel like an app. And an iPhone app feels differently from an Android app. So your mobile website must behave accordingly. Ofcourse this can be resolved by creating two mobile websites.

Ding ding ding! But we want a winner!

The Manual of Detection — Dario Buzzini

For his talk, Dario Buzzini used the detective novel “The Manual of Detection” as a guide to UX practice, backed up with examples from his work at IDEO.

Starting with the poetic (and somewhat provocative) statement: “We designers, we write stories not manuals, we design experiences not procedures, strive for beauty not truth”, he picked 11 quotes from the book that had relevance to UX.

1. On Shadowing — it’s not about being unremarkable but appearing as if you’re meant to be there (like a shadow)
   In relation to skills needed in a job — you need to have more than one in order to seem as if you should be there!
2. On Language — As an investigator, you need to know how to talk the right languages, objects have memory, too.
   Surgery situation — the nurse is touching the patient’s hand not only to comfort them, but also to measure anaesthetic. realised in surgery situation that the gadget for the nurse with stylus would eventually be used just with thumb!
3. On Leads — follow them, to let them go.
   Often your first idea may be the best, but it can’t be your only one. IDEO has a parking lot for ideas on their whiteboards, so that designers get their ideas out and move on.
4. On Documentation — most is for the wishing well, not a file .
   Buzzini stressed that should be actionable (echoing Dan Brown’s talk on documentation the day before).
5. On Nemeses — important to find your opposites.
   IDEO create partner teams for projects (apps etc) where both sit and work together. Can be difficult but helpful.
6. On Bluffing — If you’re caught in a lie, lie again.
   “Designers Lie. [laughter] Designers *sometimes* lie”. Sometimes your clients don’t need to know the truth so much as get a feel for an approximation. IDEO made a physical obstacle course for phone provider to show the hurdles customers had to go through to get a contract. The client got it. [Don Norman later commented that marketers lie and thus are successful. Designers are too honest for their own good!]
7. On interrogation—the process begins long before you are alone in a room together. By then, you should already know your answers.
   User research starts before talking — what people say is very different from what they do. Buzzini once interviewed a woman with limited dexterity who said that she had no problem opening pill jars. How she opened them? “I cut it open, how else would you do it?”
8. Cryptology — be careful what you dig up, it’s yours.
   Designers haven’t helped people with banking, making it hard for them to understand what happens with their money. Banksimple is using diagrams to help with that.
9. On Solutions — a good detective tries to know everything, a great one knows just enough to see him through to the end.
   In UX, this is about prototyping — you just have to choose and work smart. A good example for prototyping is Liveview App that lets you send a screencast to an iOS device
10. On Dream Detection — be careful to check whether what you’ve seen is real or a fallacy.
    Check exactly who it is you’re designing for.

Living With Complexity — Don Norman

In his keynote speech “Living With Complexity” (based on the book of the same name), Don Norman urged the audience to understand the difference between the complicated and complex, think about where the complexity is in any system, and to think signifiers, not affordances. Some of his findings were:

Another interesting tip he provided was to think about where the complexity occurs in a product system (aka Tesler’s Law of the Conservation of Complexity). For example, with coffee machines, in a manual it occurs with the user (making the coffee), a semi-automatic in the machine, a pod model in the packaging.

He finally echoed other speakers such as Halvorson with his reminder that it doesn’t matter if a design is bad unless it starts to affect sales.

——–

By the end of the day, most people had managed to collect most (if not all) of their UX Trump Cards (apparently Bill Buxton and Robert Hockman Jnr were particularly hard to find) and Mental Notes mini-sets. While the fabulous location was a given, UXLX excelled in running a tight ship — speakers were kept to time so the four rooms never got out of sync, a common problem with conferences — and a line up of quality speakers. It’d be great to see some more local/European speakers (a prime example was how Netflix — a service that isn’t available in Europe— was used as a case study several times), but given the diverse crowd, hopefully some will cross the line from participant to speaker next year.

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.

This May, Dan Brown will be speaking at UXLX in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of our media partnership with UXLX, Johnny Holland got the chance to interview Dan on a topic that he has been the go to expert for years now, Effective Design Documentation. We’d like to thank Dan once again for taking the time out of busy schedule for this interview. Hope you enjoy.

JohnnyHolland: Given all its moving parts, design can be a challenging thing to document properly. What advice would you give to design teams that are attempting to get proper Design Documentation injected into their organizations process?

Dan Brown

Dan Brown: “Design documentation” is shorthand for the collection of techniques to capture and communicate design ideas to other people on the design team. Those ideas may be half-baked or they may be well-cooked, and designers have various reasons for creating documentation. “Documentation” may not be a printed PDF: it can come in many forms, including interactive prototypes. Regardless, documents are any tool that communicates a design idea and ensures projects run smoothly.

Let’s now unpack “proper design documentation”. Different organizations face different challenges, and documentation that works for one group may not be “proper” for another.

The central challenge we see time and again is ensuring consistency: different designers communicate the same concepts differently. Consistency remains important, since different designers may be working with the same stakeholders, developers, and quality engineers. Imagine being on the receiving end of those deliverables, not knowing what to expect from one project to the next. One designer provides painstaking detail of every interaction and the other leaves more to interpretation.

There are lots of things a team can do to normalize their deliverables, but using templates is not one of them. Ultimately, the content of the documentation must be driven by the project itself: forcing people to fill in the blanks yields unreadable deliverables. Instead, to ensure consistency, the design team should meet regularly — monthly or quarterly — and share their work, examining their deliverables as a single portfolio. They should identify opportunities to streamline and align so that readers of their documents aren’t bombarded with a new approach in every project.

How has EightShapes Unify helped design teams create and manage the documentation they create?

Early in EightShapes’ history, we established ourselves as a firm that didn’t just do design, but also helped design teams communicate better. This can mean a few different things:

• translating mature design systems into re-usable components to speed up the design process and ensure consistency in the resulting designs
• preparing guidelines around the use of design systems
• running workshops to help teams correct the discrepancies in their approach to documentation

When Nathan conceived and implemented EightShapes Unify, however, we had a real opportunity to make a broader impact. Through much soul-searching (and expensive lawyer meetings) we decided to release it for free. We can’t know how everyone uses it: it’s been downloaded more than 15,000 times, by teams of multitudes and teams of one.

Everyone at EightShapes has a different perspective on the value and impact of the documentation system. For me, the beauty of EightShapes Unify is the freedom from meaningless templates. I remember using meaningless templates earlier in my career, answering questions like “Who are the actors of the system?” and “What are the dependencies?” These questions are either so broad or so irrelevant that the document becomes a mish-mash of trite responses.

Instead, the system provides “page patterns” — simple page layouts used frequently for common tasks like explaining a wireframe or comparing two approaches. This task-based approach to documentation mirrors our design philosophy

How has UX documentation had to evolve over the past few years? Did this have any influence on why you wrote a new edition to Communication Design?

There are two factors exerting pressure on documentation–the design problems and the project participants. My experience shows a marked increase in both over the last several years.

People generally point to new interface conventions (carousels, accordions, fly-outs, mega-menus, ad nauseum) as driving the evolution of documentation. But web sites went from nice-to-have to essential business tool overnight. The range of new UI patterns is only a small fraction of the story: more companies are trying to do more work online. This means increased complexity in transactions and depth of information. These sit at the heart of new design problems, and they force us to reconsider the tools we use to describe our solutions.

At the same time, there are more people involved in the web design process. Our projects incorporate team members with a greater range of experience and broader perspectives. They have different interests in the project and different agendas for the outcome. All of this puts pressure on the design documentation, serving more needs and purposes.

I wrote a new edition of Communicating Design to scratch an itch—much of my thinking around documentation had evolved over the preceding five years. These two pressures—new challenges, new participants—contributed substantially to the changes in my thinking.

Considering the current trends towards mobile, tablet, and in general ubiquitous design, how will UX documentation have to evolve yet again to support these new challenges?

At EightShapes, we’re exploring how interactive prototypes cooperate with other kinds of deliverables to document the entire user experience. Coming from a passion for good communications, we acknowledge that increased complexity demands a multi-pronged approach for defining experience.

Luke Wroblewski’s “mobile first” design approach resonates strongly with me: in a recent project, while I was sketching concepts, I started with the tablet version of the application without even really thinking about it. If the trend continues, however, we designers will need to separate further from specific platforms and start with the underlying models.

The biggest challenge for designers will be the increasing emphasis on abstraction. As data becomes available everywhere, the models we use to define its structure across multiple platforms must divorce themselves from any one specific platform. If the available information and its inherent structure is one factor driving the design of an interface, we need better tools for designing those structures. In short, the more abstract side of information architecture receives greater emphasis.

Why is creating good documentation essential to a designer, regardless of what their current role is?

We are purveyors of stories. We design products to support the stories of users’ lives. We design products that presumably bring about a change, going from “Eli suffers from situation X” to “Eli benefits from product Y”. This is how we do design and how we describe our ideas to other people involved with the product.

A design document tells a little story in and of itself: for example about how a particular feature works, or the conclusions stemming from user research. A document a also contributes to the overall narrative of the project. But the most important story is the one about the product, how it works to bring about change. This multi-layered approach to storytelling is the essence of designing an interactive product.

User experience designers must be able to create good deliverables because they should be able to tell a good story.

What are the dangers of going from the whiteboard to design/development?

There may be none, but that’s not true for every case. Planning is crucial to both design and development: knowing what you’re going to do before you do it can prevent wasted effort and unnecessary detours. Experienced designers know how much planning and design they need to do based on the nature of the problem, the existence of well-established patterns, and the composition of the team.

That said, no amount of planning can ever replace the brute force method of trying lots of different things. Discarded ideas might not be a sign of wasted effort, but a necessary by-product of the creative process. One might argue that successful creative endeavors depend on the balance between planning and trying things out.

Some signs that you might need more robust documentation include:

• Working with new team members, where communication conventions have not yet been established
• Working on a project with multiple streams of work, where keeping track of progress on each stream is crucial
• Working on a project with clear milestones, where the project team expects each phase to come to a solid conclusion
• Working on a poorly-defined design problem, where taking the time to define boundaries is time well spent

I’d recommend creating more documentation in new situations just because it forces you to communicate clearly and acknowledge constraints. If you start creating documents for the sake of demonstrating productivity (rather than moving the project forward), perhaps its time to go back to the whiteboard.

How can designers move beyond being all about the documentation? How can they stop being deliverable monkeys?

As I thought about this question, I really wanted to understand what “all about the documentation” and “deliverable monkey” means. (And if you think it’s easy to get past the picture of a thousand monkeys sitting down at a thousand MacBooks, you are wrong.) I came up with two things:

First, designers in our field can often feel removed from the product. We’re pushing boxes around a page, composing annotations that no one reads. We’re writing mark-up and code strictly for the purpose of demonstrating an interaction, but know full well it will be tossed when it comes time to build the product. Our involvement ends once we’ve told the story, capturing the experience sufficiently for someone else to build it.

We feel like we’re paid to create things that are at once essential to defining the product and are still so far away. This demand to churn out wireframes all day long makes us feel like, well, monkeys. (No disrespect to our primate cousins. I’m sure they lead very productive, fulfilling lives.)

Second, in order to feel connected to something, designers sometimes focus more on the deliverable and less on the product. We pour our ego into the PDF, reflecting our passion for the product in the documentation, something we control.

Both of these things come from designers themselves. That is, if you think treating these issues depends on a systemic intervention, you’ve looked too far for a cause.

Here are some things that have become ingrained in my work, that help prevent any possible devolution:

• Determine the barest minimum that needs to go into the document in order to communicate the ideas effectively. Try not to do much more than the barest minimum, but definitely don’t do less. Can the team sufficiently understand your intent with some rough wireframes and light annotations? Perhaps embellish those with some context through business objectives and user requirements, but avoid doing much more.
• Treat the document as a framework for a conversation, not as a final product. By thinking of it as a means to an end, rather than as an end in and of itself, you approach it differently.

How could proper UX documentation have prevented the Cylon Uprising?

Products sometimes behave in unexpected ways. Some ways are delightful, like when you discover that shaking your iPhone “un-does” your last action. Some are disturbing, like when robot servants rebel against human oppression. While good documentation should capture all the functionality of a product, we can’t predict how people will use it, and people always find new ways to use (or abuse) products.

UX Lisbon 2011

Dan Brown will be  speaking at UX Lx: User Experience Lisbon, one of Europe’s premier user experience events. The second annual UX LX conference takes place May 11-13, 2011 in Lisbon, Portugal.

No, this isn’t another reference to the TV series LOST. This is the online world of Club Penguin, where millions of young children waddle around as cartoon penguin-avatars in a winter-set virtual world. You can play games, earn points and decorate your igloo. And the imminent arrival of pirate penguin Rockhopper is all my boys can talk about. Apparently with each arrival he brings rare new gifts (once he introduced a new breed of red Puffles, the fluffy little creatures you take care of). He’s a seafaring Santa Clause to the world of Club Penguin.

Disney's Club Penguin

Plenty could be said here about self-expression, scarcity, achievements or other psychological principles which–trust me–work just as well on adults as they do on penguin playing kids. Instead, let’s focus on one idea I’ve never seen discussed: periodic events. Why is the Rockhopper narrative, and dozens of similar storylines, so enthralling? And what does this kind of a recurring event do for a community?

The significance of rituals

Think of the shared, recurring events you celebrate. Perhaps Christmas with family? A Tuesday afternoon happy hour with friends from work? Maybe there’s a birthday next month or a monthly book club discussion. Our lives are filled with these recurring beats. There is a rhythm to our lives. From the natural (breathing, seasons, menstrual cycles) to the invented (Summer break, national holidays, new movie releases), we are entertained by these periodic events. Rituals and tradition give our lives momentum. Why is this important, psychologically? These events unite people. They are a shared experience through which people can gather together. They are a chance for similar people to congregate. And even if we have very little in common with the other people, the rituals offer something to do together. Through shared, recurring events, we feel a sense of belonging. And there’s more, these rituals give us something to look forward to. There is variety in an otherwise repetitive routine. From week to week, or year after year, there is continuity, comfort, and heightened anticipation.

Business Rituals

Businesses are no exception. You have quarterly earnings reports. There’s also an annual review. Blood drives come around from time to time. There’s the annual holiday party in December. Budgets are set on a yearly basis. Even the work day is punctuated by regular breaks. Maybe there’s a team lunch on Fridays. Periodic events are present in just about every area of our lives. And all these things work in a subtle way to unite us. The events I share at one company may not translate to another office, but within that one company, they are something we can share. These recurring events create sustained interest, anticipation and a sense of belonging.

MIA Online?

So now, let me ask this question: What do people have to look forward to on your site? Or in the software we use? Or in the community you’ve built? For most of us, launching and maintaining a Web site is enough of a chore. But what change is there to look forward to? Once a year, a number of sites participate in a CSS reboot, where all the styles are dropped. Some sites even commit to refresh their look on this day. This gives casual visitors– especially those who rarely visit a site, reason to come back– to see what’s new. Department stores regularly have sales, seasonal offerings and other events, yet the only online equivalent seems to be cyber Monday. Excluding scheduled maintenance outings, what do your users have to look forward to or reminisce about? Are there regular, recurring events enjoyed by all? Like Rockhopper in Club Penguin, many kids games, use a narrative structure to create events, why aren’t we doing the same in our business applications and public websites?

Some (perhaps crazy) ideas

Consider some ways that all users or groups within a system could enjoy shared recurring experiences.

Quora

• One company I worked for had a monthly speaker series that brought in such luminaries as Brian Eno, Scott McCloud and John Maeda. What if a Q&A site like Quora.com made an event out of regularly hosting recognized expert, available for an afternoon to answer any questions within their area of expertise?;
• eCommerce sites routinely offer sales, but the only shared community event is cyber Monday. What about hiding surprises at Easter? Or setting up a themed specials every few weeks? Instead of a time-based event, maybe every ‘x’ sale resulted in a discount for everyone online at the same time;
• What if my time tracking app rewarded everyone on my team with a fun, bi-weekly report on how we’re doing? Instead of a chore, time tracking could become more like the Wii Fit with regular check ins, goals and feedback;
• In ancient Israel, debts were dropped during the Jubilee year. Maybe internal organizations could declare one day of the year a “reset your inbox to zero” day. All employees email inboxes would automatically empty and you’d have a clean start (don’t freak out– this could be limited to internal emails only). Much of the group pressure that results from mounting email could be removed, as this would be a shared experience for everyone;
• Imagine a hot new startup that only allowed new members to sign up at a designated time, in pairs! If you’re friend didn’t also sign up within an hour window, both of you would have to wait until the next opportunity.

Perhaps some of these ideas sound a bit far fetched? The point of all of this isn’t utility, but engagement–with each other and with a service. We’re talking about creating delightful experiences through shared events. Consider some services that have made periodic events core to their experience:

Daily Deals

Woot.com

What would you think of an eCommerce site that only sells one item at a time? No inventory. No catalog to browse. Sound silly? Services such as Groupon and Woot have made the daily event a core part of their business. One deal. One day only. That’s it. We may rarely make a purchase from these sites, but we can’t stop coming back, you know, just in case. We’re curious– what will tomorrow’s deal be? And this approach to business leverages variable rewards; just as with slot machines, all it takes is a great deal every now and then keep us coming back to these sites (or subscribing to their daily emails).

Monthly Challenges

750words.com

750words.com is founded on one simple idea: Write at least 750 words every day for one month. The site tracks your progress with simple row of boxes, one for each day of the month. Writing at least 750 words earns you an “X” for that day. In doing so, you compete against your own best streak. How many consecutive days can you write 750 words? So where’s the periodic event? It’s the monthly reset. If you fail to write for 30 consecutive days, you can alwasy look forward to “a clean bowling-esque score card” next month. We nearing the end of January, when most of our New Year’s resolutions start to fall to the wayside. But why wait until next year to take up running or jogging again? HealthMonth(also from the same brilliant mind behind 750words.com) encourages you to make personal health goals (in the form of “do more of…” or “do less of….”) for a period of one month. You’re allowed a bit of grace and backsliding before you are out of “the game” for that month. And if you don’t succeed, don’t worry. Everyone starts over again at the 1st of the month. Why wait until next year give losing weight another shot?

Community Events

We’ve also seen periodic events emerge from community groups. Think of the #followfriday hashtag on Twitter. Or the CSS resets I mentioned earlier.

Shared TV Programming

In the era of Tivo and on-demand programming, the communal bonding around “last nights episode” seems to be waning. Time shifting TV has fragmented our conversations. But perhaps this communal relic can be brought into 21st century. I recently read about a startup that wants to “connect friends in real time while watching their favorite TV shows.” A periodic event once set at a national level by broadcasters may now be agreed upon by friends.

A (real-time) challenge:

The sites that have introduced periodic events are few and far between. Here’s my challenge: Are you giving your users a reason to come back? If not, how might you build periodic events into the systems you design or use? We’d love to hear your ideas on this concept could be applied to online interactions. Here’s what we’re going to do: All your comments and ideas will be held in a queue. One week from today, we’ll publish all your suggestions. See you in a week?

UX Lisbon 2011

Stephen Anderson will be a keynote speaker at UX Lx: User Experience Lisbon, one of Europe’s premier user experience events. The second annual UX Lx conference takes place May 11-13, 2011 in Lisbon, Portugal.

This May, Louis Rosenfeld will be speaking at UXLX in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of our media partnership with UXLX, Johnny Holland got the chance to interview Louis on a topic that is near and dear to his heart lately, Web Analytics and User Experience. We’d like to thank Louis once again for taking the time out of busy schedule for this interview. Hope you enjoy.

Johnny Holland: You’ve been spending a lot of time writing and presenting on Web Analytics and User Experience lately. From what you’ve learned so far, why do you think web analytics are being used more now than in the past?

Louis Rosenfeld: Design is a more strategic activity than ever before, and with more at stake, we’re all looking for evidence to help us make and validate our decisions.

Plus analytics tools are becoming cheaper and easier to use.  For example, there’s really no excuse for not at least trying out a tool like Google Analytics on your own personal site.  It’s free and, thanks to the great work of brilliant UX people like Jeff Veen, easy to use and understand.

How are teams commonly using analytics to measure the effectiveness of the user experience their product/service is providing?

Traditionally, teams have used basic analytics, like clickstream analysis, to measure conversions of all sorts, such as the percentage of customers that successfully make an online purchase, or the points at which prospective college students fail to complete an online application.  They’ve also compared behaviors among audience segments; for example, are international students having a harder time with that application than domestic students?.

Louis Rosenfeld

The challenge with traditional web analytics is that, while it’s a great way to determine what is happening when users interact with a product, it’s not that good at telling you why they do what they do.  Analytics will help you arrive at some great hypotheses–but for the most part, you’ll have to test them using other user research methods.  And it’s through those more qualitative methods–the one that UX people are more savvy with–that it becomes possible to learn why the new design is better, why the new content titling guidelines are worth following, and so on.

How can analytics help inform UX activities prior to performing user research?

Well, to be clear it is a form of user research, but sure there are many ways.  For example, I suggest reviewing frequent queries before determining what sort of task analysis you might do.  The “what” data of analytics helps you sharpen the “why” questions of qualitative research.

How can it be used following user research?

If you can segment your data by audiences that correspond to your personas, you can incorporate things like common queries and most-accessed documents into those personas.

How are teams misusing information gathered from analytics?

By not going beyond the reports.  By taking that what data–say, a factoid that states that “placing the button to the right of the address field increased conversion 13%”–as an important conclusion on its own, rather than exploring why that’s the case.  If we don’t go further, we only learn something about button positioning for some unique case, rather than something more generalizable about user behavior that can help us solve future design problems.

Is this why we see blog posts and articles on “Left aligned buttons work better for …”? How damaging can posts like that be?

Yes.  Those are very damaging when they’re presented as dogma and taken literally, rather than as points for discussion that, hopefully, lead to learning.  Thinking about the “what” is pretty pointless if you don’t explore the “why”.

Yes.  Those are very damaging when they’re presented as dogma and taken literally, rather than as points for discussion that, hopefully, lead to learning.  Thinking about the “what” is pretty pointless if you don’t explore the “why”.

Is the information being gained by analytics impacting boardroom decisions or business strategies at all? If so how?

I don’t spend a lot of time in boardrooms–for better or for worse–but I imagine that when you manage a large organization, even a non-profit, your main job is to supervise one or more tiers of middle managers.  That doesn’t scale well, so you’ll naturally resort to numbers to help track the performance of middle managers and the products they manage.  Those metrics may be poor, or they may be incomplete; either way, they’re likely to amplify what is already a dangerous approach to making important decisions.

Do you think it’s possible to become too married to the data that comes out of analytics? Where do you draw the line?

Yes, but that’s true of any form of research data, whether it comes from analytics or user testing or an ethnographic study.  Each, on its own, paints a woefully incomplete picture of reality.

But there are bigger risks with analytics data to keep in mind.  First, there is more of it, which will impress some people far more than it should–especially because some of it will be garbage data that should have been scrubbed in the first place.

Second, analytics apps provide us with canned, impressive-looking reports.  While these reports can be useful, they’re generic.  They don’t necessarily pertain to your users’ needs or your organization’s goals.  Analytics data becomes more useful when it helps answer one of your questions, but making it do that takes more effort than many organizations are willing to invest.

My favorite example here is Netflix.  They identify which movies are getting searched most frequently.  Of those, they identify the movies whose pages are getting the most visits.  Of those, they identify the movies which are getting added to customers’ queues least frequently.  That’s a report that’s hugely valuable for Netflix to study regularly; in fact, it’s not so much a report as the answer to a useful question:  “Which popular titles not being added to the queue?”  Either way, it certainly wasn’t anything their analytics application was going to provide automatically.

While writing your latest book (on Site Search Analytics), has anything special stood out to you on the subject?

I’m just shocked at how few people even bother to analyze what their site’s users are searching for–which is why I wanted to write this book and get the topic out there as a valid user research method.  This under-utilization of query data is due in part to ignorance–many of us don’t even know we can get at this data–and partly because it can be a little tricky to set up.

But there aren’t many better–or other–sources of such semantically-rich behavioral data.  In high volumes.  Without the taint of coming from a lab.  In effect, query data is our users telling us what content they want from our sites in their own words.  Really, they’re trying to have a conversation with us; are we listening and learning from it?

Search query data can not only to help us improve our search engine’s performance, but our content and our metadata as well.  So, if you’ve got a search engine, you’ve got query data somewhere.  Lots of it, likely.  Why wouldn’t you want to learn from it?

What can User Experience learn from Web Analytics? What can Web Analytics learn from User Experience?

This is one of those questions that could take a few pages to answer.  For sake of brevity, let me distill it this way:  Web Analytics is great at measuring and monitoring how well an organization is performing at meeting its goals (as expressed as Key Performance Indicators).  in other words, WA tells us about the world that we know.  UX methods, conversely, help us suss out patterns and outliers in data–they expose the world that we don’t know.  Each results in an incredibly valuable perspective, but the organizations that combine these will realize benefits far greater than the sums of their parts.

You describe the nature and personality of Web Analytics and User Experience as polar opposites. What if they had a baby together though? What would it look like? How would it behave?

That’d be one amazing (if somewhat schizophrenic) child.  He would pepper its parents with incessant “why?” questions, like all kids do, but just as many “what” questions as well.  He’d probably be quite odd-looking, but that’s another story.

UX Lisbon 2011

Louis Rosenfeld will be  speaking at UX Lx: User Experience Lisbon, one of Europe’s premier user experience events. The second annual UX Lx conference takes place May 11-13, 2011 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Jeroen van Geel: Earlier this year you wrote that design research doesn’t innovate, technology does. This caused quite a discussion. What were the main counterexamples you got back?

Donald Norman: No, that’s not what I said. And indeed, that is the main problem with the reaction I got: many people never read my post or listened to my talk: they simply reacted. (The people who did consider it thoughtfully were very favorable; in fact, I was invited to give it at several places, like Delft and the Copenhagen Business School).

Innovation is a very complex topic, very thoroughly discussed in academia, which is not something most designers follow. The important points are these: There are many forms of innovation–process, product, radical, incremental, and so on. I considered two forms of product innovation: radical (e.g., the invention of the telephone) and incremental (e.g., releasing a new version of a mobile phone, automobile, or kitchen appliance). Radical innovation in the products, I argued, always comes from the works of inventors, excited by some new technology and anxious to explore its potential. I do not know of a single radical innovation that has come from the people who do design research. Not the telephone or automobile, not Facebook or Twitter. Not 3D television nor, for that matter, high-definition television. Not hybrid autos. Not the Internet itself. Market studies, market research, design research, field observations (ethnographic studies), etc., do not yield radical innovations. They are very important in finding new uses of and improvements to existing products, but these are incremental innovations, not radical ones.

Incremental innovation is very important. Over 90% of the radical innovations fail (some of my friends say 99%). Yes, when they happen they change lives, but think about it: how many radical new product innovations have you experienced in your lifetime? One? Ten? Even if it was 100 that is still relatively infrequent compared to the thousands of incremental product innovations every day.

Moreover, radical innovation almost always starts off being inferior to what already exists: it takes good design research to transform that radical idea into something that is appealing to the world.

Alas, we train our design students to do radical innovation, even though in the real world, these radical ideas will almost certainly fail, even though they will be asked to do incremental innovation in their practice, and even though the evidence says that the radical innovations come from anywhere, and often take years or even decades before their worth is understood and appreciated.

In other words: we are not facing facts. We shy away from truth. We are delusional.

One of your points is that there is a gap between research and practice. What did you mean? Do you see any way of changing this?

Don Norman

Unfortunately, the term “research” has two very different meanings in design. One is the way it is interpreted by practitioners: design research is the early studies of the needs and characteristics of the people for whom the product or service is being produced. Let me call this “Design Studies.” The other is the interpretation by the university academic community as well as industrial research laboratories, where research is an activity aimed at increasing our fundamental knowledge in a field or of producing new concepts, ideas, and realizations. Let me use the term “research” for this activity. Both have gaps.

Design studies are often clever, engaging, and entertaining. But the relationship between the knowledge gained and the design of the product is often forgotten. Those who do design studies are often applied social scientists–not designers–and they often fail to frame either their studies or their results in ways that are meaningful to the design team. Many design teams simply ignore their reports. Now, I hasten to add that in many design firms, the design studies are done jointly with the design team, so this gap does not exist. But I find this to be the exception, not the rule.

Research, on the other hand, is aimed at the development of new knowledge and concepts, new ideas, and realizations of those ideas. Researchers often push technology to the limit, demonstrating compelling, engaging prototypes. But they are seldom practical. Here the gap between research and practice is fundamental: I do not believe it can be bridged easily. This is because the goals, motives, and even personalities of the research teams differ from those of the practitioners. One wants deep understanding, the other wants to know what to do next. One is happy as soon as an idea has been demonstrated, even if it is held together only by tape, string and mirrors–that is, even if it only works on special cases and requires careful attendance and repair by the research group. The practitioner wants something complete, robust, and reliable. Researchers are incapable of delivering this; they are too curious, too driven to learn new knowledge. The practitioner is too practical.

The design studies-practice gap can be overcome by better training of the design studies people, better integration of design teams, and better attention to the needs of the product team. The research-practice gap can only be overcome by an intermediary: a translation team that translates the research knowledge into practical realizations that the product teams can develop and deploy.

On emotional design

How far can we take the concept of “emotional design” in the nuts and bolts of a product? Do you believe it can infuse every aspect of the design process?

Emotion is so fundamental to human behavior that the answers are: “all the way” and “yes.”

While product designers have been designing personality into products for quite some time, it’s still very new in web design. Do you think we can design websites with a personality?

Don Norman: Not only is the answer “yes,” but we already do so. Everything has a personality: everything sends an emotional signal. Even where this was not the intention of the designer, the people who view the website infer personalities and experience emotions. Bad websites have horrible personalities and instill horrid emotional states in their users, usually unwittingly.

Everything has a personality: everything sends an emotional signal. Even where this was not the intention of the designer, the people who view the website infer personalities and experience emotions.

We need to design things–products, websites, services–to convey whatever personality and emotions are desired. Sometimes these might be negative. Mostly they should be positive.

You know about personas? Well, in design we should always create a persona for the product and ensure that everything in that product is consistent with that persona.

Ecosystems & Design Thinking

In your book Living with Complexity, you state that products become stronger when they are part of an ecosystem. One of the obvious examples here is Apple–why do you think they were so early in adapting the model of an ecosystem? What makes them different?

Because Apple has always had a mission: to make technology understandable and easy to use. It has always put this first. (There was a period when Apple lost its way and stumbled badly in the jungle of ill-conceived products, but fortunately for all of us, Apple got back on track and now leads the way for others.)

When a company or design team wants to start working on an ecosystem, where should they start?

From the beginning: think through every single aspect of a product or service, from when the person first hears about it, to the advertisements, sales, and purchase experience. to the packaging and installation, to usage, service and updating, and to the products and services with which it must interact. Make sure everything fits the proper persona –the proper image. Finally, think of the end-of-life experience. Updating and/or replacing the item so that the transition from the old to the new is painless: no settings lost, no data, no personalization. And make it kind to the environment.

Think systems.

A lot of people, including many designers, believe that “design thinking” has become too detached from reality and too cocky. What are your thoughts? Do designers really have something different to offer from anyone else? If so, what?

Here I refer you to my Core77 essay on the topic.

As one of the pioneers of our field, where do you get your inspiration from? What is for you the best way to stay energized?

Stay curious. Always be learning new topics. I make it a point to learn a completely new topic every year. And I talk mostly with my critics. When people agree with me, it may feel good, but I don’t learn anything. I learn from those who disagree–that is, if they are intelligent and cogent, with good reasons for the disagreement. When the reasons are good enough, I’ll change my mind. But even if I remain unconvinced, i will have learned through the process.

Or as the old saying goes: Take your work seriously, but never take yourself seriously.

So let’s end with some light stuff. What book did you last read?

Ian Morris, Why the West Rules–for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. This is an extremely important book: read the first chapter, then Section 3, then section 1. Skip Section 2, unless you are a deep history buff.

This year you’ll be a keynote speaker at UX Lisbon. Could you share with us what your talk will be about?

I never know what I am going to say until the night before. I get energized talking with the conference attendees. Quite often I change my mind at the last possible moment. What will I talk about at Lisbon? I don’t know. It might say in the program, but I never pay attention to whatever I told the conference organizers because they insisted even though I didn’t have the slightest idea. I want the audience to be surprised: actually, the person who is often most surprised by what I end of saying is me.

Thank you so much for your time. We look forward to seeing you in Lisbon.

You are quite welcome.

UX Lisbon 2011

Don Norman will be a keynote speaker at UX Lx: User Experience Lisbon, one of Europe’s premier user experience events. The second annual UX Lx conference takes place May 11-13, 2011 in Lisbon, Portugal.