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.

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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 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}

It’s conference season. And we welcome MidwestUX to the mix, brought to you by IxDA Columbus and COUPA. A two day event, hosted in Columbus, Ohio, MidwestUX follows a two track program full of four keynotes, lightning round talks, workshops, and panel discussions. As always, Johnny is there to deliver a daily write-up for those who weren’t able to attend.

I should start by noting, while we had a jam packed first day and an equally full Day Two planned, the conference didn’t start Saturday morning. The conference organizers organized quite the welcome reception with a self guided pub crawl for Friday night for any of the attendees who planned to be there early enough for the pre conference festivities.

Keynote Jared Spool

Jared kicked off the morning with The Secret Lives of Links and shares with us the story of his daughter’s ‘secret’ live journal and evolved the conversation to the findability and secret nature of information on the web. Jared points out that we don’t talk about links, and that they are one of the most important parts of a page and how we communicate information. We discuss the nature of links and search, which as Jared puts it is BYOL, or Bring Your Own Link, as people type in the words they expect to see as links elsewhere in the page.

We never talk about links, yet they are the most important aspect of our sites.

Jared continues through various news sites, university sites, and turns his attention to marketing, ecommerce and other popular samples. He shares the history of links and breaks down why blue underline links don’t work and stresses that links want to look good. He leaves us with the thoughts of how we balance the presentation of links and their actual purpose; on how the power of a link is much more than what we present and how we often mix metaphors to confuse the purpose of links and navigation.

Follow Jared at @jmspool

UX Research in the Real World: Stories from Rwanda, Veronica Erb

Veronica shares her story of travelling to Rwanda to perform UX research around teachers. Three specific lessons were shared.

1. No schedule. When you can’t or don’t schedule your research in advance you think in chunks, not in specific time slots. Work with what is available to you.

2. No Recruiting. Working without a schedule at a new site each day, it was important to know your criteria for who you would like to research and who would be most beneficial gven the constraints provided.

At some point the director is going to come in and start using his filing cabinet and you can’t care.

3. No Lab. When conducting mobile research you are working in any space that is available. Working in a principal’s desk or classroom it requires additional fluidity and the ability to ‘roll with the punches’

Veronica closes with her perceptions on the success of the project: the passion of UXsters, the alignment with the stakeholders, and the willingness to always push for more. She also reminds us not to worry with the Rwandian phrase nta kibazo.

Follow Veronica at @verbistheword

Cooking UX with Cultural Leftovers, Erik Dahl

Erik takes the stage to discuss culture in design and the mutual impact culture has on our designs and design has on culture. We define culture as being more than context. It includes people, activities, context, emotions, motivations, goals, and more. It also includes an abstraction of patterns and stories.

Erik discusses how to suss out culture through observation, empathy and openess to stories and abstraction of differences across people and the world. He moves through definition to examples of where culture and stories are misaligned and it takes time and attention to recognize the effects a decision might actually take. With samples from America and Brazil, expectations and differences in culture help us realize the decisions we make have broader effects and require more focussed attention and thought.

Follow Erik at @eadahll

From Cancer to Bankruptcy, Brad Nunnally

Brad picks up where Erik left off – discussing the need for empathy during research as it helps build relationships as designers. With experience working with cancer survivors and working with retirement savings during the 2008 market turmoil, Brad shares how empathy and relationships are vital in emotionally tense environments. Sharing some advice with the audience, Brad communicates to:

• Never go alone, use the buddy system.
• Always show up on time. Be five minutes early but never late.
• Send a welcome packet, let people know who you are in advance including photos, bios and references.
• Humanize yourself and don’t be a stoic researcher.
• Take the glass of water offered to you and truly be a guest.
• Remember the user is just as scared as you are.
• Be honest.
• When the interview is over, leave. Do not debrief in people’s driveway.

Brad concludes by tying these relationships to different movies — suspense, horror, comedy, and anything else. Research isn’t a scripted science and like a film you have to follow the rabbit holes and follow the user’s stories while maintaining a focus. Brad also shares that it is OK to cry, laugh, and befriend your participant, and to be sensitive that some stories might haunt you beyond the duration of the interview.

Follow Brad at @bnunnally

Empowering Teens through Design Education, Larissa Itomlenskis

Larissa talks about her experience teaching architecture and design to teens in Columbus. Showing samples of work, Larissa communicates the constraints and implications of teaching children in a limited time and what we as designers can take from this experience. Larissa shares the inspiration she found by educating young students on design and by sharing the samples of their sketches and concerns left the room refecting on our practice and the influence we can have on youth. Children want to throw something away if it is not perfect and it is our job to communicate how to iterate and critique effectively, how to encourage discovery in an environment without failure.

In a proffessional environment you can’t just point to something and say that’s dumb.

From Mega Website to Mobile Experience, Edward Stull and Marty Vian

Edward and Marty share their perspectives on mobile experience design with their unique roles: Edward as a mobile app designer and Marty as a current client. Putting the addage to ‘Design for Mobile First’ on end, the duo shares ther story of developing the mobile application Manta based on the rich and extensive online presence. Slides illustrated the translation of functionality from web to mobile and the implications around reolution, environment, and controls. More a showing of their work, the talk acted as a catalyst for the later presentations on design for mobile and showed additional perspectives to a lot of the conversations on how and when to approach mobile.

Follow Edward at @esdc and Marty at @mvianl

Adaptive Mobile UX Design, Jen Matson

Jen shares her story of shopping for a space heater. Navigating the Sears website with Google’s support and through the mobile version and sharing her frustration when the information and experience is sub par. The sub par experience has led, in part, to the notion of Adaptive Mobile UX Design which may be defined as:

Creating web sites and applications that try to give each user the best possible content and experience tailored to their device and browsing context.

This need and definition isn’t new as tailored advertising often employs this as large billboards and targeting marketing spreads adapt to their audience and the context. Jen stresses the canvas or varying size, capabilities of what is available, and the context of the experience as the key items to consider around adaptive mobile ux design. Jen closes by highlighting technologies and methods currently available to employ and support adaptive design including HTML5, CSS3, geolocation, dynamic device orientation and more tools and kits.

Follow Jen at @nstop

Mobile Design Thinking Beyond Apple, Brad Colbow

Brad immediately changes pace from the mobile application design and shares a story of community and social interaction at a modern camp site. After sharing his story he moves back to mobile devices and communicates how the nuanced differences across platforms can be most critical in the overall success and failure of interactions. Sharing samples from Android, Apple, Blackberry and Windows Mobile Brad compares interactions across different platforms. With different hard and soft key placement and different menu paradigms mobile app design is not a one and done process and is not a standardized process. Brad concludes with a review of the different UI Style Guides and best practices of different interactions and motivates us to understand the differences across platforms and the opportunity to build interactions with care.

Don’t let your UI hinder the user experience.

Follow Brad at @bradcolbow

Don’t Watch TV – Experience It, Brian Stone

On avereage there are more televisions in a home than number of people living there

Brian introduces us to some stats: there are more televisions in many homes than people, televisions are more ubiquitous than computers in the home, television is used as a channel to more noise and a venue for social interaction. Yet despite 97% of homes in the US having a television it is wholly ignored from a user experience stance.

Brian calls out the lack of development for televisions wether it is the interaction, the applications, or supporting the experience while exposing the growing number of web-connected systems over the next few years. By sharing samples including Boxee, Hulu and other players he leaves us with three questions around user experience and television: What can it do, How does it do it, and How will it be different?

Users want more meaningful content on demand with a great experience when it comes to tv viewing

Keynote: Marc Rettig

Marc closed out day one discussing Design for Life and brought the theoretical and practical discussions of the day into his presentation. Marc immediately confronts the breakdowns around professional definitions and just as quickly assures us he will not be sharing those thoughts and ‘defining the damn thing’. Instead he uses that as an opportunity to spring board to the need not to define our work but to understand where it fits in the greater landscape. Marc discussed some of the history of user experience and placed us in the context of where we stand in today’s business; both geographically and socially with the amorphous seat at the table.

Marc defines our current status as the ‘UX Era’ and discusses how we communicate within our community and to the broader audience at large. He charges us to determine how to bridge the gap between human society and technology with business. Sharing his journey, there is much that resonated with the audience as he left no tangible action items but rather opportunity for further conversation. If anything Marc’s talk about connections and networks inspired attendees to reach out of their comfort zone and to meet new people during Saturday evenings events.

Follow Marc at @mrettig

_{Top Image: Stephen A. Wolfe’s photostream.}

After a day of talks and a night (or even two, depending on when you got in) of parties, day 2 of Interactions 11 eased up the pace a bit. After a morning of presentations, attendees were let loose in Boulder with afternoon activities ranging from designing with junk to tea tasting.

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

Opening Keynote — Richard Buchanan

Richard Buchanan stripped it back — no slides, no holds barred, even a riff on clothes and not wearing them (more on that later) — in a pointed talk on interaction design that deftly interweaved his ideas with those from earlier talks .

First up, he addressed a recurring theme of being concerned about design not having a subject. According to him, this is a good thing. “Design has no subject matter – that’s what make this a powerful discipline. We MAKE our subject matter.” There had also been talk of the definition of interaction design, and in this light he gave his:

Interaction is how people relate to other people through the mediating influence of products — with products being either physical or digital.

Starting with “the triangle of doom” of product attributes (Lisa Strauss’s “useful, usable, desirable”, or what he calls “Logos, ethos, pathos”), he reminded us that if we can’t identify with  a product, it’ll not come into our lives, and therefore as a designer we need to balance all these attributes (e.g. it’s more important for a fireman’s suit to be usable, but for a ball gown to be desirable).

Buchanan’s core tenet is that there are four orders of design.

1. Mass communication
2. Mass industrialisation
3. Actions (the realm of interaction — or inter-action — design)
4. Environments (participation, the natural counterpart of actions)

Mass communication and industrialisation (the 1st and 2nd order of design) are natural counterparts, and have been around for nearly a century. However, the 3rd order of design is action (e.g. a chair as a site of activity). To understand action is to take into account greater needs such as content strategy and business goals (the Mayo Clinic is a great example).

But this isn’t enough. We need to consider action’s natural counterpart and the 4th order of design: environments (such fellow speaker Erik Hershman’s Ushahidi project).

So, what type of designer do you want to be: thing-thing, person-person, person-environment, participatory designer?

Taking up on the previous day’s discussion on material and principles, Buchanan suggests that “the material of interaction design is the purposes and values of people we serve, which come to us as clay.” Furthermore, “the principle behind interaction design — no, all design — is human dignity”. We should aim for justice.

If one action came out of Buchanan’s talk, it was to know your history: Erving Goffman and his ‘inception-development-fulfilment’ cycle; John Dewey’s principles of inauguration, interaction, leave-taking, everything about George Nelson (his most brutal comment of the audience “You don’t know much about the history of design or philosophy, do you?”). He pointed out that design industry is usually 25-30 years behind academia (e.g. Dewey’s work was conducted in the 1930s but only taken up by the New Bauhaus in the 1960s). While his references may have been nothing new to his former CMU students, to those not familiar with their works (apparently the majority of the audience) it was a valuable lesson. As someone tweeted: Vintage UX Bookclub, anyone?

Macro vs. Micro — Kalani Kordus & Karl Adam

Kalani and Karl gave a duo presentation about the power of small teams. Before starting their current company Smudgeproof, both worked at Yahoo on the Messenger app for iPhone. Now, they design and develop mobile apps (including the Interaction 11 official conference app). In their talk, they compared designing and developing within a large organisation and as a small startup. At Yahoo, there were lots of people and many departments involved: Design, Engineering, Quality Assurance, Product managers, Marketing managers. Now at Smudgeproof, it’s just the two of them: a designer and a developer, doing everything from research to testing and marketing.

Traditional processes (many sequential design and development phases) don’t work. At the milestones, or ‘traffic lights’ as they called it, the team often has to go back to previous phases, because stakeholders can’t agree on signoffs. In other words: lots of red lights. It is much better to have ‘roundabouts’, so they can take an exit at any moment: they can jump from any part of the process to another, in any particular order. For example, from an idea to trying it out in code, or from applying research insights directly into marketing. Design and engineering are like yin and yang. One can’t do without the other, because if it never gets built, it’s just an idea.

So now, at Smudgeproof, they have a completely different, trimmed down process, which basically consists of getting all ideas and sketches on a whiteboard (never on paper) for all to see, making very little documentation, and creating full fidelity visual mockups, that are then build. How they work is based on three principles:

• Wear more hats. They are able to stay small because each plays many roles. Not only interaction, but also visual design. Not only development but also testing.
• Fewer formalities. No red lights. Get to know the people you’re working with and trust them.
• Be like water. It can be very powerful and if something is in the way, water can go around it. Keep flowing.

The bottom line: two people can do the same as many large departments, or at least much faster. At Yahoo, a very simple bug would take days before it got fixed, due to many stakeholders and formalities. At Smudgeproof, it gets fixed in a minute, because it’s only one line of code. To me, this sounds a lot like Agile. This is easy to organize when you are your own company, but how can this approach be implemented in large organizations, such as Yahoo? Should product managers be eliminated altogether? Should design departments be cut in half? Unfortunately Kalani and Karl didn’t really touch on this.

Design for Evil: Ethical Design — Kaleem Khan

One of the most sobering, yet relevant talks of the day was given by Kaleem Khan. During his lightning talk he addressed the importance of ethics in our field. According to Kaleem we as designers don’t think enough about the impact of design. He states that we should be conscious about the artefacts we design, the clients we work for and the way we design, because design isn’t something that just stands on its own, it affects everything, including the future. Basically, if we are aware that a client (or their products) hurt people in any way, we should think twice before doing work for them.

Kaleem took a very direct and holistic approach to ethics.  However, by showing only high impact examples  — the fifteen people that committed suicide at Foxconn (the Chinese company manufacturing the iPhone), how working for a gambling agency is bad —I believe he lost some of the power of the point he was trying to make. The real issue around ethics is that they are very personal and never black and white: where one person might  get angry and step away from a client, another may find reasons for staying involved. In order to really understand ethics and how we should deal with it we must start at a different level, one that Buchanan hit on the head: human dignity.

Introducing IA, ID and UX into New Media Pedagogy, Journalism and Content Publishing — Stephen Johnson

The publishing industry is changing. According to Steven Johnson, graduating journalists have to be able to write, edit, shoot, design, code, publish, edit, do social media, and in doing so, become a new online-savvy type of journalist. Steven teaches his students at CSU the principles of IA, ID and UX, so that they will have a better understanding of the new media and efficiently create content for those media.

He recommends the classic UX readings, tells about the tools we use and makes his students create wireframes of existing webpages, in order to get a great understanding of concepts and processes that most new media professionals now take for granted. The fact that he made his students create wireframes with lorem ipsum instead of using real content was questioned by some people in the audience. As content is becoming more and more important in UX design, it felt strange that a content creating company would not use content in its designs. Steven answered that in some cases it is important to be more abstract, in order not to distract the attention from the things which are important at that moment.

In an attempt to prove that the power of content sometimes pushes towards solutions that meet scepticism with interaction designers, Steven went on to show some nice examples of very long home pages of news sites: the Norwegian VG Nett had no less than a 12,500 pixel deep homepage; The Huffington Post, 10,000 pixels; The New York Times ‘only’ 3,700. Yet all of these sites are very successful and attract large crowds.
Back in 1999, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times used print fonts in the headers of their articles to try to keep fidelity with the printed version and the Los Angeles Times still tries to keep up with the traditional newspaper by only using rollover colors for links instead of blue underline text.

To conclude, Steven refers to the story of the blind men and an elephant where a group of blind men touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. The interaction designer should be the one to see it is an elephant.

Human-Centered-Design and the Intersection of the Physical and Digital Worlds — Lindsay Moore & Austin Brown

Moore and Austen illustrated how industrial design and interaction design need to come together and consolidate their respective practices so that they can be combined in the grey area of physical-digital products. Lindsay and Austin demonstrated this by suggesting a number of principles, and two very concrete design cases.

First, they argued that there are currently three major principles to User Centered Design (that industrial designers have been dealing with for a long time):

1.  Align with users’ mental models, for instance by using affordances. As once proposed by Don Norman: the compatibility of interface elements with the human properties, such as the size of hands and those of handles.
2. Provide appropriate feedback. All products should make clear what state it is in, so the user knows what are the possible interactions in that state.
3.  Eliminate the opportunity for error. Use constraints. For instance, because of a number of safety guards, a kid cannot accidentally start a car and drive away.

However, interaction designers similarly have more practice at working with behaviour and information, and thus can bring these principles to the table:

4.  Use adaptive displays: Learn & adapt the interface to user behavior
5.  Motivate users: with game and social mechanics
6.  Use information visualization: Let information spark understanding & delight

Powered with these six paradigms, they switched from “the design of everyday things”, to “the redesign of everyday things” (alluding to the work of Donald Norman, who fought for improved usability of our designs by using some of the above-mentioned principles).

Lindsay and Austin attempted this by suggesting two redesigns: a dish washer, and a home thermostat.
The dish washer case primarily focused on adaptive display and information visualisation, attempting to restore the user understanding of the underlying principles of the dish washer. This enabled him to make educated operating choices to accommodate specific needs such as saving time or energy.
The home thermostat case aimed at improving user friendliness by offering an easier and more advanced way of entering weekly schedules and overrides, conceptualized through a wifi-powered iPad.

Evidently, a lot of positive energy went into preparing this talk and the presented designs. Still the talk fell short in inspiring us to really go at it. Maybe this was in part due to the absence of great current examples from the industry (students tittered in the audience that the thermostat is an introductory assigned design project). Maybe the somewhat obvious design principles lacked an innovative edge. However, at the end of the day, the introduction of specialized interaction designers in the realm of what until now has been the exclusive field of industrial design engineers is something to applaud, as there’s much to be gained in combining the strengths of these great disciplines.

Out and About in Boulder

In the afternoon, conference attendees got the chance to try out one of a range of experiences — sound engineering, perfume making, hiking, even mixology. We’ll be putting in photos from the activities as they become available.

It is that time of the year again: hundreds of interaction designers from all over the world rush towards the Interaction conference. This year it takes place in Boulder, Colorado (USA). Yesterday there were pre-conference workshops and today the conference itself was officially kicked off. And as always Johnny is there to deliver a daily write-up for those who weren’t able to attend (awwww).

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

Keynote Bill Verplank

Bill Verplank (who Johnny interviewed last year) kicked off the conference with the words from calligrapher Hella Basu: “in all object making, that aspect which relates to its conceptual interpretation is art, that which relates the object to an intended purpose is design, and the quality of its execution is craft”.

From then on (bar a couple of video clips), Verplank sketched (or as he calls it, “thinking with a pencil)” his way through his knowledge of design and systems, mainly covering his well known  diagrams but also peppering it with informed asides (even if his comments about CHI did cause some consternation). One interesting new story was on path-like vs map-like systems, using the example of a vending machine (a closed machine versus one with a glass window): the former might be easier to maintain, but the latter is easier for users should something go wrong (e.g. a can gets stuck), and arguably even better for business.

Verplank’s presentation shone with experience as both a designer and researcher. He explained different ways of thinking — enactive (do) , iconic (see) , symbolic (know), based on Piaget and Bruner, — and other relevant theories on multiple intelligence.

Verplank believes that we’re coming into the third —  enactive — age of computing, made commercially real with the release of the Wii, and that people should be using haptics in their products to make them smart by taking cues from people such as Hiroshi Ishii. That said, there are interesting exceptions, for example how computer scientists have moved to the Mac because the Terminal allows them to retain the language they learned in teletype machines but it now irrelevant with GUI.

We’re coming into the third, enactive, age of computing.

Verplank also emphasised the importance of understanding systems through control and feedback, and finished by elaborating on his well known but misunderstood diagram ontypes of design

• Most design is currently in the form of media (e.g.  Negroponte)
• However, fashion is becoming important (look at Steve Job’s vision)
• People/AI (e.g. Winograd) are not about designing people as much as life forms (an interesting example being Karl Sims’ ecological computational forms)
• Tools are like vehicles, and underpined by infrastructure — having common platforms as was done with unicode and fonts is key.

Proximus Maximus: Design Imperatives from the Roman Empire to the NASA Space Program and Beyond – Michael Meyer

If you don’t create anything, are you actually a designer? That’s the main question behind Michael Meyer’s talk. It’s his belief that we must completely understand the product or service we work with. As long as we don’t understand every little detail we’ll never be able to create superb solutions or understand the consequences of our design decisions. By showing beautiful examples ranging from craftsmanship to a video of the NASA Space Program he gradually shows us the power of trully understanding what it means to be a great designer: it’s all about empathy.

There are three things a designer focus on:

• Empathy. An emotional closeness. A deep, intuitive understanding of the materials you work with is important to get the most out of your work;
• Core. Each person (but also object and service) has a certain core. This is essential material that you have available to craft the product, service, experience. Discovering and understanding this core is really important when working together with other disciplines. There are (for example) often frustrations when engineers and user experience designers work together, this is because they have a different core. When you start not just understanding your own, but also the other cores, you’ll be able to work together in a situation where everybody can be a hero of his core.
• Proxy. This is the thing that represents the sum of your knowledge, to communicate your understanding and ability.

Note: this summary is partly based upon our report from The Web and Beyond in 2010.

What do you do, anyway? Describing IxD to the Outside World – Carl Alviani

This is DTDT with a difference. Carl started off with a video where he’d asked several people to give their definition on interaction design. One of the comments? “Well, it’s magic.”. While that got more than a few laughs, for Carl this sums up most of the problem he wants to address — the impenetrability to the outside world of what exactly is is we do.

When we talk about who we (interaction designers) are, we talk about the value that we have and the products and services that we try to improve. We define ourselves in characteristics that are actually so general that they also apply to other fields such as industrial design, game design, fashion, etc. It’s important to find a clear definition of what we do in order to quell backlash. When you look at other fields and the way people define them you notice that they talk a lot in terms of artifacts. Carl showed an example where web programmers are being defined people by HTML and CSS. And it’s on that level that we should start. We should be where the listeners are and have a tangible starting point for a discussion. If this means that we start saying that we draw boxes and arrows or that we stand in front of walls and put post-its on it than that’s what we need to say.

Consume Consume Consume – Peter Knocke

It’s always a delight when a speaker manages to keep a crowd at the tip of their seats while showing only one slide. Peter pulled it off. In a convincing buildup he made a strong appeal to designers to consider the consequences of their work.
How many of you regularly take Facebook mobile to the bathroom? (27%, apparently). Peter explained to us that when he was once creating a persona, Tim — a heavy consumer of social media, mail, and other interactive media — he realized on reading it back that this persona might be realistic, but not necessarily one to be proud of as a designer.
Peter started logging his own activities and soon found out his life was not much different. He discovered three types of activities:

• Consumption
• Curation (the selection and assessment of items around you)
• Creation

He was startled to find that most of the time he just consumed, and that the act of creation was a rare event. This is because our environment, the media and products all around us, stimulates this behavior above others. This notion was the main driver for this talk. We have to find a better balance in these three types of activities. We have to help our users to create more. This was the real call for change: use your personal perspective, get a bit more greedy. Design for youself if you have to. Design for creation.

Scandalous Interaction – Tim Wood

What is a scandalous interaction? For Wood, it’s daring to challenge the idea of using design patterns (he damningly called pattern libraries as “the clip art of interaction design”). That wasn’t his only ‘scandalous’ comment, as he proclaimed “Usability is overrated. Jakob Nielsen just rolled over in his grave. Wait, he’s not dead.”
But beyond that, his reasons for legitimately reinventing the wheel (with some actual examples) were for such reasons as challenging the constraints of traditional thinking. He used the example of the iPhone keypad as having a legacy back to old fashioned typewriters (though this is in itself an unusual case as they are challenging patterns.)
However, his real reason to challenge patterns is about allowing new interactions to be understood (much in line with Indy Young’s work on mental models). He finished off with an example of an interface and how working down and back up on chain of display logic—core logic—concept could allow for new visual interactions.

The Rhythm of Interaction – Peter Stahl

Peter Stahl is not only an interaction designer but also with musical interests, combining the two in his inspiring talk that it can be useful to design rhythm and flow into our interfaces. There is rhythm in changing TV channels, in driving a car, in gaming and in viewing a Powerpoint presentation: new slide-title-bullet-bullet-bullet-new slide-title-bullet-bullet-bullet. When speaking about surfing the web, there is rhythm in filling out forms, in Twitter feeds coming by, and in watching Youtube video’s. To have rhythm, Peter says, interaction should be simple, repetitive, steady, and it should always be clear how to continue. If you want a user to think, you should interrupt the rhythm to get the user’s attention.

To have rhythm … interaction should be simple, repetitive, steady, and it should always be clear how to continue. If you want a user to think, you should interrupt the rhythm to get the user’s attention.

However: rhythm only is not enough. If we want a user to be totally involved in the activity, that time flies while performing tasks and that the experience itself is rewarding, we have to add flow to the rhythm. Like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Peter helped us pronouncing this exotic name: “chick-sent-me-high-e”) already told us about flow in 1996: “…Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost…”

In our artefacts and deliverables, it is important not only to show the “feature interface design” but also a more concrete form of “user interface design”. A wireframe is not enough any more. To give better insight in the rhythm of interaction, we should add people to our storyboards. We should show how and when they are involved and what reaction or emotion we intend to get from a user at a certain point.

Peter was running out of time, the rhythmic flow we were all getting into unfortunately was brutally interrupted. Looking forward to hearing the rest of his talk some time soon.

It’s not just about talks…

Interaction is the annual conference organized by the IxDA and has grown into the biggest gathering of interaction designers in our field. Right now there are over 600 people attending the event. But despite that huge amount the organization is still managing to give it a special and personal feeling. This is mainly due to all the (un)official events going on in between and after the talks. Below you’ll see an overview of some of the social events going on:

The Officially Unofficial Johnny Hollands & Friends Dinner at the Dushanbe Tea House (image courtesy: Giles DeMarty)

Doing the Johnny during a hike

Lunch at St Julien

Doing workshops at Interaction 11

Party at the Boulder Theatre

—–

50 people. 9 hours. 1 design challenge.

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

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

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

Participants writing their cards and sticking it on the grid

The team grid

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

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

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

• history
• bookmarks

Some things to consider:

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

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

Mindmapping ideas

Desk research

Personas

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

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

Show & tell

One of the interim presentations

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

Leisa chats with a team

Ivanka helps a team

Sketching out a flow

Wireframes

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

mindSTORM - final presentation

Bucket 9 - final presentation

Stachs - final presentation

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

What’s next?

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

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

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

—–

Header image under Creative Commons by E1

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

The second and final day of UX Australia began with the inspired wake up working session, and continued with streams of talks more focused on showing both sides of the designer-client relationship, and insights on UX related fields ranging from AR to retail.

Morning Wake Up Working Sessions

In what was a fantastic idea from the organisers, the first session of the day consisted of workshops led by Jay Rogers (Traditional hand-skills for sketching), Gary Barber (Keeping sketching real), Caronne Carruthers-Taylor (Sketching user journeys), Symplicit (Wake-up design challenge), Different (Visioning) and Westpac (Touch-point card game).  Attendees loved the concept as a creative way to start the day, and we hope that other conferences pick up on the idea in the future.

Workshops - Westpac Touch Cards, and Jay Rogers teaching sketching

Real world challenges and how we tackled them, shown from two perspectives: us and our client

Michelle Gilmore, Wendy Barnao

This presentation delivered on its title with Glimore (UX designer from Neoteny) and Barnao (client side Project Owner for Asgard Wealth Solutions) sharing their perspectives and experiences of a recent challenging yet ultimately highly successful project. Barnao gave us a rare insight into what it feels like to be taken on the HCD journey for the first time and the role she played in helping the design team come to terms with, and gain access to, the complex world of financial services.

Gilmore stepped us through the lessons learned navigating the complex project and its multiple stakeholder agendas, challenging us to take more responsibility for ensuring designs live beyond the handover. How to work better with (rather than for) our clients was a recurring theme of the conference and this presentation took it one step further – sharing real obstacles faced from both perspectives, as well as strategies for doing better next time. (Many in the audience thought client/designer duos should be a regular feature). To keep the conversation going Gilmore’s team at Neoteny have created www.challengepile.com as a place the design community can capture and share project challenges and solutions.

The Value of Asking Why?

Dan Szuc

A question of value - remember when this was valuable?

Former Melbourne boy Dan Szuc literally opened up the family treasure chest with the start of his talk on value, having cleaned up his family home while here to find such relics as a (fully working) 1950s radio and a brick phone (that many in the audience found oddly good to hold).

In his highly interactive talk, he challenged designers to consider the value of their products they work with, what they do, and the need to design for things such as:

• value (self > product > environmental) and happiness “It’s hard to introduce happiness in your products if you as a designer are unhappy”
• knowing when to say no as cycle company Franscesco Betelli does
• embracing failing fast and keeping teams small in order to do so, as Google does
• creating a shared language and values between engineering, marketing, design

Szuc finished with the inspiring quote from Joshua Porter on 52 Weeks of UX

Creating long lasting value does not happen by accident. It is the purposeful application of sensible design for real people.

Creating mobile experiences that matter

Rod Farmer, Anton Sher

Farmer and Sher delivered an energetic, fast paced presentation demonstrating the acrobatic UX moves they performed in order to get the award winning 3 Mobile iPortal out into the world in 6 weeks, in total secrecy. While Farmer shared key design principles and the story of the project Sher shared the low down on the actual portal design. This presentation was packed with practical “how to” tips for designing for mobile (it’s about the total experience not just the UI), as well as being living proof of what can be achieved even under the most extreme constraints via “Mad Max UX” – despite all the challenges the app meet annual traffic targets within 4 weeks.
Take outs included:

• Mobile experience is about interaction between people, place & platform
• Think “situational planning#” – mobile experiences unfold over time, people snack, stop, start, change and get distracted – completely different to a sedentary desktop interaction
• Focus on personal over personalisation and context over features
• Always design at scale

#A big field but situated action texts from HCI are a good start point for the theory behind this e.g., Suchman’s seminal work or Jakob E. Bardram’s PlansAsSituatedAction.pdf

The Secret Life of Deliverables

Anthony Quinn
What’s a deliverable? Quinn reflected on his (and many “friends’”) experiences with the issues of deliverables in the black box of “large organisations”.
Some of the gotchas they keep in mind is the design maturity of the company (taken from B+D), implicit objectives, and clients not knowing how to critique (they get around this by both combining Jesse Jame Garrett’s Elements of User Experience to frame the deliverables, and the RASCI model -Responsible, Accountable, Supportive, Consulted, Informed – to help stakeholders understand their level of influence in any design decision.)

They concluded that deliverables are:

1. Produced to influence an outcome;
2. Recognise & respond to content
3. Draw out implicit perceptions, objectives/expectations
4. Manage stakeholder explicitly, continually/consistently
5. Ensure users of deliverables can articulate intent actions required to achieve desired outcome
6. Observe. orient, respond to change

The Westpac team are also creating a prototype toolkit of these learnings, which should be very interesting to see.

Emerging a content strategy from user research

Scott Bryant

Scott Bryant

Byrant turned the spotlight on his relationship with lorum ipsum asking how user research might be better applied to informing content strategy (not just navigation, design and interaction).

Taking principles from Halvorson’s book as a start point Byrant took us backstage into one of the most content rich online contexts – news – sharing video interviews with the people who “make content happen” within News Digital Media (NDM). Bryant used questions about the context of content, the use of user research and what content creators in his organisation were influenced by to investigate the role and nature of Content Strategy in this context.

He also showcased some of the experimental approaches to testing and measuring people’s experiences with content being taken by the USiT team at NDM such as clicktale.com, FB Like & recommend and www.tynt.com.

Defining the recipient journey: The role of software to support hearing restoration at Cochlear

Shane Morris, Toby Cumming, Jane Cockburn

Speaking from both the perspective of client and designer, this presentation showed the potential of UX to be used in conjunction with innovative medical technologies. Cochlear, an Australian company who create world leading hearing implants, identified an explosion in need for their devices in the near future, but a blockage because the current software requires specialist training for clinicians to use.

Done in combination with Different and ACID, the agile-like project  – -   is still in progess, but so far has been very successful. The lessons they’ve learned so far are:

• Use the appropriate tools: the team had initially thought they’d use a living spec doc (a Sketchflow prototype), but realised that it became too unwieldy to update and reverted to a combination of paper for general testing, flash for key screens , and a standard document for all details.
• Team involvement: having personas on the wall, and bringing developers into testing has helped them get real sense of empathy. The best story the team had was of one of their developers role-playing the part of a six-year old girl, daydreaming and all!
• Stakeholder Engagement - UX process has helped engage stakeholders (marketing in diff. countries). Cockburn called this “crossing the bridge” with a common language. An unexpected side effect of creating personas was that they got adopted by both marketing and management to the point that they were all would refer to them by name.

Activating Customer Centric Culture

Ian Muir, Ean Van Vuuren
In this seriously meaty presentation Muir and Van Vuuren told the story of Westpac’s (ongoing) transition to a customer centric organisation. Van Vuuren described the journey from the business perspective – a move from ‘selling’ to ‘buying’, (i.e., how do customers buy houses/manage mortgages/credit cards…). Muir gave us the “how to” behind the process describing the steps along the maturity model and emphasising the need for a robust strategy that can withstand challenges from skeptics. This generous presentation demonstrated the value of a customer-centric model through very visible ROI including product uptake, such as their iPhone app which has done $1.1B worth of transactions with over 300,000 customers since March this year. Van Vuuren reflected on the inevitable resistance to change but highlighted the richness of rewards when things were done right: “whenever I’m feeling down I read the comments about our iphone app…”.

Designing for Touch Screen Experiences

Oliver Weidlich
Beginning with a poignant story of his elderly grandfather using an iPad, Weidlich led the audience through a useful primer on touch screens, and some pro tips.

Starting with some background information about touchscreen devices (most primitive touchscreens were resistive, but now being replaced with iPhone style capacitive screens), he gave the three key questions to keep in mind – screen size, screen distance, and available attention (these devices are rarely used without distractions). He also emphasised that tablets not only have new ergonomics to computer and mobile, but are also encouraging new behaviours (use in bedrooms and kitchens). Because of this, help screens (usually a sign of a bad UI) are standard to help users learn the capabilities of touch applications.

Based on his experience, he gave the following suggestions:

• Avoid outer positions (these may be accidentally hit when held, and generally aren’t as responsive as the centre
• Relax muscles (Latency – minimise scrolling with hub & spoke design
• Optimize interface for taps rather than swipes or drag)
• Use touch interaction guidelines such as http://lukew.com/touch , and http://swypeinc.com (a suggestion from the audience was http://gesturecons.com)
• Make visual feedback clear: as there are no hover states as we have in web.
• Optimise for one finger (but consider multiple)

Above all, his two big takeaways were appropriate target size and placement are key, and (as in all interaction design), sweat the details.

For future inspiration, he suggested the Instapaper guidelines and concept UIs such as Skin, haptics work, roll up screens, and finger-behind interfaces.

Joe Sokhol

Nailing it down: Specifying experience design so it can be built

Joe Sokohl

Delivered with some serious southern style Sokohl asked us to reconsider the role of specifications – suggesting that while the move away from massive inhumane 200 page spec docs is a good thing, it’s not about ditching the notion of specifying design altogether (especially in complex/remote work environments).

The core message was: make sure that specifications actually do their job. Sokohl argued that anything that impacts user experience is the domain of the UX designer, and it’s up to us to communicate those specifications effectively – that is: “just enough detail to enable the developer to understand the UX designers intent”. Sokohl pointed out the common disjuncture between what we deliver and the work that has to be done, providing some alternative approaches to conventional specs such as annotated wireframes and sketches and advocating for embedded specifications which provide the detail in the context of the design.

AR-UX: The generation of the pervasive User Experience

Alex Young

Young got beyond the hype of AR (she explained the field has exploded in the last few years but mainly in novelty ways such as brand presence) to talk about its various modes, constraints, and opportunities.

Of the types of AR:

• Public is generally used for art exhibitions etc. The Lego kiosk AR box was a mixed success, as people didn’t know how to activate the experience (some had markers missing, others just didn’t get it)
• Intimate (PC) is good for home – GE Ecomagination was a success at being entertaining, but an unexpected side effect was that schools loved it as it encouraged kinaesthetic learning
• Personal (mobile) may be browser based (e.g. Wikitude, Layar, Geneo) or object (Google Goggles) – great for finding places or gaming but main issue is discovering content.
• Private (ubicomp) – the standard sci-fi goggles – is virtually unused at present, however Young sees a future in this (see yesterday’s talk on biofeedback).

The challenges are very similar to those in mobile – context anywhere, rapidly changing technology,  new affordances and users, and utility – but with added ones of physicality (T-Shirts are problematic as people are different sizes), and expectations (she pointed out that Hollywood is now making near-future films such as Iron Man which makes cinematic quality AR look like it’s here).

Designs that ship: New tools for ensuring your UX work reaches its audience

Matt Morphett

Morphett’s presentation extended the theme of working better with our clients sharing tips, tricks and props from a recent project. Morphett presented a number of different tools including the User Stakeholder triangle used to map out with client various project motivations across the three core perspectives of business, architecture and users (check out the templates). The method encourages representatives from the three different stakeholder groups to recognise the inherent dynamic between their particular perspectives, and gives them a tool to negotiate productively around the different priorities and how they impact the project. Public posters at the client’s office showed the areas of focus for each week and fun, physical props including a Magic Wand (representing users), a squeezy spanner (representing engineering), & a Magic 8 ball (representing business) were employed to help stakeholders stop, reflect and consider the motivations and implications of different design decisions.
Key messages included:

• Provide a framework that helps to get the problems out on the table and lets all stakeholders work through them together
• Ask: Who could undo a design? Go as high as you can & get them involved
• Get key stakeholders from Architecture, Business & Users seeing the dynamic between their different needs & contributing to the solution

Creating innovative retail organisations

Richard Beaumont
The conference track finished with a fast paced presentation by Beaumont that documented his learnings from working with retail chains Tesco, Coles, and 1st Choice. The sheer volume of were  impossible for even the most ardent live-tweeter to capture, but what came through was that many strategies in retail are known to user experience (talk in the stakeholders’ language, consider all aspects of the journey and roll-out), but on a far greater scale (Tesco now works across the UK, Europe and Asia).

• Tesco’s innovation strategy is – consistency, having the best people, plans, objective, projects (they demand project management experience of all leaders), succession, sharing insights.( Tesco went to Asia, learned from hypermarkets there, brought findings back, learned to work on different scales)
• The paradigm shift for different scales -  particularly from big to small  – is hard. Most Tesco small stores didn’t make money for 2 years, learned from results.
• Bottlenecks are dangerous and inevitable (people lie about metrics)
• With competitor analysis, when taking photos in competitor’s stores “if you haven’t been thrown out, you haven’t taken enough pictures”
  Documentation needs to be clear, updateable, highly visual, that cover the whole shopping journey (this includes front and back, hours of ordering etc).
• Talking in stakeholder language is key – for example putting brand decals on the supermarket sold over the marketing director Stakeholders may often not ‘get’ visuals – 3D cutaways were most successful (3D models helped the designers more than anything).  3D videos get sign off, but often bring up questions for internal departments (too high-fidelity)

Other nuggets that came out of the questions were:

• Shops work with “passion items” (e.g. you need sponge to make a trifle) and make sure these are always in stock.
• In terms of shopping science, Paco Underhill’s company Envirosell is still the best around, and those who like his book Science of Shopping will be interested in his upcoming title What Women Want

if you haven’t been thrown out [of a competitor’s store while doing research], you haven’t taken enough pictures.

The day finished with giveaways – Morgan Kaufman and Sitepoint books, an iPhone and iPad, and even trip and flights to UX Hong Kong, as well as thanks to all involved (for the record, this was the rare conference where the wi-fi never went down, and where free espresso coffee was provided aplenty) and many taking one more chance to enjoy Melbourne hospitality.

For more resources, check out the the twitter stream, Flickr sets, and many sketchnotes available.

—-

Header image by Steve Baty
Joe Sokhol image by Alex Walker
All others by Penny Hagen

Day three was a binge of amazing keynote speakers. I definitely expect that everyone’s head was completely filled by the end of the day. Besides the amazing talent that was there, UXLX in its association with the brand new Want Magazine presented clips of the newest videos that were launched that very day with the online magazine itself.

Jakob Nielsen: video

As noted above there were 3 videos during the course of the day. The first was by Jakob Nielsen. The clip selected had Jakob speaking about the state of usability practice today. He discussed how there have been two growth paths for usability professionals, but more importantly stressed that it is non-usability professionals who should be doing more of their own usability testing. This point of multi-disciplinary individuals gets highlighted at the very end of the conference as well.

Peter Merholz: Upgrade Your Mandate: Elevate User Experience Within Your Organization

Peter demonstrated through specific case studies how the following points are the key to success as a user experience professional:

• Engage across functions
• Engender empathy
• Use design tools to define problems
• Align values & vision
• Articulate experience principles
• Build from the outside in

As you can see these points resonate nicely with Luke Wroblewski’s workshop, Panu’s talk and Sarah’s talk from earlier in the conference.

Bill Scott: Designing with Lenses

Bill has been creating structured models for designers for a long time. He created the Yahoo Pattern Library (and word has it he and other former Yahoo cohorts are back at curating it again) and his book Designing Web Interfaces is an amazing resource for applying patterns to web design work. In this instance he showed us how to apply a new structural model to design challenges. This time borrowing from game design instead of architecture he talks to us about lenses as a tool for guiding design decision making.  This in essence was a deeper dive into case studies and specific examples of how to use lenses as design principles. Design principles themselves have been a constant thread throughout the conference.

Dan Saffer: Designing For New Technology

Many of us are beginning to work with new technologies in our day-to-day design practices. Dan wanted to offer his experience with gestural interaction design to express some general learnings that would be practical to any designer regardless of the type of technology the person may be designing for. Before jumping in though he started by defining “new technology” as any technology that is new for those whom you are designing it for and new for you to be designing with.

So help us all out he offered several key considerations when designing with new technologies:

• It takes a lot more time than you think.
  One of the biggest time hits is that you need to learn the limitations of the new technology within the specific contexts of your project.
• Prototype to get a sense for how people will behave with this new technology.
• Help sell it internally & externally. This will actually help you later in figuring out how the new technology can add value to the project.
• Words matter – How you describe your work will affect how people relate to it.
• Testing is hit & miss.
  It is difficult to test how people will react and be able to use a disruptive technology.
• Expectations: People expect things to work the way they have always worked. When this is not true they don’t know what to do.
• MAYA: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable (Raymond Lowey)
• Pattern Recognition
  People look for patterns to understand in everything they do. New patterns are harder to discover, but once discovered and used often they eventually become old patterns.
• The “Of Course” factor
  Most companies are looking for a “Wow” factor, but the true win is when someone says, “Of course, this is part of my life.” Thus, never being able to imagine a life without it.
• Affordances are key. People need to know what they can do and how it will behave. They also need clear signs as to how to know when it is behaving.
• Metaphors are also key. This is best way to help people understand what it is that is new.
• Personality: What is the figurative voice of the designed artifacts?
• Emotion
  If we have an emotional connection we will be most likely to engage and keep it longer.
• Emotion is almost always found in the small details
• Emotional resonance
  Some gestures had a weird emotional weight of its own.
  [matches my thoughts about motion aesthetics]
• Sound Design (big issue)
  Web almost ruined sound design with overkill and inappropriate use.
  Important tool to give personality
• Meaning
  What is the deepest reason people will use this new product?

Donna Spencer: Design Games slides

Donna took us through a series of game examples that are used to help with the design process. Games are a fun way to get people engaged in the design process without even knowing they are playing games. Playfulness gets us thinking in new ways. She is suggesting we use games because they are fun, engage people, and is a good way to communicate.

After going through a ton of great examples of games to play in a design context, she offered these considerations when playing design games.

• Determine outcome you want
• How do you expect it t0 run?
• What are the rules?
• What are the outputs?
• How will everyone be involved?
• What happens to “winners” & ‘losers’
• Make sure it isn’t a waste of time? (how will it move to a next step)
• It’s ok to use existing games and then modify them to fit your goals.

When creating games Donna suggested the following helpful hints:

• Make existing stuff more fun/game like
• By making it silly
• Creating a sense of urgency through a deadline
• Add an element of light competition
• Have instructions

Luke Wroblewski: First Person User Interfaces slides

Luke starts out summarizing the current state of information technologies with the following quote:

“We can get people closer to things they care about through the new technologies that are out there.”

Luke then offers us a history of the user interface of computers that has progressed by hiding more and more of guts of computers moving from punch cards to command line interfaces to graphical user interfaces, the current excitement around natural user interfaces (gestural interfaces) and finally what his talk is about is, what he calls, First Person User Interfaces (FPUI).

What I find interesting in this talk as an interaction designer is his use of the word “abstraction”. The history he gives interprets human interfacing with computers becoming more abstracted from the workings of the computer. But as that happens, what is more interesting as a designer, is the relationship between the human and the activity they want to achieve is becoming less abstracted and more direct.

He goes on to define at length what an FPUI is. It is basically the use of sensors for understanding the user’s position, movement and orientation to then use input usually from a video to overlay data on top of that video stream in near real time to augment what is seemingly the user’s view (through the device). There are earlier systems like GPS Navigation systems for the car that create abstract models of that world and present them as if from the angle of the user. Today though, tools like Yelp Monocle and Google Goggles are creating tremendously interesting tools that overlay their information over screen views of the world as we see it in real time.

This is very early and the uses of the tool are very emergent, but tremendously effective. For example Yelp’s Monocle was meant to be for fun (an Easter Egg) but it has helped increase sustained traffic on their properties by 40-50%. Currently though our biggest issues are around the small screen sizes we are designing this functionality for (it implies a mobile solution) and further how awkward the interaction models are. Really quickly “Point & Scan” becomes a “Nerd here!” marker.

There are solutions in the making, but even these feel a bit extreme to me like heads-up displays and nano-LED displays inside of contact lenses. The one solution that seems pretty helpful and around the corner is using near field technologies like RFID tags as the gesture to engage with them is more subtle than the point & scan required to engage with barcodes.

Eric Reiss – The Web Dogma

Eric did a smart and entertaining job of explaining his 10 Basic Rules or Creating Web Communications. Don’t judge till you get to number 10.

He starts out trying to differentiate between User-centered design and user-driven design. To be honest, I found this part of the talk to be unclear so I’m not sure what he means by driven and how it is difference from centered.

Then he discusses innovation. There are 3 bad reasons to innovate:

1. to differentiate your product
2. to be different
3. to satisfy your ego

But he clearly states that the only reasons to innovate is to solve a problem. Innovation itself though has a lifecycle where it is best done when it starts on the previous efforts of past innovations which have previously been converted into best practices. Best practices though could become habits and innovations can turn into fashion or style which can lead to old-fashioned. I liked this insight a lot. I think it explains how AOL was innovative, but turned into yesterday news to MySpace which is fighting that same fate to Facebook.

With this background he jumps into his Dogma (or set of rules). They are a good set of design principles to be used on any project. I think limiting to the web is unnecessary.

1. Anything that exists that is not for the end user should be eliminated.
2. Anything exists only to satisfy the ego of the designer should be eliminated.
   [I don’t think this one is black & white.]
3. Anything that is irrelevant within the context of the page should be eliminated
4. Any feature or technique that reduces the visitors ability to navigate freely should be eliminated
5. Any interactive object that forces the visitor to guess its meaning must be eliminated.
6. No software, apart from the browser itself, must be required to make things work necessary
   [HTML 5 Advocacy]
7. Content must be readable first, printable second, downloadable third.
8. Usability must never be sacrificed for the sake of a style guide.
9. No visitor must be forced to register or surrender personal data unless the site owner is unable to provide a service or complete a transaction w/o it.
10. Break any of these rules sooner than do anything else.

He then closed with this wisdom:

“We’re not just here to prevent bad things from happening, but to make wonderful things happen.”

Susan Weinschenk – Neuro Web Design

This talk felt like a short version of her workshop. It was so effective proven by the way everyone referenced her talk throughout social events until the very last moment. I’m sure the jokes are all old to Susan, but for us they were fun banter that just helped reinforce her excellently communicated pitch about the need to design for the realities of the human brain. The crux of the short talk is that we all need to design for all 3 brains (Old, Mid and New) in order to be effective. you can’t only design for one aspect and think you’ve gotten it nailed.

• She urged us to maintain a relationship to research old and new by stating clearly, “Technology changes but we actually don’t.”
• Some of the great insights follow:
• We are very open to suggestion through the use of framing and anchoring.
• We make a great deal of decisions based on “social elevation”. This is where a person will be effected by peers who are clearly human over edited content that clearly states quality differences of options.
• Things that are scarce are more attractive. For example, a cookie in a jar by itself tastes better than a cookie that comes from a jar that is full.
• Listening to a story about emotion engages the neurons related to that emotion. For example, telling a story about human pain may make you wince as if you have suffered the same wound.
• Pictures that include elements of our primal needs (food, danger and sexuality) are better at grabbing and retaining our attention. Pictures of people generally are powerful. It helps even more if they are attractive and in some way relate to you.

Larry Constantine – Design for User Performance

Larry started out by stating his background, which is primarily focused on mission critical systems. He admits that it is a bit different than what his peers do.

For Larry User Interface design, user experience design and even experience design were all interaction design. And he defined interaction design (the only speaker who actually took on interaction design in this way) as “How users interact with the designed artifacts in the context of their activities.” Further he is not focused on users, but more specifically on their performance. He is not user-centered by activity-centered in a similar fashion as how Donald Norman declared a few years ago when he said, “Focus upon humans detracts from support for the activities themselves.” The discussion that followed led to the need to “pay attention to the contexts in which activities take place.”

The rest of the talk tried to center on how to do this work by using “model-driven design” where the use of abstract models based on some kind of “sound theory” are used to represent data that is captured. The steps of the method are capture, carry, organize, explore, evaluate and trace. The objects of the system are stated as tool, actor, purpose, rule, community.

These can then be organized in one of three ways:

Roles < > Transformation < > Outcome
Activity < > Action < > Operation

Purpose < > Goal < > Condition.

What ends up mattering most for the interaction designer are the activities, the level of participation in that activity and the level of performance. These all come together to create maps & profiles.

The combined methods run though the following process:

• Model Driven Inquiry
• Structured & Visual brainstorming
• Compile, organize
• Focused, efficient, limited field inquiry
• Rinse, repeat
• Large scale architectural models
• Design

Larry then summarized his entire talk down to the following:

• Don’t put users at the center
• Support human activities
• Use models
• Use the power of abstraction

Jared Spool – The Dawning of the Age of Experience

Jared started out his talk making it clear to everyone that CEOs get it. They know that something is different and looked at 2 amazing examples of success based on total experience design: Apple and Netflix.

He then outlined the following points that through his research of successful experience design as a means for achieving successful business goals. A lot of what he states is mentioned throughout the above presentations but no single presentation put all of these together.

1. You have to equally understand the customer (or user) and the business
2. Really good experience design is learned but not open to introspection.
   He related a story about research he did regarding the Wall Street Journal and then hearing a creative director separately without any methodical research come up with the same conclusions and executed on them effectively. The creative director in question was not able to describe how they achieved their design. They could explain why, but not how they got to why.
3. Good design when it’s done well is invisible.
   He then asked the question, how do you do a portfolio of invisible success?
4. Experience design is multidisciplinary people doing multidisciplinary tasks.
   There are less people in organizations taking on more activities.
5. There is a coherent vision that everyone can agree to and relate equally to others in and out of the organization.
6. Everyone has access to getting direct feedback regarding their products and services.
   Has everyone seen someone use the design in the last six weeks? It is not the number of users that makes a difference as much as the number of hours each team member is exposed to direct user feedback.
7. The culture of the organization rewards failure in a big and positive way.

Jared gave everyone his usual performance complete with humor and wit and closed the conference with the reality that we are all still learning about this stuff every day.

Conclusion

UX-LX was definitely a very successful first time conference. I hope that Bruno Figueiredo, who organized the conference single-handedly, decides to make this an annual event. It was definitely worthy to belong among the must-see user experience conferences of the spring season. The venue was great, the content was well curated and the diversity of the sold out crowd were on target.

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Header photograph by Pedro Moura Pinheiro

Day 2 of UX Lisbon included presentations on seduction, creative uses of Twitter, and the secret sauce of design.

Sarah Morris: Design for Seduction

Having missed the morning workshop because I needed time to work on my own workshop for later in the afternoon so that meant my first session of day-two would be Sarah Morris’s 20-minute talk on “Seduction Design”.

Sarah said that she learned a lot of what she was going to tell us from her reading of “Casanova,” the womanizer who would seduce women just to leave them when he got bored. Here’s here take of what she called his 3 acts:

1. Find an attractive woman w/ a problem he an solve & have her become grateful.
2. She succumbs to his charms.
3. He gets bored and leaves her.

She called him the first UX Designer if only we can change act three.

She then outlined 6 points for designing for seduction:

1. Invest quality time into your relationships.
   This boiled down to a touch strategy. Discover where and when others will touch your content and be sure that they know it is yours.
2. Security & comfort: Be sure to make your relationships feel secure and comfortable.
3. Balance dependence and independence by discovering the sweet spot between undivided attention vs. continuous partial attention and snacking  vs. binging.
4. Be sure to reassure your relationships how lucky THEY are to be with you.”
5. Be sure to actively listen and respond when appropriate
6. Make the extra effort.

Sarah has a very particular angle in her talk which didn’t really become fully apparent until she started talking about her own work as part of an advertising centric user experience agency. So she then talks about how to be more effective as a UX designer in the environment of the advertising agency.

• Huddle often to align ideas.
• Have a creative brief that includes the functional, the user scenarios and the experience planning.
• Continuously learn from other disciplines.
• Merge your understanding of UX principles with the concepts of trending.
• Great design is polygamous and not monogamous. Work with others.

Panu Korhonen: Interaction Design Leadership Lessons Learned

Out of the 3 20-minute presentations I saw this was the most succinct once it got going. Further, it had a feature that I’ve never seen before. Panu for each slide had a tweet sent at that moment that had the explanation for the otherwise curt slide. As a note taker this was really great. It also made for really retweetable content.

His experience where he got these lessons comes from years of design management while he was at Nokia working on projects like the S60 operating system. He broke down his talk into 3 categories: Design, Process and People. This talk ended up being a great talk for designers and managers a like.

Design

• “In the beginning, write down short and clear design drivers”
• “When directing design, you don’t want the design that you ask for. “
• Pick the battles that lead to the designs that are most relevant for the user.
• Stay too near and you’ll bore the audience. Go too far and you’ll alienate the audience.

Process

• Create first concept in a small team. Then start splitting the work. As a design leader your focus will move to the boundaries between teams.
• Milestones are good
• Design something I know will work (then move on)
• Get basic designs approved first. When you have a fallback plan, you can free your mind to explore further
• Difficulty of UX reviews
• 1 picture can’t really show you enough. (ok)
• UX is not skin deep. Review it by experiencing it, not by looking at it
• Time is a heavier commitment when reviewing UX than graphics or industrial design
• Good UX needs good SW (play nice!)
• Demos are not just for demoing the design. They are a design tool for revealing areas of concern.
• Tools of trade
• Your design tools leave marks in the UI.
• Tools need to change to do this well.

People

• Skills is everything: Interaction design is like music. You must master your instrument before you can make art.
• The most interesting design happens between the disciplines, not within.
• You’ll spend most of your time with the inexperienced designers.
• You’ll end up spending most of your time in the least relevant parts of your UI, b/c you give that work t/ the inexperienced designers who need more help
• Tacit Knowledge
• You can’t write down the soul of a design
• The soul of the design cannot be documented. Designers must grow into it.
• Stress leads to bad judgment. Take care of yourself.

David Malouf: Sketching: The Secret Sauce of Design

As this was my workshop, I’ll break this down very quickly. This was a very hands on workshop that asked participants to put down their laptops and take out pen & paper. Here are the core elements of the lecture:

What is design?
Design is the intentional creation of the conditions that allow for serendipity to happen. Serendipity are happy accidents. Designers do this in many ways, but the process and accompanying artifacts and use of space associated with sketching alone or in a group is a fundamental aspect of allowing this to happen.

Abductive Thinking
This is analysis through asking the question, “what might be”. It favors exploration over hypothesis validation and uses the critique as a means of knowing success instead of rational criteria.

What is a sketch?
By heavily referencing Bill Buxton’s “Sketching the User Experience”, we focused less on sketch as a specific type of artifact and more as a relationship between Intentionality, Form (artifact), and Implications.  A proper sketch is a suggestion more than an answer. It asks for more input, instead of validation. To do this a sketch must have several properties:

• It needs to happen quickly.
• It needs to be cheap enough as to be disposable (materials & time).
• There has to be an extreme multiplicity to have broad comparison & juxtaposition.
• The visual vocabulary needs to be well understood by all stakeholders who will be looking at it.
• It can’t have a higher quality than what is truly complete.
• It needs to communicate in a material that gives the sense that it is rough.

There were lots of exercises to practice these ideas within a few different contexts. The last exercise highlighted a group activity where sketching is used as a tool that allows for collaborators to “riff” off of each other’s ideas. By constantly building off of ideas, we saw how the core of an idea can be expanded on again and again to have a design progress.

The environment where you work is key. There needs to be lots of wall space where you can hang up materials so that everyone involved can constantly view every sketch. Nothing should really be taken down. Walls should be removed from a design space to allow for interruption and butting in. It is preferred to use chart paper instead of whiteboards for this type of work so all artifacts get preserved in a material that can be hung up right away.

Lastly, we talked about a specific type of sketching that places people in the situation of using interfaces. By drawing quick comic strips early experience prototypes and stories can be put together.

It closed with a call to all UX Professionals to sketch every day.

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Header photo by Pedro Moura Pinheiro