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.}

As always a pumped, but a bit more tired from previous nights sponsored festivities, the audience kicked of the last day of the conference. After the opening keynote the winner of the student competition was announced and everybody got a chance to know a little more about the results from that.

Jeffery Blais – Designing for Mobile Experiences

One of the prediction for the coming decade was the importance of mobile technology over the next 10 years. Jeffery Blais from Sapient gave us a glimpse exactly why mobile experience will be so predominant. Mobile is for people that are constantly on the go, personal, naturally social, and used frequently. Presently, there are 4 billion people in the world that have some type of mobile subscription, and it’s projected that in 5 years, all cellphones in the United States will be a smartphone of some kind.

As designers, we have certain challenges we will face with the rise of mobile. For example, there will be a massive amount of devices available, each with their own nuances and methods of interactions – an interface design that works perfectly for one could completely fail for another.

Luckily, there are some strategies that can be adopted to deal with these challenges:

• Understanding the business goals behind the mobile channel of your product.
• Who is the audience that you are targeting?
• What kind of opportunities does this mobile channel provide?
• What does the road-map of your mobile interactions look like?

The keynote closed with tips on how to design for mobile experiences. The first step is to gain an understanding of the UI constraints: are you dealing with a full touch based screen or a tactile keyboard with a trackball? Understanding this allows you to know what the most optimum interactions are needed. In order to flush out these interactions, sketching is the best tool. An important part of this sketching activity is to detail the various states that a mobile application can take. It also lets you get down to the interactions that truly matter, and keeps the mobile experience as simple as possible.

Cindy Chastain – Thinking Like a Storyteller

Cindy Chastain's use of the classic dramaturgic model to map a use flow in the same manner

The importance of storytelling has been a recent topic of debate within the interaction design community. This was highlighted by a series of tweets that Cindy Chastain showcased at the very start of her talk. Some argued that they didn’t feel storytelling should get the level of importance as was being implied, while others argued that storytelling is pivotal to the process of interaction design. With her presentation she hoped to paint a better picture of storytelling’s role in design, and it would be safe to say she knocked it out of the park.

Perhaps the most profound nugget of knowledge that Cindy shared with the crowd was the fact that no matter what, when people use something they describe that use as a self-narrative. Everything from how it was used, to how it made them feel by using it. It’s how they convince their friends and family to either purchase a product, or avoid it. So, even if we don’t see the importance of storytelling from the perspective of our work, it’s very much there when our designs make it out into the wild.

Cindy pointed out that the best form of storytelling which we can learn from is drama. Specifically, there are six qualitative elements of drama which can be incorporated into our design process and thinking.

• Plot (events)
• Character (agents)
• Thought (ideas/themes)
• Diction (language)
• Song (pattern)
• Spectacle (The visual)

In closing, we were left with a practical exercise which ties to a design activity we already do: taking the natural flow of classic dramaturgic model, and mapping that to the flows we generate for how people will interact with our designs. This allows for us to map certain steps, people, or systems to one of the six qualitative elements listed above.

Gretchen Andersson – The Importance of Facial Features

Gretchen Andersson

The intention of Gretchen’s talk might not come through at once to the uninitiated. It connects a lot to what Chris Fahey said in his talk: “If we don’t humanize our products, our products will mechanize us.”.
Gretchen’s talk was more of a suggestion on how to hands-on work with how to convey the inner message of what we are working on.
Gretchen says we need take our heads out of the information architecture, wire framing, boxes and arrows work now and then and pay more attention to what it is we want to communicate to our users on a more emotional level. Her suggestion is to do that by using what she has chosen to name facial features. Gretchen referred to something that Jared Spool has said, that we are risking “if we don’t watch ourselves we risk ending up becoming perceived as a very boring crowd”. Gretchen referred to her recent switch to an employer that has a tradition to work more with product design, an area where these kind of emotional features are much more apparent in the design process.

She gave us long list of examples of static, physical products with obvious facial features among other from a recent commercials and then continued on to compare/discuss this to products with more interactive/experience over time related aspects.

She suggested we start by dissecting existing products with this in mind and then use that knowledge to apply it to our own products.

Kel Smith – The Use of Virtual Worlds Among People with Disabilities

Kel did a talk on what is referred to as inclusive design. In his introduction he talked about the term digital natives vs digital immigrants. In relation to this Kel suggested introducing the term digital outcasts, the people that are not considered in a design.

Several of Kel’s examples come from the online virtual world Second Life. He showed how people with all sorts of disabilities use various adaptations of it. Some of these were a digital guide dog for blind that leads you around and reads out tags to the user; a group of people in the Boston area with cerebral paresis that have experienced great personal development by sharing a Second Life avatar; and the Virtual Ability Island, a place on Second Life specifically adapted to people with disabilities.

He went on to show examples of cognitive computing where people control user interfaces and devices only through the power of the mind. Here is one example of a person controlling a robotic hand with the mind.

Some of the psychological aspects Kel talked about were how a virtual worlds adds a buffer of anonymity that facilitates connecting with other people easier or how fantasies can work as a distraction for pain management.

Kel gave a couple of pointers on what to think about when working with inclusive design, the most important being not to offend by for example using condescending wording and that there is a important difference between acting understanding and empathic rather that patronizing. Another source of information on the subject is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 which is described in the POUR (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Reliable) framework.

Dan Hill – New Soft City, Closing Keynote

Dan Hill

Dan Hill gave us an image of what the future looks like, and the role designers play in it. The work he does today is dealing with the design of cities, from a bus stop to an entire metropolis. By using projects that his firm is working on today, both those that are currently being worked on and those that are purely conceptual at this point. Some concepts that have come out of his work tie directly to how things are designed and how they interact with the people around them:

• Sustainable Urbanism – Taking that which in our world that is invisible, and make it visible. Projecting real time data on the fabric of the city.
• Responsive Urbanism – Public libraries around the world offer the use of WiFi internet connection for free. People are using these spaces in order to do simple browsing to their full time jobs.
• Interactive Installation – Pieces of a building or structure that can be packed and unpacked like a playpen in order to be constructed.
• Strategic Prototyping - Create artifacts from the future to show clients and stakeholders a vision of what things will look like.
• Responsive Architecture - Cover a building with material that is capable of providing feedback in real time: Display the city’s activity as it happens.
• Landscaping Information – What is the ‘cognitive load’ of the street? When does urban data become too much?
• Urban Sensing – Is it possible to monitor mobile usage in real time? How does this affect people’s behavior if that information is displayed to the public?

Strategic Prototyping

The design of a city isn’t something that happens overnight. When his team is commissioned to design a subway system, they have to consider the fact the overall life span of that subway system is 50-100 years. Some things are considered in the design knowing that the technology may not be ready yet, but maybe in 20-30 years it will be. These designs are nothing but concepts, yet they still fit into the overall design of the system being created. Dan mentioned how in one of the previous keynotes we don’t really know what a sustainable future looks like. He has a pretty good idea though, and he sees it every day in the work that he does.

Conference Committee – Closing Remarks

All the people from both IxDA and SCAD thanked all the sponsors and participants for creating yet another successful event. As announced earlier, next year’s conference Interaction11 is going to be held in Boulder, Colorado.

The vibe at the end of this conference was positive, uplifting, and inspirational. As people walked out of the theater many goodbyes were shared, hands were shook, and hugs were shared. It’s been said that our community is one of the best there is, and it’s conferences like this that makes us proud to be a part of it.

After a night of some great parties, and even better conversation, the second day of Interaction 10 began with a preview of the new IxDA.org website redesign. The team doing the redesign covered all the great new features that are coming, and went into detail on how local groups will be able to leverage the new site for their own networks and events. The excitement from yesterday was easily carried over, and people were pumped to see what the presenters had in store for us today.

Opening keynote: Ezio Manzini – Design for social innovation and sustainability

Ezio Manzini

Today’s opening keynote, given by Ezio Manzini, built on a lot of the topics covered in yesterday’s opening keynote. The topic revolved again around the subject of sustainable design, and its role in society. Ezio started off with the message that interaction designers are some of the best people to talk to regarding this as we are young both as a profession and as designers.

Over the course of the presentation, he touched on the various signals signifying the rise of a new economy. The economy of the future isn’t some utopian idea, but rather something that exists today within the framework of the old economy. The focus of the new economy will no longer be around particular products, but rather services and interactions. And most of these interactions will be totally new to us. The signals that are directing us towards this world changing economy were summed up using real world examples that are happening right now:

• Individuals and communities are inventing new ways of living. The emphasis of this point surrounded the agriculture industry and the way economics of farming are changing. People are starting to get their produce more from farm shares and farmer markets rather than big produce stores. This act of getting back to the providers of nutritional substance allows people to become more connected with the people that provide these services, but also to their local communities.
• Digital platforms are becoming catalyzers of social change. Being better connected with those around you creating an aggregation of the social action. Based on shared values and beliefs, they are able to act on these things both within their local communities and on a larger scale.
• A new scenario is emerging. Though we may not know what a sustainable society looks like, we at least have an idea. This idea is rooted in the simple concepts of Small, Local, Open, and Connected. These concepts can be mashed up in a variety of ways to think of new ways to accomplish old tasks, and allows us to create a better framework for this new economy that is being created.

In order to ensure that the new economy works in the long run, the services and interactive products produced to fuel the economy need to satisfy people’s needs and enhance their capabilities. These new services and products also need to have a goal of enabling systems (similar to the message of engagement from yesterday’s keynote). This enabling platform needs to be accessible for normal people, effective, and most importantly create a sense of trust. In the end, there is the potential for great beauty in this enabling platform.

Shelly Evenson – Service As Design

The topic of service design has come up several times already at the conference, both in the back channels and in other presentations. Shelly’s talk was interesting as it provided a great visualization of what true Service Design is, backed up by some the work her past students have done. One of the first great points she makes is about the overall context of objects today. It used it be, 15 years ago, that to order a special pair of shoes you would have to do it via a stores product catalog. Once ordered, those shoes could take up to six weeks to arrive. Today, however, it can take a mere 24 hours from when the order was placed to when the shoes arrive at you door step. Because of this increase in turn around, peoples expectations are higher today. They are looking for more faster, and it can lead to the inability to cope very quickly with all the information we are bombarded with.

This setting of the context leads directly into why service design is so important. Service Design facilitates a multifaceted and co-produced experience, with many touch points and variety of dependencies. These touch-points included People, Product, Place, Process, and Performance, and when they all come together you have something you can call a Service. People interact with each of these touch points, and it’s the path that they take which in the end fosters some kind of experience.

Today, we are seeing more and more of a mash up of social and service. People are able to tweet about a particular service, which opens them up to being directly contacted by someone representing the company behind the service. When performing Service Design in the modern, connected, world, you are creating affordances in which for people to engage in the overall conversation. The themes that make up these affordances are People, Time, Place, Usability, Visualization, and finding and organizing. The resources we design to invoke experiences must respect these affordances, and capitalize on them in new and exciting ways.

Timo Arnall – Designing for the Web in the World

Timos itterative model

Timo is a designer leading and collaborating on international projects and research on mobile technology and media out of Oslo, Norway. Timo, being a very skilled photographer and film maker, gave a very visually pleasing presentation with lots of moving video and beautiful layered graphics. In his talk, he showed us the results and findings from his work where he and his team has explored what we do with the internet “beyond the glowing screen of computers” . He also gave us a set of basic findings in his research that can be used as a tool for successfully design these kind of products.

The talk covered a mix of examples from other already existing products and examples of projects where his team had experimented with how Near Field Communication (NFC) devices such as RFID (40 billion around the globe) can be integrated in to products. He also touched briefly on the ethical issues around the use of NFC. Some of these examples of the existing were mobile tracking applications like Nokia Sports tracker and Nike Plus. The projects made by Timo and his team are great examples of how they have experimented with NFC to create new interactions and very pleasantly looking objects with a digital interface in them. Again also beautiful examples of video and product production and several of the projects he showed you can see for yourself at Timo’s Vimeo Channel.

To finish off, Timo listed three central aspects to both evaluate how successful existing NFC objects are, and as a basis for criteria when designing new objects that can also be used as an iterative cycle.

1. Immediate tangible experience – Don’t wait with giving feedback
2. Short term connecting and sharing – Satisfaction through sharing/comparing of results
3. Long term service, data & visualization – Well working online services to mediate social space

Read more of Timo’s research at http://nearfield.org and http://aho.no

Ben Fullerton – Designing for Solitude

Not only was this session standing room only, but people took up seats on the floor wherever they could. Ben delivered one of the most interesting talks of the day, dealing not with any particular practice or process but rather a state of mind. He starts off by stating that we all have the assumption that being connected is a good thing, but that there is an alternative state that also needs attention: solitude.

In order to show the importance of solitude from a historical point of view, he discussed how Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad all take their own solitary journey in order to reach a certain level of spirituality. Another example was an author who spent 10 years holed up in a library, completely alone, in order to write his masterpiece: it turns out that many of the great creatives all used some form of isolation in order to do some of their best work.

There’s too much stuff. We live in a stuff-a-lanche – Charlie Broker

In the past, the devices we used in our everyday life only had a single mode to them. Products of the present are becoming more and more multi modal, providing more unique types of interaction all at the same time. To combat this certain products are going back to this single mode of interaction, including a music/phone device he helped design. Rather than allow for you to access either function at the same time, there was a define toggle that turned one aspect of the device off in order to perform the other. You could either listen to music, or you could send and receive phone calls, but never at the same time. This idea can also be found in the “Quiet Cars” found on Amtrak trains. If you decide to sit in this area of the train, you are not allowed to disturb the others around you: no loud music, no friendly banter, not even excessive coughing or sneezing is allowed. All of this is in place to ensure that passengers have a place in which they can get away from everything. Allowing yourself to get away from everything, or disconnect, is Ben’s big call to action. There is nothing wrong with BEING connected, just allow yourself the freedom to disconnect too.

Kevin Cheng – Augmented reality: Is it real? Should we care?

Google search statistics for Augmented Reality

Kevin, entertaining as always, gave us a very thorough rundown on the current market of existing augmented reality applications out there. He even managed to have a live demo of a couple of them for iPhone. It was a mix of both entertaining variants and more or less useful ones.

AR is a term to describe the real-time merging of various technologies with the real world to create a mixed, augmented reality. Going on at looking at the history of augmented reality we have seen examples of this from the world of movies for over 20 years but it is not until with the computing power of mobile phones that we start to see a boom in the development of these types of applications.

Even so there is still a slight lack in accuracy with the current technology like GPS and electronic compasses so we will have to wait a bit longer before we see some more advanced applications. This might also be there reason why there are currently no established standards to how to design for AR.

By researching Google, Kevin could show a distinct increase in the search patterns for AR during the last two years. Notable was that the top five countries on the list were Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan, a clear indication that this is a region of the world to keep your eyes on in regards to AR.

Steve Baty – Lunch Discussion, UX Book Club

UX Book Club founder (as well as IXDA VP and fellow Johnny) Steve Baty organized an opportunity at lunchtime to discuss books by two of the speakers at the conference, Thoughts on Interaction by Jon Kolko and Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer. Both authors also took the opportunity to join in in the discussions and a short Q&A after the discussions. It was a very light hearted event where Steve introduced the audience of around 150 people to the concept of  UX book club and urged us to all do the same in our home area. Anahi Bagu and Will Evans gave us a short introduction to each of the books and then we dived in to lively discussions for about 20 minutes on both the books and adjacent subjects. Finally the two authors stepped up for a short Q&A whilst the audience was chanting “Two men enter. One man leaves!”

Two men enter. One man leaves!

This is an extremely simple but yet rewarding experience that you easily can set up where you live or even at your work place. Having the authors on the spot was an added luxury but not necessary for a successful UX book club.

Chris Fahey – The Human Interface

Things to try from Chris Fahey's talk

We are cyborgs. This is the statement Chris uses to kick off his session into why human like interfaces are important and what are the danger zones that should be avoided with regards to allowing technology replace humans. For many years it has been a fear that one day technology will some how replace humans. According to Chris, the best way to alleviate this fear is to not let technology replace us, but rather having human behavior become reflected in the technology that we use.

As designers we need to capitalize on the fact the people already give objects a bit of humanity by anthropomorphism. Since this is one of our standard behaviors, it isn’t much a leap to use that knowledge in the overall design of what we create. The way to do this is by concentrating on Strong Centers, Positive and Negative Space, Roughness, and Echoes. The world of game design has been hitting these areas recently and it has been a huge success for them.
Chris’s session was wrapped up by going over the three qualia of the human interface:

• Sentience - The ability to see or feel subjectively. This is best described by the advancement of voice or facial recognition over the years.
• Intimacy – This can be facilitated with or through machines. Devices are able to better detect our presence and collect personal information about us in the background.
• Personality – We want to see the things we use have a personality. We want to see ‘faces’ in the stuff we interact with.

The final message of “If we don’t humanize our products, our products will mechanize us”  is one that we can all use posted up on our walls, or cubes, in order to remind us of the human aspects of our designs.

If we don’t humanize our products, our products will mechanize us – Chris Fahey

Closing Keynote: Paola Antonelli – Talk to Me

Tonight’s closing presentation was given by Paola Antonelle, of the Museum of Modern Arts in New York City.

Paola Antonelli. Image by Monica Ferro

She started off by explaining how objects have always spoken to her, sometimes in the most peculiar ways. Walking down the street, stop lights, TV’s, or bus signs all speak to her in a very cartoonish manner. But by having this conversation with everyday objects, she is constantly finding new things to add to her next exhibits. In truth, we all have conversations with technology, thanks to the interfaces that helps to put a face to these objects. It allows us to communicate and interact at a very personal level, both positive and negative ways. It’s important that this face is able to not only communicate, but also be functional, provide instruction, and allows us to access relevant information.

Paola then ran through an amazing range of relevant and beautiful design projects including Crossroads, Significant Objects, We Feel Fine and Josh On.
In closing, she gave us some insight on her struggle to get the ‘@’ symbol not only included in some of her exhibits, but also making it a permanent fixture of the museum. This symbol which so many of us use everyday has been around for centuries, even going so far as span languages. At some point, accountants started to use it to refer to something, such as four bags of flours @ $50.00 a bag. Why she feels that is has a place in the museum is that fact that when the email was invented, the reason the “@” was chosen was thanks to its traditional usage. The only thing that changed was its context of use.
Paola suggests that the ‘@’ sign should be treated as a design artefact because of its history and how well it translated into our technological world, therefore highlighting the role it has played over the years.

Objects have always spoken to us – Paola Antonelli

The first day of Interaction 10, hosted by SCAD in the wonderful city of Savannah, Georgia, kicked off without a hitch. Though eventually everyone was plagued by spotty, windy rain storms, the general pulse of the conference was positive and uplifting. Attendees were still talking about some of the great workshops from the day before, and they carried that energy over into today’s sessions. If one thing had to describe the overall theme of the first day it would be the importance of providing meaning in the work that we do. Below are recaps of the opening and closing keynotes, as well as some of the sessions from the day.

Nathan Shedroff – Morning Keynote

The opening keynote came with a message of why it’s important for us as designers to innovate. Drawing from his books Making Meaning and Design is the Problem,  Nathan Shedroff approached the topic from the businesses point of view and provided insight on how our skills can help them. The goal of any business is to grow, but the only type of growth that leads to continued success is organic growth. Sure, you can rebrand easy few years, but after a while people catch on to what you’re doing. The key to ensuring lasting, organic growth is providing meaning to the people that use the products or services companies provide. Innovation is the means to providing this meaning.

Meaning comes in the shape and form of the experiences we are exposed to. Luckily for us, there are a finite number of core values that describe meaning, which Nathan describes as the following:

• Accomplishment
• Beauty
• Community
• Creation
• Duty
• Enlightenment
• Freedom
• Harmony
• Justice
• Oneness
• Redemption
• Security
• Truth
• Validation
• Wonder

What makes something meaningful to one person over another is how people prioritize these core values. In order to understand how a particular group of people rank these values, it’s necessary to do a lot of qualitative research. By understanding this ranking, we are able to trigger meaning in the things we design and bring meaning to the work that we do.

The keynote wrapped up with Nathan describing how strategic design is looking for the overlap of meaning between a company, team, and customer base. If there is little to no overlap, than something is off: the wrong customers are being served or the wrong team is trying to do the job. All of these lead to the statement of “Consumerism isn’t dead, but it should be. It hasn’t served us well. But, we don’t know what to replace it with yet.” Interaction designers are poised to be the ones that come up with this new solution, as we have the models and research methods that serve us well.

Consumerism isn’t dead, but it should be. It hasn’t served us well. But, we don’t know what to replace it with yet. – Nathan Shedroff

(The presentation and related material are available on Nathan’s website – also check out the interview we did with Nathan)

Dave Gray – Knowledge Games

Any presentation that starts off with a detailed history of the AK-47 is sure to be challenging. Dave’s overview of Knowledge Games and their role in the design didn’t disappoint. The design philosophy that drove the creation of the AK-47 is the same one he is using to develop his framework around knowledge games: keep it simple, make it rugged, ensure that it is reliable, and that it is lightweight. His goal with creating knowledge games is to provide the tools that anyone can use to design better things, regardless of whether that person is a designer or not.

Don’t over think things. – Dave Gray

Dave Gray and the AK47

How do knowledge games help in the world of design? It gives us a framework for getting from point A to point B. It allows us to open up a problem, explore the problem space, and come to a closing point where we have a defined outcome. Here are some key points that we took away from this session:

• Never open something you can’t close;
• Ask questions that get people fired up, that gets them talking and brainstorming some ideas;
• Create a meaningful space in order to do work in. A space that inspires us to create, think, and collaborate;
• Sketch, everyone can draw. If you can draw basic shapes, you can draw just about anything;
• Choose what you will finally create well. Be critical and kill a lot of babies. (This came up a lot for some reason over the course of the presentation.)

Dave ended with perhaps the best message possible. “Don’t overthink things.” This is something that plagues us all sometimes, and it’s good advice to follow no matter what you happen to be doing.

Nate Bolt – Remote User Research

The popularity of performing remote user research is growing. Nate did a great job giving an overview of the value remote user research brings to the design process and highlighted some of the best tools that are available today. He is passionate about this subject, which is best highlighted by a book he is co-authoring and being published by Rosenfeld Media.

He started off by clarifying that the research user experience really cares about revolves around the behavior of people.  While the majority of all user research being done today is still in-person, remote research is gaining popularity. This is firstly because it’s easier to get someone to show up to a remote web meeting than it is to an unfamiliar office or conference room. Another advantage is that it’s easier to pause a study to iterate a design if the research is being done remotely.

If you can put it on the web, it can be studied and tested. – Nate Bolt

One of the most valued aspects of performing remote user research is mashing it up with traditional methods. Since the cost of some of these tools are so low, it’s easy to do a good mix of qualitative and quantitative research. All of the tools he covered are showcased here at RemoteUsability.com

Matt Cottam – Wooden Logic: In Search of Heirloom Electronics

Matt Cottam’s talk explored how natural materials and craft traditions can be brought to the center of interactive digital design to give modern products greater longevity and meaning. This was a very inspiring talk on how to work with electronics prototyping combined with classic wood carpenter craftsmanship.

The initial reason why Matt founded his company, Tellart, was the current disconnect we as designers have from the technology we design for. Matt compared the crafts industry in the mid to early 20th century when design was often closely related also to the technical side of the craft like the loom industry where textile designers and the loom technicians were educated in the same school. This closeness created a good setting for creating these products with longevity and meaning. Compared to today, there is a gap between interaction designers, programmers and electronics designers. What Matt is trying to do through his work is to close that gap, or at least make it smaller.

Part of his work has also been about experimenting with the patina process of objects and how to actually control it. As an example he showed models of toy boats that were put in a bag with ground coffee and then put in a river for several months, which was a very successful way of faking patina. Several of the student projects revolved around the challenge of doing user interface prototyping without computers, often with a very limited time and space, putting lots of emphasis on the presentation of the results.

Drawing examples from numerous student projects Matt has done over the last year with students at CIID, UID and his team he showed very interesting results on how to combine traditional material with modern electronics such as sensors and switches to create new unexpected combinations.

Tellart has created a client server application for iPhone that makes it extremely quick to do simple iPhone apps that communicate with hardware in literally a couple of days. The application is open source and you can read more about it at the Google code site.

All in all, the presentation showed very promising examples, if maybe not the final answers of what he wanted to achieve. You get the feeling that Matt is on to something that could potentially be big in the coming years, certainly in connection to the conference’s overall theme on creating meaning to the things we design.

Activity: Design Jam

Cupcake Carrier Sketches

The leaders of the Portland IxDA group gave a large group of people a run down on a common activity they perform at their meet ups. Jeanne Turner and Barbara Holmes created the activity of Design Jams in order avoid designers from getting burned out and over worked. The technique is borrowed from jam sessions that musicians do in order to avoid the very same things. During the jam session it isn’t about making something real, but rather about play and having fun. During the design jams, designer discuss, sketch, explore, and listen to each others ideas about how to solve a defined problem. By doing so, they learn new methods for solving the same problem and more importantly learn from each other.

The Design Jam has some simple rules that people must follow.

1. Solve real, concrete design problems
2. No limits to what can be discussed or designed
3. No stakeholders allowed. Everyone is a designer
4. Random groups each time
5. At the end everyone has to present their designs and what the contributed to the solution

With this the actual design jam started with the crowd being given one of two problems to solve: redesign luggage carrier to avoid clothes getting wrinkled while travelling, or a means to transport cupcakes without damaging the cupcakes. My group choose the cupcakes problem. After much discussion and exploration some of the top solutions came out to be using hard sugar in the icing, create scalable containers, use an edible container, generate magnetic cupcakes, and use tooth picks with gummies stuck to the top to provide additional support. The great thing about this activity was that it was simple, very interactive, and something that any group would be able to easily host for one of their meet ups.

Kendra Shimmell – Environments: The Future of Interaction Design

Kendra Shummel in action

I was told this talk was actually a bit of a wild card in the program and I can attest to that it as it was very inspiring and entertaining to see. To quote Kendra herself from the day before: “Sometimes you joke about how during a work meeting you should stand up and do improv dancing, and here I am going up on stage doing just that at an interaction design conference”.

We all need, and try, to do other things than our normal work to get perspective on things. Kendra being a trained dancer since the age of four wanted to give us a glimpse into her world of how she uses dance as an alternate way of approaching her design challenges. Kendra started up with talking about the similarities in choreography and interaction design, and how they are connected in staging activities over time in order to convey meaning. Of course in dance there are a whole lot more choreography.

For the second half of the talk, Kendra had in collaboration with Robert Wechsler from palindrome set up a motion tracking system that was hooked up to an application that that detects movements in three dimensional space. By connecting defined volumes in this space  to virtual triggers and scales, loops of sounds, talk, and noise Kendra created new music completely based on the movements from her improv dance. The whole experience is very hard to reproduce in text. All talks were recorded and will be put on the IxDA website with in the coming weeks and if you  decide to watch any of them this is definitely one of the ones you should not miss.

Nicolas Nova – Observing Failures to Provoking Them

Failure is cool. Not only was this the statement on the opening slide, but it sums up the overall session as well. Using personal experiences, Nicolas showed a packed house how vital failure is in the art of design and how much we can learn from it when we try to make it happen. The main focus of the presentation was on the failure of products, specifically automated products such as doors and light switches. What makes these products so interesting is how easy it is to observe the failures in action, showcased by a sensor used on Swedish trains for automatically opening the doors between cars.

Some of the more interesting behaviors he has witnessed involved talking to motion based sensors, and stomping on the ground when the sensors where located near the floor. These behaviors arise due to the invisible nature around automatic products, and a person’s inability to discern how they work. The failures themselves are unique since in the past they may not have ever existed, and thanks to advancements in technology we are able to view them for the first time. There are some common reasons why automatic devices fail though:

• Distinguishing the automatic from the non-automatic
• Invisible or illegible “locus of control”
• Too quick or too slow to activate
• Weather dependent calibration
• Different ‘door’ conventions (e.g. swing vs retracting doors)

A common problem that arises when these automatic devices fail is “Individual-Blame Bias.” People start to get blamed or end up blaming themselves for the failure of technology. After a while, people get fed up and will lash out in frustration at these devices. A great example he used was a robot that helps in the care of people in a hospital. This poor robot would get kicked by patients when it came around to do its duties, for simply coming in at the wrong time.

The session wrapped up by exploring a technique called the “Anti-Probe”, which is meant to provoke a failure. One of the cases he went over where he had used this technique was with regards to the use of the Wii remote. His team modified the remote calibration to make small movements to generate huge reactions while playing a game. Surprisingly, the participants actually really enjoyed this behavior since it took a little effort in order to cause such a huge reaction. These provoked failure lead to the insight of how important it is to see how people react, what new solutions they create, and how annoyed they might get when something does go wrong. This allows the team to use failure as a design tactic and to use failure as an inspiration rather than a hindrance.

Jon Kolko – Closing Keynote

Jon Kolko

Jon Kolko started by offering four pillars which our profession resides upon: experience, behavior, meaning, and culture.

According to Jon, the word ‘experience’ is special and should be used with reserve. This is because we all have one, and no matter what that experience is unique to each person involved in the experience. Factors that help shape the experience are the complexity of ourselves that we bring to it, design artefacts, natural events, and the other people surrounding the experience. This is why though designers may be given the same input and use the same process, the end solutions will be drastically different. Therefore, the key to getting people involved in experiences is through engagement: this, rather than repeatability, is key to good experiences. It’s up to designers to be less prescriptive, focus on the space between, and strive for real engagement.

An echo from his article Our Misguided Focus on Brand and User Experience, Jon again proposed why designers have the power to change culture, and that we have the ability to affect massive and acute change in society. To showcase this point, he talked about a project one of his students did where she went in search for the answer to the question “What’s the deal with deal with kids, beer, and sex?” After collecting some amazing quotes from college students, her solution to this problem was presented. In order to raise awareness of the dangers of unprotected sex, she attached condoms and important information to bottles of beer. The result was an increase in college students practising safe sex. She was able to accomplish this by empathizing with the people she was studying, and designing something that was aligned to how they actually behave.

The final point of his keynote revolved around the quote “Good design is a privilege rather than a right in today’s world.” He states that in some cases, it’s not money that is preventing people from using new technology but perceived complexity. To illustrate this point, he told the story of teachers who refused to use PC’s in their classroom due to the poor performance. The solution to this poor performance was regular maintenance of re-imaging the machines, something a standard school teach just doesn’t have the time to do. His team at frog design helped with this problem helping HP provide a machine that would re-image itself at the end of each computer session. Teachers were then able to use all the advanced tools available to them without having to deal with all the overhead of maintaining the computers. This lead to his closing message of “Designing for real cultural change starts by understanding how people currently behave”.

Designing for real cultural change starts by understanding how people currently behave. – Jon Kolko

The first day of the conference ended on a high note, poor weather notwithstanding. Day 2 has some big shoes to fill based on the sessions of today, but the promise of the session for tomorrow lead us to believe that tomorrow will be just as informative and inspiring as today was.

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All images by Brad Nunnally and Niklas Wolkert

Today was the closing day of From Business to Buttons 09. During the day several good speakers went on stage and shared their knowledge with us on some very different subjects. We had fun, listened seriously and secretly tweeted the brilliance onto the interwebs. And now we bring you a report of some of the talks.

Bill DeRouchey – Designing Humanity Into Your Products

Today Bill did the opening keynote by telling us how important it is to design humanity into products. He did this by giving many examples, both good and bad. Bill states that as a company it is really important to have a healthy relationship with your customer. The only way to do this is to be on the same level, respecting each other and talking to each other in a human voice. And that is where the problems arise.

A lot of companies are faceless, lacking a human voice. They communicate to customers in a distant and very formal way. This formality is in fact a way of communicating power and at the same time fear. An example of this can be found in a lot of car advertisements, where cars are sold with features instead
of emotions “This is the most fuel efficient car around.” By communicating with this tone you avoid a possible connection of customers with your product or company… Because what is there to connect to? According to Bill companies have to change their tone of voice and step forward with a real voice. By doing this and making themselves vulnerable and honest they can create sympathy and understanding, thus creating slack. And Bill states “Slack is the most underrated thing.” I think he’s totally right there… A good, and obvious, example he brings up is the Microsoft – Apple comparison. Microsoft is the closed faceless company that we think is stupid every time it makes a mistak… While Apple is a company we understand, feel related to and forgive when it makes a mistake: because making mistakes is human.

So how do we humanize technology? This is a question Bill asked himself. Robots were an attempt, also the happy face of Mac and even Clippy of Microsoft Office. But there is an easier way of humanizing your digital products, and that is changing your tone-of-voice. And that is what Bill focuses on for the rest of the presentation. He gave a lot of examples of how good copy can help you sympathize with a brand or service. It’s important that this copy is not distant, but very recognizable. Like when you want to buy a product you can place a button stating “Order this product”, but it could also be “I want this now!” It’s the same function, but a totally different tone of voice. Another, and in my opinion one of the best, example was Moo.com, a service to order your business cards. When you order business cards you get an automated reply from the system. Normally this would be a very boring text stating your order is being processed. But Moo.com approaches it differently by just rewriting the copy… It’s not an automated no-reply mailaddress, but Little Moo the service robot that e-mails you a story of the upcoming steps. He will be sending the order to Big Moo, the printing robot, who will try to finish up your order. This way of approaching the customer brings a smile on your face and builds up a relationship. And all of that just by changing the copy and approach.

Tips:

• Good tone of voice humanizes the interaction between me and the service
• It’s extremely important to focus on the words
• Get the best writer you can afford
• Don’t talk AT people. Talk TO them as peers
• Write as you speak. Speak as you write
• People remember humor

Lennart Andersson & Niclas Andersson – Designing beyond the screen: the convergence of products interactions and services

Lennart and Niclas are both working at Ergonomidesign, which is a Swedish design firm I really respect. During their talk they explained the approach their firm takes towards convergent design, which is basically that type of design where different fields come together (in their examples: physical and digital products).

First they jumped into their way of looking at research and approaching projects, which is focused on ergonomics. They split the field up in physical, cognitive and emotional ergonomics. Physical ergonomics focuses on the way your body works and it’s limits. Cognitive ergonomics is a field interaction designer are used to, focusing on the mental workload or how people’s mind works. And lastly you’ve got emotional ergonomics, which looks into emotions and the way people connect with designs. How do they associate things? If you’re interested in learning more about this I recommend the interview we did a few weeks ago with Lennart and Thomas, prior to the event.

The reason they’ve got such a broad scope is because all the products they design touch all those fields. And more and more interaction designers will start touching those fields soon, with more physical products getting digital interfaces. But it’s not only the interaction designer that is involved in this proces. Lennart and Niclas show us of what disciplines their teams consist, which is a combination of interaction, service and industrial designers. By bringing them all in on the same time you get a great mix of knowledge, which should lead to better products. Each discipline will touch the fields of the other disciplines, but mainly focus on their own. A industrial designer will look at how strong the material must be, an interaction designer at the way somebody will interact with it and a service designer at the different contact points.

Another topic the Anderssons (no family btw) touched was the world of natural user interfaces. How do we bring the natural into NUI? Is it truly a more natural way of interacting? Lennart said that “A natural gesture does not necessarily equal a natural interaction.” Which is very true. Consider this: sticking your thumb in the air is a natural gesture to OK something… But when you are in a public space you are never going to keep putting your thumb in the air to say OK to a user interface waiting for confirmation. You would feel ridiculous. And is it intuitive? People are clueless how they must respond, since it is new. Here arise all different questions around the discussion of most advanced yet acceptible. And NUI’s are so immersive that you are completely cut out from the world. It is so unique and new that it needs all your focus, which isn’t a good thing.

Other interesting brainfarts:

• Emotional experience cannot be designed, but enabled
• How do we stage for a good user experience?
• To design really useable and compelling natural user interfaces – you need deep insight about the users

Gene Liebel – Every 3 Seconds, a User Dies Somewhere

Scott Berkun – Why Designers Fail and What to Do About it

And so we approached the end of the event with the closing keynote by Scott Berkun. He pulls us into a world of failure and learning from failure, which designers aren’t good at.

As designers we don’t like talking about failure. We try to forget about it and mostly like to share success stories. But the success stories are unique, while we fail 95% of the time… We do this while drawing, sketching, prototyping and designing. And according to Berkun in failure lies the biggest chance of learning and improving ourselves and the products we create.

So why do we fail? We seem to set the wrong goals and fail to meet those goals. One example Berkun pulled out of architecture is the design of a building by Koolhaas. It was a beautiful building everybody loved, except the people working there… Because all the visitors kept asking where the restrooms were. Somebody forgot to design good wayfinding… And since there was no room for solving this problem, the people working there hang up their own signs… How could this have happened? Why didn’t anybody notice this during the design proces? According to Berkun this is because designers have no failure analysis. We don’t check up after delivering a design… We fail to have a feedback proces, while other disciplines do have this. Like a doctor having an autopsy, and the airforce holding a mission debrief.

So his message is: let’s start checking how things went and learn and improve. If you can’t solve a problem, redefine the problem and solve that. There is nothing wrong with this. As an example Berkun refers to the Newton, the failed PDA designed by Apple. Everybody laughs about it… But it probably gave Apple good knowledge about designing that type of products, causing them to create the iPhone as it is now.

During Scott’s talk I had to think of a book that I consider my personal bible: ‘It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be’ by Paul Arden. In the book Arden states that if you want a problem to be solved, you have to make it your own problem. Because as long as you are pointing to others causing it and needing to solve it, you can basically do nothing about it. And this is something Scott also talks about by stating “Own your mistakes” You must study the failure you caused and learn from it.

Today and tomorrow Malmö will host From Business to Buttons 09. Sweden’s leading event on interaction design. And since Johnny Holland is the proud media partner of this event we’ll be delivering a day-to-day report of the main talks.

It’s been a great day full of talks and workshops. People met, talked Swinglish and shared a lot of insights. On the conference floor people could play around with new technologies and a very interesting Microsoft Surface game, created by Ergonomidesign. I would definitely recommend you to watch the videos of all the talks below and the workshops, which are available to watch at the Bambuser FBTB09 channel.

Garr Reynolds – The Zen of presentation design & delivery: Why it matters now more than ever

Reynolds had the honours of doing the opening keynote on From Business to Buttons 09. And he did a nice job sending shivers down the spines of all the speakers having to talk after him. In his talk he showed us the power of presentating in a good way (+ why Powerpoint sucks).

As a big fan of jazz Reynolds first refered to the relationship between jazz and presentations. According to him they should both be structured, but leave room for freedom. Presenting is not about reading up bulleted lists or bringing across as many facts as possible, it’s about story telling. You have a story to bring across where you want people to feel energetic about and interested in.

When you want to give a good presentation there are three things you have to keep in mind: restraint, simplicity and naturalness. Restrain yourself from bringing across too much or too complicated stuff. Simplicity is important in the story and design of the presentation, keep focus. And the presentation should have a naturalness in it, both in timing and flow. According to Reynolds the zen master of presentations is Steve Jobs. He makes it look so easy, but that’s mainly because of the great preparation. Jobs’ presentations are very visual and aesthetic which attracts the right attention. You should have slides that support your story, not trying to bring across the entire message in itself.

Reynolds showed some examples of good and bad presentations. Comparing Bill Gates’slides from the past and present, showing a major difference in the design. (from the 90’s lollipop slides to design slides nowadays). Another great example is Al Gore’s presentation on ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ A real recommendation if you want to see a good presentation.

We aren’t blamed for using bulleted lists, since Powerpoint kind of forces us in this position. But Reynolds does want us to forget about this way of presenting. He quotes:  “Learn all the rules, then forget them” – Basho.

Lessons:

• It’s not about the tools, it’s about the ideas
• Start in analog mode, with sticky notes or sth like that
• Take a risk – child’s mind/beginners mind (In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, in the experts mind there are few – Shunryu Suzuki)
• Put yourself in the shoes of the audience, it’s their time. (Hara hachi bu “Eat only until 80% full”)
• It’s not about the thing, but about the story of the thing
• Embrace simplicity: maximum effect with minimum means

Dave Malouf – “What’s going on” to “We’re not gonna take it”

Catriona Campbell – How do we really create and show Return on Investment from social media?

In her talk Campbell touched a lot of different points, but two really stuck out:

Micropayments

The most interesting quote Campbell threw at us was “Advertising is dead. We must start monetizing social media.” According to her there are a lot of commercial possibilities that lie within social media that we haven’t touched yet. She calls this field social commerce: using social media to earn money.

Campbell is a great believer of micropayments. She says this will be the next great thing. People will start exchanging small amounts of money for content on a huge scale, like for good tips or music. We already saw this trend unfolding in Second Life and even the app store, but now it will become a general theme.

One of the more interesting new initiatives in this field is TipJoy, a way of giving small amounts of money to people you like on services like Twitter. When you’ve set up an account you can tweet an amount of money to the person you like (as small as $0.01). These kind of payments seem small, but when you’ll have enough people doing this it can become something big. I think it’s really interesting… Every day we give away a lot of interesting content and data, even links. But why shouldn’t we reward people for doing this? I can understand people don’t want to pay $25 a month for a subscription on a digital newspaper or a Twitter feed. But giving a tip of $0.10 for a good article or $2.00 for somebody who’s showing you nice sites all the time does seem fair, plus the amount is small enough to consider. It’s what made the app store big.

EEG

The technology of the day was definitely electroencephalography (EEG). This “is the recording of electrical activity along the scalp produced by the firing of neurons within the brain.” (thank you Wikipedia). With this technology it is possible to measure the emotional engagement a user has with a product or page. It is able to measure: cognitive attention, visual attention, emotional attrection and emotional engagement. And the technology has developed so far that it has become very mobile.

In line with this Campbell talks about the different modes a user can be in, which are very interesting to explore. In general people are browsing the web in a task mode, searching for information or doing their e-mail. But with, for example, social media they are more in an explorative mode. Understanding these modes is key in designing good experiences and knowing when to present what kind of interaction. As an example she says Facebook puts people in an explorative mode, but as soon as they are in the mailbox of Facebook they change to a task mode. Really interesting stuff, and definitely worth researching how people feel. Especially when you can use a cool technology such as electroencephalography (I admit I copy-pasted that word…).

Matt Jones – Designing personal informatics

Recently Matt wrote an article for us about personal informatics, which holds the main part of his talk at this conference. So instead of repeating his words I’d like to focus on a small, but still very good, part of his talk: the importance of playfulness. Matt states that playfulness creates fun and thus engagement. It’s the icing on the cake that makes otherwise boring data interesting. One of the examples he gave was the interface of the Toyota Prius, which gives you an account of the consumption of the car. It does it in such a way that it almost becomes a game to drive more efficient. By integrating this kind of playfulness into a product you are able to engage people in a way they would normally not think about. The common becomes new and energizing again. When it’s about points, it’s a game.

Another example he gave is called ‘delighters’, which are things you place in order to create delight deliberately. In the physical world this could be a beach ball that is placed on your hotel bed on a sunny day, putting a smile on your face. In the digital world this could be a compliment for keeping your mailbox spamfree or the product Matt created: the Dopplr personal annual report. In the annual report they translated otherwise boring data in a playful way, like translating your carbon print in the number of hummers you’d drive (so 2.1 hummers instead of telling 42.299kg CO2). Another thing they did was translate the amount of kilometers you travelled into an animal with a relative speed. This way numbers were suddenly something funny and relatable, like being a mouse or a wombat. This approach really appeals to me. Being able to look beyond the data and to translate it into a story people love is briljant. The way they made the year report made people realize how they traveled. And people who didn’t have or didn’t update their Dopplr data realized they were missing out on the fun, which caused them to start keeping track of their accounts…. Thus bringing in more valuable data for the company. Brilliant.

Some other lessons from Matt’s talk:

• Personal informatics: don’t steer it all the way, but keep the data open enough for interpretation by individuals
• Data Gifts: give the users something back… this became the annual report.
• Don’t forget to test the outliers (the extremes)
• Matt Locke: Data + Time = Story
• Add video to presentations. Integrate video in the presentations. Not fullscreen. Why? It looks impressive.

Today one of the best UX events in the world started; interaction09 in Vancouver. For four days more than 400 interaction designers huddle together in order to get inspired on the field of interaction design. Of course we sacrificed ourselves and traveled to Vancouver just to give you a ‘live’ report. For the next four days you can read our thoughts and observations.

On this first day there were a series of workshops. We attended a total of three, of which these are the reports.

Workshop: Design Studio (report by Pieter Jongerius)
In this workshop, participants were challenged in their design thinking. Speakers were Liya Zheng and Jeanine Harriman from LiquidNed. Their main argument: interaction design is a growing and promising discipline. Broadly applied “Design thinking” can dramatically improve user experience as well as corporate performance. This storyline was obviously well received by the UX-professional audience.

Three levels of design were indicated:

• Interaction design. Main ingredients of this design level include demographic research, persona’s, technological requirements, user experience, scenario writing, sketching.
• Service design. On this level, we took the step of looking at a greater timeline for the experience of this product, in our case a garment retail example. Moments in time included: awareness, trigger to shop, shopping destination decision, browse, shop, reflection on the purchase. These steps were called the ‘service journey’. For each of these steps, some activities and problems were identified, such as ‘customer becomes aware of a trend’ and ‘no one to give you honest feedback’. These served as a basis of designing the service in terms of contact points and communication requirements.
• Strategic design. On this last level, the group explored the challenges of looking ahead several years. The aim was to come up with an innovative business idea, based on social, technological and demographical trends. From these trends, the group was free to select a target audience and identify opportunities.

It is true, this way of design thinking is very powerful and it enhances the view and influence interaction or UX designers have in their teams. However, many of the participants seemed to have already used these types of methodologies. In fact, the speakers seemed to be surprised of the level of experience. The group was even appraised as their “best audience ever”. And we were in it, yay!

Designing for Touch screens and Interactive Gestures (report by myself)
In this workshop Dan Saffer and Bill DeRouchey introduced us to the world of interactive gestures. The first part of the workshop focused on Dan’s presentation ‘Tap is the new click’, which is based upon his new book. It goes into the challenges interaction designers face when designing for gestural and touch interfaces.  One of these challenges is the changing field of expertise/knowledge: when designing gestures we also have to keep in mind the physical (dis-)abilities of people. Kinesiology and physiology will become a growing part of our job.

We shouldn’t design our interfaces based on pixels, but on physical dimensions. Although it sounds logical, it is worth the mention… we are so used to designing in screen resolutions. This approach would also call for sketching out your interface before digitizing it. This is a very easy way for seeing what it looks like. This brings me to the core of the workshop: paper prototyping.

Saffer and DeRouchey told us that low fidelity prototyping has become more and more important. Gesture and touch interfaces have become so diverse and complex that you need to play around with the interface and test it. Since actual prototyping takes a lot of time, paper prototyping is a good alternative. During the workshop people split up in teams and had to design an interactive music booth. With paper and tape they had to make a testable version. The energy in the room was remarkable and within an hour most teams had a fairly good working prototype. This shows that with minimum tools you can mimic a complex interaction, which you can then test and improve on the spot. Without touching any computer.

At the end they defined three zones of engagement for a particular product: attraction (noticing the product from a larger range), observation (seeing how to use the product) and interaction (actual usage of the product). When designing an interactive installation you should be aware of all these aspects. At the end of the workshop it was noted that the observation zone is the most difficult to design for… it lies halfway between attraction and interaction and touches questions like “How can I participate?” and “Wouldn’t I look ridiculous when I participate?”

So we want to be Hardware / Software designers (report by Patrick Sanwikarja)
This workshop consisted of two parts. The first part was a presentation by Ted Booth (Smart Design) and Michele Tepper (Frog Design) that was basically about the differences between interaction design (the software) and industrial design (the hardware). In the second part, five groups worked on a choice of four design assignments that integrated software and hardware, such as a medication dispenser or a robotic vacuum cleaner.

Even though the border between interaction design and industrial design is a grey area, some clear differences can be found. The first, most important one is that when designing for hardware one has to take into account all the physical restraints. That may be a quite obvious difference, but it does mean something for the way industrial designers work. For instance, industrial designers can’t make any last minute changes to their work because their products are not made of code and pixels. They have to make sure that when the injection mold is build, months before the products will be launched, the design is already definite. This makes industrial design a much more iterative and dynamic approach, always figuring out the best balance between materials, cost, durability, usability and so on. What follows from this is that prototyping is of the absolute essence. For hard/software design, prototyping should be an integrated exercise. Ideally, this is done by prototyping the circuitry, but easier and also effective ways are making video mockups and paper prototyping.

Feedback is important, too. Rule: have twice as many critiques as you think you need (and that probably still won’t be enough). But the most important thing when designing hard/software is to bring the experience alive. It all comes down to an integrated concept and being able to share that. When you can get the big picture across, you can deal with the details later.

This workshop didn’t provide me with groundbreaking new insights, but I did take some things out of it:

• First of all, nobody really knows what interaction design really is, what to call it and where the line lies between interaction design and industrial design. But the good thing is, that doesn’t really matter. Especially during the second, active part of the workshop, people from different backgrounds collaboratively came up with really interesting ideas. What matters is that different people have different skill sets and that you should be aware of who does what best in your organization.
• Mock it up before you fuck it up! When it comes to prototyping and iterating, interaction designers can take an example from industrial designers.
• Wireframes are weird. And they are. Industrial design is about creating an experience in space, interaction design is about an experience over time. I don’t think wireframes are wrong, but I do agree with the presenters that interaction designers should pay more attention to designing the temporal aspect, rather than designing just the ‘snapshots’.
• Finally, sketches are still the best way to bring ideas across. Sketches are vivid and they are a shared vocabulary that everyone understands. The second part of the workshop really showed that.