After a night of engaging conversation over dinner, drinks, as well as Brad Pitt and George Clooney sightings, the second day of IDEA kicked off. The speakers of the second day had big shoes to fill after the great speakers from the day before. Needless to say, they all rose to the occasion effortlessly and gave attendees plenty to think about for their trips home.

Tim Queenan – The Dawn of Perfect Products

During the opening session, Tim laid out what perfect products used to look like in the past, and more importantly, what a perfect product will look like in the near future. He started off by asserting that “The assumption that social media makes products better is wrong”. The truth is, products have flaws and some of those flaws are there by design. The social media ‘silver bullet’ can’t fix these flaws, or even hide them.

Types of flaws:

• Volume – How much space does it take up?
• Physical Decay – How long will the product function, or stay relevant?
• Usability – Is it easy for the intended consumer to use?
• Usefulness – Does it provide any value to its consumers?

The view of a perfect product is no longer accurate. In the past, to reach product perfection it needed to:

• Fulfill a need or want
• Have a niche or mass market
• Provide the business with high margins
• Be perceived to give high value
• Have customer replenish or repurchase the product
• Allow the customer to be easily up-sold or cross-sold

So, how is this view changing? Some emerging ideas are that the perfect product of the future will focus more on human behavior and needs. These future products will need to be intuitive, elastic, intelligent, and polarizing. The challenge for us is that many companies don’t understand this yet, and user experience professionals are the ones best suited to teach them.

Christian Crumlish & Erin Malone – Social Design Patterns Mini-Workshop

The book “Designing Social Interfaces” written by Christian and Erin is set to be released this October. Over the course of this mini-workshop they showcased 5 Steps, 5 Principles, and 5 Anti-Patterns from their book. The workshop portion of the session was a companion card game that showcased the importance of a variety of social design patterns.

5 Steps to follow:

• Give people the ability to identify themselves and their work.
• Ensure there is a way to create objects in the system that people can relate to.
• Give people something to do. Mark favorites, define tags, and collect objects. Start out simple, and let the network grow as is necessary.
• Enable a bridge to real life events, because aspects of events occurs both online and off.
• Finding interesting content shouldn’t be a selfish act, allow people to easily share their interests with others.

5 Principles to consider:

• Pave the cowpaths, see what shortcuts people make and then lay down the paths.
• Talk like a person, and make it conversational. People want to know what has been written was done by a human.
• Be open and play well with others. It’s ok to keep private information private, but take advantage of openness where it makes sense.
• Learn from games. Games are becoming more social everyday and they have many lessons which we can learn from.
• Respect the ethical dimensions. Consider what you will do with the private information you collect.

5 Anti-Patterns to avoid with your social network:

• Cargo Cult – The act of performing particular behaviors and setting up certain scenarios expecting past outcomes that were actually dependent on outside forces.
• Don’t Break Email – People have standard behaviors and habits when it comes to their email, don’t run the risk of alienating them.
• The Password Anti-Pattern – 3rd party services are training people to sign on using their service rather than an internal login system.
• Ex-Boyfriend Bug Anti-Pattern – Though it appears a specific relationship should exist, there may be a good reason why it doesn’t.
• Potemkin Village – Building out many groups and relationships when a population can’t support them decreases the overall value of the network.

The card game that followed the presentation was very entertaining, once our team learned all the game mechanics. The basic flow of the game was to start with a social object card, e.g. Urban Farming, and create a social product for a specific audience delivered through a defined channel. The team is dealt cards, and team members place a balance of social feature cards, delivery mechanism cards, and target demographic cards around the social object card until they have created a completed social digital product. The more balanced the resulting social network is, the more points the team accrues.

Social Media Card Game

The game is currently in beta, so keep an eye out for its release date.

Matthew Milan – Innovation Parkour

Using Parkour as an analogy, Matthew’s presentation dispelled some common misconceptions about innovation and instructed us on some activities we can adopt as designers to practice being more innovative. To start off, he identified innovation as “creating a better way to deliver value.”

Some of the myths that Milan attempted to dispel is that innovation is expensive, requires a ton of time, and takes a special kind of person to do it. To the contrary, he argues that innovation is rather cheap; takes some practice to train the mind to look for it; and is a collaborative effort.

In order to reach the stage where innovation becomes second nature, Milan argued that people need to achieve a certain level of skill. The degrees of mastery are unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence (True Mastery). In order to reach the level of unconscious competence it is necessary to practice:

• Visualizing
• Seeing
• Collaborating
• Trusting
• Participating
• Being Open

The session ended with an impromptu interview with Dennis Schleicher Jr on how practicing the art of Parkour trains the mind to do all this.

Mari Luangrath – If You Build It (Using Social Media), They Will Come

The story of Foiled Cupcakes and its owner Mari is truly inspiring. When she started her business, she didn’t understand the importance of social media and how it could affect her business model. The lesson was quickly learned though when she beat her initial sales projection by over 300%. This was all done without a single storefront location.

She found her customer base using social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, and LinkedIn. Rather than approaching them as a sales person, she looked to forge a personal relationships with people. Through her activities on these networks, people generated a lot of buzz for her business, which eventually made its way into local news media as free press. Though she had a target market, she quickly found other untapped markets through the events she planned online.

In the course of just six months, she has gone from being a social media novice to one who is dominating her local market. The use of social media has become the single most powerful driver of her business today.

Stephen Anderson – The Art and Science of Seductive Interactions

The task of closing out IDEA fell to Stephen with an intriguing view on how to persuade users into becoming more engaged with the products we design. He said to the engaged audience in the MaRS auditorium that by using the art of seduction, we are able to draw people deeper into the interactions of our designs. People are able to engage in a desired form of behavior that is both fun for them, and informative to the system. Using the psychology that lies behind seduction, designers are able to motivate people to overlook any usability potholes that make certain actions difficult to perform. This isn’t an excuse not to fix these flaws, but it gets the user engaged and having an overall good experience.

Steven continued by informing the audience that in order to seduce people into engaging with your designs, it’s necessary to understand what motivates them. These motivations can be uncovered by observing the way people interact with others. Things to remember are that people are emotional; can be both irrational or rational; eager to learn; desire the familiar; and inclined to do what is easy. Looking for the behavior that drives these desires allows us to create something that plays on their curiosity and encourages them to behave in a variety of ways. A quote by Kathy Sierra was shared that best sums this up, “Brains pay attention to what brains care about, not necessarily what the conscious mind cares about.”

Thus ended the IDEA conference of 2009. Thanks to all the conference organizers, the Information Architecture Institute, the MaRS Centre, and Toronto for providing everyone with a fantastic  experience.

After a daylong workshop given by Nathan Curtis of EightShapes, The Information Architecture Institute’s IDEA09 officially kicked off on September 15th. The conference took place in Toronto at the MaRS Centre this year, with an approximate attendance of 250 UX professionals from around the world.  Many of the conversations that took place over dinner and drinks were fueled by the sessions of the day, and extended the conference’s experience well into the night.

Luke Wroblewski – The Impact of Social Models

Luke’s unique position at Yahoo, and some data collection applications on Facebook, allowed him to present on a variety of social models a social network can use, and how that model influences member behavior and contribution. The data used to validate these social models was derived from Yahoo Answers, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.

The social models of he identified were:

• No Relationship – No clear definition exists between the users of a network
• Community – A simply defined meaning to a large group of users
• Group – Clearly defined relationships that can be a subset of an overall network
• Symmetrical – User acknowledgment of a relationship brings personal meaning to a connection
• Asymmetrical – Loosely connected relationship that don’t require any confirmation

All of these models work on the fact that people naturally organize with other people based on the context in which their relationship exists. The level of user feedback and involvement in the network also influences how active an individual person’s contributions becomes.

Leisa Reichelt – Bare Naked Design: Reflections on Designing With An Open Source Community

Based on her experience working on the Drupal 7 UX Project, Leisa offered the audience insight and lessons learned based on her team’s interactions with an open source community. Over the course of the project, her team has had to foster involvement and gather feedback from a community that is diverse and global.

The first piece of insight offered was how to successful lead the design of an open source project that must remain open and be transparent in order to encourage community involvement. Though there are many voices that need to be listened to and demand to be heard, the design process can’t be a democracy. The design team must show a strong sense of authority in order to lead the project in the right direction.

Another great take away was the process her team used to gather user feedback and solicit ideas from the community. Using YouTube, the UX team on Drupal 7 showcased their thought process, ideas, and prototypes. Her team even created usability kits in order to crowdsource some usability tests using the posted videos. The community responded with follow up videos, or ideas of their own posted on Flickr.

Thomas Malaby – Making Virtual Worlds: Games and the Human for a Digital Age

Thomas offered attendees a view how the digital worlds that are present in many of today’s online games are becoming extensions of our real world societies. In many of these games, concepts like social status and community involvement are being reflected and encouraged based on the game mechanics of the virtual world.

Virtual worlds are becoming more and more persistent in nature (persistent games in nature? awkward sentence), with no real end. Game developers are able to continually add new ‘spaces’ and features, which keeps the worlds alive and challenging. Players, or residents, of these persistent worlds are required to put forth effort in order to stay on top, or to ensure their current social status level. In order to maintain their quality of ‘life’ in-game, certain objects need to be acquired through the games virtual economy or by accomplishing goals. The digital avatar is becoming more of a digital extension of the person engaged with the game.

The major crux to these persistent worlds is player involvement. If there isn’t a large engaged population, the world will slowly fade way. Or as Thomas puts it “Something isn’t interesting unless there are a lot of people involved. Be it virtual or physical.”

Christina Wodtke – Social Space Online: Lessons from Radical Architects

Sessions that follow lunch are always tough, but Christina did a great job getting the crowd engaged by comparing the world of user experience with that of architecture. As a profession, architecture understands the importance of designing for a specific environment, and there are many lessons that translate to the world of design.

One of the best examples of properly designing for an environment is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Japan. Since earthquakes are common in this region, many aspects of the hotel were designed solely for withstanding and recovering from an earthquake. The lesson here for us, as designers, is to consider all the possible digital earthquakes that may occur in the projects we are involved with.

Types of Digital Earthquakes:

• Technical Execution
• Maintenance
• Scale
• Bandwidth
• Trolls
• Spammers

Another interesting concept she shared is how the mode of travel, and the velocity of that travel, has a direct influence of the architectural style of a time period. As we drive by buildings faster and faster, bigger and more eye catching signage is required to draw us in. This concept translates to the web, for many times we don’t consider how fast our users are going when traversing the web and how best to capture their attention.

Maya Kalman – Does Designing a Social Experience Affect How We Party? Of Course It Does!

What made Maya’s session so great was how everything she said turned into an analogy for what User Experience is all about. Maya runs Swank Production, an event planning agency in New York City. Her business is all about planning personal and meaningful experiences for her clients.

During her presentation, she provided us with a down to earth definition of Social Experience Design. “Social Experience Design is mean to connect people in new and meaningful ways.” She continued by detailing the reasons why good design is important. Good design helps to put people at ease and gets them to relax (aren’t those the same thing?). This helps to remove social barriers and encourages people to open up and be more social. Also, a beautiful design gives everything associated with a presentation a higher sense of value. This concept ties into the cognitive nature of aesthetics and how it effects the perceived value of an object. For experience design is experience design, whether it is done using pixels or party hats.

Jeff Dachis – User Experience as a Crucial Driver of Social Business Design

Social Experience Design can be hard to sell, but Jeff gave the crowd a great framework to use in order to help convince our clients. The framework for this was called ‘Social Business Design’ and is made up of four main aspects.

• Ecosystem – The connections a person, or business, has with others.
• Hivemind – Businesses need to stop hoarding all its information and open it up for collaboration.
• Dynamic Signal – Inject your company into the overall conversation, for this conversation is happening with or without you.
• Metafilter – Define the meaning in all the noise that comes along with your ecosystem and by being a hivemind.

In the near future, a company that is hive-minded, dynamically signaled, with a meta-filtered ecosystem will be better than any other.

After hours of great presenters and high quality content, Day one of IDEA closed.

Top image by Small