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

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

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

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

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

A few months ago we set up five Flickr groups around several UX topics. Every month we will try and make some sense of the uploaded material. This month we selected the UX Errors group and will look at examples of issues that arise when proper attention isn’t paid to two very important components of successful user interface design: Perceived Affordances and Designing for Task Flow.

Perceived Affordances

In The Design of Everyday Things Don Norman introduced many designers to the concept of affordances, which he would later clarify as “perceived affordances”, or the actions the user perceives as being possible based on how an object is presented. For example, if your design includes a “button” make that button look pushable.

Posted by Adam Connor

Push me. Wait… you can’t

The ATM example suffers from some misrepresentation. The labels for the physical buttons are styled with bevels, commonly used to represent buttons in GUIs. As a result, many users try to press them, only to realize after a few attempts that the buttons are actually to the right and left of each label. In this case, objects give off an inaccurate perceived affordance.

It’s not uncommon for ATMs to have physical buttons and digital label displays. In this situation, it looks like someone thought that adding a little visual “excitement” to the labels would be an improvement. If simple, plain text labels had been used, people would most likely have experienced less confusion.

Posted by Olivier Lorrain

Where’s the Button?

In the gas pump example people tended to press the octane number, as evidenced by the fingerprints around the “87″, when choosing a fuel. This happened despite the “Push to start” label on the actual button and the arrows pointing to them. In this case, there isn’t enough emphasis given to the real button in comparison to the large yellow square label. Which begs the question, why not just make the yellow square the button to begin with?

Posted by Andreas Popp

Which way is up?

In our last perceived affordances example, we have three components, all with a triangle/arrow pointing up, all beveled from the panel on which they are presented. Which one do you push to direct the elevator up?

The two arrows on the top are lights, which indicate the direction the elevator is traveling, while the lower button is the actual call button. Many users pressed the lights in order to call the elevator. Why? Most likely because the bevel caused people to perceive them as buttons. Also, the lights have a higher visual significance than the smaller triangle on the actual button. Had there simply been no bevel around the two lights, it’s likely there would be less confusion and more people would find the real button first. That’s not to say that the button itself couldn’t use a bit more visual prominence in it’s display too.

Designing for Task Flow

When I was in grade school there was an exercise we did where each student had to write instructions on how to construct a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The teacher then attempted to construct the sandwich according to those instructions verbatim. If an instruction left something out, small details like removing a slice of bread from the bag containing the loaf, the teacher would stand there and act stumped until the student modified their instructions to be more specific.

The purpose of the exercise was to give students an appreciation of the fact that even simple tasks are comprised of a multitude of steps, and that finding the right level of detail and sequencing for those steps is critical to user’s success and satisfaction.

Posted by Eugenia Ortiz

Follow the Arrows

In the example to the right, there appears to be some attempt at sequencing in the digital display as well as from the large “2″ at the bottom of the device. In this case however, some considerate and/or frustrated individual(s) has taken it upon themselves to try to make up for the devices inadequacies by adding additional instructions and labels.

Posted by Frank Farm

Easy as 1, 2, 3

Our second example also uses numbers, in addition to a list of instructions, to provide guidance. Yet the arrangement of components and labels gives a perception of chaos that even a well written set of instructions can’t overcome.

Both of these interfaces exemplify that in user interface design, identifying a sequence of actions is not enough. Numbers and lists, while somewhat helpful, should be used in conjunction with a logical and sequential arrangement of controls and inputs.

Johnny Holland’s Flickr Groups

Observations are a critical tool in any designer’s tool set. They provide us with in-site on things we should do, shouldn’t do and could do better. Many of us photograph our observations to preserve them, to keep them as reminders, learning tools that won’t be lost in the background when our next big breakthrough comes along. We also share our observations so that we can learn from and educate others. So that we can build a stronger dialog and further conversation.

To that extent, Johnny Holland has established five Flickr groups, so that we can share, discuss and learn from eachother’s observations.

In addition to the UX Errors group, where we collect examples of design decisions that have a negative impact on individual’s interactions with a product and overall user experience, and from which this month’s examples were taken, we have:

• Daily UX: collecting pictures of everyday user experiences, good or bad.
• UX Sketches: collecting sketches of products, interfaces and ideas
• UX Patterns: collecting examples of interface and interaction patterns.
• UX Events: collecting photos from UX conferences and meet-ups around the world.

Like any collaborative effort, these groups are what we make of them. So please join, share your photos, comment and discuss. And if you have any ideas on how we can improve the groups or better utilize them, please let us know.

There are so many interesting UX books coming out that it’s hard to know which ones are worth your money. So from now on we will try and be your guide. Each month we will share with you our opinion on the newest UX books. And as a bonus we will add a classic you must have.

This month we review Card Sorting, Designing Social Interfaces, Thoughts on Interaction Design, and revisit The Inmates Are Running The Asylum.

Card Sorting

Type: practical
Authors: Donna Spencer
Publishers: Rosenfeld Media
Details: 160 pages, paperback

With this book you can learn card sorting in a few days.

Card sorting is a method for finding patterns about how people categorise content and functionality on a website. In Spencer’s book she sets out to explain how you can successfully apply this inexpensive research method. And she did a good job at this. The book is a handy guide for anybody who wants to do card sorting, ranging from beginners to people who want to do it the proper way.

Spencer splits up card sorting into two variations: open and closed card sorting. In open card sorting participants are given cards which they have to group any way they think best. This version is very useful for creating structures for new and existing websites. Closed card sorting means participants are given cards which they have to sort in pre-defined groups. This version is useful when working with new content in an existing structure. In the book she takes you through every step to make both types of card sorting work.

If I had to name one thing I would have liked to see different in this book, it would have been the focus. Right now it presents itself as the definitive guide to card sorting, but all the examples, cases, and text focus on websites and intranets. It would have been more interesting to see how card sorting can be applied in a wider UX context.

But what I like about the book is that it’s honest and practical. Card sorting isn’t presented as the holy grail in user research, but as an interesting and useful part of it. Spencer notes that if you want to do proper research you have to also use other techniques alongside this one.

Designing Social Interfaces

Type: practical
Authors: Christian Crumlish & Erin Malone
Publishers: O’Reilly
Details: 478 pages, paperback

A practical guide for anybody who is working on social interfaces.

Are you currently working on a social media project? O’Reilly have once again published a trustworthy book full of principles, patterns and best practices. You can save yourself a lot of time on coming up with ways to make it a social environment that works, as long as you are willing to follow the patterns.

The book has been divided into five parts. Each one is a collection of principles, patterns and best practices. These aren’t pre-defined categories, but overlapping themes:

1. What Are Social Patterns?: introduction;
2. I Am Somebody: focusing on the notion of self, my online identity;
3. Objects of My Desire: about the type of activity you want to encourage;
4. A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood: focusing on the social network, shared activities and interest;
5. But Wait… There’s More!: creating an open experience.

The format makes it a wonderful resource you can grab when facing a specific challenge. And I am not just saying this because I think so, but because I actually used it. In the past I’ve bought quite a few practical books that never gave me the answers I needed.

Thoughts on Interaction Design

Type: theory
Authors: Jon Kolko
Publishers: Morgan Kaufmann
Details: 2nd edition, 155 pages, paperback

Understand the story behind our profession on an academic level, but with an accessible tone.

In 2007 Jon Kolko self-published ‘Thoughts On Interaction Design’. These 1,000 copies, now known as ‘The Green Books’, have become treasured items. Fortunately Morgan Kaufmann decided to republish the book (with a blue cover) so that every interaction designer has access to this thought provoking material.

In ‘Thoughts on Interaction Design’ Kolko and several other authors explain to the reader what interaction design is all about. They dive into the history of interaction design and its relationship to engineering and design. In an almost academic, but also realistic way they explain what we do (or should do), how and why. Even though there are several books that have attempted this, Thoughts on Interaction Design is the first that explains it in a way that sticks – it not only makes me proud as an interaction designer, but also gives me knowledge to apply in a discussion.

To give you a feeling of the writing style, here is a sample from the book’s website,

Interaction designers are trained to observe humanity and to balance complicated ideas, and are used to thinking in opposites: large and small, conceptual and pragmatic, human and technical. This is not a jack of all trades. Instead, it is a shaper of behaviour. Behaviour is a large idea, and may, at first blush, seem too large to warrant a single profession. But a profession has emerged nonetheless. This professional category includes the complexity of information architecture, the anthropologic desire to understand humanity, the altruistic nature of usability engineering, and the creation of dialogue.

A must have for every interaction designer.

UX Classic: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

Type: Methods
Authors: Alan Cooper
Publishers: Sams
Details: 288 pages
Published: 1999

See where personas started – and why we needed them in the first place

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, if you’re in interaction design you know about personas. The technique burst onto the scene in Alan Cooper’s 1998 book ‘The Inmates Are Running the Asylum’.

It’s perhaps fitting that a technique that has generated so much debate is found in a equally provocative book. Cooper spends much of  ‘Inmates’ setting up what’s wrong with current products and IT culture, mixed in with a few of his own software exploits for good measure. Luckily he a gift for clear, engaging prose and memorable catchphrases such as “dancing-bearware” (it’s not that it dances/functions well, it’s that it does it at all), “software apologists”, and (my favourite) “programmers act like jocks”. Yes, it can be over-the-top, but you can’t accuse Cooper of lack of passion.

Interesting with a decade of hindsight is Cooper’s horror stories of ’90s Silicon Valley projects. He documents bad products (VCRs, ATMs), Microsoft team battles, and a Job-less Apple scraping by on the power of its brand.

Still, while this is all great, its all a lead-up to Cooper’s tour de force: personas. Developed as “a precise description of our user and what he wishes to accomplish” (p123), Cooper goes through in detail their purpose and how they’re made (for the record, he is emphatic that they’re based on research and they they’re “discovered” rather than “made”). His case study of Sony Trans Com’s P@ssport IFE still holds up today in both demonstrating the process and the final product (the other studies have dated more). How would “Clevis McCloud, crotchety [but spry] septegenarian … slightly embarrassed about the touch of arthritis in his hands” (p126) use your product?

“The Inmates Are Running the Asylum” is worth buying even for the twenty or so pages on personas – it’s not only the first example of it, but still probably the best. Beyond that, it’s a great reminder on what can go wrong in IT. The day all of the examples are irrelevant will be a happy one for interaction designers indeed.

Buy UX Books

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

Two parties and four hours after day 2 of the IA Summit 2009 closed. Day 3 opened with a low-key UX Book Salon organized by Lou Rosenfeld of Rosenfeld Media.

The UX Book Salons are an opportunity for people to get together to talk about the content, presentation, style and form of UX books (that we love or hate). For the publisher, these impromptu gatherings provide a valuable source of customer insight. And for me, I just like talking about books occasionally.

Yoni tickling the ivory. Photo courtesy of Jonell Gades

After a fairly soft start to the day, the next session was a fair smack in the brain muscles.

Matt Milan & Michael Dila: Innovation Parkour

In this presentation Matt & Michael presented their ideas on innovation – how to obtain a level of mastery such that we are unconsciously competent during the design process. They began by asking the question: Why do we do our best thinking when listening to angry music? It’s when we let everything go.

Parkour is a confrontation of the physical, built environment. It’s about the flow; and it’s fun. In parkour the practitioner doesn’t follow the paths laid down by the architect or city planner; rather they confront the structures and makes their own way.

When things become uncertain – in an emergency; in times of massive change – we need to observe, orient, decide and act (OODA) in a conscious, yet unconscious way.

The presenters discussed four stages of mastery:

1. Unconscious incompetence: we don’t know; and we aren’t aware.
2. Conscious incompetence: we don’t know, but now we know we don’t know.
3. Conscious competence: we know, but it requires conscious thought
4. Unconscious competence: we know, but we no longer require conscious thought before acting appropriately

How do we train to be free?

In a sport like tennis, the player practices drills for hours and hours, day after day. They do this so that, during a game, they no longer need to think about how to play a shot: they can instead concentrate on the strategy needed to beat their opponent.

Some practices are well defined, but bottomless (we never become ‘perfect’). Examples include tai chi, yoga, or design.

“The best design thinking is design doing.”

Kyle Soucy & Nassir Barday: Professional IA/UX Organizations: How to start up and run a successful local group

Given my involvement in the UX Book Club I thought I had to go along and hear what Kyle (UPA) and Nassir (IxDA) had to say about local groups. And I’m glad I did, although I didn’t leave happy.

Kyle and Nassir presented a very good overview of how one might go about setting up and running a local group based (loosely) around UX. They covered organizations such as UPA, IxDA, IAI, CHI and others, and looked at the presence of local groups around the world. They also discussed the pros and cons of forming local groups under the umbrella of one of these existing institutions.

In starting up a group the presenters advocated for just doing it. Pick a date and a venue and get the word out there. Team up with an existing organization only if and when it makes sense to do so. Make the meetings regular and consistent so that people can plan ahead to attend. And be communicative: let people know in advance what’s coming up.

The reason I walked out angry was simply that in the course of an hour-long presentation on IA/UX groups, with particular focus on starting up local groups, there was not a single mention of UX Book Club. I’m sure no one else in the room noticed; or cared; but in the space of four months UXBC has grown to over 1,000 people in 40+ locations, so I’d have thought a mention was warranted at least. Meh.

[I skipped lunch and the next session while I calmed down. That left the Closing Plenary...]

Jesse James Garrett: Closing Plenary

JJG’s closing address to the IA Summit caused quite a stir. For those people attending who’ve never identified themselves as Information Architects it seemed like a lot of fuss over nothing. From the stalwart IA crowd the reaction was mixed.

The crowd follows JJG as he wanders the room. Photo courtesy of Andrea Resmini

Jesse lamented the slow pace of innovation within the IA community; the lack of new ideas; the lack of a language of critique; and the lack of clear examples of ground-breaking information architecture. Where is the IA avant garde?

The full transcript of Jesse’s speech is available for reading here: http://jjg.net/ia/memphis/ and it’s well worth a read.

There was a great deal of applause, cheers, and then it was clearly over. As 5-minute madness got under way people started making their quiet goodbyes as the first departures headed for early flights home.

The conference was a great experience, although I won’t be back next year. But that’s a story for another day.

Title photo courtesy Todd Zaki Warfel

Day 2 rolled around far too fast, after a late night and some really engaging conversation. A leisurely breakfast at the famous Arcade Restaurant removed the cobwebs and prepared me for the day ahead. I missed the first session as a result, but we made up for it by having a round-table discussion on personas: how we use them; how we go about creating them; and when they are(n’t) appropriate to the project. There were a lot of good insights, and we managed to get through breakfast without setting up opposing camps.

The famous Arcade Restaurant in Memphis.

Richard Anderson & Craig Peters: Strategies for Enabling UX to Play a More Strategic Role

This working session was run over two timeslots, the aim being to allow participants to arrive at strategies that would work within their own context. Richard and Craig introduced a series of strategies commonly used by UX practitioners to help elevate the awareness and importance of the practice within their organizations. Participants then discussed each strategy, looking at why it might or might not work for them.

The first strategy presented was the “Just Say No” approach. Essentially: decline any project that doesn’t advance the prominence or importance of UX within the organization.

Participants generally felt that, whilst this approach may work for some organizations – busy agencies, for example, or internal UX teams already overburdened with work requests – however it works less well for UX teams attempting to build a presence. The counter approach – to take on all projects and over-deliver – seemed to be the preferred approach in building a UX culture.

Additional strategies discussed include: Evangelizing UX; the ROI approach; organizational structure and placement of UX.

Most participants were attempting at least one or more of strategies discussed, with varying degrees of success. By exposing people to a broad range of tactics, and hearing the success and failure stories from peers, participants would have gone away with a new appreciation for the challenges they face in raising the profile of UX within their organization; but would also have been better equipped to meet that challenge.

Nathan Curtis: UX Design & Deliverable Systems

Nathan Curtis talks documentation systems. Photo courtesy of Dan Brown.

During this session Nathan Curtis – of EightShapes – presented the Unify design documentation template system, based around Adobe InDesign.

The primary object in the 8SUnify system is the template, with the main example being a wireframe. However, Nathan went to lengths to make it clear that the system can be used to create just about any type of design documentation.

Below the level of templates sit elements – standard, ‘atomic’ objects – and components – reusable page ‘chunks’. These standard elements provide both efficiency and flexibility.

The system comes with a range of page libraries – standard types of design documents – which are made up of components and allow for very rapid production of documentation.

Nathan explained the choice of InDesign as the foundation software. Namely, it was chosen due to its:

• Cross-platform
• Great for vector-based drawing
• The most/better modular system available
• Powerful support for styles
• Familiar to most/many UX designers.

Jared Spool: Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon

In this funny and engaging session Jared ran through a behind-the-scenes look at Amazon: it’s scale, scope, and fundamentals. Along the way the audience gained an insight into Amazon’s thought processes and evolution. More valuably, Jared distilled lessons from Amazon’s approach into four key concepts to help with those “Why can’t we just do it the way Amazon does it?” moments.

1. Engaging through content

Amazon’s product pages present visitors with a wealth of information about the product, much of which is provided (free of charge) from customers. Jared gave the example of Amazon’s brief foray into the sale of milk through the site – which attracted over 1,000 reviews, ranging from the mundane to the down-right literary.

The reviews for Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows (the final book in the HP series) attracted 3,900 reviews. To help sort the gold from the dross, Amazon introduced the “Was this review helpful?” question, allowing them to promote most helpful, and most helpful critical reviews. In this manner they’re able to manage the quality of the reviews without actually imposing any editorial controls themselves: it’s all user-driven.

2. Don’t fear new ideas

Amazon has, over the years, introduced a range of innovations to the site. Analytics on buying patterns – “People who bought this also bought…” and “People who viewed this went on to buy…”; user-submitted lists; discussion areas; and the recommendation engine all being successfully tried and implemented. But then there’s tagging: a failed idea.

Given the size of Amazon’s customer base, and the volume of orders that goes through the site, they have a large incentive to try new things. Introduction of new ideas is tightly controlled, however, so that the impact of a bad idea is minimised, and recognised early.

3. Reduce tool time while delivering confidence

Tool time is that time spent performing tasks that don’t advance you towards your goal. Time spent directly working towards your goal: Goal time.

Amazon uses a three-tiered security model in the delivery of functionality to avoid asking you to do unnecessary tasks – like log in – unless it’s absolutely necessary.

4. Never forget the business

Jared’s last point is well worth remembering: never lose sight of your business (model) and your purpose. Whatever else you’re doing, don’t drift away from your core through little, tangential ‘improvements’.

Russ Unger: Heuristic Analysis for the Pitch Process

Russ Unger – co-author of Project Guide to UX Design – presented the case for the use of heuristic analysis as a method of quickly and cost-effectively demonstrating value to potential clients during the business development cycle.

Heuristics – those ‘best practices’ or ‘rules-of-thumb’ – are a convenient way of evaluating the quality of a user experience without recourse to user testing methods. They can also be applied quickly to an existing design, along with several competing (or competitor) designs, to produce a set of recommendations for ‘quick wins’.

Russ argued that provided potential clients with a small set of such recommendations can demonstrate expertise and establish a rapport that increases the likelihood of success in winning further business.

Russ’ was the last presentation I attended on Day 2. During the late afternoon I was happily ensconced in a hotel room with a talented group of folks (Todd Zaki Warfel, Matt Milan, Jeff Parks, Joe Lamantia, Joe Sokohl, Will Evans & Jon Tirmandi) discussing ubiquitous computing for a Boxes and Arrows IA Podcast.

Title photo courtesy of Jonell Gades

Friday 20th March marked the opening day of the 10th IA Summit. Held in Memphis (USA), at the Peabody Hotel (famous for its ducks) the 2009 conference revolved around the theme “Expanding our horizons”. 350 people from around the world converged on Memphis for the three day event, and after two days of pre-conference workshops; 2nd breakfasts, elevenses, lunch, afternoon drinks, dinner, after-dinner drinks, and nightcaps; and the occasional trip to Gracelands, BB King’s Blue Restaurant, and – of course – the March of the Ducks at the Peabody, the conference got under way.

Keynote – Michael Wesch: Mediated Culture

Wesch‘s background in anthropology was well in evidence during this engaging, wide-ranging, and fast-paced exploration of the role of media in shaping our culture.

The keynote started in remote villages in the highlands of Papua New Guinea and ended with the role of information architectures as architectures of human participation.

Michael Wesch’s work in Papua New Guinea in the late 90′s provided an opportunity to study a culture in which relationships are entirely unmediated. The lack of telephones, newspapers, letters – let alone email, IM, twitter, or facebook – necessitate direct interaction between individuals. In the absence of any written laws or legal code, disputes were settled with a group discussion wherein parties put forward their issues.

The physical layout of the villages were another reflection of this lack of mediation. Huts were positioned and oriented based on one family’s relationship to, and friendship with their neighbours.

The introduction of a Government census created a cascading set of changes to village life. The census required each individual to have a name by which they could be recorded, however people tend to have several names. Wesch likened this to our own multiplicity of identities online and off, but used examples such as “brother”, “father”, “husband” etc for the villagers. This new unique name – “Census name” – became the way in which individuals identified themselves officially.

The flow on effects were severe. Villages were rebuilt in linear arrangement, hiding the relational character of previous layouts. This linearity was to enable hut numbering – an address – to be given to each individual. A documented legal code introduced the notion of mediated disputes – the individual now presented their ‘case’ to an official – someone who understands and could interpret the specific issues being presented.

The essential point here was that media are not just tools; they shape our relationships.

Wesch then embarked on a rapid foray into Web properties such as Youtube to show examples of how media shapes our relationships today. Looking at topics such as ‘bias’ in media – intellectual, emotional, spatial, temporal, sensory, political, social, metaphysical and epistemological – Wesch showed how media has a real impact on the ways in which we interact and think.

Lastly, Wesch tied these topics into the role of information architecture in creating architectures of human participation. Looking at such ideas as media’s role in both distancing up – through mediation – and connecting us, Wesch set up the rest of the conference to look at issues of context, language, and architecture.

Andrew Hinton – “You are (mostly) here. Digital space and the context problem”

My first presentation of the day was Andrew Hinton‘s talk on context. Melding ideas from cognitive psychology and information design, with examples from such sites as Facebook, Andrew discussed the role of context in experience design.

One of the more interesting examples from this session was the different visualizations of a particular suburban location and the different information conveyed by each. But the point was made that, regardless of which map was being used, it was our understanding of the territory that was being shaped – not the territory itself.

In digital spaces, however, the map creates the territory; and language & context shape each other.

Dan Brown: Designing Rules – The Engine of User Experience

I really enjoyed Dan’s presentation. It was a good coverage of ground I’ve been operating on for a number of years -  how to specify the rules by which content, navigation, and interactions behave in a dynamic interface. By ‘rules’, Dan is referring to the algorithms which drive changes to the presentation and behaviour of the interface.

The presentation covered three broad areas:

• Content: rules that drive content selection and presentation;
• Navigation: rules-driven changes to the make-up of sub-navigation; and
• Business rules: inventory-driven presentation rules as well as rules for determining process flow;
• What makes a ‘good’ rule; and
• Some guidelines for documenting them.

These rules are not necessarily patterns, although patterns may suggest the use of certain rules. Nor are they components, although components may use rules to drive behaviour.

In short, Dan’s presentation covered the ways in which we can define, document and communicate the behaviour of a site or application.

Cindy Chastain: Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design.

Cindy Chastain presenting at IA Summit 2009. Photo courtesy of Jonell Gades

This was one of my favourite presentations of the conference. Cindy took a fresh look at the pointy end of experience design projects, presenting ideas from the art and craft of storytelling.

Using the notion of themes from fiction and film – the subject matter, topic or idea on which a work of art or literature is based – Cindy put forward a case for their use in experience design projects as a means of unifying teams, assisting in the work of defining strategy, and helping to design for pleasure, emotion and meaning.

The presentation looked at the tangible and intangible elements of a user experience. The content, pages, flow and visual design being the tangible; emotion, pleasure and meaning being the intangible elements.

Cindy went on to put forward the idea that writers and filmmakers design for emotion, pleasure and meaning all the time. For these pursuits, the theme represents the coordinating force – something that is often missing from Web projects.

The notion of a theme as a unifying concept for UX projects is a new one (at least to me) and contrasts well with the (rather jaded) Vision statement. I’m looking forward to seeing more on this from Cindy in the future.

Evolve or Die: Panel session

This panel session, comprising material from Gene Smith, Russ Unger, Joshua Porter and Christina Wodtke was perhaps the most contentious of any of the first day’s sessions. Part message of doom; part call to action, the four presenters addressed the question of how practitioners of information architecture (as opposed to the practice) can remain central to the work of designing effective and efficient Web sites and applications.

The perspective of the presenters seemed to reflect a reality that was different to the one with which I’m familiar; one in which information architects fulfil fairly narrowly defined tasks within a broader project. Coming from an agency and consultancy background in which information architecture, interface and interaction design are merged in the one job role, the central tenets of the presentation were foreign. However, theirs is a reality that is all too common in large US corporations.

Notebook, sharpie and conference notes. Photo courtesy of Jonell Gades

The advice for information architects in these narrow functions was solid: expand your toolset; focus on the end product, not the deliverable; you are not your title; go deep, if information is your thing – design rules for systems, social spaces, design algorithms, recommendation engines.

For those working in these narrow roles the advice surely caused some angst, but I don’t think most people saw anything terribly unconventional in the notion that we need to remain relevant to the business and provide value beyond cranking out wireframes and sitemaps thoughtlessly.

And so ended the formal part of Day 1.

Title photo courtesy of Joe Sokohl

In the wake of the ever increasing popularity of gestural interfaces, Dan Saffer wrote his newest book: Designing Gestural Interfaces. In this publication by O’Reilly he tries to give us some valuable insights. But did he succeed?

Gestural interfaces are not new, but they are more popular than ever. Everywhere around us you see new ones popping up. And before everybody is coming up with their own interpretation and translation of what they should be and do, we must evaluate what has happened in the past and how we must deal with the future. Dan Saffer’s book is a great starting point for this exercise.

Let’s go through the book chapter by chapter.

The basics

The first chapter is an introduction to the subject. It gives a good and basic explanation. One interesting part of this chapter is ‘matching the gesture to the behavior’. This approach states that the best designs are those that ‘dissolve in behavior’. Here the product must become part of what the user is doing fluently. This is what good gestures should be, combining peoples natural behavior with a related action.

The human body

In the second chapter Saffer focuses on the human body, something a lot of designers often forget. The importance of understanding the mechanics of a human body is really fundamental in order to design good gestural interfaces. What is you body capable of doing? And what not? And we should not forget ergonomics. This is important even though there is no mouse. Saffer goes into this subject rather well, describing possible limitations and pointing us on some simple, but valuable facts (10% of adults are left-handed).

Patterns for touch, interactive & free form

After the first two chapters the book dives into possible patterns for gestural interfaces. It’s an important step Saffer tries to take here: trying to define an international set of patterns. Several companies are developing gestural interfaces and are creating their own patterns, independent of each other. Some, like Apple, are even trying to patent some patterns… so it’s really important to start describing a set that is recognized by users and freely usable by any company. It would be a great step if the patterns Saffer describes would be available online, open for discussion and growth.

Documenting gestural interfaces

Documenting static websites in the 90s was pretty straight forward. But with growing interactivity and gestural interfaces it is a challenge for designers to capture the way an environment or device interacts with a user. The fifth chapter of Designing Gestural Interfaces looks into different ways to document your project. The one I like the most is drawing storyboards, encapsulating not only the interface but also the context and how the user behaves in it. It’s a great way to test for yourself if the design works, but also a superb way of presenting the concept to clients.

Prototyping

When you’re done with the sketching you want to prototype an interface. In the sixth chapter of the book you get some low- and high-fidelity ways of prototyping. Amongst the low-fidelity is the creation of paper prototypes, which I really like. It’s an easy and really fast way of making a ‘working’ version of your product. You can give it to a colleague and let him play around with it. But even playing around with it yourself is really helpful, since you will ‘feel’ and see what it does. Of course paper prototyping is not always the best solution, since gestural interfaces can also be about bigger objects or even spaces. But these are also easily prototyped. Saffer gives some nice examples of these.

Communicating

For me chapter 7 “Communicating Interactive Gestures” was one of the more interesting ones. It learned me the true importance of communicating that there are interactive gestures or not. Imagine that there are some public spaces that have gestural interfaces, and some don’t… but it’s not communicated well. This will cause real stress, since people won’t know if, when, how and what they will trigger an event. It’s really important to be clear about this, stating when there is an interaction possible… what it triggers and how. But in order to achieve this we will have to find an international language, explaining this to us. It could be something as simple as an RSS icon, but it has to be something clear.

Future

In the last chapter Saffer tries to sketch his vision for the future. Unfortunately he plays on the safe side and only describes the main trends going on in the field. So when you follow the important sites in the IxD and UX field, you are covered and can skip this chapter.

Conclusion

Before I started reading this book I thought it would dive deep into the world of gestural interfaces. But I should have known better… Since this is the first serious attempt to capture the subject it is logical that it needs to introduce us to a lot of new things. And although only the first chapter is called ‘Introducing Interactive Gestures’ I have to say that the entire book is an introduction to the subject. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t give helpful information, but it never goes into the subject deep enough to totaly cover it. This makes Designing Gestural Interfaces a great book for people new to the subject, like students. Let’s take this book as the fundament and see some new ones building upon it, going more in-depth.

Book Details
Designing Gestural Interfaces
author: Dan Saffer
publisher: O’Reilly
details: 247 pages, paperback

Beautiful Evidence is Edward R. Tufte’s fourth book on visual evidence. His earlier books about this topic where ‘Visual Explanations’, ‘Envisioning Information’ and the highly praised ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’. Beautiful Evidence deals with analytical design and is a collection of critically analyzed (and very beautiful) images, principles and pitfalls which apply to everything from MS Powerpoint to sculptures.

Analyzing different visualization methods

The first four chapters respectively deal with mapped pictures, sparklines, links & causal arrows and words, numbers, images together. By critically analyzing beautiful images Tufte succeeds in explaining which characteristics make these methods work for a certain goal. Also for each method some principles are presented at the end of the chapter.

A great example of this is the analyses of Alfred Barr’s book cover / table of contents / history map for the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition in 1936, pictured here below on the left (on the right is Tufte’s stripped down version which he uses to explain the role the arrows play within this visualization).

Art-styles and a few artist are mapped on a grid of time whereas the color indicates if it was an internal (black) or neighboring (red) influence on Cubism and abstract art. The size of the nouns tells something about the historic relevance. The arrows represent causal paths (which only go in one direction). What it does so well, is focussing on causality and combining multiple sources and levels of data (which happen to be 2 of the principles mentioned in the next paragraph).

Although the causal paths in the art chart are complex, the idea of causality is simplistic.

Principles and pitfalls

After one hundred twenty-one pages of critically analyzing images, Tufte comes with a number of (fundamental) principles for analytical design which are derived from the principles of analytical thinking. He emphasizes that these principles apply broadly and are indifferent to language or culture or century or the technology of information display:

1. Show comparisons, contrasts, differences.
2. Show causality, mechanism, explanation, systematic structure.
3. Show multivariate data; that is, show more than 1 or 2 variables.
4. Completely integrate evidence; words, numbers, images, diagrams.
5. Thoroughly describe the evidence. Provide a detailed title, indicate the authors and sponsors, document data sources, show complete measurement scales, point out relevant issues.
6. Analytical presentations ultimately stand or fall depending on the quality, relevance, and integrity of their content.

He continues with some pitfalls which need to be avoided in order to apply these principles right. Important is that both cause and effect are shown because that’s how we can determine what happened, by comparing before and after. The most common pitfall is that people start ‘cherry-picking’ (making a selection of the content which only advances their point of view). Furthermore one should be careful that the conclusions drawn from the data aren’t overreaching and that meaningless content doesn’t replace the real evidence.

Microsoft Powerpoint and sculptural pedestals..?

Up till now, the structure of the book made perfect sense. From critically analyzing the most amazing images (from Galileo and Da Vinci to medical monitors) and coming up with principles and pitfalls, Tufte suddenly devotes an entire chapter to a full frontal attack on MS powerpoint in which he boldly states:

The PP slide format has the worst signal/noise ratio of any know method of communication on paper or computer screen.

The sudden change of topic might be strange, but the arguments he provides for his statements are solid. In twenty-eight pages he explains how powerpoint’s workflow forces people to create bad presentations. From the emphasis on bullet structures to providing the wrong layout for data visualizations. He thoroughly explains why powerpoint is contradicting with his principles. He even conducted comparisons of various presentation-tools using ten case-studies in which powerpoint was outperformed by all alternatives. In order to make better presentations we should use ‘good teaching’ as a metaphor in which explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism are the core ideas.

In the last two (short) chapters another rather strange switch of topic is made. These chapters briefly explain how pedestals influence the sculpture they carry, but they mostly consists out of photographs of sculptures (of which half are made by Tufte).

Conclusion

Beautiful Evidence is a typical ‘Tufte-book’, which means that it’s full with beautiful images and photographs, mostly from greats like Galileo, Da Vinci and Newton, which he critically analyzed. To me they’re all very inspirational and often work as eye-openers. They tell a lot about how people interact with and perceive visual information. Furthermore the book is full of principles and pitfalls which I’ve already written on a separate piece of paper to keep in mind for when I have to design analytical visualizations again. All very useful content.

The strange switches of topic make the book feel more or less like a collection of information then a solid coherent read. To me it feels like it does take away some of the strength of the book, however this doesn’t make me like the book any less. The chapter about powerpoint, though unexpected, was an eye-opener and also a very entertaining  read.

However, there are some topics in Beautiful Evidence which Tufte has already discussed in his earlier books, which sometimes results in somewhat of a deja vu when reading it. But there’s enough new content to keep me satisfied. I really like it and I would buy the book even if it was just for the critically analyzed images. A incredibly inspirational read.

Book details
Beautiful Evidence
author: Edward R. Tufte
published: Graphics Press, 2006
details: 213 pages, hardcover