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

Jakob Nielsen: video

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Scott: Designing with Lenses

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

Dan Saffer: Designing For New Technology

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

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

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

Donna Spencer: Design Games slides

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

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

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

When creating games Donna suggested the following helpful hints:

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

Luke Wroblewski: First Person User Interfaces slides

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Reiss – The Web Dogma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He then closed with this wisdom:

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

Susan Weinschenk – Neuro Web Design

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

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

Larry Constantine – Design for User Performance

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

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

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

These can then be organized in one of three ways:

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

Purpose < > Goal < > Condition.

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

The combined methods run though the following process:

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

Larry then summarized his entire talk down to the following:

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

Jared Spool – The Dawning of the Age of Experience

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

–

Header photograph by Pedro Moura Pinheiro

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

Sarah Morris: Design for Seduction

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

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

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

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

She then outlined 6 points for designing for seduction:

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

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

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

Panu Korhonen: Interaction Design Leadership Lessons Learned

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

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

Design

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

Process

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

People

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

David Malouf: Sketching: The Secret Sauce of Design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Header photo by Pedro Moura Pinheiro

UXLX or User Experience Lisbon[i], was the brain child of organizer Bruno Figuierro. Bruno put on an amazing event. It was clear from the moment I stepped off the plane and was greeted by Bruno[ii] (and Donna Spencer) that Bruno was putting out all the stops. His team crafted an experience that was one of the best conferences I have been to.

About UXLX

Getting set for UX-LX

The format of the conference was an interesting one, based on other UX conference experiences, but reconfigured to be all new. The first 2 days were end-capped by 3-hour workshops. These were opportunities to dig deeper into our practices. They were led by some of the best practitioners from around the world. In between the 2 workshops each day were short presentations from presenters who submitted abstracts for review and selection.  The last day was a binge of presentations by thought leaders of user experience. Each one could have been a closing keynote all its own. The nights were always filled with networking opportunities where at any given moment you could hear 4 or 5 languages being spoken around you. With about 25 countries represented from as far away as Australia & Brazil and as near as around the corner, this was truly an international conference.

Lisbon is a beautiful hilly city in the spirit of San Francisco or Rome. It had 7 hills like both with great views here and there. It felt much more like San Francisco with a big pay, long bridges (even 1 modeled after the Golden Gate) steep hills, and trolly cars that take you up and around them. Of course, it had an energy and culture all its own.

The night before the event, there was an ice breaker of wine tasting and fado (the local music of Lisbon). It was a first chance for people to start making people. I can say that the people I met that night, even though there were just a few, stuck with me. It was a nice touch with little fan fare.

Day 1

Luke Wroblewski (@lukewdesign): Influencing Strategy by Design

Luke’s workshop was one of my favorites of the conference. It was less a workshop than a great seminar on what it takes to influence strategy as a designer being a designer. This leads to Luke’s core thesis is that designers do not need to become business people to influence strategy, but our skills and thought models are a great complement and add value to the business strategy side as designers being designers.

• Don’t be a victim. Take responsibility and be ready to respond to needs as they arise. This will put you in a position to influence through co-ownership.
• “Leadership is not a position; it is action.” Donald McGannon
• Designer’s unique thinking processes is a wonderful complement to business analytical processes. This is best underscored by 2 dichotomies:
  • Risk averse vs. Failure open
  • Deductive/Inductive vs. Abduction (or referencing the past vs. looking to [& envisioning] the future)
• Design’s core competencies break down to: insights, synthesis, means and meaning
• Translated to pattern recognition, storytelling, visual communication and Empathy
• There are so many data sources out there for designers to access and then use to tell stories with the goal of visualizing to create empathy.
• Business looks for incremental growth. Design creates geometric and exponential growth.
• It is important to enter the conversation and create artifacts at the right level of the problem being worked on. “Where you start the conversation is where it is going to stay.”
• Framing: Design redefines the challenges facing the organization.
• Problem Solving:  Design finds new opportunities by solving existing problems.
• Function & Form: Design makes things work better.
• Style: Design: Design is the gateway to be hip & cool.
• No conscious design: Design value isn’t recognized. This attitude fosters design by default – however things come out is fine, because there are more important issues to deal with.
• We are in a world of metrics. We need to stop being scared of data and embrace data and understand that we have the power as designers to bring life to data in new ways that business people can’t as they are mostly locked into the visual & limitations of Excel.
• A high percentage of the hard work of having influence is being able to present with confidence.

I would say that one of the flaws of Luke’s presentation is his lack of understanding of the audience he is speaking to. It was even clear during the question and answer that some people were overwhelmed by an expectation of having to be expert visual designers, as Luke’s examples were a brilliant master class in visual communication. Most usability professionals, information architects and even many interaction designers are not formally trained or otherwise have experience in visual communication of this sort. I would further argue that many are even further on the continuum of Deductive/Inductive to Abductive thinkers than business people. They use scientific methods as grounding to the work they do. This dichotomy became dramatically apparent among the different speakers. Scrolling through the #uxlx twitterstream can give you insights to this.

Marcos Silva – How NUIs are changing HCI

I was very excited going into this talk, but must admit I came out less than thrilled. From the title I expected us to be told we have to do a serious re-think about older HCI principles in order to design for NUIs and that NUIs themselves are challenging HCI principles even more generally. I’m still waiting for the big challenge to Fitts Law. But this didn’t happen. Instead we were just given a history of interfaces and what NUIs were and why we should care. While the speaker only had 20 minutes, he did not use his time wisely to make a case for or teach his audience anything they either don’t already know or couldn’t figure out quite simply for themselves.

The one major take away I got out of this talk that I didn’t go in with is how the nature of gestural interfaces means that much of the interaction model is hidden and it is up to us all to share what we know and learn to others in order to make it work. While I never said it that way before, it has been noticed by myself and many others the Apple way of putting in subtle instructions of using their products in the very commercials that cause us to buy them.

Conference issue

Timing was a big struggle.Yes, we were late a lot, but what the problem really was about is that there is no slack so that this struggle with time could be better managed. In this case on Wednesday I was not able to make it into the second 20min. talk and because I left the room I was in I couldn’t go to the talk that was in the room I was supposed to be in.

Susan Weinschank (@thebrainlady): Designing Usable and Persuasive Websites

This was a beautiful master class on the psychology of behavior. Susan never missed a beat in telling us the great story of the mind. She separated the mind into 3 simple units of understanding: New, Mid and Old and explained what each meant and how we could be taking advantage of the strengths of each to create more usable artifacts, but to also create artifacts that are more persuasive. She did caution that not all uses of this information is ethical, so it is up to each designer to figure out how to use this information.

I really appreciated that Susan started out with the dichotomy of issues in design that deal with “can do” vs. those that deal with “will do”. She did underscore that sometimes design decisions can lead to both and further that sometimes they are in opposition with each other.

Then Susan listed different core behaviors of people and how we can optimize our designs for them:

• People don’t want to work or think more than they have to
• Progressive disclosure: only display what you need now, but have easy access to what is need (with easy ways out without loosing context)
• Path of least resistance: users will always choose the path that feels easiest.
• Examples: We always like examples.
• Affordances: We interact with things when we can tell what it is we can do.
• Only the features they need (and nothing more).
• Defaults: We like when others make decisions for us, or fill in the obvious data (so long as we can override).

Visual Systems

• Color can be used for imply associations (but be careful about color blindness)
• Don’t use colors like red & blue that don’t work well together because they are on opposite sides of the light spectrum.
• Grouping through use of white space. Nearness implies association while distance implies disassociation.
• To make icons more recognizable use the canonical perspective (always from the top a little and from the side)

Typography

• Most standard fonts are just as readable whether serifed or not, normal case or all caps are equally readable. Size is more important. Too small is bad, for everyone.
• Things are hard to read on a screen (backlit like LCD and OLED) because of the higher luminescence.
• Break it up into chunks
• Use proper fonts at proper sizes.
• White background with high contrast color/shades
• Oh! And make the content worth it!
• Line length: People read faster with longer line length, but prefer shorter.
• Keep density (aka clutter) to a minimum.
• People CANNOT multitask regardless of age. Everyone takes a productivity hit when attempting to multitask.
• Human memory is fallible, complicated and reconstructed.
• Chunk things
• Give strong landmarks and other contextual markers
• Group things into 3 to 4 items.

We Are Social

• We look for social validation
• Will look to peers before making decisions

Reciprocity

• We will do activities when there is a perceived sense of debt.
• Bonding: We prefer to do things synchronously with others in person.
• It is inconclusive whether or not really being in person matters across all types of online social activity, but synchronicity definitely matters.
• Laughing releases hormones that make us feel good. (Typing LOL doesn’t work.)
• Strong ties/weak ties:
• There are a maximum number (like less than 7) of people in your network (who ARE near you) who can be strong ties.
• Weak ties can have 1000’s
• Mirror Neurons
• You feel similar effects watching someone do something as doing it yourself.

Attention

• Inattention Blindness: People are blind to the things they are not paying attention to.
• Tendency not to notice when things change outside of our visual field
• Need to make it quite obvious that things have changed.
• Ways to get people’s attention:
• Cyan/magenta
• Big words
• Use fun & novelty: pay attention to what is fun & novel
• Things that are different stand out
• People are easily distracted
• People Crave Information
• Dopamine Loop: Dopamine causes us to look for things.
• We wouldn’t look for food if we didn’t have dopamine
• Searching for information creates more dopamine which causes us to want to look for more information (the loop)
• We want more choices to keep searching. However, this leads to paradox of choice:
• We want more choices
• However when we are given too many choices we act less often
• When searching we need feedback to corroborate requests happen.
• Unconscious Processing
• Commitment
• Get people to make small commitments and then loyalty grows and kicks in to allow for bigger commitments and stronger loyalty.
• Emotional events get processed differently than unemotional events.
• The Old Brain reacts to the big 3: food, sex and safety
• Using appropriate imagery and contexts can be very persuasive.
• Advertising has been doing this for years.
• Scarcity: When we perceive something to be scarce we begin to crave it.
• Habits are very powerful. They tend to hold across different contexts.
• Being used to turning on a light switch as up is hard to unlearn.

Framing & Anchoring

• This is a type of suggestion that sets in motion a specific type of meaning. 
This is probably one of the most powerful forms of persuasion because it is unconscious and because it usually works best with enough critical mass of people involved.
• People make mistakes. Be ready for it, in all its contexts.
• Use confirmations if the consequences are severe.
• If you know it’s an error then correct it for them.
• If the task is error prone then have people do things one at a time.
• You make mistakes too:
• Iterate your design.
• Test your designs.
• Susan uses http://usertesting.com to pilot her scenarios for in person tests.

It holds 5 liters of beer with a tap on the bottom.....

The networking party w/ 2m beers

On the 1st night of the conference we had a great party at a local micro-brewery right next to the event. They had the above “draft pitchers”. Beer was flowin’ for sure.

[i]Lisbon was originally called Luxboa and so they still use the abbreviation LX. Seriously, it was everywhere in the city.

[ii] I was an invited workshop leader for the conference.

Set up picture by Pedro Moura Pinheiro , beer picture by Dave Malouf / CC BY-NC 2.0