Evaluating Web Design – webinar from Navigation Arts

I attended a free webinar given by Matt Schleyer, NavigationArts’ Director of Design,  on how to think critically about a web design.  I noted some of his points and thought I’d share them here.

If you want the slides or the recording, you can find both on the Navigation Arts website.

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THE POWER OF APPEARANCE

The most powerful form of communication is non-verbal. What people see (visual design) has the power to comfort, motivate, direct or distract and is a silent yet mission critical deliver channel for your brand.

According to the Stanford Web Credibility Project http://credibility.stanford.edu/ [last updated in 2007], the number 1 (#1!) credibility criteria is visual design.

ART & SUBJECTIVITY Or You say tomato, I say bowling ball.

At heart we are all visual communicators – what we wear, what we drive, how we decorate the house. We all have a point of view on matters involving aesthetic. Design is not inherently quantifiable. Design is not formulaic. There will never be a design solution that will satisfy everyone.

Traditional Media vs. new Media -

Traditional Media [advertising] is frequently an unwelcome guest thrust upon unsuspecting or unwilling participants. (commercials, magazine inserts)

The world of design is no longer linear, where the point was to capture your attention, not to have you interact.

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USER CENTERED DESIGN

It is imperative to create not award winning design, but appropriate design.

Smart user interface is able to reconcile the oft competing demands of the business goals, the technical limitations and the users’ needs.

User Centered Design requires far more than a set of engaging visuals. The interface must be informed by, and built on top of, strategically developed IA and sound technology and populated with rich content.

THE DESIGN PROCESS

Ask stakeholders/participants:

• to give you a 30 second speech explaining what the site does/should do (you will get different answers and this is a good thing).
• to tell you what they want users to leave their site with? What constitutes a success for their users? (again… different answers are important to get).

DESIGN EXPLORATIONS

When presenting your client your designs, 2 approaches are sufficient, 3 may be pushing it.

More than 2 (3 tops!) just creates more headaches (noise) for the client and will lead to a less successful design.

Although it is difficult, do everything in your power to remove your personal feelings and biases from the process. Even working on a project for a few days or weeks will lead to emotional attachments to the product. It is important to acknowledge and respect that so that you can avoid mistakes.

USER TESTING

Do whatever you can to not remove this from the development phase. DO NOT SKIMP HERE.

Your proximity to the project and your acute emotional ties can and WILL cloud your judgment.

Make every effort to accommodate reasonable user feedback (even if it conflicts with your personal opinion).

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EVALUATION QUESTIONS

THE BASICS:

Is all the critical information above the fold (1024 x 768 resolution)?

Is the experience consistent?

Is the interface transparent?

THE ‘ABLES’

Is it Maintable?

Is it Scalable?

Is it Memorable?

IA Summit ‘09+IxD ‘09 = RedUX DC (part 2)

Cindy Chastain – @cchastain – Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design

1st activity is to prototype a device that gets folks from point A to point B

2nd activity is to prototype a device that gets folks from point A to point B in the manner which is most comfortable for them.

As designers we too often neglect to define a coordinating force behind the scope of what we are designing, making or building.

Tangible elements of a web expericnet – visual design (creative), copy (marketing), information content (content stragegist), UI/System response (IA, IX designers), error message (engineering), music (outside source) — these are all created independently but experienced holistically by our users. To unify our design process, use themes. The themes of filmmakers. Subject matter, topic, or idea on which a work of art or literature is based.

For a storyteller, theme is used as a compass. Examine every element in terms of the theme. The theme coordinates the elements of the story

Theme can inform strategy. Strategy is very much dependent upon themes. Theme defines functional and content requirements.

Themes get us one step closer to deisgning for pleasure, emotion and meaning.

Theme Defined: Theme is an overarching statement or phrase that encapsulates the value and focus of the experience that we intend to deliver.

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Donna Spencer – @maadonna – Design Games

Games are fun. We work better when we’re having fun.

Design the home page — design a page that would work best for them (don’t worry about stakeholders or any other users).

Divide the dollars – this is good for feature prioritization. Allocate and defend allocations.

Free Listing – list out as many of X as you can.

Reversal – look at your problem and instead of looking at it head on, reverse it. At the summit we brainstormed how to make airport security worse

To make your games more effective, make very clear instructions and keep your goals in mind.

Web site for Design Games: designgames.com.au

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David Malouf – @daveixd – Foundation

What is Foundation? Creates a solid base of core theories and crafts – transcends all design disciplines (includes art history, color, 2D design, 3D design)

Pratt Institute – Brooklyn, NY – Rowena Reed Kostellow (The elements of design) – Founded the Industrial Design School at Design.

Breaks down as sketch (and sketch and sketch….!). Building an endurance for creativity.

components of foundation: line, plane, volume, texture and color.

It has a language and therefore can be critiqued.

Does IxD have foundations? Not in any course, I have taken or seen… but still…. do we build anything? Is there something that we shape and mold even if that something is invisible?

Element Foundations of IxD — Time, Abstraction, Metaphor.

Everything in design has some aspect of negativity (white space),

Behavior is our Medium. What does that mean?

Time – attention or posture (read: Cooper’s concepts around posture).

Frequency – how many times in X period

Rhythm – predictability or syncopation

Delay – in our responses, in the system (negativity?)

Abstraction – level of directness or interaction. Includes command line > Finger tap click (most abstract to least abstract continuum).

Everything in computers is a metaphor – Dan Saffer IA Summit 2005

Movement has an aesthetic. There is a direct correlation between how good a motion feels and how effective the motion is.

It isn’t the power of our tools that matter, but it is knowing what to do with them.

Beauty is not about “liking.”

Okay, okay… this went waaaay fast for me to get down. Go to his web site:

http://davemalouf.com

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Dave Cooksey – @saturdave – Taxonomy Validation

I actually went to (and blogged) this presentation in Memphis. Check it out, so I don’t repeat myself

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Dante Murphy – @dantemurphy – State Mapping

Understanding the elements and their attributes is not the same as understanding the system.

The whole must be greater than the sum of its parts. Mapping a single journey, or single use, is not effective. We need to look at multiple journeys to understand the system. In order to understand the multiple journeys even more effectively, introduce time. Better than a use-case, we need to identify who they are, and how their conditions change and thus their behaviors change.

Behavior, Activity and Structure must be combined with state.

I’ve got a PC, I use Visio: I’m a fucking caveman.

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Dan Willis – @uxcrank – Time to Spit on the Table

We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish. -Marshall McLuhan

Culture is like water. We don’t know who made it.

Eric Reiss on Inappropriate Deliverables: had to present a flow chart for how to tackle cold calls. Addressed the manager by his first name and used sticky notes (out of normal for their culture). Made the manager understand that the problem was a work in progress. They got actively involved.

Existing culture expects something, give them something that they don’t expect (Inappropriate tactics) and get desired results.

Example: fining people when they break the ground rules of the meetings. Using messy prototype to explain functionality.

Things to keep in mind:

Inappropriate doesn’t (always) mean rude.

Understand the existing culture and gauge the ROI

Get tactile, Get personal

Use humor, but constantly track the discomfort in the room.

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Jared Spool – @jmspool – Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon

Product that Amazon used to sell – Tuscan Whole Milk. Reviews ran away with themselves…

I like the way Amazon does it. Why don’t we do it just like Amazon?

How do we deal with this question?

Engage through content.

Quality of reviews – shipping info? not so great. Really verbose review getting into details… really valuable. Problem is that there are 3,947 reviews for that product. Chronological presentation of reviews failed; the good reviews got buried. So they added the helpfulness question and it was worth about 2.7 billion dollars to Amazon in 2008. There was no launch, there was no press release. They just put it up and people started using it.

Lesson learned: More people look at negative reviews than at positive reviews. Sorted them into most helpful favorable review and most helpful critical review.

Caution: be careful when emulating features.

Target uses the same software as Amazon (the exact same software). People use the reviews completely differently on target than they do on Amazon. A lot more negative reviews, every alarm clock review was negative.

There is a dynamic about writing reviews – when you write them, why you write them. Ratio of reviewers to purchasers 1 in 1,300. Purchases required for 20 reviews: 26,000. Would require 1.3 million product views.

Amazon also has visitors, we should get those, too!

Amazon uses all sorts of user-generated content, we should, too. Caution: Not every experiment pans out.

Example: tag cloud on Amazon. #notinterested #wasteofmoney

It’s worth experimenting for Amazon. (every 5 bux they add to every purchase on their site is an addition 875 million dollars).

Nobody ever remembers/notices an Amazon redesign. They are changing all the time.

Amazon turns its inventory every 20 days. Best Buy turns its inventory every 74 days. Standard retail payment terms are 45 days. Essentially, Best Buy is in debt. Amazon is not. This how they are able to give us free shipping and discounted prices.

Great presentation! Get the slides on slideshare (upcoming).

IA Summit ‘09+IxD ‘09 = RedUX DC (part 1)

Whitney Hess – @whitneyhess – Evangelizing Yourself – You can’t change the world if noone knows your name – IA Summit ‘09

Self promotion is a means to an end. By promoting ourselves and helping to educate people, we can help the whole community of UX folks, thrive: Evangelizing ALL OF US.

What is your life’s purpose? Is what you are doing now going to help you get there?

http://thisisindexed.com/

Common Sense is not Common Practice.

Part 1: Sharing your message

You don’t have to be an extrovert to network.

Can you explain in only one sentence why you are important, without any hesitation.

Play up your strengths. Accept your weaknesses

You must have a blog. We are all experts. Write as frequently as possible. Read everything, always share.

Use Twitter. Constantly share your ideas and opinions. Follow people that inspire you.

Avoid negativity. User your real name. Don’t lock your tweets. It’s important to get into the conversations.

The opposite of working is NOT working. -someone smart.

Accept invitations for professionally enriching events, seek out events. If there aren’t events in your area: Start your own or even just ask someone to coffee. Make the time in your schedule.

Remember: we are all each others resources.

Exude confidence: Focus on past successes. Recognize your strengths. Even if you’re scared, do it anyway.

Be willing to walk away from negative situations.

Shut up and listen: We’ve got two ears and one mouth to use in proportion.

Be a leader:

• organize events
• mentor other
• communicate hope, optimism and enthusiasm.

Don’t feed the trolls.

Be reliable, be grateful.

There are no rules; I’m making this up as I go along.

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Christopher Fahey – @chrisfahey – Notes on Starting a Design Consultancy

partner at www.behaviordesign.com. blogs at www.graphpaper.com

The Crucible:

Your job is your business school and incubator — observe, network, participate, collect.

• Collect contracts materials/methods.
• Collect documentation materials/methods
• Pay attention to what goes wrong: how did clients screw the firm? What methodologies didn’t work? Who were the assholes? You’re going to have to know what not to do.
• What makes a bad boss? What makes a bad employee?

Forming a Team: Defining the initial identity. A thousand hours later…. Behavior

Pros of starting your business with partners (it’s kind of like getting married):

• complimentary skills
• diverse experiences
• share decisions making
• specialization
• collective wisdom

Business skills required:

• sales and marketing – you might think the phone is going to just start ringing. it won’t.

know your clients; you’re clients don’t know you.

make stories not deliverables

selling abilities is more important that selling ideas.

negotiation and pricing: don’t sell yourself short. charge high prices. it’s better to lose a bid because you were too expensive than because your stuff sucked.

• Project Management

PMs have to know how to exert power

• Company Management

You have to be thinking about money all the time. If you can’t manage money at home, you’re going to have a really hard time running a business.

Stress. There are a lot of mouths to feed. There is a culture to maintain.

You need a Business Plan. How big should we be? What does our brand mean? What types of clients and projects are we aiming for? Do this 1-2 per year (plans change).

So why start a business?

• Power
• Glory
• Freedom
• The Thrill

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Todd Zaki Warfel - @zakiwarfal – Sketching and Paper Prototyping

Let’s talk wireframes – haven’t done a wireframe in 2 years. Don’t really intend on doing one ever again.

Consider the alternative: We do a lot of sketching and prototyping.

6-8-5: six to eight sketches in less than five minutes. Goal is quantity over quality. Quality comes later (during the critique). Put everyone’s on the wall and then pitch (3 min)/critique (2 min). Do this with clients for 6-8 cycles (takes about 6 hours). It’s incredibly intense. Only do this on Friday. Your employees will not be able to work the next day

charette: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charrette

When you are sketching you can do various things for emphasis: line weight, shadow, labels.

Why prototype?

• the client can get the concept better if there is something they can “click around with” to “get it”
• you can actually test it (and get feedback).
• technical feasibility
• test run on building this.
• demonstrates transitions (not possible in static frames)
• for ourselves — working through our designs.

What happens if you don’t prototype?

• not those things above?
• recent project had 17 iterations of a homepage – if we had started the prototyping earlier…
• angry clients

8 guiding principles – these apply to paper, hardware, web sites,

1. Know your audience and intent – who’s going to consume it? what’s the goal of the prototype?
2. Plan a little. Prototype the rest.
3. Set expectations. This is the biggest failure point. If you don’t set expectations for what the prototype is going to be, then you are going to get disappointed consumers.
4. You CAN sketch.
5. It’s not the Mona Lisa.
6. If you can’t make it, fake it. (simulate AJAX with keynote, .ppt, even paper)
7. Prototype only what you need. Don’t do the whole entire system

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Olga Howard – @olgahow – Making the Case for Social Networks in Organizational Settings

What is our identity? Inside of work vs. Outside of work.

We are not just our title. Mom, Wife, Friend, Artist, IA,

How does social networking add value to your life?

10 years ago, Hal needed a job in Copenhagen. He sent out a message via sixdegrees.com and voila! Someone knew someone who new Hal who needed a job.

We learn at home 24/7. We go to work and we are in a totally different environment. At home, we are able to reach the broadest possible audience. At work, we are told that we have to ask our boss. At home, we are able to contribute our knowledge to the broadest possible audience. At work, we often don’t even communicate with the person 3 cubes away. At home we can skype, IM, tweet. At work, we have to use email (old technology). At home, we have efficiency. When we go to work, all of that is gone.

At home, we can gather info fast, we participate with the broadest possible audience, we communicate and contribute. We want this at work.

The small world problem: Wanted to know how long it takes for info to go from one place to another when you don’t know where the recipient is. 160 people were given a message for a person in Boston. It took each person 5-6 steps to actually get the message to the intended recipient. This is the origin of 6 degrees of separtion.

Finding Information: Social Platform vs. Email – Which is faster?

Seeking information via Email: If we think about how long it takes for anyone to figure out if the email pertains to you, consider if it has the info you need, figure out who else might have the info… takes about 4 minutes. If we take 10 people and we say that it takes them 4 minutes to look at the message they receive before sending it off to 10 people. Etc… takes about 7.25 hours of company time.

Seeking information via Social Network will take about 40 minutes of company time.

After 9/11, the CIA was mandated to improve their internal communications. They created intellipedia. What was valuable to them was not that they had this scenario, but now their materials were being validated by their colleagues. THey are now reaching the broadest possible audience.

IF we agree that people are the value of the organization, then we also agree that the value of the organization is the sum of the knowledge of the people.

Social platforms strip away function geograph and titles. All that’s left is what makes us people. – Erik Johnson of Clueless.

Titles are constructs created by organizations in order to classify us into a monetary and task system – Anders Ramsay

The 150 rule: Once you get more employees than that… ?

The Serendipity Factor (Nathan Eagle) – wants to connect people based on what they like to do.

Email and wasted effort: 10% of your email is garbage. You could almost do all the work that you actual need to do in the amount of time that it takes you to go through the garbage. Imagine a social environment. Internal twitters.

In the future:

Companies will get flatter; what’s good for my peers is good for me [Gore is a good example (no org chart)].

The next phase… okay we need social networks… now what?

indiux.org

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Livia Labate – @livlab – User Experience Health Check – A measure a day keeps the redesign away

Developed to help product management communicate progress to the client.

Why do it?

Gives us a language to describe how things improve over time and how our efforts are affecting that improvement. Measures successes. It’s applicable to any product or service. It introduces a shared language for teams to discuss elements of the project.

How do you do it?

- Deconstruct the service – list capabilities and chunk logical group

- Choose competive benchmarks (e.g. who does this well? who does this very poorly?) Select at least one for each capability.

- Establish a scoring criteria – essentially arbitrary scale: problem area, functional, parity with benchmarks (average), very good, better than most, Best in Class

- Set target scores – How good do we need to be at this to meet our business goals and user expectations? The important thing: you have to agree on the score. Why wouldn’t we be aiming for 100 for everything? Because we have to determine which are most important for our business goals.

- Set current score based on.. The team is empowered to disagree and defend their positions.

- Tally up and communicate… doesn’t matter what your deliverable is. Whatever works, just communicate.

- Chart your progress re: all of these benchmarks over time. You can use this to measure the effect upon the quality of the user experience.

For more info: uxhealthcheck.com

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Joe Sokohl – @mojoguzzi – A Real Nowhere Man

Principles and tools around managing remote people remotely.

Communcation

It’s very critical to heighten your skills and approaches.

Flexibility

Fit where you need to fit. We have stereotypes for a reason. You need to be aware of them. Change your meetings to work with your teams in other time zones. Don’t be disrespectful; bind your team together. Be ethical.

Sensitivity

Don’t have a have a meeting meeting with your team members in New Orleans on Mardi Gras.

Courage

Stand up and do the right things for your folks. When managing employees remotely, remember “you are the umbrella that keeps the shit rain off of them.”

Hope

Give your team members something to strive for. If you are communicating with your staff in a negative way, it’s going to have a huge negative aspect.

Email – the lowest common denominator, ubiquitous and effective. As a manager, you really need to work on how you use email. There is no inflection, no rolling of the eyes. Avoid sarcasm, avoid terseness, definitely spell things out. Try to avoid lazy contractions (ya’ll).

Telephone – Don’t be quiet and mousy. Be clear and direct.

Collaboration tools – You want to give your team evidence that you are supporting the tools that will help them feel a part of the team.

Microblogging – #keepintouchwithyourteamwherevertheyare – think about your message.

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IA Summit 2009 – Panel – Evolve or Die!

Panelists:

Gene Smith
Russ Unger
Joshua Porter
Christina Wodtke  

automated IA:

• contentsense – content on a web site that reorganizes itself around your declared intent — a search refer, behavioral 
• cookies — they can do it faster and cheaper. 

SEO is a lot bigger than we are. Their business is findability.  Our business is findability. SEO is usurping IA?

issues that we are dealing with:

• social design
• massive ia
• user-generated ia
• automation/automated ia
• creating tools
• evolution

why do we think IA is stuck?

• perceptions on the part of industry. 
• certain organizations/practitioners have locked ia down(?) into a box (sitemaps and wireframes) — the people who are really doing IA don’t come here. 
• IAs (individuals) are not stuck, but the practice is stuck

The people who are in the IA box really fetishize their deliverables.

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Russ Unger:  If an ordinary person can understand what you do, you’re on your way to being a commodity.     

commodity – something that is in demand but something that can be acquired anywhere in equal quality.

“Little IA”

If you want to focus on sitemaps, taskflows, wireframes – you have a few options, you can work for a huge company that can support people to do these basic tasks

“Big IA”

Being a “big IA” encompasses a huge list of things… entire life cycle of a project:  business requirements, consumer research, interaction design, IA, brand design, visual design, QA,

Big IA = UX… it’s really not the U… it’s really Experience Design   

The polar bear book is not where to start.

Advice: get out of our comfort zone as much as possible. 

Contributing to the commodification and diluting the practice? Jobs have been going overseas for years. How many people own furniture made in america? how many of us can afford to? good enough wins sometimes. 

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Josh Porter

We are all designers here. We’re all on the same team, but we find things to fight about all the time.

Advice: the problem should always trump the process
A lot of the focus at places like this is about “doing things the ‘right’ way” The fact that you use or don’t use a particular tool or technique shouldn’t matter. It’s about solving the problem.

the deliverable that matters is the final product. Our wireframes/prototypes are not the final product. Our designs will change before they are release and/or immediately after.

behavior first, design second…. we justify by process. we’re doing this, because we’re using this technique. not because this is what we’re seing about how our stuff or the client’s stuff is being used. 

Information Architecture as a term – 
-the term information has a negative quality about. (read The Social Life of Information) — the way you frame something, the way you think about something, changes the way you act on it (info-prefixation).

  For example, my Republican friends say that the problem with government is government itself. This means that i can’t talk to them  about what an efficient government would look like. 

We really need to focus on the architecture part of information architecture. 

“every type of architecture elicits a different type of participation”  -mwesch in the keynote
    
In NYC they said, if you build a plaza you can build a taller building. Lots of plazas were built. Lots of them were not very good.  This is because no one ever talked about what makes a good plaza.

In the same way that we have an information problem. To solve the plaza problem — give people places to sit, realize that the primary activity of the plaza is people watching so place the plaza near places where people are walking/moving/acting.

Architects know this: the space defines the behavior. 

Space defining behavior is easier to see in the physical world, but it is every bit as true in the digital world.
Designers create environments, structures, in which things happen. 

Examples:

facebook has symmetric relationships – must reciprocate friendship
private profiles
lossy activity streams (until last week)Twitter has asymmetric relationships – followees don’t have to follow followers.
public profiles
non-lossy stream

structure allows behavior, (elicits, determines, controls, restricts, influences, etc.)
this is what IA is. 

Moral:

If IA continue to approach their challenges as information or content-based problems the field will become increasingly irrelevant.  BUT if they can approach their work tas designing environments/structures that influence behavior, I think it has a chance. 

There are 2 different types of behaviors:
-directed behavior – measurable outcomes
-undirected behavior – immeasurable outcomes

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Christina Wodtke
what if we became more IA-y?

you are not your title. 

I’m tired of being an IA. We’re outgrowing our titles. It’s not actually what i do:  I’m a product manager. I’m a content strategist …

my kid eats snails.  Her favorite book is  But I am an Alligator. 
She’s at the point where she tries everything; she has not determined who she is yet. 

so what do you do?

• content inventories — I’ve done one of these once. it took a very long time. I can get mechanical turk to do it, much more cheaply.  i love knitting, but i can’t make a living knitting. it takes too long for me to make a sweater and i can get the one at the gap for almost nothing.
• A thesaurus is not a dinosaur [there might have been a time when this statement wasn't true...]
• Navigation. we do “wayfinding.”  nobody uses the navigation bar, we just use it as a method to show people the type of things that they will find on our site. they use it as a scope note to guide their 

98-2 rule: we spend 98 percent of our time on the nav and the users spend 2 percent of their time there.

• Google spell check… it’s not actually spell check, it’s a recommendation system, it’s pattern recognition. it’s data analysis. it’s very satisfying and it really seems to work.
• wireframes… the reason we do wireframes is because we didn’t trust our designers to understand visual hierarchy.  new solution: smarter designers

“people don’t still do that, do they?”

           prototyping… let’s create prototypes (interactive) instead.             

Are Rosenfeld & Morville IA’s? No, they are search experts. If data is your thing, why not do algorithm design? Go deep. Work on recommendation systems. True recommendation systems are based on analyzing human behavior.

what can YOU do?

• design rules for systems (dan brown’s talk)
• create social spaces
• design algorithms
• tackle privacy vs. engagement issues
• select technology platforms
• work on recommendation systems.

if we’re moving on, is IA itself evolving?

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discussion.
Q. is there a career path for IA?
how many senior/juniors are doign the same thing?
job description for senior ia — the things listed there are not included in what is listed in the definition of IAs – we haven’t defined what IA is well enough for those that hire us. Questions we need to ask our clients: what would make you happy? what outcome do you want to get from this??? what will make you go home feeling like we had a good day. what will make you smile when you write the check??

Q. “i’m very happy being a tool”
the problem with becoming a commodity is that your price drops. 
the danger is trying to continue to sell wireframes when no one is buying them. the process is good as long as it is not the end in itself. if the wireframe is an illustration of a point to help everyone get an understanding, then it’s good. but what ELSE could we be doing?  where are their opportunities to get it better? 

who is teaching their clients to wireframe? i don’t want them 3 years from now. i’m doing it for them and teaching them to do it for themselves. 

Q. (a. hinton) – we get tied up in orthodoxy. orthodoxies can come up pretty quickly. 
a wireframe is just a polished sketching. at some point, sketching got hardened into wireframing.  

preciousness is the problem, not wireframes. 

Q. It’s a myth that smart designers do not need wireframes. i have really smart designers and they do require wireframes (e.g. jeffrey zellman)

what do you mean by quality — the interface has to be down on paper. there is a weaving that has to be done to translate between the user research and the design. the translation piece doesn’t have to be a wireframe, but there has to be some translation.

 ebay’s business argument – a/b testing. if you let us a/b test, we’ll increase the business. 
it’s outcomes that matter. it’s moving the numbers. 

trying to sell to really bored middle managers. 

Q. For businesses, commoditization is good. and we’re working for businesses. 
It’s okay to outsource your design, it’s just not okay to outsource your design strategy.  You can replace product, it’s the thinking that you can’t replace.  The issue is: how do we differentiate ourselves?

IA Summit 2009 – Donna Spencer – Design Games

What are design games?
they are always something that will provide an outcome that can be used in a project

why design games?
because it’s much more fun to have fun at work
by playing a game, we use different parts of our brain. we can stimulate creativity
if you tweak your process to make it more fun you will get much better outcomes

games to play with users

• design the home page — very good for focus groups – just ask people to design a home page that will be perfect for them. it doesn’t have to “look like a home page” (logos, nav bars, etc.) just think about the things that are important and get those down. this will tell you a lot – what is most important to people
• divide the dollar – give the group a set of features (or have them brainstorm a set of features) and then have them divide the money across the features – and justify their decisions.  what if they just divide it equally??
• metadata games — use to illustrate that people call the same thing the very different thing. [ex. what do you call x (image) cozy -- terminology is so damn important... we need to know the terms that people use. ]
• Freelisting — good for terminology – tell me as many of x as you can think of. (e.g. tell me as many dogs you can think of). the ones that she says first are the ones that have meaning for her, dogs they have owned, do own, etc. can get an idea of her mental model. list varieties of beer. very good way to identify cognitive patterns… 
• card sorting — write content ideas on index cards and ask users to sort them in ways that make sense to them. this is a very common technique, but we can make this more “game-like” – prizes, time contstraint, get fun with the content. 

games for design teams

• idea cards — you have some sort of problem that you are working on (design challenge), brainstorming, draw three cards from the deck and come up with a solution that uses those concepts (ex. audience, integrity, travel, difficult, risk, images, personality, impersonal, etc.)
• reversal – rather than tackling the problem head on, reverse the problem and solve that. [ex. going through airport security is awful. how could it be made worse?]

planning design games 

• you definitely have to want an outcome, so you must plan to get that. 
• rules/constraints have to be defined
• have to figure out a way to make sure that everyone is involved. 
• prizes? criteria? how will success be measured – how to communicate that without corrupting the experience
• instructions – make them clear to avoid stress for the players. [ex. identify the things you want to see on the home page, discuss which are most important and why, sketch a home page that represents those ideas this can be pictoral or done in words (show examples to make people realize there is more than one way to do it).] 

More games (suggested by audience):

• design the box - use with clients, product team, lots of folks – we all know how the product works. we all know how boxes work. if your product was a box, design the box. if the agency was a product, design it’s box. now sell that product to the rest of the team.  if i was a product, how would i sell myself?
• brain writing. use sticky notes. every time you have an idea, stick it up to the wall. then sort it. 
• different hats - pretend you are a person from a brand designing your site? (?)
• creativity cards – oblique strategies. posting them on twitter as oblique chirps. 

————————

maadmob.com.au
@maadonna

IA Summit – Naomi Norman – How to Work Within “Government Time”

abstract 

User research  

• must be done early. the earlier te better.
• cuts through deliberation, makes decisions easier
• use large samples

Quantitative methods:

• user surveys
• scored interviews-
• data mining
• card sorting, cluster analysis

Qualitative Methods
-A/B testingdefine your consultation 

• train your client
• user research
• content development
• consultation-your process

learning to love governance

• know your client’s governance
• collaborate to establish it
• know each group’s responsiblity
• target your communication appropriately
• get them to champion your process

documentaiton and presentation

• establish an audit trail – all comments need to be codified, documented and presented. It’s important to recap this, helps to gain consensus

what role do we play?

• faciliatate engagement
• give people a voice
• raise awareness of issues

….

Our goal is to transform government services for the benefit of our users.

ROI metrics for gov’t must tie back into their mission. But to be successful, we must understand their are their desired outcomes. 

• reduce fone calls?
• increase traffic to a particular area of the site?

The Government loves consensus and committee based design. Some tips to help:

• User research will help to illustrate facts of use (not politics of opinions)
• affinity diagramming – aids the group decision making process

Biggest key to getting things done: Find out who needs to sign off on it and how you can get that to happen. 

IA Summit 2009 – A. Hinton – You are (Mostly) Here

[slides are here]

Digital Space & The Context Problemfake news:  They are going to watch you in Vegas.  They will video everything you do. They will record everything you spend money on. They will keep a line-by-line record of everything you do in the city. Then they are going to notify everyone you know….

This is exactly what facebook did (beacon). what was the outcome? giant user revolt!

issues:
-What does the word “friend” mean? In the same way that ”ready-mades” (dada) disrupted notions of what “Art” is. changed the frame of reference for the “object” – changed the way people think about high art, low art and culture, mediated environments have changed our conceptions of relationships and information sharing.the issue is: labels – what we call what we see/do
[Colin Powel's presentation picture of "WMD's" in Iraq relabled as an IHOP] 

the issue is: situational ethics – how we justify our actions within different contexts

—————————————————————————————————————

Everybody Loves Brain Scans:
frontal lobe (logic, reason, most recently evolved area of the brain – spock) vs limbic system (id – capt. kirk). basically we perform cross-benefit analyses between the two on a constant basis. (Capt Kirk vs. Spock) 

• cheap wine vs expensive wine: the brain scan showed different neural reactions to the same wine with different labels. something about it costing more makes it taste better (literally). 

“you all are IA’s, you label things for a living – i’m simplyfing things, but… “It’s all about labels. It’s labels that are important. Context and language are highly symbiotic. They affect each other in many different ways that we don’t entirely understand. 

A map is to help you navigate streets. This neighborhood is made of streets with names and other stuff without names – Boylan heights (research by denis wood, nc state) – can listen to this at This American Life, episode 110. 

What do the maps mean?

Jack-o-lanterns map correlates to newsletter mentions map. what does this mean? No matter who lives there, the houses are mentioned in the newsletter. Do certain houses attract certain people? 

“the territory was there first, and the map came later but the map has a lot of power over how we understand the territory.”

Denis Wood’s  book is about this. 

There are fuzzy boundaries between real and virtual. 

Vertigo - describes the effect of the realization that we are actually in more than one place in the same at the same time.

Context collapse – radical readjustments of context. They’re really screwing up when we think about what it means to be “here”

There is all this “fuzzy human stuff” that we are trying to make into data

“love” 

• go to facebook and say which of the 6 mutually exclusive labels about that love relationship – single, in a  relationship, married, engaged, open relationship,  etc. 

Eats Shoots & Leaves – something as small as a comma can change what we mean in a significant way. 

nook vs stadium

• d vs @ 
• private vs public
• re: vs re: all
• these distinctions are not so obvious in the machine context. 

context shapes identity:

• linkedin – professional me
• facebook – school me
• chemistry – dating me
• etsy – crafty me
• livejournal – private-thoughts me
• myspace – party & music me

crossover of contexts:

• are you friends with your kids on facebook? your boss?

 People are uploading pics from high school and carefully tagging them….”i deserve to have that in the past” 

Our identities are tied to the spaces that we are in.

We are in multiple spaces.

What does that mean about our identies? The self as a multiple, distributed system… a decentered…  – sherry turkle

tweetdeck is not playing by the rules
Changes the rules of how people behave the in the space -  filtered updates, putting people in groups, etc. 

People/Applications/Both are constantly changing the rules. 

Implications are everywhere – news, money, learning, entertainment, family. The context problem exists anywhere or with anything that can be online. Even if people themselves cannot  be online, information about them can be. What are the human limits to comprehending context?

you can look at this, but you can’t do anything about it “in this context” – ex. google earth – holocaust memorial museum crisis in darfur 
 
Language and context shape one another – especially online where everything is language based (literally must be coded to be there)

Information archecture is great at findability, but findability is only part of the value proposision of IA. The act of defining content via findability is designing context. We lack a suitable language for this…

———————————————————–

Q. Issues of changing the rules (e.g. post once, ping many)
-twitter updates on facebook – these are being presented as value-adds, but they are actually taking the value away from context.  They’re not going away, it has always happened (example of using newspapers for not what they were intended for). We are all sort of learning a new literacy. Learning new ways to ingest/filter things out.

Q. Are you positive or negative on the fact that people can see you?
Neither. things are just changing. in some ways it can be positive, in some ways it can be negative. we are going to have to come up with a language about privacy – this kind of privacy or that kind of privacy?

—————————–

recommended/related presentation: luca rosati, andrea resmini - towards a cross-context IA (slideshare)

IA Summit – Dan Brown – Designing (business) Rules

[slides are here]

What is a rule?

We are not talking about “what you should and should not do,” we’re talking about rules that that lead amazon to suggest particular thing to us (of all possible things). If a wireframe tells us what goes on the screen, then a rule tells us how a screen changes in different circumstances.

• Rules drive the user experience, but they are not a single cohesive system.
• Rules make use of language, but they don’t define that language.
• They are not linear, they apply only in specific situations (which meet very specific criteria). they are not a recipe. They change depending upon context.
• Rules help us make choices about what is seen and how we see it. 
• Rules craft one aspect of an experience (mediation between director and actor).

What DB does:

• templates – basic element of a web site
• Navigation/classification – how people find the content
• Content types (structural) – giving us a meaningful language for talking about the range of information that is available 

Rules tie these three things together.  

IA integrates real-world content into the abstract framework they are dealing with. 
rules are what help us (what we use to) do this. 

**Content Rules**
what are the mechanisms that we need establish to put the content into the templates that we design. 

cooksillustrated.com - 
what goes on home page? do i pick from all categories of recipes? do i pick the newest? do i pick the most popular? 

what are the set of guidelines that we use to make these decisions?

**Navigation Rules**
Imagine a room, depending upon the room, it has THESE type of exits.

cnet.com > mp3 players
3 categories – price, manufacturer or Other
these choices allow us to change what we see.
interesting differences – mp3 player 20-50 dollars is the lowest; digital camera less than 100 dollars is the lowest. mp3 lets you see All prices. Digital camera does not. 

ecommerce product page 
available in stock – this is visible when certain criteria is met (rules).

————–
Rules are a criteria for selecting responses to behavior

Rules are not patterns - rules require context.
Patterns are things that require rules to be managed. 

Components
Navigation blocks are components. Single components can have many different rules applied to them.

Sun’s accordian component:  content is not defined, but you can write rules about how the component is to be used in different area of a site.  

How do we structure our rules?
Things to think about:

1. Action – what is the action that is performed – (show the content? hide the content?)
2. Scope – from which content types are you going to draw your content? what is the range of available content
3. Filter – this component will use x scope (e.g. recipes), which ones (e.g. fish)?
4. Quantity – how many
5. Format 
6. Default – What happens if no criteria is met?

——————————-
SCOPE: 
Facets – what can users filter by
Options – how will users select the value that they’d like to sort by?
Range – upper and lower limits. how will these be determined and/or set. for all areas? per product?
Effect – selections and presentation – does the user’s selection alter the interface in real time?
See All – do i let them do this? is there a see all option?

——————————
Types of (wireframe) Annotations:

• Prose rules - e.g. If, then – if you are in x state, show sales tax
• pseudo-code – If then – IF state=x THEN display tax

Table - 
Wireframe content – Lastest articles (label in the wireframe)

Flows – render the rules visually

what makes rules good?

• good rules are user-centered – provide content that is meaningful to the user. 
• good rules ares are unambiguous
• good rules are feasible (use existing IA parameters) – most popular articles — are we collecting information on determining whether articles are popular or not
• good rules have specified responsibility – we need to specify – does the machine determine the content or does an individual dtermine the content (using the same rule, but different entity is responsible for it’s implementation)
• good rules will degratde gracefully – a.k.a DEFAULT – if all else fails…something relevant shows up

Do the right thing 
We need to take our rules very seriously because they govern how our product interacts with its users.  This is a somewhat ethical enterprise.   

Documentation of Rules -

• Do the people actually pay attention to the rules? are the rules implemented?
• Consider making the documentation fun, entertaining & engaging.  This will be helpful to help the rules get implemented.

Consideration: is it better to get a stakeholder on board with enforcing the rules? or do we be prescriptive about it? Consideration: Feasibility of rules:

Whether they are enforceable? how are they to be enforced?  Hand-offs: the spirit of the rule vs. the letter of the rule
As IAs/Designers, we communicate the spirit – but we hand off implementation. 

When we document a rule, we are documenting what the machine or the editor needs to do, but they don’t communicate what the overall user experience is. Wireframes need to include content to help communicate the end result.  IA was defined as the language of the web site and rules make use of the language (?).

Q. Do we create the rules and then engineer the IA from the rules? 

We are designing user experiences and it’s very easy for us to get caught up in the minutiae of what we do, but we need to ground ourselves in the user experience.

Q. Who “owns” the rules set.  the client? the designer? 
Rules have a ripple effect. If it’s unfeasible in some way, I want to know. We want to make them as feasible, as implementable as possible.  Who is really going to consume this deliverable?  We design for the user, but we also need to design for the editor/for the organization to make sure that the rules acutally get implemented. 

Comment from the audience: Bill Scott presented the interesting moments grid as a format for annotating complex interactions – perhaps could be used for interaction rules as well. 

IA Summit 2009 – Dave Cooksey – Taxonomy Validation

About dave:  saturdave ux consulting

Testing and taxonomy – why testing is important 

Taxonomy is an “expert” activity that comes from a priveliged view. Taxonomy is more closely aligned with business/technology goals than user goals.

The facts about taxonomies and metadata

• relationships are implied (as opposed to an ontology which defines relationships).  Users must interpret the relationships.
• A user’s individual experience informs their interpretation. Their experiennce very much differs from ours. This is why we need to test.

Why taxonomy validation is necessary

• justifies the cost of creation
• helps resolve organizational conflict
• vets ideas with real users
• reassures the business that the project focus is on success

Taxonomy validation techniques:

1. delphi card sorting – allows for direct interaction with participants (can ask follow ups and ask people what they mean, to describe their experience, justify their choices)
2. remote card sorting
3. usability testing - focuses on interaction (step-by-step vs. bird’s eye view)
4. search analysis - indirect (no follow-ups, no “what did you mean?”)

Delphi Card Sorting: About

• Qualitative method
• Small sample
• Based on the delphi method
• developed at UB
• Article by Celeste Lyn Paul, A Modified Delphi Approach to a New Card Sorting Methodology

Delphi Card Sorting: How it works

• Heirarchy is laid out in cards (seeded or not)
• Inform the user what the vocab is for 
• Users are instructed to turn over cards that they don’t think are necessary, move cards around, make new cards (add ones for missing concepts). 
• While they work, ask the participants about what they are doing (e.g. Why are you collapsing x and y categories? Why did you turn that one over? etc.)
• Users work in a cumulative fashion (don’t restart the test everytime, let them build on each other’s changes)
• The process generally runs for about 15-20 participants until the heirarchy stabilizes. 

Delphi Card Sorting: Tips

• If possible, get a video recording of the sorting. Video recording is essential
• Take pictures of the table before they start and after they finish (each participant)
• Remember, this exercise is to inform YOU - the end result is the final heirarchy, with notes. (which ones people had problems with, what flip flopped a lot).
• Considerations: What kinds of users are you testing: do they have domain expertise? do you have multiple user types?
• Plan for lots of space. Allow time between participants
• Create a starter sheet to make notes

Remote Card Sorting

• quantitative, large sample
• open or closed (closed – tests structure, open – creates categories, gathers many perspectives)

Remote Card Sorting: How to do it

• recruit via intercept or email (keep these separate, don’t combine the analysis/results)
• determine sample sized needed
• choose software
• focus each sort to 15-20. NOT TOO MANY ITEMS
• put items/categories on cards
• run study
• analyze the data

Online tools for card sorting:

• optimal sort
• mind canvas
• web sort
• cardsort
• socratic card sort
• web cat

Remote Card Sorting: Tips

• run a few qualitative to test, if possible
• pick the most important categories and items (stereotypical problems)
• read the comments
• deliverables will depend on the software used. 

Regular card sorting

• -open or closed: closed – write down your terms and let them organize them. open – let them come up with their terms and then organize them

Usability Testing

• piggy back on system testing
• task based – Where would you go to do this?

Usability Testing: Tips 

• have a clear goal
• keep it simple
• ask follow-ups, probe a little bit.
• illustrate how data is driving the experience.

Search Analysis – Tips

• Try to get as much info as possible about the data. 

IA Summit – Stephen Anderson – The Art & Science of Seductive Design

[slides are here]

example of good design:
iLike

why does it work?

• piques curiousity – will this work?
• visual imagery
• leverages pattern recognition – we like to find patterns.
• relies on recognition over recall – with an empty form field, I have to remember the artists i like. In the iLike system, it’s much lazier this way (for the user), I just have to recognize my likes not remember them.
• uses motivators well - confirmation message includes: play the iLike challenge (trivia questions with a time constraint)

It’s a convergence of user goals and business goals - user has fun, business gets info.

what made this work?

Not IA alone, but psychology, game mechanics, etc. 

Increasing motivation and reducing friction.

Focus on natural human impulses.

What do you know about people? make a list. start there. 

Curiousity

• mystery hot wheels. there all of these knowns and they want the unknown.
• example CPK don’t open it
• netflx – rate your return to reveal what you might like. 
• linked in
• lovely charts

play hard to get

• private beta + social proof
• social motivation: the single most important factor in determining whether or not someone will adopt is whether or not their friennds hang out there.
• constraints can be attractive (e.g. 140 character constraint). 
• sabre town – like yahoo answers, but it tries to connect people. personalized. your question will be sent to people likely to answer and you might receive questions related to areas you have knowledge/experience. constraint – you have to have karma points to participate. they don’t tell you all the ways to get karma (it is NOT explicit – system should not be gamed)

friskiness, playfulness

• dopplr – delighters – matt biddulph – example of a site good for travels – based on the idea of serendipity. where are you going to be and when — shows you missed opportunities so that they don’t get missed. who is giong to be there at the same time? 
• different colors is used in each logo, for each profile, what is going on here? colors are based on cities (somehow). 
• mooplr – promotes dopplr offline
• supplied me with something i didn’t know i needed. the result: now i am a loyal user. 

collect & catalog what you like and ask yourself why you like it?

Then use the deck to ask yourself — how can we use X to improve this design?

Things to think about:

• social psychology/social design
• persuasion, choice, influence (6 principles)
• game mechanics – what works what doesn’t
• brain research, cognitive science.  - fun humor visual  curiousity etc.

Stephen’s site: poetpainter.com