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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