You can measure the value of an event once the dust settles – what are you left with that can inspire and motivate you for the future? There are many thorough and well written reviews already online from the event but I want to take a retrospective view of some thought-provoking presentations from UXLX Lisbon. It was a conference that introduced me personally to some brilliant minds, and most surprisingly, they were not the minds already known within the UX field.

There is something unique about this community which is obviously born from it’s professional inclination. That of helping people do things better, solving problems and encouraging one another. It makes for a great atmosphere and the various actors on this set made for interesting viewing.

The largest collection of familiar names from any UXer’s bookshelf were assembled. All mingling, showing interest and generally being open to conversations whilst suffering from jet lag.

The format was intense and relentless – one felt at work for sure and the breathless nature of the schedule left little time to collect thoughts. But the most interesting talks were conducted by the new generation  of practitioners who have read the headliners’ books and are now taking their craft to true cross-discipline thinking and application.

Silvia  Calvet – CV&A Consulting

Silvia Calvet explained her approach to cultural change by combining the worlds of knowledge management, learning and UX to produce a system that a government department felt they owned. Anybody who has worked in the public sector knows that this is not easy but her enthusiasm and approach produced an outcome with some useful takeaways. View her slides to gain a fuller picture of her process for engaging a workplace to take ownership and be actively involved in improving working practices.

Seamus Byrne – Graphic Mint

Another enthusiastic entertaining speaker was Seamus Byrne from Graphic Mint who convinced us about storytelling being the best method for engaging users. This (as UX storytellers will no doubt testify to) is a sound logic and one that we know works, but applying the thinking in UX gives an interesting angle and one that Seamus is exploring over at the Graphic Mint blog.

Sarah Bear – LBI

Sarah Bear from LBI artfully looked at seduction as a subject for user experience design. Casanova’s three stage seduction was used with great effect as a metaphor for the UX journey. Carefully introducing social media in her talk, Bear made a plea to those in UX to get involved in the advertising world to ensure quality experiences would occur. ‘Be included or be ignored’ and this is true enough in certain firms and was echoed by the Interaction director of RG/A.

Karri Ojanen – RG/A

Karri Ojanen had a different take on this – that the advertising world is changing and that the old broadcast way of messaging is no longer valid within today’s society. User experience design he argued, lay at the heart of the shift in this well known, century-old paradigm. It was another great presentation that helped galvanise the keynotes by providing a relevant and useful backdrop.

All the small sessions I attended were well delivered and very interesting. The slides engaging and informative, the personalities likeable and eager to discuss their ideas. The tweets backed this up and it’s always amusing to see the flow from the audience – judging, commenting and evaluating statements and throwing them back to the floor.

Bruno Figueiredo organised a great conference, it was professional and enjoyable. But the selection of these less well-known speakers really provided an excellent focus and possible view into the future of this profession.

This conference gave me a reminder that this discipline has some excellent practitioners, whose work is truly inspiring and yet largely unsung. It was a great reminder of how many talented people there are in this evolving community.

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I have already covered content, visual design and behaviour as part of the UX design framework but now for the important topic of interaction…

A major element of UX, it has been described as

“the design of behavior, positioned as dialogue between a person and an artifact. A person commonly doesn’t talk to an object; they use it, touch it, manipulate it, and control it. Usage, touching, manipulation and control are all dialogical acts, unspoken but conversational.” – Jon Kolko

and also…

“a design discipline dedicated to defining the behavior of artifacts, environments, and systems (i.e., products)”. – Robert Reimann

Undoubtedly interaction design is a design discipline that has become a defining element of UX. Though the preceding two quotes assert the alignment with a user’s behaviour they do so here in relation to their interaction (the person and the artifact).

In other words it is the behaviour of the object in relation to the user. The following principles reassert this notion that many interaction design issues are born out of preconceptions of what a user expects to be able to do with the interface they are presented with.

Progressive disclosure
Good interfaces display this all the time. By only revealing necessary information at a specific point on the user journey, or within a specific context, the tasks presented are relevant. This is a type of layering , but in the case of the interface, the layers are interactions. In the physical world we see this exhibited on road signs as we reach a destination. In sign up forms, revealing necessary steps in stages to allow an easier route to completing a form.

Affordance

In design, affordance is defined as the properties an object or environment has that defines its usage. The hammer is a very basic example, for hitting nails it is the best tool for the job, a handle to pick it up and a heavy end to hit a nail with.

In website design affordance is perceived and describes how interactive elements give clues about how an element is interacted with. The input field, the carousel, the scroll bar all have a way of describing their interactive qualities. But it is important to remember they are perceived, in other words prior knowledge has been gleaned somewhere before a user fully understands how these elements act within a web browser.

This is important to consider when using new interactive paradigms – there may be no prior experience that a user can take from, which will result in initial poor usability. However the experience of the product may eventually be better once the interaction has been learnt.  

An example of perceived affordance and the glitch with usability can be seen in Google Wave’s scrollbar. Though it works a little like a normal scrollbar, it grows with the length of a list and has an elasticity to its behaviour. The purpose is to save space but see what one user thinks; ‘I’d be content with an option to use normal scrollbars. For me, the issue is that scrollbars are easy and don’t need to be reinvented; at the risk of sounding Luddite somehow (though how Luddite can I be, being a Wave early adopter?) there was nothing wrong with the standard widgets, and Google didn’t need to make changes.  Second, they break the rule of "don’t move the controls around." I don’t want to have to go find the scroll arrows again. As it is, I avoid using them whenever possible.’

Confirmation, Errors and Forgiveness

The avoidance of errors online is a major consideration especially when one considers the increasingly important role websites have to play in tasks that are important. The online vote for a general election may not be too far away but the system for the voting paper would need to be designed to minimize user errors and allow a user to navigate and be clear in their actions.

These three qualities are all closely linked and are in fact related to a user’s mistake. It is widely accepted that errors will be made, and the system must forgive these faults. One way is to ensure a confirmation stage is instilled before a deletion or a payment. Past this point of confirmation it is easy to see how the user’s experience of a service can be rated in terms of forgiveness. If you have mistakenly paid for an item how easy is it to regain your money? If you have deleted a record can you undo? 

An optimal pattern of interaction maybe that the user decides on an action, the system asks the user to confirm it. The user does but realises their error and the system ‘forgives’ the mistake by allowing them to rectify the issue. How many systems do not allow this to happen? Many online banks, for example, will not reverse a confirmed payment without a call to customer services.

Fitts law

Size and location of interactive items (eg buttons) can denote an ease and speed of use. The smaller and more distant the area of interaction, the longer it takes to move from a resting position to the target and accuracy is also affected if speed and distance is a factor. However in touch screen technology the extra dimension, of what you are pointing with, (in this case the finger) plays a part in this principle. Moving objects with the finger can become tiresome if repetitive, and Fitts Law again plays a role by the ensuring the least amount of effort is required when interacting with an interface.

Constraints

In the interface a physical constrain can be seen in the slider to select appropriate parameters (price available for flights for example) or in form input fields with the radio button (select one) or the check box (select one or many of several options). The screen is also a physical constraint and leads to the inevitable frame effect on the design of a page. However Windows 7 for mobile and the iPad see the screen more as a window to look through at the content than a frame to be bound by.  Used well constraints will simplify and reduce errors by improving usability.

Control

The principle of allowing a user control over a system regardless of their proficiency or experience. ‘Expert’ modes allow advanced features to be made use of but should never inhibit the minimum requirements of operating the interface and getting expected responses from it. The advanced user is considered the secondary audience where popular interfaces (such as on a web browser) are seen.

Facebook (with a user base of 500 million) has in recent months been struggling with confusion over it’s public and private settings, the line between shared and private information is undefined and as a result disconcerting to users. In an effort to address this the security settings have undergone a redesign – to give control back in a way that is clearer to the user.

Many feel that by using a service they should not feel violated by their interaction with it but unfortunately as a design exercise the failings are still evident and have led to many giving up their profiles. The design still fails to communicate effectively which privacy settings apply to areas of a profile and at the time of writing this post, basic information design rules have still not been observed.

Cost benefit

Activity (and interactivity) will be pursued by a user only if the benefits are greater than the costs. The costs in this case are typically time and attention spent by the user. Advertising is a typical annoyance but only when deemed irrelevant. In the proper context the cost benefit is increased and will likely lead to increased results.

Sometimes, as in the case of Flickr, the tools developed end up being of more value than the product itself. Flickr was actually a component of Game Neverending, an online multiplayer game produced by the Canadian company Ludicorp. The image sharing component of the game became Flickr as it was deemed a more feasible project. The cost invested in producing an element of the interface resulted in a massive benefit for the company who sold to Yahoo!

However this good fortune is a rarity in design, often features that have little cost benefit are only expensive and drain resources of a development group. One must be mindful of the impact of spending energy on elements with little discernible value to the user – they run the risk of being expensive distractions and potentially harmful to the user experience.

Interaction design

Such is the established nature of the discipline of interaction design it is very easy to forget that the design principles at its foundation have been in existence as a core of product design for decades. Interaction as a component of UX is extremely important but it is important to view all the elements as part of the cohesive whole. Designing with user’s experiences in mind effectively means that all areas of the UX design framework need to be taken into account to give the best results. UX is a part of good design practice and should not be treated as a separate entity.

In the next part of the series, I’ll be covering persuasion, perhaps the newest element in the UX mix.

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The audience represented those who really are empowered to change the user experience daily – the product and web development managers. In the presentation I highlight several ways to create change and use approaches to help give a different perspective to their task in hand.

So much of what they deal with, the political and organisational challenges as well as resource issues and technological constraints, we only observe as UX people. The real-life of producing and implementing what we draft is something that as UX people we need to be more mindful of. After the implementation of the ideas, these people are the ones who must ensure business runs as usual and goals are met.

The presentation is an introduction and also a practical approach to get UX integrated with 5 tips to help UX become a reality in the team and the business.

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Next week I will be hitting the road again and this time it is Lisbon where I am attending UX-LX. Hello Group is a sponsor and we are bringing UXBASIS to the community with a tool that aims to promote UX amongst other disciplines – especially project and product managers. This conference has an amazing line up of speakers (the best I have seen at an event like this), and it really promises to be a unique experience. I will be posting a summary of the highlights, after the event.

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We have released UXBASIS as a mobile version, so your smart phone can now easily navigate the cards within a browser. Entering www.uxbasis.com into your address bar will automatically direct you to the mobile version. Within the next week we are also accepting orders on the UXBASIS cards and poster, and we aim to deliver worldwide for a fee that just covers the cost of production and shipping. We have kept costs low to ensure that the items can be distributed beyond UX teams and into the wider development community. This is where we feel that the real impact of these tools will be felt, benefitting users and businesses alike. We decided to make physical cards to help people like us communicate with project managers and clients about the work that we do and the purposes of our tasks. If anything we hope that UXBASIS is a conversation starter with the people who have influence over product teams, and inevitably control budgets.

Our aim is to help businesses and professionals work smarter and more collaboratively by making these tools more readily available to those in the user experience field.

If you are interested in purchasing a box of cards or a poster (or both) then email uxinfo@hellogroup.com or follow @hellogroup on Twitter to keep updated.

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Gaining a lot of traction in user experience is the design to delight point of view. Roth told how recently he was paired with Matt Mullenweg (creator of Wordpress) at the 7 on 7 event. Here they worked on a few elements inside the Wordpress blogging dashboard – elements they say that are now live and ready to use. Putting their collaboration in the admin section, the fun mode allows a user to publish with a difference.

Photo courtesy of Julia de Boer

Roth stated that often the publish button is such an anti climax, the culmination of hours of carefully crafting a post, seemed to them to be launched without fanfare. By adding a library of video clips they have changed this sacred moment, so when the publish button is pushed, a full screen video is played of motivational video moments. They also looked at the stats component and compared visits to populations of real towns in the US, and symbolised the size of traffic by photographs of the town. This humanised the data, and provided more visual interest.

Roth is particularly interested in how little effort one can put towards the maximum amount of impact. Roth says;

…if you are in viral – swing the bat as many times as you can

The tip he gives is to create viral that gives spikes in traffic through enjoyable and non-political content.

Roth was humble when going through his projects and seemed nonchalant about the impact of his work. He is a true artist, prolific and determined, irreverent and seemingly mistrustful of those organisations (Google) who have so much of our data. Or those governments (China) who censor the access to freely available information. Roth’s work has meaning and he stated that you should not strive for a following but rather ‘surf the waves of memedom’ to produce the best work. But as far as an artist who stands in the intersection of viral media and art, you would have to argue he is one of the best.

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Earls stated that we think of ourselves as individuals, thinking and feeling what is done to us from external forces. In the last two hundred years history, economics and recently, marketing affecting our behaviour. The web has shown that we actually are highly connected and copy each other much more than we realise or would like to think. Individualism and originality were immediately set up here by Earls to be questioned. We find great pleasure from doing things together and collaborating. The idea of the individual is actually an internal mode of thought, not acted out in reality and this is proved by our online interactions.

1. Everything is social 
Social first and foremost. Our minds are fundamentally adapted to be social, we naturally seek security from each other. We instinctively know when something dangerous happens from the behaviour of others. From the moment we are born to when we die our lives are with other people. Our inclination for co-habiting means that isolation is the greatest punishment. This even affects how we think, we think before action but in reality we act and think in that order. Thought following action a millisecond behind. We also think together in a way that is subliminal or tacit, a common understanding revealed in the popularity of tagging and memes.

2. Copying not originality rules
The ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ effect (from When Harry Met Sally and Meg Ryan’s restaurant scene) is what shapes our decisions. We take opinions and referrals on trust. We copy behaviour if we think it is good or desirable. Here, there was another myth exploded:- independent agency is a fallacy. The success of Amazon can be attributed to the taste selector, and it’s recommendation engine. He remarked that opinion polls are banned in some countries before an election because of this power to persuade.

3.Sailing on social soup
Earls said there was a missing element that Chris Anderson missed in his book The Long Tail. If a lot of traffic appears here, it is likely that it means you have social influence. He moved on to the anti-social problem of binge drinking in British culture. No individual influences people to do this, but a cluster mentality develops. This structure is the most  important thing, and a dynamic that can only be changed by changing the group’s perception about their behaviour collectively. You can not make people do something but you must work with them. His last mention was Tweenbots, an experiment by Kacie Kinzer into a theory of letting humans do the heavy work of data input through their sense of compassion. Tweenbots lets the humans put down the paths, that services can use for other purposes.

Photograph courtesy of Julia de Boer

Everything is social This was a fascinating talk, mainly because it changes the perceptions that we may take as defacto from marketing gurus and experts. Earls’ points are based in ethnographic study and social science. Behaviour of the individual is influenced greatly by the crowd. Earls’ findings are important; expelling the myth of the individual, the missing element of the long tail and originality as not the main factor for success represents a shift in thinking.

He has moved the conversation on from landmark books such as Groundswell and into another area of consideration. We cannot control the crowd, we must go with the flow. Drawing parallels with sailing, Earls stated that we all must learn to navigate the stream, but the tides are out of our control. Momentum in crowds can not be anticipated or created but exist due to many smaller factors that we can only react to. I think realizing this fact will help us build better experiences and help us realise our goals realistically in social media.

Mark Herd is author of the book Herd: How to change mass behavior by harnessing our true nature.

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Computers are a type of technology that we have had to conform to, the web is a good example of this. Browsers and operating systems are prohibitive but Richardson believes that the browser will become less important relative to other access points. This convergence of the web and the physical objects we find in our world, is the next phase. He highlighted the Times Square take over for GE where stepping inside the browser was the concept – allowing the interaction of people around the world to the advertising screens.

He made clear that phones and computers are on a collision course. Merging together, resulting in communication devices that are mobile, enabling content creation and real time reporting. Before objects and the web were separate, now they begin to intersect and in the medical area it is a pragmatic blend.

He showed a concept relaying health data in real time to doctors. Monitoring patients with heart problems, motion, heart rate and body temp being wirelessly transmitted to the cloud via smart phone to electronic devices. The benefit – allowing a patient to alert the doctor or healthcare workers when certain points have been reached through monitoring. Giving more freedom to the patient and more time to the healthcare practitioners. This seemed an excellent use of technology, and one you can imagine being used widely.

Webjects

Richardson then showed the webjects – his word for completely blended physical objects with the web. There are two types. The first is the object inside the web – a wrapper of services around the object. Zipcar was the example of an ecosystem of a physical product with a wrapper of touch points of the mobile, website and service to create a car sharing business. The ecosystem formed of physical objects meshed with web software and services.

The other type is the web inside the object using the object as a portal with the object interacting with the web it as it is used. He gave an example of this with a multi-touch in-store augmented reality device for Intel. Here uses would be scanned by a camera, their gender and physical attributes then pre-loading the shelves with the right sizes and styles for that person. A demo at the moment it did give a view of how the digital experience will become placed alongside the real physical objects, with the benefit of closing sales faster.

No relevance, no point

Richardson closed the talk by stating that technology creates needs, but without relevance, solutions will not develop or be adopted. This statement seemed particularly apt with the amount of startups we had seen that day, some of them having no clear relevance at all. Apple’s success is a strange firm to follow or replicate, but what they have understood is the power of making connections between their products and the creation of their ecosystem. Of course the problem that is becoming apparent now is that ecosystem is invite only, and a closed shop…

See the presentation here

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Photo courtesy of Julia de Boer

Werner Vogels (@Werner) gave a passionate talk about the new way of building applications by making use of the cloud. He highlighted how the old model of Push, where a solution is designed, built and launched is being replaced by the Pull model. Here products are defined by finding a service that is lacking, connecting to that user base, innovating to answer their needs or wants and reflecting on the outcome (and I guess refining it). The idea of infrastructure being a service in itself has been solved and he backed this up by highlighting key service providers who operate in the cloud. This he said, is now an established world and the loop of a holistic range of services can now be seen in a variety of really interesting services.

He listed a range of characteristics and existing startups which will enable the development of services that will transform the next five years of application development. 

The characteristics include multi-device capable, the social graph, user generated content, virtual goods economy,  recommendations and premium support. From the outset these applications need to be infinitely scalable and must give the api user the ability to walk away without being bound to the technology and must be immediately ready. Servers, Vogels stated, are no longer the issue and this has been solved as a potential problem. The cloud has given us a range of new opportunities to build apps now and into the future.

Some of the highlighted services included;

drop.io – allows any content to be dropped into a shared environment and converted into real time

simpleGEO – location service working from the GPS co-ordinates of a mobile device giving contextual information such as demographics, changes over time, physical objects and relevant information to make decisions.

animoto – videos on the fly from location based information

twilio – voice and sms – speech to text. Once closely guarded by Telcos, but now this company has simply enabled voice and text into existing applications quick and simply using an XML file. Enables you to be called and instructed from a website update.

Directed Edge – a service where you can upload data and move down social connections, a recommendation engine with available connections

Social Gold – ways of making money by selling virtual products with real currency (or virtual) They will also maintain the inventory and charge the customers – multiple currencies are supported throughout Europe

Chargify – crowd service allowing real payments

github – version control of your web development handled on the cloud8

8k Miles – project management and development teams provided for projects you submit for tender

Vogels said the new music industry (eg last.fm and spotify) has already got the power of this and are using it in the right way. All modern apps need or will need the tools above, the good news is that they are available and out there. His excitement about the possibilities were certainly infectious – architect it right, allocate the percentage of the income to the infrastructure and produce something relevant quickly with adaptability. Great talk, and giving a lot of ideas here.

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The name – his first tip was not to choose ‘a crap name’. He illustrated this with playtxt, all too close to the bra manufacturer Playtex in the UK with obvious problems there.

Pick the right co-founder – not having the right partner will result in major problems

Location – the right place is so important to where you start the business. He highlighted the valley as the place that illustrated this well but also Clerkenwell in London where over 80 businesses are in the same area. The reason is that you can call on others when resources are needed – particularly skills that are not needed regularly but are specialized.

Hire slowly, fire quickly – particularly important Scott said when your intuition tells you somebody isn’t quite right you should follow it. Time and again he said that when he had made a decision to fire he regretted not doing it sooner. But of course, making the right hire should take time, as it is such a commitment.

Delegate – if somebody can complete a task to 70% proficiency  compared to yourself, then delegate the task

Have a one line pitch – the ability to be able to tell anybody your idea with clarity in very powerful and helps solidly your proposition to potential investors, journalists and the man in the street

Beware of the bubble – You as a start up founder are not normal, you live in the tech bubble and be aware of this. Many people still do not know what Twitter is, and we should remember that.

Stop building, but measure what matters – it is very likely that the things resulting in revenue may not be your main focus initially. Be aware of what is in the offering and remember to analyse performance thing form the start

Time flies – building something in Scott’s experience takes twice as long than predicted, gaining funding from investors takes three times as long

Practice – Quoting Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Outliers’, it takes 10,000 hours to gain real expertise, so practicing is the basis of excellence and this also goes for pitching.

Help others – giving help comes back to you , its a circular function

Time out – unplug from the web and get out of the echo chamber.

The location point was particularly interesting, and Scott said there was a bias towards start ups from the US over those from Europe. I think I share his view but wonder if it is because they have a different culture and density of population to ensure momentum is created and ideas take flight…

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