Euro IA 2010 – ‘Strong IA feels real’
Last week I was in Paris for an entertaining, yet equally perplexing Euro IA. The majority of talks were a thought provoking foray into the usual domains of information architecture but also service design and co-creation.
The opening keynote from Oliver Reichenstein was a strange experience, part personal take on the field and part philosophical reflection on how he personally arrived at his own professional destination.
I am an admirer of his work and yet elements of those great data visualizations and experiments (the web trend maps) were not mentioned here. He did attempt to explain his user experience diagram but after claiming metaphors were only useful to a point, he then likened IA to ‘the recipe for user experience’. This gastronomic reference, was a recurring theme throughout the two days.
Contradiction seemed to be the order of the day. On the one hand stating that he found IA used too many ‘bullshit’ terms that were unhelpful, he then described his own design process as ‘dialectic’. I find philosophy in alignment to IA has never been helpful to our profession. It doesn’t resonate with me as thought-through – ‘the architecture of the mind’ that Reichenstein holds up as one of his views is unhelpful to a layman and really only strengthens the opinion of those who feel that IA is intangible. Even Reichenstein says that ‘if you stretch metaphors they break’.
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Ian Fenn wrote a fictitious tweet, and yet ironically it was exactly what it felt like after he delivered his keynote.
It was a shame that this opportunity was lost of convincing the group that he didn’t just use the term because he liked the phrase. But unfortunately that seemed the real reason if you take the talk at face value. |
His comment that ‘strong IA feels real’ was ironic, as this ia felt unreal, unrealistic and abstract. Even if it works for him and his company, I felt he didn’t tell the whole story.
I think therefore IA…
Other talks also reflected the philosophical aspect. Koen Claes focussed on designing for memory (enjoyable but try selling that to a CEO). Peter Bogaards talked about the similarity with gastronomy to aspects of what we do as UX people.
All thought-provoking stuff but really it had the feeling of some in-joke that only UX people would get, and that those from other communities who were present, the product managers, marketing and developers would look on and question.
This is not a practical application or useful in my opinion and after talking to a few attendees after day one they felt the same. These talks gave more attention to the experience of being human than the thing that we design. Though the two are obviously connected, it becomes too indiscernible from existentialism.
Lean IA, service design and Ubicomp
The second day proved far better, more real and more tangible. More useful to talk about how to design in an agile way, using co-creation and the methods and skills found in the scrum processes of product development teams.
Here Jeff Gothelf, Johanna Kollmann and Franco Papeschi proved that the application of our skill set is the most important thing in our domain. The tools and methods are fine but not as important as engaging the team, working collaboratively and transparently and being an agent for change.
Their approaches were the exact opposite to the mysterious design master. This is the future of UX, with Claire Rowland and Chris Browne representing service design and ubicomp in a very comprehensive, fascinating talk.
Christophe Tallec also talked about how the theory of the wisdom of crowds, has usefully been applied to a product. These emerging fields becoming more relevant every year, and I guess in the not too distant future these fields will become facets of the same discipline.
Aimless ends
The closing plenary was given by Paul Kahn where he stated that Facebook was not important to him. But with its 500 million users and a previous slide stating how the biggest sites are user generated it just seemed he was being provocative for the sake of it.
As he ambled through several sites that he liked, it was similar to surfing a smashing magazine post of cool dataviz sites. The structured and non structured aspect of metadata is well documented but the talk really just seemed to meander without purpose.
His closing message that user-centred design is best tackled by saying ‘you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink’ was uninspiring. Did this statement derive from too many failed projects? One he showed – though it used a neat UI trick it was where he openly admitted he didn’t have numbers to know if it was effective or not. Who knows?
Summing up
There were a lot of great presentations and Martin Belam has gathered the talks on his site and are well worth a look. But keynotes are from thought leaders. Surely they have a responsibility to not use the platform as a casual debate (or product promotion) with throw away comments?
Or perhaps that is their call, but I do ask as an attendee for the speakers to prepare the material and avoid being self-indulgent or misleading. Give us something real. Give back something tangible to this community.
I remember last year being at a talk where a student pleaded – ‘give us something we can use’. From the keynotes, I was left with the same feeling…
UX LX 2010 - 3 days in Lisbon
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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.
UX-LX Lisbon, Portugal
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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. |
Secrets of a viral superstar - Evan Roth
Concerned with the intersection between art and viral media, Evan Roth gave the audience a tour of the projects he has been involved in recently. Also teaching in Paris, Roth is interested in a demographic that we often forget about – the BAW (bored at work) network. He suggested that this is the group that drives viral marketing, and the ability to get people to interact at their work is what drives viral success.
| He harnesses the power of crowd collaboration to produce the Michael Jackson hand video where a group of people plotted the co-ordinates of every frame of Michael Jackson’s glove in the first moonwalk video.
The results are (predictably) interesting and fun. Crowd sourcing by asking people online to undertake a small task to achieve a greater goal. |
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Music plays a role in Roth’s work, and he showed a video that took 3 days to produce for Jay-Z – Brooklyn Go Hard. The last few frames of the video show the source code to the Flash animation, this was due to a rush to publication and it remained in the video. The code has since been used in a multitude of ways by many different people. The viral effect of the code’s popularity going beyond the immediate attraction of fans of Jay-Z and the music. |
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.
| His most visually impressive project is Graffiti Analysis, where a marker pen is tracked and it’s motion path redraws in code and renders on the screen. Roth believes graffiti is free speech and not dissimilar to the web. The web have the same peer systems working together for common goals. In this work the digital system is where the interface is the marker, the thinner the line the faster the speed all rendered in the 3d space. The effect is something unseen before and this project has resulted in GML (Grafitti Markup Language) which is available for download. |
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The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo. |
Eye writer was the last project he showed, that took the code from GML and paired it with eye tracking software to create a drawing application that worked from movement of the iris. This enabled those artists who could no longer paint or tag, the ability to draw again. To draw using only their eyes gave something meaningful and satisfying back to those who have lost so much through paralysis and provided a fitting end to this interesting talk. |
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.
Everything is Social - Mark Earls at The Next Web
This talk proved to be one of my favorites, not only for the style of presentation which was energetic and humorous, but the way Earls exploded a few myths from his research findings and the findings of others. He started by looking at football crowds, making sure the audience participated in a few Mexican waves. He said that the research that is being conducted is showing that the theories of social behaviour are being revealed by technology. The web is forcing us now to see ourselves as social creatures.
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.
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Showing this popular video, he asked us to consider Colin, the hero who starts the dance, as an innovator, his second friend the early adopter. He then proved that the idea of influencer is wrong, this is not what happened in reality. In truth, he tried several times to get people to dance around him but it was the crowd who decided. The change that occurs is when momentum is the change agent, not people in the crowd. It is not the influencers, it is the influence. Not individuals but the collective. Earls reiterated; we are fundamentally social, we are fundamentally like that. It was not Colin’s actions but the crowd (look carefully and you will see Colin leave the crowd). |
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 |
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.
The future will be physical - Alan Richardson
Frog design’s creative director, showed some of their cases and how he sees the future of the web developing into something more tangible. Coming from a UX point of view, he gave examples of physical (and 20th century) technologies that we use and that we conform to (trains) or that conform to us (cars). We adapt to technology or it adapts to us.Though he didn’t remark on it, I guess the latter is the preferable and optimal use of technology from a human point of view.
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
Building blocks in the cloud – Werner Vogels
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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.
Start up rules of engagement
Andrew Scott (@andrewjscott) from Rummble, gave us his insights into the pitfalls and perils of running a start up. His most valuable experiences notably coming from his failures. This is something that made for a great talk, and his 12 tips are pretty much core to creating of a successful business.
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…
Social wayfinding and spending – Waze and Hyves
Waze is a wayfinding app with a difference, in that it’s maps are crowd sourced and are updated in real time (certainly something that Nokia and Google struggle to keep up with). Their approach is to ensure that their maps become generated by their user’s GPS trace as they drive. Their platform is drawing the maps from where their user’s go. They even encourage further exploration of unchartered territory by building games to find prizes and gain points, even having a badge in Foursquare. Its a fresh way to look at mapping and the community of users are apparently really engaged with the product.
On the face of it it looks a good way to ensure accurate maps and you can see municipalities and fleet management companies benefitting from an app that tells users of traffic jams in real time and can divert them to quicker routes. However when asked about safety, legality and the environment (encouraging users to drive for no other reason than to find cherries and gain points) the answers were a little vague and evasive. No blame there, but something they need to be well aware of with these issues creating real concerns from media focus and government concerns.
Hyves has been aware of Facebook moving in on all countries and threatening to dominate the social space. They have realised that their unique selling point is their ability to talk locally. In the Netherlands it is currently outperforming Facebook by providing relevant and timely local information. Their aim is to integrate this into society as much as possible and a very good place to start is to enable e-payments through profiles that have been cash-enabled by a user depositing an amount in an account. By pre-loading an account linked to the Hyves profile, one can easily pay for a bar tab or order food in a restaurant that accepts these payments.>The payment is linked to the user’s bank account that asks for verification through SMS before it is processed. This ensures a degree of security but also convenience. The system enables a user to order food and pay for it before going to a waitress. The concept here sounded really good but unfortunately we couldn’t see how this would operate in practice due to video problems over the network.
However Rabobank is backing it and it seems an excellent idea, and moves us even further towards the cashless society. Next up it’s the Web of Impulses, Mobile health made social and Ebay Classifieds….Tweet
Going mobile at The Next Web
Today will be the start of The Next Web and the themes are Mobile and Real Time, in a two track afternoon. I have opted for mobile, as my interest in contextually aware devices will no doubt be focused on. If you are up for a flavour of the day check out our blog for the video and posts around the event.
Hello and The Next Web
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Spring in Amsterdam and something that never fails to inspire and enlighten is The Next Web conference.
The event focuses particularly on the future of the web, and this year 32 start-ups are assembling with the usual mixture of journalists, venture capitalists and industry types amongst the 1200 delegates. |
Hello Group was born out of the start-up culture, and has been attending since 2006, when both the company and the event began. As a group of web professionals we are always interested in the themes that run here and the technological developments that are often highlighted by progressive thinking.
This year, Hello’s presence will be made up of Peter Svarre, Jakob Langemark, Frans Petersen and myself. We will offer up a mixture of video and the usual highlights and views from this energetic and intense conference. Regular updates will be posted here and also on our event blog; thenextweb.hellogroup.com.
Last year I could sense a palpable awareness of UX as the element that distinguishes good from great products and this year I can imagine a further extension of that – particularly after Facebook’s announcements recently and the launch of the iPad. The closing speaker this year is Frog’s creative director, Adam Richardson and Evan Roth is also featuring. It’s good to see a mix of creative, business and science present in this year’s speaker list – very apt for the web, and it all starts tomorrow…
Sketching User Experiences – Bill Buxton
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In many ways Bill Buxton’s book was a surprise. Perhaps I had read too many reviews but what I found was part history lesson, part analysis of design practice and efficacy of tools. On the whole, I felt it was posing the question of what we should be striving towards in our design practices.
The foundations of design theory and practice The credence behind many of his statements can be found in the immense bibliography that one imagines you attain when you are a principal of research for Microsoft and also a design professor. There is no doubt it helps in carrying weight to his arguments and in many ways it enriches the design education of anybody who is involved in this profession Occasionally there is a tone that seems to dismiss those who do not have this breadth of knowledge, that they are lacking and are mere naive clumsy designers. That seemed to show a lack of awareness of the way people find their references from different sources these days. |
Universal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through Design
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With a title like that you would think you were in for some pretty arduous reading. But this book achieves a solid, broad and well researched overview of the key design principles.
When I review a book I like to see what others say about it. The criticism this book receives, is focused on the layout (typography and quality of illustrations) and the focus it has on US case stories. However, the core of the book is the text, and it is a well written enormously ambitious work that cites key influencers of design thinking. It crosses the boundaries between design disciplines with ease. It is essential reading if you are a designer, in education or work with those involved in design. |
Euro IA 2009
 Photo courtesy of Bill Liao |
Last month was Copenhagen’s turn to host the Euro IA summit, and being a resident I was fortunate to attend the 5th event. Beyond Structure was the title of the conference and many talks echoed the thoughts of Everyware, the need for going beyond the web page paradigm and the emergence of UX principles. |
Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?
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The human brain is complex but this book manages to break it down into parts that we can relate to and is a very accessible and quick book to read.The author, Dr Susan Weinschenk, tells of us having three brains in one. Which certainly explains why it is so necessary to embark on research – with three brains how can we ever second guess our users?
She lays out how this complex system works but also states that the unconscious mind makes many of the decisions in our lives. By influencing the unconscious mind though design techniques, we can effectively persuade users to interact with our sites and become more engaged.
The book is not really a practical, by the numbers guide, but more about the concepts of why users do the things they do. As such its worth buying and an enjoyable read that gives us insights that are backed up with actual contemporary research. |
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Sacca, Twitter and why should we care?
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Last month, at The Next Web 2009, Chris Sacca – investor in Twitter, was interviewed on stage and also chaired a panel about the Twitter ecosystem. The following post is a combination of his comments. Before being a major investor in Twitter, Sacca worked for Google, where he ran the the alternative access division, whose ambitious aim was to get everybody connected to the internet. They mostly focused on user experience and solving user problems. |
The Next Web startups
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Aside from speakers, The Next Web also showcased 19 startups from an initial list of 200 (though only 18 showed up due to a patent issue). Sun Microsystems sponsored the competition with the eventual winner being presented with a cheque from Netlog. |
Tipping point – beyond 2.0
 Jeff Jarvis (left) and Andrew Keen courtesy of Ann Helmond
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Jeff Jarvis (author of What Would Google Do?) and Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur) painted opposing views of the techno-cultural landscape. Keen actually regarded Jarvis as a ‘cheerleader’ for Google although Jarvis himself said he used the company as an example for changes in the real world. |
Impact of Web 2.0 on Search
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Ricardo Baeza-Yates gave us Yahoo’s view that they do not believe in black boxes as a way to solve the complexities of search but that its more about what can be learnt from users.
Of course nothing new here but he gave a holistic view about how Yahoo is addressing the different areas of the conundrum. |
Next Web 09
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Something of a departure for me is to attend Next Web 2009, in Amsterdam. Its different as it is not explicitly about the world of user experience, but more about technology and its application on the internet.
Hello Group have sent me here to gauge just what is coming up in the world of the web in these really testing times. It will be good to see the new startups touting their wares and to hear from notable technorati and their different points of view. |
Everyware
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Adam Greenfield’s book is a thorough examination of ubiquitous computing. As a user experience professional, he writes with the insights of a practitioner. This gives us a book that will be invaluable, as the UX community grapples with the challenges of this concept.
What Greenfield is eager to make us aware of is the lack of a design language, or agreed design standards to build interfaces that will allow users to interact with ‘everyware’ (his term for inexpensive devices that have been integrated into everyday objects and activities).Managing information in the environment of ubicomp is challenging.
Building interfaces that relate to physical objects involves designing systems that relate the mechanics of the device to the user through an illustrative user interface.
When building these systems we have to think beyond just laying out the choices, we have to think about the way the systems work in the real world and show this on screen. We must be aware of the technology in use and what is next in terms of future applications. |
Paper Swans and Play-Doh
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Analog In, Digital Out: Brendan Dawes on Interaction Design
There have been several events where one speaker really shone out from the rest, and this alongside the more celebrated thought leaders in the UX field. His delivery can best be described as entertaining, humorous story-telling. As the title of the post suggests, he has a different approach to illustrate the importance of interaction design.
His book has been out since 2006 but despite the arrival of the iPhone and Wii his observations are just as important today. Brendan Dawes’ book, ‘Analog In, Digital Out‘ is an important work to this domain for many reasons. |
EPIC 2008 (IN)VISIBILITY
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A big surprise when attending the EPIC 2008 conference was the lack of talk around the next stages beyond ethnographic research. The academic stance was accompanied by representatives of large corporations, though it felt mainly a concentration on the methods and findings of ethnographic praxis. Read more… |
IA Summit 2008 UX Matters review
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After several blog posts, UX Matters asked me to do a proper job on it and it is now live here, in an overview of all the highlights of the IA Summit 2008. |
Design principles for building user engagement
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Luke Wroblewski – Content Page Design Best Practices One of the talks at the IA Summit was by Luke Wroblewski, author of two books and various resources published on his site. If you can see/hear the presentation at this location, I would urge you to do so. There will be something in there I have missed! The content he shared, was an insightful window into how we design pages and how the business requirements of a page may actually work against it. It really reminded me about the mechanics of persuasion, and he highlighted some insights explicitly. The following observations were made by Wroblewski. Read more… |
Being that UX team of one
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Leah Buley – How to be a UX team of one If there was an award for the most enthusiastic and passionate speaker I think Leah Buley would take it.Her presentation, How to be a UX team of one was a real hit, at the recent IA Summit in Miami. Anything with cartoons immediately gets my vote. It was engaging and inspirational with the hand drawn elements serving to convey the speaker’s personality and it was a refreshing change to the usual slides. Read more… |
IA convergence and emergence
 Andrew Hinton (Inkblurt) – |
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Ok a bizarre word to start off with. That grabbed the attention and yes, the talk covered links. But it was more about an explanation of IA, and as Hinton stated, ‘moving the conversation about it forward’. From the start Hinton mentions emergent theory and I think that’s a very good place to start. If you look at the practice of Information Architecture it is very much in an emergence. It is only as old as web design itself. |
IA and its changing general dynamics
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Mathew Milan – The Information Architect and the Fighter Pilot
If you click the image to the left you will go to a response to the presentation by Mathew Milan, that contains the presentation slides with audio and numerous comments from readers beneath it. From my point of view this was the most thought provoking of the presentations because it touches on elements of my design education, that of reflective practice. But it is really important because of the ramifications of Milan’s observations, and the ensuing discussions… |
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Raising hackles at the IA Summit 2008
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Jared Spool: Journey to the centre of Design Jared Spool’s opening keynote was perhaps deliberately inflammatory. If you go into a room of IAs and say UCD is dead you probably run the risk of losing half the audience within the first two minutes. |
However, provocations aside, Spool raised some important issues that we need to figure out if we are working in a commercial environment where IA and usability are often questioned as being expensive luxuries.
Yahoo! Pattern Library is open for all
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All this talk of recession and the web is currently awash with generosity. After my favourable words about the BBC who gave us a view of their new design language, Yahoo! have decided to go one better and provide their entire pattern library and developer tools for free.
Very kind and of course there is a monetary side to it but the new site is live here and during the day long workshop they gave at the IA Summit 2008 the complete set was given away on a memory key. |
IA Summit 2008 Wrap-up
After two days of workshops and three days of talks I thought I would give a brief run down of my top talks in no particular order. I will re-visit them in more detail as they have given me alot to think about, some affirmation and some important decisions to make…
- Leah Buley – The User Experience Team of One
- Jared Spool – Journey to the centre of design
- Joe Lamentia – Effective IA for Enterprise Portals
- Luke Wroblewski – Content page design best practices
- Stephen Anderson – Inspiration from the Edge: New patterns for interface design
- John Ferrara – Extending the gaming experience to conventional UIs
- Mathew Milan – The Information Architect and the Fighter Pilot
- Todd Zaki Warfel – Data driven design research personas
- Martin Belam – IA for Tiny stuff: Exploring widgets and gadgets
- Andrew Hinton – Linkosophy
These talks were all excellent for different reasons. The most interesting emerging subject is that the discipline is in a state of change and the labels of what IA is are more confused than ever. Perhaps that is why the poster that Dan Brown showed on Saturday night is more pertinent than alot of other ideas at the moment….Tweet
Information Architecture 3.0 - Peter Morville
A holistic view of where we have come from and where we are headed was outlined from a founding father of IA. A notable comment was;
‘Iterative design is good but you need a structured method to stop going around in circles.’ Read more…
IA Summit 2008 - Yahoo! Pattern Libraries
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Whilst still getting over the jet lag, today marked the start of the IA Summit 2008 for me, here in Miami. The first day has been excellent in terms of knowledge sharing from the Yahoo team – Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish and Lucas Pettinati. They have also designed templates for wireframing using patterns from the YUI library which will be publicly available very soon. I’m already really impressed by the community spirit exhibited here and there is a great feeling of togetherness and transparency. I will go into the details of what was said in a later post but its going to be a good five days of insight and inspiration. Apart from design patterns, there are loads of other talks I will be attending, I will cover a synopsis review and my take on each one in subsequent posts (that will take me into May no doubt)… |
Ambient Findability
I guess you could say this is a meme map of Morville’s observations, research and his ability to see into the future of the trends of Internet based technologies.
Its an interesting, and enlightening, discussion about what we as humans want and need from technology. It seems the text is intended to propagate more discussions and in turn discoveries around the subject of findability and technology. The book certainly makes you think about where we are heading as a society, but also the importance of the products we use and how they become integral to our lives.
Being able to orientate ourselves is a natural human instinct. In the 21st century, findability is a concept that we must ensure is present in the products that are developed (have a look at this great article about its importance just published here on A List Apart).
Its an inspirational read for many reasons, never trying to present answers, but certainly showing the questions that we need to answer if we are to harness the information monster we have created.
You should expect to read something that will present concepts and not case studies or solutions to problems. This book is about the bigger picture and the troubles of information management we face as a society.
Verdict: A philosophical study of where we are, and where we are going that proves Morville is at the forefront of thought leadership when it comes to Information Architecture.
Designing Web Navigation
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James Kalbach succeeds in bringing together the fundamental components that determine great, and not-so-great, user interfaces. The UI itself must always be respected and the author illustrates exactly why in the journey the book takes us on. What the book does is show how this can be achieved, from the past, notably from the present and into the future. The illustrations are in colour (critically important for any design book) and give clarity to the text’s important insights. Read more… |
Living Wireframes using Office Live
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The challenge that faces any design project that uses wireframes is that they can easily be snapshots in time and become static. As soon as they are printed or circulated around a stakeholder group they become a moment in the site development’s life cycle. They often can be made redundant due to forces outside of the design project. This can be a potential point of weakness for this valuable deliverable. |
dConstruct 2007
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I thought I would post this up whilst the event was still fresh in the mind. Firstly, bang for buck, this was the best I have been to in the last 3 years. That includes the Future of Web Design and @media. The range and quality of speakers were first class, all of them were interesting, not all appealed, but they all provoked an element of inquiry and from any web event that’s exactly what you want. |
Live Writer update
OK. I am officially impressed. This software allows me to post seamlessly. My only gripe is how it handles images by resizing them immediately when you import into an article. Hence all the images on this blog are a bit fuzzy. I will try to master that bit but all in all its great. If I had more than one blog I would post simultaneously without any problems at all. However one is enough for anyone surely…
UX Intensive - Adaptive Path, Amsterdam, June 2007
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Sometimes attending events do nothing more than affirm that you are doing the right thing. That you know a bit about what you do and that there are many like-minded individuals out there who are moving in the same direction.
This event proved all those things but also gave us some excellent food, in an area of Amsterdam that was devoid of drunks, stoners or sex workers. Amsterdam is a wonderful city and the trip reaffirmed that fact. It also provided some great workbooks on design strategy, information architecture and interaction design. I only attended the IA event (my company’s budget too tight to splash the cash on the three day course) but it was well worth it. For an overview, view this UX Intensive page. Chiara Fox did a very good job of outlining IA and all the various facets of the work that it encompasses. There wasn’t any real new news that we could take home but just an affirmation of what we do know. All in all a good trip and money well spent. |
Windows Live Writer
This possibly will make me write a lot more on this blog as it promises to be an easy way to upload content. I have been really busy over the summer, attended a workshop in Amsterdam with Adaptive Path, presented our approach to IA to various business teams in London and the US and also have been working on Metadata strategy.
In the next few days I will try to write about each of these elements, and as for Windows live it seems a good idea to have a spell checker that works instantly rather than through a web dialogue. Its Word for the web, and that can’t be such a bad thing…
Future of Web Design 2007
Well what was the verdict on this conference? Mmmm, thats a tricky one.
Ryan Singer from 37 signals was, perhaps predictably, very good indeed. If you have ever read their book Getting Real then the applied methodology written about was evident in Ryan’s presentation. Another Ryan, this time named Freitas, from Adaptive Path had a lot of interesting things to say about ‘Gradualisation’ and ‘Punctuation’. The iterative nature of online product development and the time when a site realises its reason to be. I really enjoyed this but I feel that the audience was less appreciative and seemed to recoil from the labels that were being thrown at them.
However the remainder of the speakers were lacking in a purpose or direction to what they were meant to be here for. Why is it that those in the creative industry are so unable to articulate what it is they do (process), how they do it (application) and show relevance to the wider audience (cultural awareness and empathy)?
Its a real shame that at events like these they end up being face-offs for the big agencies to say how great they are and how much their billion dollar clients love them.
So, what is the upshot? What is the future of web design? To be honest I am not sure you would have found it here. Although a sales presentation from Adobe did show a direction it may go in with their desktop live environments – called Apollo.
The Xbox360s were good fun for a while but much like the free water supplied by Microsoft, refreshment was short lived and pretty flat by the end of the day.
We are in a web 2.0 hangover. Please can we get over it and move on?Tweet
