disambiguity

What are you doing about diversity?

The old debate about the lack of women on the speakers rosters at conferences is doing the rounds again. Jeremy Keith has a good round up if you’ve managed to miss it.

For me, I’m going to think local for now. I’m going to put my hand up, I’m going to say yes when asked, I’m going to try to do a good job, and I’m going to keep looking for other great chick talent and to do what I can to make people who make the decisions know about the talent that’s out there.

What are you going to do?

(If you’re in London, you can come along and be a friendly and supportive audience member at the NMK Event ‘Usability: Whose problem is it anyway’ on Monday night (26/2) and witness my local action for diversity in action!).

Design Consequences: A fun workshop technique for brainstorming & consensus building

For my recent BarCamp session I shared a design technique that a colleague and I developed quite recently that we’ve found to be quite successful in both generating great design ideas and developing consensus about the design approach for projects within a multi-disciplinary team.

We call this technique Design Consequences, due to the similarity it has with the similarly named childrens games. We tend to use it in the earlier stages of the design process, although it can be used for more detailed interface design problems.

So, how does it work? It’s pretty simple really.

What you need:

1. a clearly articulated design problem and design goal(s) - for the BarCamp exercise our design problem was to design an electronic version of the BarCamp session wall where people could add their own session and choose which sessions they were going to attend. 
2. some design ideas or components – when I do this in a client context, we do this by spending time beforehand looking at our specific challenges and seeing how other people have approached them, and trying to understand design techniques or principles that work (as well as those that don’t). This gives people access to a much greater repoirtore of ideas to draw in the Design Consequences exercise.
3. a multi-disciplinary team - try to get the entire team if you can. The exercise works best with no more than 8 people involved, but it can be done with more if required. Get management to the table, bring all kinds of designers, bring the product managers and marketers, bring your developers. Bring everyone you can, as long as they’re familiar with the project and the design problem.
4. lots of paper and markers and post its – make them as colourful and fun as possible. Make it look like a crafting session. A sense of play and enjoyment is key to this exercise.
5. some examples of the type of output you’re expecting – anything that starts with the word ‘design’ can be very intimidating and scary. Lots of people ahve been told throughout their lives that they can’t draw, or that they aren’t creative. I have some *very* scratchy samples that have been created by people who design for a living. I show these before we get started so that people realise quickly that pretty drawings are not part of the equation.
6. A bundle of energy – you need to be just a little bit hyper to run this exercise

What you do:

1. Round One – everyone has seven minutes to design, individually, the the first page that users would see when confronting the ‘design problem’. So, a typical example would be a website homepage, but it could be any part of an application or website or even, say, an email. The faciliator(s) should participate, but keep an eye on the clock and give some warnings with a few minutes to go, and again at about 30 seconds.
2. Round Two – here’s the consequences twist. Everyone picks up the page they’ve designed, then passes it on to the person on their right (or left, it doesn’t really matter). Everyone then has to review the page they’ve received (ask for clarification from the original designer if it’s a little sketchy in places), then decide – if you were the user, what would *you* interact with, and what would happen next. You have seven minutes to draw ‘what happens next’. (Don’t tell people about Round Two before Round One, it’s much more fun when it’s a bit of a surprise).
3. Show and Tell – we then go around in a circle and each person describes the page they received, what aspect they chose to interact with and why, and then describes what they designed next. Discussion is encouraged.

What do you get? Lots of great data, and lots of great conversation fodder.

It’s a good idea to capture as much of this as possible as you go around the group. Of course, the best way to do this is to write up ideas onto post it notes as you go and stick them on the wall. There should be an ‘in’ section of the wall and an ‘out’ section of the wall. (‘In’ means that the idea has legs for this particular design problem). Affinity sorting on the run also helps to draw out the key themes or ideas that have emerged from the exercise. You should be leading the group discussion, helping the group to gain consesus and make decisions as to the design approach to be taken in solving the design problem, and trying to document these decisions as you go.

This process can be quite time consuming and intense, but more often than not there will be a few key ideas that the group is particularly enthusiastic about and that really propels the decision making.

By the end of the session you should be in a position where everyone is in agreement about *what* will be included in the wireframes that comprise the next phase of the design process.

Why would you use this approach?

• It makes a great change from the talk-fest of meetings
• It generates lots of ideas – and often some really great ones 
• It stops people getting to attached to their design ideas and makes evaluation and critiquing more effective
• It helps get all the team feedback and ideas into the pot (in particular, it’s great to get management and technical input at this stage)
• It drives buy-in, involvement and consensus
• It pulls in cross-discipline scills (for example, developers are often really great at quickly identifying great ID approaches for Rich Internet Applications)
• You’d be amazed what you learn earlier rather than later by involving the entire team at this early stage
• Getting lots of brains involved in the design process can uncover some really creative gems
• It makes the design process faster
• It’s fun!

So, there you have it. Some quick notes on a technique that’s been quite useful for me lately. I’d be interested to hear what you think of it and if you try it, to see if you too find it useful.

Future of Web Apps (London) – Highlights & Themes

Continuing in the theme of hanging out with geeks* I spent a couple of days at the Future of Web Apps conference this week. It wasn’t as fun as BarCamp, but it was interesting.

Here’s some of the things that got my brain ticking (or that entertained me) throughout the two days. (Warning – it’s a rather long post):

YouTube’s success is not to do with User Generated Content, it’s about watching TV online (IPTV). Almost all the top viewed videos includes copyrighted material (TV shows, music videos etc).

Michael Arrington was talking mostly about the formula for a winning startup, but I thought this passing comment on YouTube was interesting. I’d not thought about it that way before. Makes total sense. (It made even more sense when Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo showed his chimp video later in the conference as an example of the best of UGC.)

‘There are websites I now visit just so that people know I’ve been there’

Arrington again, this time talking about MyBlogLog. I’ve always sort of gotten the vanity aspect of MyBlogLog, but I’ve never thought of it so politically! Personally, I tend to find it somewhat surprising, in a disturbing way, when I go to someone’s website only to see my own noggin staring back at me!

Again, as an interesting counterpoint to Arrington, Yahoo’s Horowitz spoke more about MyBlogLog and the role it plays in ‘turning users into neighbours’. Making each member of a blog’s audience more visible to one another, and how that can in turn promote a sense of community around a blog (and I am thinking that it actually provides readers with some potentially interesting information they can use in evaluating a blog too….).

So, that’s peaked my interest in MyBlogLog a little more… to the point that I’ve finally given in and put their little widget in my sidebar. It’s an experiment. If you have opinions, I’d be interested to hear them. (Except for opinions on the pink. It’s a phase, you’re going to have to deal with it or stick to RSS! )

Community has been a key promise of the web since the beginning (Edwin Aoki, AOL)

Community or the social web was a continuing theme throughout many of the presentations at FOWA, the centrepiece of which was Tara Hunt’s presentation early on day one.

Tara opened with a nice definition of online community care of Lee & Vogel (2003) which was more or less ‘generating member driven content resulting in relationships’. I also liked her definition of the three ’Levels of Engagement’ which were Lightweight Social Processes (a la Digg, Last.FM), Collaborative Information Structures (a la Flickr, Threadless, YouTube ) and High End Collaboration (a la Wikipedia, Open Source projects, CouchSurfing).
Read more

links for 23 February 2007 – Semantics, semantics and tags.

• When tags work and when they don’t: Amazon and LibraryThing (Thingology)
  a statistical comparison between Amazon and LibraryThing tags, and making concrete recommendations for ecommerce sites interested in making tagging work.
  (tags: amazon folksonomy tagging socialSoftware)
• Semantics in HTML Part II – standardizing vocabularies at microformatique – a blog about microformats and “data at the edges”
  the next chapter in my continuing effort to better get my head around Microformats
  (tags: microformats SemanticWeb)

links for 22 February 2006 – How to use OpenID

• How to use OpenID (a screencast)
  If you don’t know about OpenID yet, now’s the time and here’s the place. I got myself an OpenID this week… now I just want more places to use it!
  (tags: openid identity)

links for 20 February 2007 – We Are The Web

• YouTube – We Are The Web
  A Net Neutrality Message for Everyone: We Are the Web
  (tags: netneutrality)

links for 19 February 2007 – Accessibility is a global issue

• Del.icio.us Pecha Kucha presentation creator
  now there is never an excuse not to have a presentation – Create a Pecha Kucha presentation from your last twenty del.icio.us bookmarks.
  (tags: del.icio.us presentation mashup barcamp)
• Computer-based exam discriminated against blind candidate | OUT-LAW.COM
  A qualifications body discriminated against a blind systems manager when it failed to make its computer-based exam accessible to her. The tribunal ruling is the first to find a US company with no presence in the UK liable under the UK’s Disability Discrimination Act
  (tags: accessibility)

BarCampLondon2

When I finally had the opportunity to grab a ticket to BarCampLondon2 last Thursday - in the midst of a busy week at work and with weekend plans already in place, it was very tempting to just let this one go through to the keeper. It’s now Sunday evening and I’m pretty exhausted (although, I’d have nothing on everyone who camped on site overnight and were up to all hours playing Werewolf!), but I’m very glad I went along. It was a great weekend.

For me, I found that I got more out of this BarCamp than the last one. There seemed to be a lot less navel gazing around ‘being geeks’ and lots more just getting on with it. Also, I wasn’t able to coerce any of my workmates to come along with me, so I had much less of a safety blanket. This is a great strategy. I met lots more people at this BarCamp and had so many interesting chats. It does make walking into a room a little scary at first, but you just do it. Walk in. Find someone who doesn’t look too scary. Talk.

Speaking of talking, there were lots of great presentations. I went to some… the bummer about BarCamp is that you miss more presentations than you can see. Some highlights for me included Ian Forrester kicking off with a talk about cool things you can do with Pipes; Andy Budd with a great overview of the importance of Design, Usability and User Experience; Riccardo Cambiassi talking about ‘Always On Brainstorms’ and using social software like Skype as everpresent and inclusive channels for idea generation (‘creating a playspace for imagination and creativity’); Tom Coates evangelising and defending the importance of social software and giving insight into what works and why; Simon Willison enlightened me, at least, as to what OpenID is and why I need one (I have one now); and lots and lots of people either angsting about Microformats and/or RDF; and a really interesting talk on Artificial Intelligence + Emotion by a guy whose name I just couldn’t remember (not for want of trying… sorry!)

Not to mention all the other great chats in the breaks between sessions or in front of the ‘wall’ trying to work out which session to go to next!

For my presentation I managed to make people who turned up do most of the work I ran a demo of a homespun design workshop technique I’ve recently started using which we currently call ‘Design Consequences’. It’s much more approachable and fun than the name suggests, so I’m issuing a call for suggestions to rename it! I’ll do a write up of what Design Consequences for anyone who was there and wants the notes, and those who missed out, in the next couple of days. Thanks to everyone who came along and participated in my session. I had lots of fun! (Update: I’ve written up the technique here if you’re interested in trying it yourself)

Something else I find really interesting about BarCamp are emergent themes… little topics that keep popping up over the course of the weekend in somewhat unrelated ways. Here’s a few I picked up on:

• Play & Fun – I heard these words mentioned in quite a few sessions I attended. More times than I expected. This makes sense to me. You should be spending your life working at something that you enjoy, that is fun. Integrating play and fun into work is something we should be more conscious of, I think.
• Time – in particular capturing and navigating time… either time we’re spending right now, or content we’re creating now that we and others might want to retrieve in the future, as well as content created in the past that we want to retrieve in a way that is specifically related to that time and place. I don’t think we think about this very much at the moment. I bet we start doing this a lot more soon. It’s going to be very interesting. I keep thinking of IA/IxDA and Microformats/Semantic Web. I think these two communities will be spending a lot more time together in the near future and rightfully so.
• Working together and thinking about ‘normal people’ – there seemed to me to be a much smaller delegation under the design/usability/accessibility flag at this BarCamp (see above re: me not being able to coerce co-workers to attend at short notice… although it could have been that it was a larger BarCamp so we were a little more dispersed?). Last BarCamp I got the sense that the developer community were a little bemused to find so many ‘not-proper-geeks’ had turned up to BarCamp. This BarCamp I got the feeling that there was a growing concensus that we all need to be working much more closely together. That together, we’re much greater than the sum of our parts and we can do much greater and more effective work that way. 
• The Power of Social – there were a few presentations that were dedicated specifically to social software, but it really pervaded almost all of the presentations I attended in one way or another. It makes me think of what Om Malik wrote recently about social networks being ‘just a feature’ – part of the offering of sites that set out to meet particular needs, rather than an end in themselves (which, perhaps, is just meeting the need of ‘being social?). I suspect we may look back and laugh at all the time and effort we spent in trying to ‘architect’ social spaces. That, in the places they add value and are powerful, social networks will just evolve. There are certainly some good examples of that already. More on that later.

So, that was BarCamp for me. Next up, I’m fortunate enough to be spending Tuesday and Wednesday this week at the Future of Web Apps conference. So, it’s likely there’ll be more posts in this vein before the week is out.

Anyone else going alone? I’m flying solo at this one too!

links for 16 February 2007 – Introducing the book

• YouTube – Introducing the book
  “compared to the scroll, these pages take longer to turn”… a very funny look at adapting to new technologies
  (tags: humour usability design youtube learnability)

I’m off to London Barcamp2 tomorrow. Hurrah!

Chatting with Bill Moggridge – Part Three – What makes a good design team?

This is the third and final part of my chat with Bill Moggridge in which we talk about the ingredients of successful design teams – who is in them, how do they work together, where do they work, those kinds of questions.

This was a chat I recorded when I was talking with Bill about his new book, Designing Interactions.

You can catchup on the first two parts of the chat here: Part One / Part Two

Enjoy!

(Duration: 10:28)