disambiguity

Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good (IA Summit 07 Slides)

I was on a panel at the IA Summit over the weekend titled ‘where does IA fit in the design process‘. I was staking a case for Agile UCD, and these are the slides I used to outline my case in 5 minutes or less (Of course, you could talk about this topic for hours, so this is very much just an overview!).I’d be interested to hear your thoughts/experiences!

links for 27 March 2007 – Virtual violence is not acceptable

• Kathy Sierra cancels ETech presentation due to death threats
  I can’t believe that *anyone* would think this kind of intimidation is anything like acceptable. It makes me sick. Whoever is behind this should be named and shamed.
  (tags: blogging)

Six steps to get the most from a conference

Conferences have a mixed reputation. I don’t get to many, but I really love it when I can. I’m at my second for the month now (at the IA Summit), and I think I have a strategy that works when it comes to getting real value from a conference.

Here’s my six step strategy.

1. Fly Solo. Going to conferences without colleagues or a whole pack of people you know can be pretty scary. Do it anyway. There are some great things about flying solo including: meeting more people – if you don’t hang with your crew you need to find people to talk to, therefore you get to meet lots MORE people than you normally would. This is probably the best thing about conference – the people you meet and the conversations you have. Also, when you’re flying solo, you can really take advantage of serendipitous opportunities. You don’t have to worry about whether your posse wants to do what you need to do, you never have to check with your people. It is scary at times, but it’s also very fun. You learn, pretty quickly, that a room full of people you don’t know is actually a great opportunity, not as terrifying as it first appears. If you talk to people, they’ll talk back. People are surprisingly friendly like that. 
2. Choose sessions tangentally. Don’t go to sessions that look as though they are ‘for you’. Don’t choose presentations where you’re already pretty familiar with the subject area. Unfortunately, most of the time you’ll walk out unsatisfied, feeling that you didn’t really learn anything. The nicest thing you can say about these sessions is that ‘it was nice to have what I already know confirmed’. There are much better ways to spend your time. Rather, choose sessions that are tangentally related to your interest, subjects that you don’t know much about. You’d be surprised how often the content is really related to what you do AND you learn things. (And you often get the chance to meet a whole different set of people to the ones you usually hang out with, because your ‘familiars’ are all in that session that you thought was for you. Make sense? Using this approach I’ve had a hit parade of great sessions where others at the conference were much less satisfied. (That’s why I spend hours at Taxonomy and Search Design sessions in the last couple of days. Time well spent, as it turns out!) Oh, and also. If you *do* find yourself in a dud session and your conference is multitrack – get out. Go find a better session. It might feel a little rude, but you’re paying to be there and chances are the speaker is being paid to speak. Make them earn it
3. Don’t be a fangirl (or boy). One of the appealing things about conferences is the opportunity to meet some gurus. As such, it’s tempting to choose your schedule on a celebrity basis. This is often a big mistake. I tend to go for speakers who I don’t really know. Here’s why. The gurus spend a lot of time speaking and writing about whatever their thing is. You’ve probably read their books and their blog. They did three presentations last week and are doing two next week. And, they don’t come up with new stuff very often. Subsequently, whilst you do get the opportunity to see them in the flesh, you probably would have already heard or read most of what they have to say. This is disappointing. On the other hand, people who speak less often are more likely to put a lot of effort into their presentation and do a lot of preparation, AND you probably haven’t heard what they’ve got to say ever before. Some of the best presentations I’ve attended have been from people I don’t know. Much better to use Stategy 1 to meet your gurus. It’s scarier, but overall a much better approach. [sidenote: this also applies to going to presentations because your friends are presenting. If you know what they're going to say, don't go. disclaimer: choosing unknown speakers *is* a somewhat risky strategy. You may get some who are just not very good presenters or who could do with some more experience, or who are affected by nerves. In my experience it's well worth the risk].
4. Participate. Take whatever opportunities you have to get involved. This might be asking a question, or signing up for something that’s interactive/activity centred, or helping out as a volunteer with the conference (I’m helping out on the IAI booth for an hour or so on Sunday, for example). Again, this is a lot about talking to people, meeting people, engaging with discussions. 
5. Twitter. Or whatever other back channel is going on at that conference. Sign up, sign on, get involved. Find out what’s *really* going on and what people *really* think. This is especially good where there are multiple tracks and you want to know if you should leave the dud presentation you’re in for a better one. It’s also a great way to ‘meet’ people you don’t know before you actually meet them in the flesh. That’s fun, and makes conversations easier and richer.
6. Switch off the laptop. Face it. If you have the laptop on you’re probably not really paying attention. (Exemption if you’re live blogging the event for the benefit of those who can’t attend). Same goes with Twitter and other back channels. Use these with discipline and make sure you’re actually tuning in to what’s being presented. You can check your email anytime, but this presentation is a one off experience. Be there in body AND in mind.

So, there are my top tips. Anyone got other tips to contribute? (or care to add, amend or dispute mine?)

Happy conferencing! 

[ooh, gratuitous plug. If you're at the summit and somehow managing to keep up with your blog reading(!), pls come to the panel I'm speaking on on Sunday at 11.15am. We're talking about where IA fits in the design process. It should be fun. I believe there will a podcast posted later on for those who can't make it.]

links for 22 March 2007 – Design Patterns on Flickr

• Chris Messina’s Design Patterns on Flickr
  what a great idea. I would say that I wish I’d thought of it, but thanks to Chris and Flickr I don’t have to! Wondering how others do ‘add friend’ – here’s the place to find out.
  (tags: designpatterns)

Design starts with Proposition (ergo Usability)

Here’s a typical story.

A project is in its final phases when it gets to the part of the Gant chart that says ‘usability testing’, and so they do.

People come in and are asked to perform tasks, and so they do, with greater or lesser degrees of difficulty. And yet, something else is wrong.

It’s not so much that they *can’t* use your website, it’s just that they don’t want to.

People ask me all kinds of questions about usability. What are the most common usability problems? What’s the best way to make sure our site/application/system is usable? That kind of thing.

It’s pretty clear when they ask these questions that they’re thinking on the presentation layer. Is that button in the right place? Is it big enough? Has it got the right label.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the presentation layer is important, but it’s not the biggest usability problem I see in my work. The biggest problem is that you’re designing something that people don’t care about. You’ve got your proposition wrong.

What’s your proposition? Well, basically it’s the value you’re offering to your customer. Are you offering something they want? Are you solving *real* problems for them? You’d be amazed how often this is not the case, and how often people don’t know about this until they’re about to launch their product or, worse still, once it has launched and is failing.

The diagram above is one that I pull out fairly often these days (it’s another one I’ve borrowed from Flow). It talks about how you need to design from the proposition down. You need to get the value offering right, then look at the model for delivering that value to clients at a conceptual level, then start looking more at what elements go on a page, what functionality is included, how it is structured and ordered. Unless you have all of these in order, it doesn’t really matter where your buttons go or what they’re labeled. Appearance level usability is the most superficial, easily remedied and perhaps even least important of all of the levels of design.

If you’ve got a flaw in your thinking at the top of the chain, then no amount of surface usability is going to save your product.

So, how do you approach this kind of Proposition design and usability? It’s pretty simple really, you test your proposition. This kind of testing (or really, research) is more about talking than tasks, and it’s about understanding your customers better and checking whether you are conceptually on the same page as they are.

I’ve been involved in several projects just in the past twelve months where doing this kind of research has saved companies tens of thousands of pounds (double that if you’re talking dollars) in *not* designing and developing functionality that either was unwanted by their customers or was designed to solve the wrong problems.

Working this out when you have a few pencil sketches or a couple of visio wireframes with a few days invested is an awful lot better than working it out when you get to the ‘usability testing’ line in your Gant chart.

So, if you really want my advice about usability, it’s that it starts right at the very beginning. Before a line (or a box) has been drawn. If you’re not designing the *right thing* then no amount of design expertise is going to get you a really usable product.

Talk to the people you’re designing for.

You’ll save lots of time and money and look really smart.  

Amen.

links for 19 March 2007 – Twittervision

• Twittervision
  dead cool, if you’re into Twitter or interested in the minutiae of what people all over the world are doing. Be warned – it’s uber addictive.
  (tags: twitter maps visualisation)

WWAD? (What would Apple do?)

People say that it is some kind of Steve Jobs special sauce that makes Apple the company that it is, but as this Fortune article reveals, they reap rewards from using design techniques that we all have access to, and should *all* be doing. All the time.

These techniques include prototyping:

“One of the best pieces of advice Mickey ever gave us was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn’t work,” says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product. Apple Store Version 0.0 took shape in a warehouse near the Apple campus. “Ron and I had a store all designed,” says Jobs, when they were stopped by an insight: The computer was evolving from a simple productivity tool to a “hub” for video, photography, music, information, and so forth. The sale, then, was less about the machine than what you could do with it.

But looking at their store, they winced. The hardware was laid out by product category – in other words, by how the company was organized internally, not by how a customer might actually want to buy things. “We were like, ‘Oh, God, we’re screwed!’” says Jobs.

But they weren’t screwed; they were in a mockup. “So we redesigned it,” he says. “And it cost us, I don’t know, six, nine months. But it was the right decision by a million miles.”

and User Research:

“When we launched retail, I got this group together, people from a variety of walks of life,” says Johnson. “As an icebreaker, we said, ‘Tell us about the best service experience you’ve ever had.’” Of the 18 people, 16 said it was in a hotel. This was unexpected. But of course: The concierge desk at a hotel isn’t selling anything; it’s there to help. “We said, ‘Well, how do we create a store that has the friendliness of a Four Seasons Hotel?’” The answer: “Let’s put a bar in our stores. But instead of dispensing alcohol, we dispense advice.”

OK. So maybe you don’t have budget to build a store twenty times over, but everyone has time and budget to do a paper prototype and show some people. Even if that’s all you can do, do it. 

Both of these techniques have been key in helping Apple make more dollars per square foot than stores like Saks or Tiffany – a pretty successful outcome by any measure, not to mention the way that the experience of the Apple store contributes to the over all Apple brand equity.

WWAD? Prototyping and user research. Go crazy.

If it wasn’t for Twitter I wouldn’t be here…

People ask me what I think of Twitter and whether it’s really important or useful. I’ve already said a bit about it, but here’s a funny story.

A few days back I was flying out of London to come to SXSW. I left home a little early because I quite like hanging out in the duty free stores and wanted to give myself a little time.

After lugging my heavy bag through the tube I settled myself down into a comfy seat on the Heathrow Express to wait a few minutes before we set off when my mobile did the buzzy thing… a twitter message had arrived.

It was a message from Jeremy Keith saying that he was waiting on a taxi to take him to Gatwick. Interesting, I thought. What were the chances of two planes setting off from London from two different airports to Dallas at roughly the same time.

I thought it might be worth just double checking that I was heading for the correct airport.

Of course, I was not.

Much frantic rushing through London peak hour ensued with rapidly beating heart as I tried to get to Gatwick in time to board my flight to SXSW. As it turns out, they’re not so strict with the 2 hour check in thing afterall… thank goodness.

But, here’s the thing. If it wasn’t for Twitter, I’d have stayed on the Heathrow Express and by the time I worked out I was in the wrong place it would have been far, far too late. 

Thanks to Twitter, and Jeremy (I still owe you beers!) I made it.

Flash forward to this afternoon and a Twitter from PeterMe lets me know there’s a UX meetup this evening. Again, something I would have totally missed without Twitter.

So yes. I think it matters. And then some.

Checking in from SXSW

It’s day three at SXSW and before heading out for a breakfast taco (yeah, I know)and the first panel of the day, a quick update!

After two days of panels I can say again the same thing I always say: If you want a panel that rocks you need to be concrete: give real examples, tell stories, show us stuff. Interestingly I read a book on the plane on the way over that explains this really well, it’s called Made To Stick, and if you need to be communicating your ideas to others it’s definitely worth a read.

There have been some panels that rocked and others no so much. Here’s my top five favourite so far (in chronological order):

• After the brief – a field guide to design inspiration Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychart led an energetic and inspirational session sharing with us what they do in their lives to foster creativity and inspiration, including design vigilantism, crossword puzzles, and regular exercises with extreme design constraints. They talked a LOT about getting away from the computer and actually making stuff. I’m inspired
• Tag, You’re It - it’s from this panel that my favourite quote to use out of context comes. “There’s no such thing as Information Architecture anymore,” says George Oates. By happy accident I ended up at this panel when I had something else pencilled into my program and it was great. I’m happy that we’re not spending time arguing taxonomy v folksonomy so much these days, but looking at how people are using tagging and what we can learn from this mass of data and human behaviour. This panel also introduced me to my new buzzword for IA ‘pivot’, which Thomas Vander Wal used a lot to describe what you’re doing when you click on a tag and which has a close relationship with facets. I’ve heard it used a few times since but it was new on me. I can’t decide if I like it or not.
• Stop Designing Products - Peter Merholz argues that the experience is the product and there is much more to good experience than cool technology or a bunch of features. Good experiences are born from a clearly articulated strategy that is applied across all channels, and a big part of that strategy is retaining the magic in the user experience, where magic to the users is data and logic to the rest of us! 
• Every Breath You Take - an incredibly intelligent, engaging and interesting panel on identity, attention and reputation which are topics that I’m finding incredibly interesting at the moment. There are all kinds of problems and opportunities around identity at the moment and this panel, including Christian Crumlish, Ted Nadean, Mary Hodder, Kaliya Hamlin and George Kelly took a run at some of them. I’m still thing about the idea of Identity Friction and how we need to increase identity friction in virtual spaces to better replicate how it works in the ‘real world’.
• Making Your Short Attention Span Pay Big Dividends - a lighthearted, story filled and inspirational presentation from Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners) and Brendan Dawes (magneticNorth) the crux of which is – have lots of ideas and give them a go, see what happens. Less with the talking, more with the doing. That way fun lies.

The biggest highlight of SXSW is the people. It’s been amazing to meet all the amazing people I’ve met so far, to catch up with a few people I know who are here, to put faces and real life personalities to the voices behind the blogs and books I read, to be amongst hundreds of people who are also completely into it.

I got to have a quick play with one of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) machines the other night and whine to an engineer who actually works on Google Reader that it’s way to slow (he knows, they’re working on it). This is all ridiculously good.

So, for now, I’m going to step away from the laptop and get back amongst it. More soon!

links for 05 March 2007 – Links are the grammar of the web

• Links are the grammar of the web
  Look at your web sentences again. Delete the first half and then turn the second half into a link. Focus on what your customers need to do, not on what you need to tell them.
  (tags: content link usability)
• Bokardo – Social Web Design » Five Principles to Design By
  Design…is about use. The designer needs someone to use what they create….The highest accolade we can bestow on a design is not that it is beautiful, as we do in Art, but that it is well-used.
  (tags: design)