disambiguity

UX London Tweets – Jeff Veen

Here is a dump of my live tweets during Jeff’s presentation at UX London. I’m writing a more coherent version of this for Johnny Holland – coming soon!

• @veen talking about designing our way through data
• @veen things that happened in 1974 (meta = hippy goes mainstream). A v important year for the internet #uxlondon (also the year i was born)
• a tiny little 6yr old epiphany for @veen in 1974 when he first saw Pong – ooh, I can control what’s on the screen!
• tools for participation lots of capacity to store data = some pretty cool effects
• there are 24hrs of video uploaded every 8 seconds on YouTube.
• as a designer I can look into the data and see if there is something in there I can use to inform the design (eg. the colour)
• I’ve taken the story out of the data and shown it by applying design elements
• ‘decorating’ data rather than using design to provide better access is dangerous. @veen
• Google Analytics interface inspired by Indiana Jones @veen
• use visualisation to change behaviour (statistics can be anesthetizing, hard to make meaning)
• find the story in the data, assign different visual queues to each dimension, remove everything that isn’t telling the story
• mini theme from #uxlondon – don’t be a control freak
• think more about giving yr audience tools so they can find their own patterns & stories, rather than controlling their experience
• shout out to Dopplr at
• provide filters to enable clarity (helping people make sense of data) @veen
• Storytelling using data visualisation is incredibly compelling Now we need to give people tools so they can find their own stories
• @veen tshirt: ‘Math is Easy, Design is Hard’. Not a popular tshirt at Google.
• research is great but it’s just data that you use to inform your design. Data doesn’t tell you how to design. shoutout to @stop
• @veen quotes @zeldman: ‘start with the user, but know yourself’. Thinks this should be inverted
• ‘The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.’ Richard Hamming, 1962 #uxlondon (via @ritchielee)

Research opportunity – ‘Proud Mums’ and ‘Good Friends’ earn £40

I’m looking for some people to partipate in a research project in or around Central London next week (9-10 September). More information here.

links for 25 August 2008 – What games can learn from social software

• Infovore » Playing Together: What Games Can Learn from Social Software
  There’s a strange piece of slow glass between the web industry and the games industry. It’s strange because whilst stuff passes through it in both directions, it seems to move faster towards the web, and slower towards games. In the past 2-3 years, there’s been a lot of talk in web software about making applications more playful and gamelike. Now that people have done that – and succeeded – I guess it’s an appropriate time to return the favour.
  (tags: interactiondesign play socialmedia games gamedesign)

links for 20 August 2008 – Iteration Zero

• The Wisdom of Experience
  Allan Cooper’s talk at IXDA Conference 2008
• One week, rapid, collaborative, agile inception used in iteration zero or sprint zero
  To begin an Agile project we need a shared understanding of the most important business and user objectives to strive for. We need a shared understanding of the current work practice of those who will be using the resulting software.

Some unformed thoughts on Ambient Intimacy for the next generation

My little boy is six months old tomorrow. I’ve been thinking a lot, since he’s been around, about what the world looks like to him now, what it might be like in the future, and trying to understand how his little brain develops and turns him into a real little person (incredibly quickly, as it turns out).

I’ve been thinking a bit about this lately and I’d love to workshop it with you…

For people born in 2008 (and probably a few years before) – ambient intimacy will just be a normal state. It won’t have the novelty that it has had for us. The ability to stay in touch with people that we have stronger or weaker ties with in this light weight way will be something available to them from a very young age and – in all probability – throughout their entire lives.

What do you imagine the repercussions will be?

For example, assuming that within the next few years, more and more people will have a social presence online, my little guy will have no real excuse to ‘lost contact’ with anyone he makes contact with. Can you imagine a kindergarten equivalent of Facebook? I can. Extrapolate from there.

What does that mean? Being able to ‘lose touch’ is, when you think about it, a pretty valuable luxury. How will we negotiate this I wonder.

What about ‘contact’ scalability. How many contacts could you accumulate over the course of a lifetime if you start really young? How will we manage that? If we get stressed about our mum’s friending us on FaceBook now, what do our kids have coming? We think Twitter gets distracting now – how will we manage all the noise that such a huge number of contacts will generate? Or will we all just shut up? (I doubt it).

How will we manage our identity online as our identity changes? Will this pressure that seems to be about to have an ‘integrated’ online persona (work, social, family, all in together) continue? If not, how will different personas evolve and how will the be related? Will we be able to re-invent ourselves? Will it be as fun? Will our kids ever forgive their parents for putting so many photos of them on Flickr when they were babies?

On the brighter side though, imagine how powerful and extensive these networks will be – the ability to motivate, research, refer, inspire, inquire. How distributed and trusted information sources will be.

Put on your future goggles and imagine what it would be like… what do you see?

links for 29 May 08 – Fruitful Seminars

• Fruitful Seminars: Making Social Tools Ubiquitous
  But what do you do if you don’t get the level of engagement you’d like? And how do you progress from a small-scale pilot to widespread adoption? The first ‘social’ seminar hosted by Fruitful Seminars with Suw Charman-Anderson.
  (tags: fruitfulseminars socialnetworks)

links for 25 May 2008 – Why Twitter is the canary in the news coalmine

• Jeff Jarvis: Why Twitter is the canary in the news coalmine | Media | The Guardian
  Developers at the BBC and Reuters have picked up on the potential for this. They are working on applications to monitor Twitter… Summize, and other social-media services… for news catchwords such as “earthquake” and “evacuation”…
  (tags: twitter socialsoftware ambientintimacy)

links for 30 April 2008 – Mental Models Workshop

• Mental Models workshop with Indi Young | Clearleft
  I’m looking forward to going along to Indi’s workshop – finally! Have been meaning to catch this one for ages. If you can get to Brighton for this it will be well worth your time.
  (tags: training workshop indiyoung mentalmodels)

links for 31 March 2008 – Twittery Goodness

• YouTube – Twitter in Plain English
  life happens between blog posts and emails
  (tags: twitter ambientintimacy)
• I’m Over Twitter (Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic)
  for three reasons: most people are not that interesting; twitter takes bitesized content too far; twitter feels distancing even as it connects me.
  (tags: twitter ambientintimacy)
• Friending, Ancient or Otherwise – New York Times
  Academic researchers are … exploring the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies. In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and “friending,” they see the resurgence of ancient patterns of oral communication.
  (tags: ambientintimacy twitter socialnetworks)

links for 07 February 2007 – User Research as Commodity

• Tim’s Musings: User Research as a Commodity
  “The Product Manager and I were convinced that we needed to expose our work to end users prior to going live, and we could see there was no way we’d get even a week out of the schedule. So we decided to try something new—prescheduled testing.”
  (tags: agile user-research ucd ux)