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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)

Chatting with Bill Moggridge – Part Two – What Interaction Designers can learn from games

Here’s the second part of my chat with Bill Moggridge.

You might remember that I was lucky enough to have the chance to talk with him about his new book, Designing Interactions and that he was happy for me to record the chat and share it with you. Here’s Part One in case you missed it! (update: you can get part three here too!)

As you can see from my microphone stand pictured above, I am a very professional correspondent and go to any length to ensure good sound quality.

(Clearly this is a blatant lie… I’m working on it!)

Anyway – in this second part of the chat we spend some time talking about designing games and what interactions can learn from games design. Interesting stuff.

(Duration: 5.49)

Chatting with Bill Moggridge – Part One

In December last year I was lucky enough to catch up with Bill Moggridge to chat about his new book, Designing Interactions.

My mission was to write a piece for Usability News (mission accomplished).

I recorded our chat and Bill was happy for me to share it with you all, so – apologies for the not so great sound quality – I hope you enjoy it!

In part one Bill talks about the process he went through to design/write the book (yes, there was a prototype involved!) as well as some thoughts on what factors are common where good interaction design is created.

(Duration: 10.02)

update: also check out Part Two (5.49) and Part Three (10.28)

Podcasts are boring (Hot tips to hold attention)

I keep getting distracted when I try to listen to podcasts. My mind wanders, I check my email, before I know it I’m doing something entirely different and have forgotten that there’s someone talking in my ears. The podcast becomes background noise. I stop listening.

You could say it’s my fault. That I don’t have good concentration, or discipline. That I don’t care enough. But it’s not me, it’s them.

Podcasts are boring.

(At least, the ones that I’ve been listening to that are produced by people who are supposedly interested in design and user experience…. I know there are some that are really cool and interesting… but that would make a boring title).

Yes, yes, so you’re really smart and probably pretty well known… that’s why I’m listening to you. But you still have to make an effort to reach through the microphone and grab me by the earlobes. Lots of people are trying to get in my ear these days, but too few are putting any effort into making it a great experience for me.

I’m no expert in podcasting, but I know what I like Having spent the last few days listening to a whole bunch of podcasts, this is what I’ve learned:

• Don’t over prepare and don’t read from a script. Definitely don’t try to ‘fake’ an interview. It sounds artificial and lifeless and dull.
• Have a plan. Once you get started with your podcast it’s pretty easy to ramble on and on. This is not a good idea. Know what point you want to make or what information you want to share, have a strong structure and stick to it.
• Talk about something interesting. Just like my wishlist for conference presentations, I’d also like your podcast to be full of meaty information not just a top level review, I want you to take a position and argue it (bonus points if it’s a controversial position and you can back it up!), and I love hearing about real life examples and stories.
• If you must edit, try to keep it subtle. Personally, I’d be aiming to keep the podcast authentic sounding and to edit as little as possible. I’d rather do a few takes and minimal editing than try to hack together something coherent from rambling single take.
  Why shouldn’t you rehearse your podcast? You’ll do a better job the third time through than the first.
• Don’t be cool, be passionate. If you care about your subject matter (and you should if you think you’re worth listening to), then put a bit of enthusiasm into your delivery. It was always the voice that held my attention – speakers who had LIFE in their voice, and HUMOUR and HUMANITY. People who were passionate about the topic of the podcast. And don’t cut out the bits that make you seem human. This is the joy of the podcast… you make yourself more human.
• It’s a performance, not an internal monologue. Think about how you’d prepare for a conference presentation. Take away the slides and all the same ‘how to’s’ pretty much apply. You can’t just get three of your mates on the phone (no matter how A-list they maybe), shoot the breeze and call it a podcast because you’ve got some big names chatting. Have you seen all those posts about how panel sessions at conferences often suck? These kinds of podcasts are worse.
• Keep it snappy. Set yourself a time limit and stick to it. For me, I’d prefer a podcast around say 15 minutes long. Any longer than that and I’ll probably lose concentration or get called away to do something else. I’d LOVE a really satifisfying 15 minute podcast to listen to every day.
• Be creative. What can you do to make your podcast a better experience for your users? I don’t know the answer to this, but I have some ideas that I reckon might be kind of cool… podcasts use music a bit these days but I’d quite like to see a bit more. What about sound effects?
  I’m thinking of radio plays – sound effects, characters, storytelling, suspense. Lists? Vox pops? Talk show? There are lots of different genres from which we could be drawing inspiration.

Now that anyone who wants to can easily grab a microphone and start pumping out the podcasts, I think it’s time to raise the bar. So, if you’ve to something to say, and you want to say it in a podcast… take a little time before you hit record and think about how you can give your audience a great listening experience.

What are our tips for making podcasts not boring? And what podcasts do you recommend?

less is not enough

OK. So I’m finally almost brave enough to send you in the direction of my very first ever podcast that I did for the Office 2.0 Podcast Jam. (Assuming you haven’t wandered over there and had a listen already.

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about this ‘cult of less‘ that 37 Signals seems to be leading and whether, in fact, it has an evil side. Well… ok, not an evil side. But is it all as good as it seems?

I started thinking this when I was listening to Peter Morville give the keynote at EuroIA the other weekend. He was pondering the ever increasing abundance of information that we have around us now, and wondering if it was helping us to learn, to make good decisions.

I wondered the same about information architecture and interaction design.

So, I’ve been thinking a bit about these web based project management solutions such as BaseCamp and GoPlan and thinking about what they *don’t* do when compared to more complex software such as Microsoft Project.

Now, don’t get me wrong… I’m not saying that there aren’t some *serious* problems with Microsoft Project but it was, for better or worse, instrumental in teaching me how to be a project manager. This is something that neither BaseCamp nor Go Plan could do.

Similarly, we’ve seen some interesting user testing lately that has shown users asking for more complexity to help enable their decision making.

So our natural response as designers, to simplify the interface, may in fact, be reducing the ability of the people using our software or websites to be able to learn, and to make good decisions.

So, that’s the crux of what I’m thinking of. What do we lose with ‘less’? And is it (always) worth it?

If you want to hear the full blow raving version, you can find it here.

I think I sound a bit less like Judith Lucy in this one

Image credit: 37 Signals being featured in HOW magazine

what’s it like being a designer at Flickr?

I’ve wondered this myself… so I thought I’d use the PodCastJam as a great excuse to get in touch with George Oates, an Australian (ex Adelaide) gal who’s been working with Flickr since before they were Flickr (remember Ludicorp?).

So, in my podcast interviewing debut (and… yes, I need more practice. Want to be interviewed?), I’ve posted an interview with George on the PodCastJam site.

I feel very nervous suggesting this, but I can’t hide such a great opportunity to chat with someone who designs in such an interesting spaces…. so, go check it out!

(Does anyone else think I sound remarkably like Judith Lucy?! Surely I don’t talk like that all the time…. must be my special podcast interviewing voice. A cousin of my phone answering voice).

Personally, I’ve found it really interesting that despite all the different perspectives that people have been coming at Office 2.0 at the conference and the jam, two really loud recurrent themes keep coming out – community and collaboration.

I like that.

Technorati Tags: office20jam, george+oates, flickr

Posting v Podcasting (Ideas on Privacy & Perception)

So, today I did my first ever podcast and shipped it off to Anne for the Office 2.0 Podcast Jam.

I’ve shied away from podcasting for as long as I’ve known about it for a few reasons.

Before this blog I had a few short lived experiments with websites and blogging, but none of them really stuck. Partly, I think, because they were so inauthentic. Firstly, I didn’t know what I wanted to write about, but more importantly, I didn’t really want people to know who I was for security reasons. The idea of someone hunting me down somehow from my website was something that was a real fear for me at the time.

When I first start blogging it was with a mixture of excitement and fear. I was using my real name and talking about my real life and experiences, but this time I was not afraid for my personal safety, but rather scared that people would think I was talking crazy talk. Or that because I didn’t have a full and complete understanding of absolutely every topic I decided to write about, that people would think that I wasn’t very smart.

Nonetheless, by the time I started this blog, you could Google me and find out bits and pieces about me. One of the reasons for starting this blog was to have more control over what potential employers and others would discover if they started searching the internet for me. (heh. not that I have anything to hide, except for a *really* dorky assignment from my undergraduate degree that just won’t seem to go away!)

The design of my blog – until very recently – was not really personalised at all. It was like a WordPress uniform – taking seriously WordPress’s default tagline ‘just another WordPress blog’. It didn’t really give much away about who I was. My age, my gender, my nationality, who I worked for. None of these things were actually hidden – you can find them all on my About page if you really care – but they weren’t explicit in the design of the blog. I didn’t link to my Flickr account (where my *real* life was documented) from my blog for a long time.

This was quite deliberate. I felt that it wasn’t really to my advantage to make a big deal of being an Australian girl who talked about user experience and went for beers with her work mates on Friday nights. To be honest – I felt that these factors would probably create perceptions that weren’t necessarily as credible as if I was a 40-something year old guy from somewhere in the States.

Now given that, as it turns out, many more people reading this do so via RSS than by looking at my blog, then perhaps that didn’t really matter after all. Although – I guess you have to see the blog and decide to subscribe… so maybe it does make a difference.

Podcasting takes that feeling of ‘exposure’ and multiplies it exponentially. All over again, by letting people hear my voice, I feel as exposed as I ever did when I first posted a page on the internet. Not that I’ve gotten all worried about stalkers again, but I worry about what perceptions people will make of me when they hear my voice. Will I sound like I know what I’m talking about? Will people take me seriously?

This ‘exposure’ worries me much more than the other deterrants to podcasting.

For me, podcasting is much harder than writing a blog post… writing a blog post seems to happen at about the same rate as my brain is able to process things in some kind of vaguely structured and (sometimes) logical way. Podcasting moves much more quickly. When you pause to think, there’s a big gap of silence, which is all good until you realise there’s been a big gap of silence, and then it gets longer and longer,… ok, so this only happened a couple of times.

I podcast, it seems, the lazy way, that is, without doing much post production work. A podcast for me is kind of like the 8 minute opening scene of Altman’s ‘The Player’ – one great big long take!. It’s agility training for a blogger. You’ve got two options – work out what you’re going to say, memorise it, then recite it. OR have a structure and a point to make, and get stuck into it. I think the second approach is the only real option – but it really is an interesting exercise.

As I blog, I find my post heading off in directions that I wasn’t expecting. This is fine – sometimes it’s interesting, other times it’s a strange and tedious tangent that just gets deleted. With my one-take podcasting approach, I have to be working out how the structure is working as I go along, but still get through the argument that I’m currently making somewhat coherently!

Funny how this was so much easier when I was doing High School debating!

Perhaps I should just succumb to post production? I suspect that if I’d started editing this, my first podcast, I would have edited it all away and been left with never to contribute to the Jam!
So, there -some initial thoughts and reflections on podcasting. I’d be interested to hear your experiences and how you’ve found it or why you avoid it.
I’d also be interested to hear if you think that my overly anxious approach to both blogging and podcasting is perhaps, gender related? Anecdotally – Anne reckon’s that women seem to angst a lot more over the quality of their podcast than men do. Or perhaps they just share their angsting more?

Not that I want to make it all about gender – but it’s interesting that one of the reasons for PodCast Jam was to give more women the opportunity to have their voices heard… but we’ve still got significantly more men than women sending in the podcasts (unless things have evened up today).

photo credit: Matthew Whatley on Flickr

office20jam, podcastjam, office20

but, what is Office 2.0?

So, as you know, I’ve been trying to recruit design and user experience types to participate in the Podcast Jam for Office 2.0. (hello! are you out there!). Something I’ve noticed is that your average designer on the street doesn’t necessarily know what Office 2.0 means, and what’s included.

If this sounds like you, can I recommend that you invest 5 minutes in Richard MacManus’s opening keynote podcast in which he talks about Office 2.0 as a paradigm shift that is more than just web versions of the Microsoft Office suite, and discusses a few examples of Office 2.0 services that you may or may not have heard of.

Meanwhile, an amazing thing about podcasts… I love hearing people’s voices! I particularly love people being surprised to hear that Richard has a New Zealand accent!

And, I’ve noticed that people are saying ‘two dot oh’.

Surely I’m not the only one who’s been saying ‘two point oh’…

or am I?!

Technorati Tags: office20jam, podcastjam, office20

Jam On at Office 2.0 PodCast Jam!

The Office 2.0 Podcast Jam kicks off tomorrow – so be sure to go check it out and get involved. There’s some really interesting stuff happening from kick off including podcasts from Richard MacManus, Rosemary Stasek (talking about her experiences in Afghanistan, now that’s a perspective you don’t get at your average conference), and Eric Severson (talking about XML single-sourcing for document management, which is, for now, lost on me, but Anne tells me is very important and often overlooked!)

The online chat is open now, so that’s one very easy way to participate!

But it’s not too late to record a podcast and send it in as part of the jam!
For many of the participants, this is their first experience with podcasting, and I can tell you, it’s pretty straight forward. It’s even easier if you have someone you think is interesting and set up an interview with them! (or get them to interview you, or interview each other!). I’ll be doing some of that during the week using Skype (still investigating the best ‘recording’ option – anyone got recommendations)

One of the GREAT things about PodCastJam is that it allows all those voices who are usually absent from a conference like the Office 2.0 Conference to participate in the conversation. I’m particularly hoping to hear more women speak, more people talk from a design and user/customer experience perspective, and more people based in places other than the US.

So if any or all of those sound like you – let me encourage you to give it a go! Just a short 5-10 minute piece on whatever you think is interesting (you can really only cover one topic well in that time I reckon), and send it off for everyone to consider and talk about.

It’ll be great fun, so get involved!

Technorati Tags: office20jam, podcastjam, office20