IxD10 – Friday
Friday, February 5th
This was the first day of the main conference. I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was raining and since the conference sessions were held in more than one location, I had to walk a few blocks. I didn’t mind though. Definitely an interesting way to see Savannah.
Besides the keynotes, I selected sessions based on design strategy and design research. There were a couple of slots I wasn’t sure where to go so I just rolled the dice. I’m glad I did.
10:00 am – Nathan Shedroff – Meaningful Innovation Relies on Interaction and Service Design (Keynote)
Ah, service design. This ended up being somewhat of a controversy at the conference. Some people felt they’ve been doing this for years and years. Others felt this was really just emerging as a discipline. Like lots of things in user experience, what service design means depends on who you ask. I think it means using our problem solving skills to understand, and design, an entire service. This extends beyond just a single software product. One of the service design students I met from SCAD had a good example of this. Think about the iPod. This hardware device, can’t really function without iTunes. This software application, can’t function without a huge library of music. Etc. Think these products and processes were designed in isolation of each other?
A few bits from Nathan’s keynote I found interesting:
- Meaning. It deepens the connection you can make with an audience.
- All design is the process of making experiences.
- All design is the process of evoking meaning.
- Research is the key to strategy.
Slides: nathan.com/thoughts
Video: vimeo.com/9659499
11:00 am – Dave Gray – Knowledge Games: A Grammar for Creativity and Innovation
When Dave first started talking about the AK-47, I knew this was going to be a different presentation. He wasn’t talking about gun ownership rights. This was about the design philosophy of the AK-47:
Don’t design for a perfect world, because the world isn’t perfect. Design simple things that are rugged, reliable, simple and easy to use; things that work even when conditions are chaotic; things that work even when they are mostly broken.
Simple, rugged, reliable, lightweight. I like that. The story of the AK-47 is actually very interesting and I’d encourage you to read about the history and the man that designed it (even if you don’t like guns).
Dave also talked a lot about ideas. He talked about how to most people, ideas are like their babies. They nurture them. Care for them. Want them to succeed. But, like some babies, not all ideas are good. We need to recognize when they aren’t good and be willing to move on. Dave used the analogy, “We need to kill more babies.” Out of context of the presentation, this may seem a little harsh. But, I think it’s true. You need to be willing to let go of your ideas when they aren’t good. I’ve found this process of letting go can be quite freeing. It opens you up to new ideas (and less diapers to change).
A few bits from Dave’s presentation I found interesting:
- Design for chaos.
- Some processes are linear. Some are non-linear. They’re still friends.
- There is a difference between a business process and a design process.
- Don’t overthink it.
Dave also talked about the ten essentials, or building blocks, needed for running a knowledge game (i.e. a framework for running a participatory design session to generate new ideas or refine existing ones):
- Opening & Closing
- Fire Starting
- Artifacts
- Node Generation
- Meaningful Space
- Sketching and Models
- Randomness
- Improvisation
- Selection
- Try something new
I really enjoyed Dave’s presentation. I look forward to learning more when his book comes out in May.
More Info: knowledgegames.net
Video: vimeo.com/9658327
12:00 pm – Nate Bolt – Remote Design Research
I was really excited about this session because it’s one of the areas I’m really interested in. I’ve done a decent amount of on-site design research but the closest I’ve come to any sort of remote research are telephone calls.
Nate started out by explaining the difference between market and ux research. Market research is about opinions. UX research is about behaviors. I think this is especially important to note. There have been times when a research project of mine has been postponed because some felt a marketing research project would yield the same results. It didn’t. It’s not the same thing.
When to go remote?
- You don’t need to see their native environment
- You want realtime feedback (e.g. users currently online using an application)
- You have a lot of observers
- You can’t get to their location
When remote = fail?
- Lack of bandwidth
- Translation/language
- Minors/kids
- If you need to see their faces
Designing remote studies:
- Time aware tasks. Make tasks relevant to their time/need.
- Real time objectives. More impact than other research deliverables.
- Portable research.
- Change on the fly. Iterating.
Remote Design Research Tools:
Communication Tools:
- Phone
- VoIP/Skype
- Adobe Connect (Nate’s fave. $39 a month plan.)
- Live Look (No plugin required. Use in a pinch.)
- WebEx
- GotoMeeting
Recording Tools:
Recruiting for Remote Design Research:
- Live recruiting = gold standard
- Agencies
- Customer lists (not panels)
- Craigslist (last resort)
- Live recruiting math: 10k uniques a day, 200 respondents, 10 scheduled, 6 participants
- Incentives? Collect min personal info. Amazon gift certificates.
When tech breaks?
- Have a one phrase card sitting on your desk, “Can you hold for one sec while I adjust something on my end?”
What they worry about?
- Who are you?
- Can I trust you?
- If you can see my screen can you see my face?
- Will you be able to take control of my computer?
- Will you help me remove the plugin?
- Will I get in trouble for installing the plugin?
- Is this going to end up on YouTube?
As you can see, there was a ton of information in this session. I’m looking forward to digging into these techniques. Nate also reiterated something I’d learned in the Mental Models workshop. He said to, “Burn the script. Find out what matters.” I like that.
More Info: remoteusability.com/
Book: rosenfeldmedia.com/books/remote-research/
Video: vimeo.com/9841981
1:00 pm – Lunch and Dry Clothes
Lunch was held at The Olde Pink House restaurant. It was refreshing to dine at such a unique place. Not your typical conference fare. After a tasty lunch I headed back to the hotel. I needed to dry off and catch up on some email.
3:30pm – Richard Banks – The 40 Year Old Tweet
The title of this session almost prevented me from going. Almost. Even though I’m starting to get tired of Twitter and its kin, I’m glad I went. This wasn’t about Twitter. It was about all the digital artifacts we’re creating out there on services like Twitter. The title of the session came from an entry found in a journal. A family member was willed a large number of journals and they contained years and years of rather mundane entries. Entries not unlike those we tweet. Put together chronologically, these create a history of us.
So what happens with all of these artifacts when we’re no longer here? Richard, and his team at Microsoft Research, are working on possible solutions to this problem. It’s really worth watching the video of his presentation. It really moved me and reinforced the responsibility we have as designers.
Video: vimeo.com/9664533
4:30pm – Jon Kolko – My Heart is in The Work (Keynote)
I didn’t take notes in the closing keynote of the day because honestly, it was hard to concentrate. I kept thinking about responsibility. Every design decision we make, affects someone. Think about that for a second. Our talents and skills, can be used to help people beyond just software. That’s heavy stuff.
For more heavy stuff, watch how Jon closes out the day. I really can’t do justice to his presentation with my words. But, the one thing I will note is that Jon is starting a little school down in Austin. The Austin Center for Design, “exists to transform society through design and design education. This transformation occurs through the development of design knowledge directed towards all forms of social and humanitarian problems.” In other words, they’ll be teaching how to use design skills to help people. That’s very cool.
Video: vimeo.com/9665365
Conclusion & Thoughts
It was a good day. I couldn’t believe there were two more days of sessions left. I definitely feel more responsible as a designer now. I’ve always wondered if the type of work I do can be applied to things beyond software. After seeing that this *is* happening, I think the answer is yes.
IxD10 – Thursday
Thursday, February 4th
Mental Models Workshop
In the morning, I headed downstairs for the first of two workshops. I choose the mental models workshop because it’s a topic I don’t know much about. The workshop was taught by Indi Young. Now I have to confess, I purchased her book over a year ago and only read a few pages. Sorry Indi. After chatting with a few other attendees during breakfast, I found out I wasn’t the only one. Luckily for us, Indi covered the basics in a few hours.
We started by practicing having conversations. Yes, we practiced talking. But we also practiced listening and learned how to not influence a conversation. I do a lot of talking in my job so it’s always fun to learn and practice new techniques. It’s often hard not to influence a conversation based on your own opinion or the opinion of other project stakeholders. These conversations are meant to learn about someone else (i.e. not what you want them to tell you). According to Indi, there are six rules for this type of conversation:
- Look for behaviors, beliefs, and reactions (not preferences)
- Ask open questions only
- No words of your own
- Follow the conversation (don’t just stick to a script)
- It’s not about products (not evaluative)
- You’re looking for immediate experience (last 6 months or so)
After the conversations, we learned how to comb through interview transcripts. Combing is basically just going through a transcript and picking out things that are interesting. After you’ve selected these quotes, you organize them into logical groups. These groups are called towers. Similar towers are then grouped together to form mental spaces.
After you’ve created the mental model, the portion on top, you look and see if your product can support all the towers. It’s really a nice way of discovering and visualizing gaps in functionality.
Those are the basics. I’m still digging through my notes from the workshop but I’m eager to create one of these. Of course a big question is do they work? I asked a fellow attendee. Here’s what he said:
We created one for a client. They weren’t really sure how to organize their website. Though we created it mostly to help them with this, they learned things about their customers and business they didn’t even know. After showing it to them, they thought we were pretty much geniuses. It was awesome.
Also, you never know when a big boat is going to float by your window in Savannah.
Right Way to Wireframe Workshop
After a quick bite, I headed to the Right Way to Wireframe workshop facilitated by Russ Unger, Will Evans, Fred Beecher, and Todd Zaki Warfel. What’s the right way to wireframe? It depends. I know. I hate saying that but it’s true. This workshop wasn’t about wireframing techniques or the software you use to create wireframes. It was more about using a design studio process for creating them. It’s a collaborative process in three phases: sketching, presentation/critique, and iteration.
Our client during the workshop was a non-profit that connects people needing money for autism treatments with donors (micro-lending like Kiva). The client has been working with just a number of cobbled together web apps for running this but really needs a more cohesive web presence. Our design problem was to design a website homepage that met a number of stated goals.
We started by sketching design solutions. Lots and lots of sketching. We used a technique called the 6-8-5 method. We had about five minutes to come up with 6-8 sketches. Go!
After our sketches were complete, we presented our ideas to the team for critique. Rules of the critique? You have to give 2-3 things that work before you discuss the 1-2 things that don’t. Once everyone had been critiqued, we picked out the best pieces to use as part of a team design solution.
Once our team had, what was obviously a winning solution, we worked collaboratively to create a more refined sketch. We then presented this to competing teams for outside critique. We were encouraged by the facilitators to steal good ideas from other teams. Only after this critique, and theft of ideas, did we actually open a computer. We worked collaboratively in our software tool of choice to further refine the design solution. Our team worked with OmniGraffle.
Once our final wireframes were finished, we presented them to everyone. It was really enjoyable seeing how different teams came up with similar solutions. Even though the task was to create a new home page, most branched out beyond that and designed other pages too. I felt some resistance from some in our group to this approach. I can only assume it’s because they believed you have to design the home page first. I don’t think it’s possible to create a home page if you don’t know what the rest of the site is going to be.
After the group presentations, the facilitators got a chance to show off how they tackled the same design problem. Obviously they had more time to put their solutions together but it’s always fun to see how other people work. Most of them created videos of their sketching and wireframing process:
- Russ’s Video
- Will’s Video
- Fred Can Haz No Video
- Todd’s Video
All of the activities in the workshop were time constrained. This made it enjoyable but a little tense. It also didn’t provide an opportunity for everyone to participate in the collaborative or final wireframe creation pieces due to the sizes of the teams. Perhaps something to think about for next time.
Conclusion & Thoughts
The workshop day at IxD10 was definitely enjoyable. I look forward to digging more into mental models to help my team better understand the mental spaces of our users. The wireframe workshop reinforced my approach of presenting solutions to stakeholders early on in the process. Not worrying if something looks right, but worrying if you’re getting the experience right. I think for some, this may seem sloppy. I don’t see it that way and the facilitators of the workshop reinforced this for me.
Something else I noticed, and I’ll touch on this in future posts, is that people love them some Twitter. This conference was no exception. It was a great way to feel the buzz around the conference and coordinate meetups with old and new friends. I do think that some get a little too into it.
IxD10 – Wednesday
I was lucky enough to go to the Interaction 10 conference last week in Savannah, Georgia. This was the third annual conference for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). There were workshops, keynotes, sessions, networking and tweeting (lots of tweeting). Because there was so much content, I’m going to break this up into multiple posts. Besides not wanting to write a novel, I need the time for everything to sink in. Also, you’ll have to excuse me if I get a little geeky. I really get into this stuff.
Wednesday, February 3rd
After an easy flight into Savannah, I heard through the #IxD10 grapevine there was a presentation by Niklas Wolkert that night. It wasn’t officially part of the conference but I figured why not check it out. I’m glad I did. Niklas works at Ergonomidesign and recently completed a cool project on Microsoft Surface called Sonicspree.
Sonicspree is part game, part music store. I enjoyed seeing the product and watching the game being played, but the best part was hearing about the process used to design and develop it (here comes some geeky stuff). Their design and development teams worked within an Agile framework, something we use at work, and incorporated the design process in an interesting way. They start with a Sprint 0 where they design what will be in Sprint 1. While Sprint 1 is worked on by development, they design everything for Sprint 2. Once Sprint 1 is complete, they review the work and bake changes into future sprints. Rinse. Repeat. The goal is to have an actual shippable product at the end on each sprint. It doesn’t have to have all the bells and whistles. It just needs to work. This forces you to focus on the core pieces. Refinement happens in later sprints. Seriously, they did go back and refine functionality. They didn’t just work on additional features.
Niklas also showed their modified Task Board. It’s a nice way to see which pieces are where and how you’re progressing as a team. Plus they use Post-Its. I think it’s a rule that if you don’t use these, in some way during a project, you lose your design card.
It was inspiring to hear how their team created a really fun game in a short amount of time. This reinforces the thought that if you don’t worry about all the little details, and leverage the strengths of Agile, you can create a great product within a time constraint. In Niklas’s words, “Let go. You don’t have to know about the end from the start.”
But here’s the rub (and why I struggle with this approach). The scope of this product was fairly limited and there wasn’t an existing application to factor in. I’m not saying this was an easy project. Far from it. I’m just saying that when you have an established platform, with paying customers and expectations, it makes it harder to ignore all those little details. There’s usually more at stake.
I’m very intrigued by what can happen when you don’t consider every little detail. It feels a bit like gambling (which can be fun). I guess it just depends on what’s at stake. Definitely intrigued though.
@geoffa