Lunch Buffet

http://www.thesherpaproject.com/

General themes?
Collaboration, transferring research into results, and the need for speed

Books mentioned throughout the conference:
The Myth of Innovation
Everything is Miscellaneous
Architecture of Happiness
Crossing the Chasm

Conference Site:
http://www.adaptivepath.com/events/2007/aug/

Pictures from conference:
search for "uxweek2007" on flickr

The programming was dual track and I did miss some great presentations and workshops. Not including everything I attended...

Day 1

1) Deborah Adler - Clear RX "From Master Thesis to Medicaine Cabinet"
A very polished presentation , Deborah (now with Milton Glaser's firm) created the prescription packaging and label design revolution through Target. She walked through the entire process, showing iterations from graduate thesis through the final solutions. She worked hard to stay within the constraints of label printers etc, trying to keep costs down as much as possible. This led to the somewhat squarish design of the packaging. Deborah is now working on another small medical packaging project. The only disappointment I had was with her response to the ROI at Target. Apparently, Target has had a significant increase in sales as a result of her work. That is the kind of data that helps us designers justify time and expense at companies that might not be as savy as Target.

2) Kevin Brooks from the research department at Motorola Labs - "Stone Soup: Stories and Storytelling for Collaboration" did a great presentation on power of telling stories. He started with the retelling of a 300 year old story about making stone soup which demonstrates inadvertent collaboration. He spoke about the roles story play in gaining understanding, empowering individuals, and creating a means to bond. But one my biggest takeaways was his views on the purpose of listening through some exercises. I oftern find that I am a poor listener, and that in discussions many people are simply looking for openings, ways to trump the speaker, and as a inequality meter... just where do I stand intellectually in regards to the other participants. Through the exercises, we looked at story patterns and techniques, such as telling the ending first

3) Since I didn't sign up for the stickies session ahead of time I ended up at the Collaborating with Customers session by Jeff Herman and Ann Bishop of eBay. My biggest take away from this was the Hallmark styled video narratives they put together as a communication tool. Reminded me of some of branding efforts Hallmark did while I was there a few years ago. They were Hollywood quality stories of their customers, such as a group of potters in New Mexico.

4) Jesse McMullin from nForm did a very informative presentation on The Designer as Facilitator.
He crammed a lot of information into a short amount of time, rather than reply highlights from my notes, you can just check out the presentation. This was one of the best of the conference.
presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/jessmcmullin/smoothing-the-way/
nForm: http://www.nform.ca/ 5) Missed the Generative Toolkit and research overview by Liz Sanders of Make Tools since I didn't sign up ahead of time. I understand her 2 sessions were some of the best of the conference.
Make Tools: http://www.maketools.com/

6) Indi Young presentation on capturing the user experience with Mental Models. Whenever I work on diagramming a mental model of an experience, I find that I always do them differently. Indi showed a format and process for using these models to identify areas of an experience to focus on, what to ignore, and ways to gain insight by applying gap analysis. She also went into prioritization and Six Sigma techniques to apply to the model. Using a 4 quadrant scatter diagram (importance - feasibility), she used the standard deviation technique from Six Sigma  She has a book based on this presentation coming out this Fall.

diagram diagram
Mental Models: Aligning design strategy with human behavior - http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models/

 
7) Apaptive Path's Andrew Crow did a presentation on communicating ideas throughout an organization. He touched on identifying the Personality, Motivations, and Politics of people involved in in-house development as a means to pushing design innovations upwards. He spoke about using personality tests to help identify personalities. Apparently, this is something large organizations have been doing lately. It helps you and the team approach eachother and communicate effectively. Some ideas, "moving the cheese" which involves working across the company to gain support and analysis for a concept before approaching your boss. It is easier to get support this way. Manage Up by making sure your boss knows what you need and Manage Down by creating an environment and mindset that lets people flourish. Also touched on finding out what success means in the eyes of stakeholders. That seems to be a theme throughout the conference.
Book recommendation: The Art of Project Management

Day 2

 
1) Kicked the day off with another stunning presentation, the debut of the "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC)initiative. This project is aimed at the world's poorest children living in remote environments.
Lisa Strausfeld, a principal at Pentagram NYC and well known in computational design circles, demoed the first public display of the UI. They also brought along the key developers and designers, each presenting from one of the laptops (images on flickr) which we could play with. Pentagram's involvement comes from Lisa's association with Nicholas Negroponte from the MIT Media Lab's, who is leading the project. Nicholas has been focusing on politics, working with government officials across the world in helping them adopt this learning technology. Along with the technology comes a redefinition of education theory. They are focusing on using Constructivist learning techniques as defined by Seymour Papert. I was also pleased to hear that Walter Bender was involved, he had really inspired me when I visited MIT years ago.
Red Hat has been charged with developing theLinux OS called "Sugar". They use abstracted spatial navigation, putting the user at the center of the interface with four different views, Home, Friends, Neighborhood, and Activity, all displayed through zooming. It is really education based on shared activities. The global navigation is hidden in a "picture frame"  that appears when the users interacts with the edges of the display. They found that in classroom settings that kids are eager to share through discovery, so they design some interactions that might otherwise be considered experimental. They prototyped using Flash, but not sure how it was coded in the final product. Some other aspects include a time based, non-hierarchical journal, leveraging the concept of "continuous space". They had difficulty with the neighborhood mesh views scalability when they were developing it in urban settings. Imagine all the special representations of networks if you were sitting on a college campus like MIT.

From a hardware perspective, the XO laptop has physical extensibility with external analog devices. Kids can hook up external sensors directly to the computer. Was also interesting to hear that it is often used in communities that have power at the school, but not in homes. So the monitor works as a light as well. It also functions as a rich-media player, web browser, and e-book. A global network of developers are donating time to develop activites and applications that support the learning experience.

Project site:
http://www.laptop.org/

Screenshots:
http://www.laptop.org/en/laptop/interface/

Pictures:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/maggiemason/sets/72157601631952842/

Related Podcast (Michael Evans/ Red Hat):
http://osc.gigavox.com/shows/detail1868.html 2) Had to make the hard choice and missed Jared Spool's presentation on "Usability for Web 2.0" for APs Ryan Freitas "User-Centered Design for Evolving Products". I actually do not remember to much about this presentation other than he borrowed a lot of ideas from Agile.

-         Gradual iteration appears as stasis from a consumer standpoint

-         Toolkit

o  Restate value

o  Tell the story

o  Atomize the features

o  Tidy the seams

With value propositions you must know your audience - benefits, competition, differentiate. Spoke to the elevator pitch as pitched by Geoffrey Moore. Spoke to t focus on iterating the roadmap and not the product.

2) One of the best presentations of the conference form Yahoo's Bill Scott and Karon Weber. Bill is known for his work on Yahoo's UI pattern's library. The presentation was about two large initiatives, Yahoo Teachers and Yahoo Gobbler  that came out of "Hack Day" projects. Essentially, it is company sanctioned days for people to work on passion projects and to collaborate across across teams with people you normally wouldn't have a chance to work with.

Periodically, over a 24 hour time box, designers take existing yahoo api's, products, and patterns and create something new for users. At the end of the 24 hour's you are timeboxed to a 90 second pitch. It is quick, it is Agile, and it is cheap.

Yahoo Teachers is essentially a knowledge collection. Currently in Aplha, it has turned into a 2 year project. It is a system to gather, organize, and share information between teachers. The contextual framework involves distribution of materials and topics within a geographic social network of other teacher/users.

The key functionality is around drag-and-drop harvesting of online data instead of explicit meta-data tagging interactions. It leverages the Gobbler, a hack of a bookmarklet tool that lets users copy and paste online information into pre-meta populated containers. It pulls all the related authorship information from the source automatically. The users can annotate the source information as well. It is then all pulled into a rich text editor from which lessons can be published and shared with peer groups.

From an IxD perspective, they did everything right, much better than a similar project I worked on 10 years ago. They did deep research on the education system which led to initial prototyping with teacher involvement. Marketing was brought along on ethnographic studies, a common theme of cross silo collaboration at the conference this year.Yahoo gathered a group of teachers for a 7 day workshop from which prioritization was given to features. Had them use stickies exclusively. I believe there were lower fidelity, working prototypes, and they would incorporate changes overnight and have a new build available the next day. This core set of teachers became evangilists for the project and helped build the initial community around the project.

3) Again, double-scheduling made for a tough choice. Dan Brown gave a presentation on UX documentation, probably had a lot to do with his book "Communicating Design" which I haven't read through yet.  Went instead to APs David Verba's presentation on "Sketching in Code". He started with a quote which is probably is Agile, "Engineer never more than a stones throw from the physical product". He basically spoke to projects where he prototyped in Rails and then handed the code over to developers in India who formatted it in the appropriate language of the final product (Java). Therefore, user tests were done with functional prototypes. His argument is that this exposes issues earlier in the process and allows for easier by in from stakeholders. It also fosters collaboration among developers,designers, stakeholders, and users. It also helps everyone clearly understand what is and what isn't possible. This is a way to eliminate front-end development documentation which is sometimes difficult to see clearly and is often low-fidelity from an interaction standpoint. I really valued a small diagram he presented, which had lines and nodes of decision points that lead to course corrections, and experiments that branched into dead-ends. This is a great technique I am going to use in the future with mind maps. It would be especially useful in charting and understanding decisions in a large scale agile project where decisions are made "face-to-face" and on-the-fly within distributed teams. David then walked everyone through features of TiddyWiki, MVC frameworks, Open Laszlo, and Axure-iRise. No talk about Serena Composer.

diagram

4) More from the Agile UCD camp, Leisa Reichalt gave a new iteration of her "Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good" presentation... the one all done with sticky notes. She started things off with debunking the idea that WW Royce created the waterfall process. From there:
diagram

Agile
Sprints
User Stories
Pair design/programming
Close Proximity
weakness: end user

UCD
personas/scenarios
iterations
user testing
weakness: time

Interesting, her conclusions and ideas on meshing these 2 methods is almost exactly the same as my ideal process. She put forth the idea of a "Cycle 0" which needs upfront research, analysis and high level design, and a design strategy. These are all non-existent concepts in Agile. The results of which are ,product goals, a shared vision, contextual research and modeling, and personas/scenarios. She then wraps the idea of "cycles" around stories (something we were calling internal releases). Cycles are where you determine how much design and testing you do on a higher level and execute to inform the next set of sprints. A "mid-project cycle" would have designers testing the previous group of sprints (cycle -1), doing detailed designs for the next cycle, and starting research and design on upcoming cycles (cycle +1). Feedback on design is continous and continually informing the design and development.

diagram

4) Doug Lemoine, dorector of design communications at cooper,  gave an overview of Cooper , their process, and how documentation fits into their projects around a case study on a financial services web application. He spoke really fast and crammed a ton of content into the presentation. Much of their documentation looks like things I do with web apps, and a lot like Studio Archetype layouts. They have around 25 people and typical project engagement, design, is 3 to 6 months. The process follows:
research - persona development- framework design - refinement.

And then onto the beautiful design decks that I really miss doing. Their premise for extensive design documentation is it helps visualize, creates a tangible artifact for discussion, encourages people to commit, and is something engineers can work from. Although a have a rough understanding of Cooper's process, it was interesting to hear a thorough description around the role of an interaction designer and design communicator on their teams.

diagram

Interaction Designers is to sketch out solution ideations and produce the final "pictures". He associates IxD to Paul from the Beatles

Design Communicators synthesis and lead the testing, creates communication artifacts, and challenges designers. They associate themselves  with Socrates.

Essentially, the documentation they do is "the story" they create to present research findings framed with personas and ideal usage scenarios. They use the idea of "working back from the ideal".

Research exposes:
Behaviors, personas, scenarios, and brand keywords

Problem - Solution approach
Visual design is at a later stage. I still do not quite understand why Cooper has this division.
Personas are a collection of attitudes and goals.

-         How does the design help persona get their work done?

-         What is the Scenario

-         How does behavior work? Screen layout diagrams

-         What is the essence of the solutions? Why is it good? What are some bad alternatives? Explanation of rationale.

-         Are the represtnations global?

-         How do we make this easy to find? TOC, cross-reference

-         What are the dimensions of the interface elements? Styleguide

5) Emili Ulrich from Steelcase gave a presentation on Elito, my biggest take away from the conference. Developed at the Illinois Institute of Design, it is a very simple research framework with very powerful results. It gets sales and marketing into ethnographic research, helping leverage points of view that normally are not heard and providing a great collaborative framework for discussion. It isn't really revolutionary, just a straight forward, practical way to bridge the synthesis gap between research and design, as well as, creating shared ownership across an organization. In this way, it very similar and fits nicely with Agile methodology.

An important Steelcase implementation, and one I have seen done effectively at other organizations, is the separation of a research team as it's own group. This makes it easier for them to work cross-divisionally without perceived biases.

From Q+A:
They have also used this to capture feedback on prototypes. It doesn't replace the experience needed to conduct observational analysis. Build new elitos for each observer and do not swap researchers.

Short for "ellie's tool" the quick "features" are:

-         Values based argument

-         Separates seeing from thinking

-         Share insight throughout the organization

-         Safe space for shared brainstorming

-         Shared ownership across teams

-         Captures honest opinion in a "loose fit" structure

-         Lateral thinking across organization silos that becomes a design process

-         Bridges arguments between business and design

-         It is not documentation for the sake of documentation

-         Opinions are part of the framework

The researchers take different stakeholders on ethnographic studies (aka "site visits"). Emili typically uses voice recorders as a documentation method over others, probably because she is fully dedicated to research and can spend quality time parsing information. But of course, video, still images, notes etc are all part of the process. Whatever is appropriate.

Following the onsite research, a collaborative session is set up with a leader, typically the researcher. This session is the point in which information is captured. If, for example, designers were on the visit, then they would sit around a table with the session leader and a person projecting and recording information. Images or video is projected on one screen, giving context from the visit, and another screen has a projection of the Elito documentation that is being entered from these discussions. Buy in happens this early in the process because everyone wants to contribute, and is contributing. This technique and environment also mediates any arguments that take place. That's great, how many meetings have you been in where an arguments evolve around abstract thoughts with nothing to bring it back within a context? It let's people see the bigger picture, focuses discussions, and let's everyone have their say

diagram

So what is it? It is a simple grid structure with these columns:
Observation
Quotes, something read in secondary research, all fact based
Insight
Your opinions, what you think, why it is important, what questions are raised. Emili uses colors to differentiate different participants insights if there is disagreement.
Value
List of words, examples are "quality", "simple", "efficiency", "ease of use"
Concept
What design needs are emerging

All of these longitudinally creates a metaphor, hooks for a story. (Yes, this ties in directly to Agile stories). And across the research, patterns can emerge that result in themes.

She showed a project that went from research to design solution to market using this technique. I believe they were in an architecture or interior design firm. They noticed that there were stacks of resource books lying on the floors around desks. These were items from their large resource library which was tucked away in typical office cabinets. A theme of "access to innovation" began to emerge as an opportunity, and lead to a design solution that was previously unidentified.

Another example, and a good example of how this can be leveraged into branding and marketing is Steelcase's Nurture product (http://nurture.steelcase.com/). Everything about this project used Elito as the collaborative force. Nurture is framed "By focusing on user experience, we can create inspired solutions that protect privacy, reduce chaos and remove obstacles"

Elito
http://trex.id.iit.edu/ideas/elito
Consultant:
Trysh Wahlig tryshw@gmail.com

Day 3

1)     Presentation from Best Buys Kathleen Hoski and research partner Paris Patton from Sachs Insight. They used a combination of  usability interviews/focus groups - contextual inquiry - longitudinal ethnography. The one very interesting technique which was very effective was the cinematic styles they used when doing on-site visits. It showed what a profound impact a professional videographer can have in communicating personal stories and testimony. It was a style for styles sake. Most video capture in these environments is still, on a tripod, in a corner. After more than a few minutes, you get bored to death, often missing key insights. You feel like you are viewing a research study, and the people are essentially impersonal lab rats. The up close and personal nature really forced us to pay attention to what was being communicated.

So, longitudinal ethnography isn't anything new, but Best Buy is using it to gain insights around purchasing decisions. I believe they were showing purchase decision timelines around large display HDTV, they found it typically spans several years. Basically, the customers capture video and journal entries of their experiences. We watched an entertaining video from a customer turned director who had some fun editing and splicing his videos.

diagram

2)     Presentation by Marty Gage, head of the Design Research Practice Group at Lextant (and formerly with Fitch!) lectured on Participatory Design. He used a case study around Nationwide's campaign to get more employees involved in community volunteer programs. He had a slide which showed how research translated into a UX framework which I liked
diagram
Spoke about utilizing SME's on research to gain further insight.

With Nationwide, they let the "users" define the perfect process allowing them to see the big picture. Yes, email and news items on the intranet are not the best way to drive interest, there are all kinds of communication methods that can be used, you don't have to use the computer alone. The framework he uses is:
Prime - Dream - Embody - Evaluate
Basically presented a design process that forces stakeholders to visualize their ideas of an ideal solution.  This forces them to create a benchmark instead of being sideline critics. He had a process for taking these qualitative experiencial models (mock ups down with stock photos) and making them quantitative (counting the number of pictures and doing a direct interpretation of what each image meant). This would be the basis for scenarios. Also utilizes diaries and photo journals as part of a generative process.

Day 4 

3)     Separate presentations on IxD by Dan Saffer (AP and CMU) and Bill DeRouchey (Ziba). Both presentations were extremely slick. I enjoyed Dan's discussion on fighting WWAD syndrome. Getting inspiration from Architectural space by comparing the floorplans of and modern suburban houses. Personal space takes priority and our cars (giant garages) become most meaningful.  Another highlight was his attention to Mechanical Objects (invisible states, infrequent use, and direct manipulation) and how this can translate into digital interfaces. Reminds me, I haven't hit up his photostream in awhile.  From Bill, the ideas of Priority, Clarity, and Purpose in tangible interfaces. I especially enjoyed his rant against over complicated interface language by using terms like "contextual menus" and replace it with a verb. He used the example of TV remote, breaking regions into "select", "adjust", "control" and "pinpoint". He has a background in IA and writing, and this definitely gave me some insight as to how some of my skills can translate into the physical realm.

The Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI) provides Design Guidance and controls which allow a new generation of safer, more usable and compelling health applications to be quickly and easily created. This site is aimed at user interface designers, application developers and patient safety experts who want to find out more about the benefits of a standardized approach to user interface design.

http://www.mscui.com/Default.aspx

With the Microsoft Health CUI you can:

• Interactively browse and download the available Design Guidance documents
• Interact with on-line implementations of the available controls and samples that implement the guidance
• View the delivery roadmap for future areas of the Design Guidance and controls and learn about the delivery lifecycle that is used to create them
• Download and install the controls for use in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

From slashdot:
I would say the reason a lot of projects, even small ones take so much time is that requirements cannot be defined.

Compare building a house to software. Before you build a house

1. Plans are drawn up
2. A step-by-step schedule to created for the construction.
3. Contractors are brought it to complete the work as needed

Schedule times can slip but you still know where you are in terms of progression.

If we built this house the way we do software development

1. Hire all the construction workers
2. Tell them to build something.
3. At any point during construction tell them they are not doing it right.
4. After missing all the deadlines (which were made up by wants/desires of the customer) hire more workers.
5. Wonder why they cannot get the job done
6. Cancel the project after everyone realizes they don't want it anymore.

=====
1)Hire all the construction workers
Each construction worker is an expert on one of the domains, such as cabinent making

2)Tell them to build something
The outsourced contruction firm that employees the craftsmen has a process for building houseboats. The building being constructed is a skyscraper. The client is going to lease the building to other companies. The skyscraper needs to be modular so that the companies leasing it can create their own environments, that being anything from post-modern deconstructionism by the likes of Morphosis, to, high gothic design from hundreds of years ago. The vision of the building itself given to the outsourced team is a bit like the Blur Building sitting on Lake Geneva, but with the only design guidelines being a set of four words. Interestingly, that is how most high level IxD and architecture specks start. The problem is that the designers brought in on the client side are experienced in designing urban loft spaces and were brought in after the project started and told by one of the engineers that the "design phase" is over with even though there never was one. The outsourced construction firm has no internal visionary and builds the skyscraper literally from coctail napkin sketches without any creative exploration in order to meet a deadline.

3)At any point during construction tell them they are not doing it right.
The design vision is an abstract construct in the client's stakeholders minds.