![]() |
|
Spaces home Lunch BuffetProfileFriendsBlogMore ![]() | ![]() |
|
Lunch BuffetOverconsuming interaction design and art
October 23 UX Week 2007 his was the first Adaptive Path conference I have attended and is
the only big conference I have attended this year. I chose this over
conferences like SXSW hoping to get more relevant insights into
research techniques and I wasn't disappointed. Coincidentally, the
Agile 2007 conference was also in DC that week which is interesting
considering how much crossover is happening. Ben Carey has posted some
thoughts ( http://www.thesherpaproject.com/ General themes? Books mentioned throughout the conference: Conference Site: Pictures from conference: The programming was dual track and I did miss some great presentations and workshops. Not including everything I attended...
Day 11) Deborah Adler - Clear RX "From Master Thesis to Medicaine Cabinet" 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. 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 Day 2 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: Screenshots: Pictures: Related Podcast (Michael Evans/ Red Hat): - 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: Agile UCD 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: 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: Problem - Solution approach - 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: 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: 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/ Elito Day 31) 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 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: Day 43) 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. August 09 Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI)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:
August 01 Contextual Design - Defining Customer-Centered SystemsISBN: 1-55860-411-1 Chapter 20: Putting it into practice The first job of a design team is to design the process that will enable them to collaborate in gathering design, designing a system, and producing the result. The principles on which the process is based fall into 3 categories: 1) Using customer data 2) Running the team 3) Driving design thinking Without a clear understanding of your customers, based on real events rather than anecdotes, and captured explicitly, you have no criteria for deciding on one action or design decision over another. Always ask what data is needed to justify one decision over another and what is the best way to gather that data. Use a process that reveals unarticulated aspects fo work. Contextual Inquiry reveals the hidden aspects of a work practice. Paper Prototyping reveals how a particular design plays out in a real world context. Base interactions on the customers own work situation, where they are the expert, and communicate in their language. In dealing with complexity, use a concrete representation of the customer data to reveal how the work hangs together as a whole. Use representations that reveal both the common structure that applies across customers and also the unique variations that your design will have to account for. This should effectively highlight critical pieces for systems design. Gathering customer data is only worthwhile because it helps make design decisions. It will tell you what matters to make, how to structure your system, and how you are doing on your as you design and build it. External checks alleviates arguments within the team. In collaborative design, meeting facilitation is critical. The Agile techniques for meeting are well suited for this. Drawings representing the customer work practice and the system work model help manage the design conversation and keep the design coherent, but they also manage communication within and beyond the team (i have found this to be the most critical part of an effective design process). Contextual Design uses sets of diagramming techniques (chapter?): 1) What the workplace of the customer is (User Environment model) 2) What the new work practice is 3) How a user will perform a specific task in the new system 4) What the system work model is A design process naturally alternates between working out a piece of design sequentially, then stepping back and considering the whole design as a structure. This alternating between doing and reflecting keeps the design moving forward while remaining coherent (brilliant, much better explanation than using the term "global" design) The system you design is a whole and needs to fit together as a whole, or it won't provide coherent support for your customers work. It shows the whole design in a form that the team can comprehend and manipulate. Design Communication across teams is where things break down. Communicate the consolidated models and the vision in addition to the User Environment Design (here i think the writers are still dwelling in formality... these models need to be more than flat representations, they are taking a baby step with getting people out fo the habit of writing linear text) Build a living online specification with hot links between data, storyboard, user environment, and functional specs. (lo-fi wiki hacks with swf shells that load files exported from InDesign or Illustrator-works great!) On figuring out what to do in a redesign: Do not use Flow or cultural models. Rather than do formal consolidations, use the sequences to generate scenarios of use. These scenarios make a composite of the customers you interviewed to tell the story of a typical use. Build an affinity, scenarios, and models to brainstorm issues and design responses. See work structures by looking for natural clusters of work and artifacts in the physical model. Look for data used in artifacts. Run a visioning session based on key issues you identify, build up the design response, build storyboards based on the scenarios, and go right to UI design and paper prototyping. Artifacts guide the layout and presentation of the UI. Use the structural thinking behind the User Environment Design to help organize the UI, but don't build a User Environment diagram explicitly. This process gets you as quickly as possible from seeing the data to organizing a design response. Such a process could be run in about 2 months by a small group of four to six, drawn from ENGINEERING, UI DESIGN, USABILITY, and MARKETING. 8 to 15 customer interviews should be enough. July 16 Jeff PattonPlaceholder for insights from spending a few hours with UCD/Agile evangelist Jeff Patton The Designer as FacilitatorInterview with Adaptive Path's Jesse McMullin http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2007/07/13/interview-with-jess-mcmullin/ This applies to some challenges I have been dealing with for the past year. The collaborative design process they use to flush out a high level strategy and vision makes sense. They have stakeholder's express their design vision by putting it on paper. It is similar to approaches Thoughtworks promotes. Although it isn't a magic bullet, it can be extended to figure out those pesky requirements. February 04 On project failureFrom slashdot: Compare building a house to software. Before you build a house
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
===== 3)At any point during construction tell them they are not doing it right. November 19 Shop Class as Soulcraft (Cognitive Stratification in society)From the essay:
"A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part."
The essay starts with the authors experience working at a Washingtom think tank and subsequent abandonment to opening a motorcylce repair shop specializing in vintage models.
It is a comprehensive historical look at how the Arts and Crafts movement morphed into the use of unskilled labor as part of "process engineering knowledge". There are many brilliant insights such as what gave rise the terms "blue collar" and "white collar" and how the later doesn't have, and shouldn't have exclusive domain in what we call a knowledge economy.
I stumbled on this going through a photoblog of a 21 year old in Mumbai and it reminded me of a discussion about why our house in Kansas City is not selling. Essentially, first time homwe buyers these days do not have the knowledge, skills, or patience to maintain a 80 year old house. They were never taught how to fix things and technology in our world increasingly becomes a black box. In India, with millions of people sharing limited resources, you have to be able to hack everything around you. Hard to write a good summary because there are so many great insights on the "information systems" in this esasy. It is a must read. cited books:
1) The Culture of the New Capitalism
2) The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past 3) The New Basis of Civilization
4) The Wheelwright’s Shop
5) Principles of Scientific Management
6) Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century
7) No Place of Grace
8) Journal of Interactive Media in Education 9) The Mind at Work September 27 New York Times Reader - Beta is liveHere it is: http://firstlook.nytimes.com/?category_name=times%20reader For everyone that isn't running Vista and or the latest version of XP, here is a demo: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20060914/nytimes-reader-screencast/ | ||||||||||