Recently in UX Week '06 Category

[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]

LB: Wanted to call it Learning From My Colleague's Mistakes. This is funny because we are always trying to avoid being seen as having made a mistake.

We all screw up. But more to the point, the best stuff comes out of the learnings from things that don't go well.

So here's a third title: FAILURE!.... FA!LURE... steal from the best.

So this panel is going to talk about failure. It is a truism: fail fast, fail quickly, fail is not a bad thing. In Silicon Valley failure is very important, it is a badge of honor. Failing upwards is not uncommon.

So let's dig in.

1. Failure is Fun. You usually get there because you are trying something new. That's a good thing.
2. Failure is Fixable. Very few people are working on the Challenger. When we have disasters they are virtual, its a server going down, its something we can get past.
3. Failure is Easy. Actually failing to do something is actually difficult. Its hard to screw up that badly. What failure is easy means is once you've hit bottom there's only one way to go. Success is difficult because it brings options. It means you have something to prove and choices to make.

So let's get some stories.

DV: Measure Map was really a sweet setup but there was a clear point where a misstep was hard to recover from. They rolled it out to a small group of people. Everything was running smoothly. But you have to keep this moving forward and that is hard. At some point the level of service started to degrade. The magic started to go away and it is hard to get it back. You make an implicit promise that a high level of service will continue.

JV: When he thinks about the goals of the Measure Map project he thinks that they must have been mistaken or else they never would have been able to get anywhere close to there. He talked to a Google project manager and was asked about how much time each template needs. This is wildy unrealistic and is clearly a way not to think about design work. He can design it when the inspiration is ready to happen but that's also a crappy answer. Setting expectations are important. You want to set a milestone. They set a goal of presenting at the Ajax summit and two days before they were nowhere near being ready. The demo was a fake, you only clicked on the things that you could click on. Even if you miss milestones they at least give you a place to try to get to.

RF: The hardest thing is working with someone who you realize can't push your idea forward in their organization. One solution is to take a t-shirt to a meeting that says "I have budget authority" and ask who gets it. Talk to that person!

AW: So a client wanted a design solution and Jesse used the word Ajax to explain something and the response was tepid at best. But they started talking more about this and we all know what happened next.

RF: Jesse's word helped bring value but not to the audience he first presented it to. At panels and conferences you don't often know who you'll be speaking to. Context and audience is very important.

JV: Jesse's coining of Ajax to sell ideas internally was a good lesson in building ideas to share what you've learned. That's why AP always shares ideas and counts on the value coming back. When AP fails is when they've held things back. They always succeed when they give things away for free.

LB: This is also very helpful for professional development. If you're always giving away ideas you have to keep coming up with new ones. This is also why the culture of critique is so important. You have to be constantly willing to be told how your work is doing. One place that really understands that is art school. People who go to art school understand how to take and give critcism.

JV: The notion against taking criticism is based on the idea that everything you come up with is good. You don't have to make something perfect right now. Do something boring, solve that problem. Like Michael Bierut said, start with the obvious. With Measure Map they iterated and iterated and threw out ninety percent of their code. They were sketching with the product itself.

RF: The worst thing is going a long period of time without having anything to react to.

PM: He is a very abstract thinker and presents ideas sometimes with the realization that abstraction can get people too attached to an idea before its baked. Be willing to iterate your half-baked ideas.

LB: When you do that you set the tone. You give people permission to fail.

RF: No idea is sacrosanct. There's nothing that can't be messed with.

IY: When dealing with a client she got asked why something was done a certain way and had to answer that she didn't know. This scared her but really the client wanted to explore it together. You have to be able to admit that you are wrong.

Q: This really disarms the audience and helps people feel comforable to talk about whatever is on their mind. You are vocalizing whatever is on their mind.

Q: Something that Janice said earlier about integrity. Clients don't want to feel like they are being sold something or that they are stupid. If something isn't right and everyone admits it clients are forgiving. If you are just trying to convince they will sense that. If you have integrity and are trying to help them.

LB: Our fear of making a mistake leads us into that pattern. The thing that he most worries about is often in other people's mind not a big deal. But it will become a big deal if it snowballs. If you mention it at the beginning.

JG: You can't always be sure or count on the people you are working with or for having the same goals that you have. Did a technically complex project where they engaged with the technology lead and worked with his people. Worked on something. Tested with users. The tech people are excited, the business people are excited, but when the technology manager came back into the loop he said that it will never work, because he made the original system. Should have gotten buy-in.

LB: Janice says that business decisions are emotions wrapped up in logic.

JV: On projects where the consultant and client don't work together. One thing is that maybe you shouldn't have been working together in the first place. Think about what kind of clients you want. Make sure that you are doing good important work. Make sure you can make something that you want to talk about. Will it be lucrative? Keep them in that order. Important > Can talk > Lucrative. This was when things were tight in the industry but really helped make sure that the projects would start off being successful.

RF: When you start off wrong it will end wrong.

Q: So when have to gotten fired or fired a client.

JV: He got fired once. Because he didn't evaluate from the beginning. It exploded. Every meeting had more stakeholders with more meetings and nothing got done so they fired him. He should have done the up-front research to find out that it wouldn't work.

LB: The flip side of that is a project they took because they wanted it but knew they shouldn't. Figured out a project plan with a big non-profit. Do their best to be open and flexible. When you cut down the budget to be able to work with a client you have no flexibility. It led to a lack of communication because there wasn't enough budget for face time. There was a lack of willingness to make needed changes because there wasn't money! The first part of a project should be making a plan and the second part should be fixing and changing that plan. If you don't it won't work.

AW: Research is often an opportunity to learn all kinds of things you didn't know going in. The way you respond to mistakes demonstrates that you know what you are doing.

[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]

[Michal Migurski of Stamen]

Data Viz: Why Now?

Because the tools and the audience have caught up.

Starting with Map of the Market from the let nineties. This was inspirational but largely alone. This tree map uses size and color.

Our palette of visualization is pretty sparse.

So why now?

Reason #1: Data Got Cheaper

Newsmap by Markos Wescamp. The data costs nothing because he is pulling from an open API. Colors mean topics, size means volume of stories, etc. Also a tree map.

FundRace used mapping data in a pioneering way. Red or Blue was a cell phone/ GPS add-on to this.

History Flow visualizes the history of Wikipedia pages.

These use data that is not abstract, it is highly individualized socially created stuff.

Phyllotaxy is built on the publicly and freely available data from flickr. It specifically uses Creative Commons data. Related Tag Browser is also a cool proof of a workable algorithm.

Reason #2: Flash Got Better

Added socket communication, emphasized developing interfaces, etc.

Gapminder is an amazing example of this.

Digg Labs is another example.

Etsy is built on a number of visualizations including shop-by-color.

flickr time tunnel

One use: Geography

Election result map took a media assumption and scaled the visualization according to population and other more significant data points.

Mappr came out of a project done for MoveOn and evolved into an application built on the flickr API.

Open Street Map is all about mapping from a pedestrian perspective.

Open data is critical. Free software is useless without data. The Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

Attention by Stamen (link?)

Trixie Tracker started as a baby blog and then made a product for tracking your kid's development and sharing that information with your family. Mommy crack for type-A parents.

Week in Review is an awesome data viz project that uses paper and real live human being with pens!

So the future of this stuff?

Tableau is doing some cool stuff to help people choose appropriate visualization for the data set.

Presentation is online

[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]

[With Kevin Chang of OK/Cancel and Yahoo!]

So what do you think of when you hear community? They thought about this when they redesigned Yahoo! Local. But what community meant when they asked developers and managers and designers and everyone else was a million different things.

Concept > Discover > Definition > Refinement > Development

There are different methods to think about what your users are thinking.

• User Profile
• Use Case
• Wireframe - but what are you doing building wireframes if you don't even have concept!
• Video
• Animation
• Interactive Prototype
• Comics

Think about the skills and resources needed for each option.

So comics. What do we mean by this? Use them to tell a story about how people will use your product or service.

Start with chickenscratches on the white board.

Then build basic use cases, very basic. And then build the comic.

So this is a good way to communicate internally but you can also so it to users.

Ask users to mark it up as useful, confusing, complicated, or appealing with different colored markers.

[Video of users going through this]

This gets people thinking about if they would use it, or their friends would use it, etc.

[intermission with an activity. Pass your name badge to the right and draw the person whose name page you have in a minute.]

Anyone read Orbiting the Giant Hairball?

Who is an artist?

If you ask starting in first grade you see a logarithmic drop. Everyone can draw!

Comics communicate concepts

Why are comic so great? Why use this medium? USPS has been sending comics to people to tell them information. Comics are a very accessible medium that quickly reaches an audience. They beg to be read.

Think how storyboards are used in movies. They are also used in product design.

They are approachable and fun like we want our products to be.

If you've read Understanding Comics you'll get this, if not, you need to!

Communication

Comics are a universal language above language or text. Think of a drawing of a dog with a speech bubble at its butt. You know that it is farting, so does a little kid who can't read and who has never seen a comic.

Think about how abstract you are being. Maybe show a screen that a person is using. Maybe show just enough and leave the rest to the imagination. What matters is what the user is doing, what they want to do.

Comics are also a great means of expression. Think of words in speech bubbles. Then add art with facial expressions. This gives emotion and context.

The expression can come from body language. Think Will Eisner's book Comics and Sequential Art.

Divide things between panels, use a panel to communicate change. Look at small changes to convey emotion.

• Communication
• Imagination
• Expression
• Motion
• Iteration

Remember, you can draw comics. You can draw comics to communicate comics.

Think Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work.

To draw people you can trace over photos. You can use standard avatars but this is mostly good as a starting point for tracing.

Tools:

• Tarquin Engine
• Storyboard Artist
• Comic Life

[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]

[Barbara Brennan, a designer for the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum]

The place we are going today is the facility that the Air and Space Museum uses to restore planes and make production models and presentation materials.

American by Air is the newest exhibit she is working on. The team has between fifty and a hundred people.

Start with curatorial content.

The exhibit tells the story of US air transportation from the beginning in four major sections:

• How the government shaped the industry and the technology of flight
• How the air travel experience has changed
• The social and cultural impact of air travel

These things are funded by donors, not the federal government. This means that content is in part defined by corporate donors. They won't compromise quality but will look for stories that relate to donors. Similarly they change content under pressure from Congress.

Funders for this one:

• Boeing
• Airbus
• NASA (surprising since the President just rewrote their mission to eliminate research on earth...)

So let's walk through this exhibit.

Start with the beginning of flight. Instead of telling that the government did this or that, they pull out individuals and make things like an interactive piece where you assume the role of an early airmail pilot.

They go through each time period and try to pull out stories about customer experience and then try to present this information. This is what people care about. (Do they do research to determine that this is actually what people want?)

They have full-size figures to stand next to. They have walk-through airplanes. The early period was a time when airlines competed on service quality, unlike today.

Because production takes a year, they are trying to come up with ways to integrate "current" information that couldn't be known when exhibit copy and content is sent to production. They are working on an "in the news" section to pull current headlines.

Each graphic panel in the exhibit has to tell a story. They use graphic symbols to identify content structure and to present big ideas.

(She keeps denigrating information that includes discussion of systems like the government and industry. It seems surprising, and a little condescending, to assume that the audience will "fall asleep" upon readin this real information. Is there research to back up her assertions?)

She again reminds us that the corporate donors and the director of the Smithsonian gets to veto things. (What happened to this great American institution of independent research? Oh the travails of living under an anti-science/ anti-government Congress and President...)

Before building the actual exhibits they construct 3D models, both physical and digital 3D. For planes that are too small for wheelchairs so they build QTVR interactions for cockpits. They also make these available online.

They test the mechanical and interactive portions. They also test how often people read labels, a fifty-percent reading rate is considered high. They test each piece with real visitors to the museum.

To test computer interactions they start with paper prototypes and then build powerpoint.

So how do they decide what is mechanical and what is computer-interactive. If the mechanical gets too complicated they often switch to digital. The goal is to get as many things physical as possible. You can't get so married to the direction you are going that you can't kill it and change gears.

In-house or contract:

• All products must be content driven
• Cost is a huge factor, this project is $300,000 in the hole
• Pro-bono arrangments haven't worked in the past
• NASM builds in-house capabiities but lacks many skills, like object modeling and animation
• Must determine creative ways to partner with industry to create cutting edge products that support content

Q: How did you get into this?

A: All strange paths. Theater design, lighting, graphic design, art history, architecture, etc. People come from everywhere.

Q: How do you determine what your audience wants? And how do you deal with a broad age range?

A: They survey people who are walking through the building and find demographic data that way. With content they have to balance and intpret information for the audience. They surveyed people and found that they weren't interested in engines. But the curator and academics see that as important so they come up with a way to contextualize this more complicated information. A similiar thing happened at the Monterey Bay Aquarium where they found that people didn't care about jellyfish but still wanted to do an exhibit about it and it was a hit.

Q: What are your favorite immersive exhibits?

A: Viscious Fishes at the Smithsonian about predatory fish. Highly immersive.

Q: Have you developed a business strategy? Have you thought about target market to attract new visitors? Etc.

A: (answer from NASM web person) This is a big issue for the web site particularly. Just finished an evaluation of the site. They've been on this "Y" generation kick lately. What comes out of surveys is that the demographic is still really broad and their primary demographic is still from 35 to 55. They need more people to go out to the center in Dulles and basically are paying to keep it open. They are looking at ways to change their image in some ways.

[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]

[A panel on cool stuff led by Jeff Veen]

(The panel participants aren't listed anywhere so I can't keep track of who is saying what but I'll do my best to take notes. Right now they are just introducing themselves. Jared Spool is talking about what UIE does and some other people are going to demo real live stuff.)

Stamen Design Work

• mappr associates a massive placename geotag database with placename tagging from flickr.
• cabspotting tracks yellow caps by GPS on a map in realtime data.
• digg swarm that represents stories with yellow blobs to watch the digg storm in effect.

So how do they get this work (and they did the awesome MoveOn conversation visualization for election '04 conference calls)? They decide what they are interested and draw attention to themselves by doing free research projects.

MindCanvas by Uzuntu

• Demos (Jeff declares "oooh")

No marketing business model, completely word of mouth.

So why flash? Needed sound and some things that Ajax couldn't do yet

Back to Stamen: Team is three people, occasionally four. Often work only on one thing at a time because atomizing work with many projects is too difficult. Working on one thing at once leads to a unified office atmosphere.

Q: So are your desks pushed together?

Definitely. Converted one of the walls into a whiteboard wall.

From post-its and whiteboard drawings they go into data land. For Digg, for example, they had to design an API before building the API apps on top.

Back to Uzuntu.

Very mobile communication. No meetings, just Basecamp and e-mail to have formal communication. It's been two years and it works great for them. At most they have five people on a project. One person plays the conceptualization role but most drawing is done collaboratively. They also use Powerpoint for prototypes because it is the best way to collaborate. It let's them go back and forth between anyone on the staff.

To another guy (I wish I caught his name)

They also used PP for an animated comp for Harvard Business School. This was the only way to do it but realized it was stupid to do in PP. It was a way to get an idea in front of a client.

The back button is a real concern. Do users of Kayak drag a slider and expect the back button to work?

To Spool.

The back button feels vistigial because the browser was never meant to be an interactive window. Now we just have to wait for users who like the back button to die off.

To Uzuntu.

To date nobody has expressed a problem with using the browser for a flash heavy app.

Q: How do you involve users in development?

Veen: For MeasureMap they did a ton of research up front. They realized that people only use a few data points in huge stats packages. They did a little ethnography and then started building working prototypes right there in Rails.

Guy I don't know: They make a prototype just rich enough to do testing.

Veen: The team is very comfortable with throwing away their work. They know that it is iterative and are willing to get rid of ninety percent of their work.

Stamen: Not much user research but definitely iterate to get it right.

Spool: Really loves paper prototypes and then makes them clickable. All that work of doing this is work that doesn't return value. If you would just use paper and have people point with their finger instead of clicking real things. It gets the idea across without risking hearing "I love it, ship it today!"

You don't need fancy laboratories with one-way mirrors. You just need to see and watch somebody.

Q: (odd question with enormous scope about everything in the universe)

Veen: So you mean, where do we start?

Guy (I wish I knew his name): Know your audience. Use tools and research and try to really understand people and what they need. Getting out and talking to people is always where they start.

Q: How do we drive technology.... (What?) Web is neat but pointless? (Did she really say Web 3.0? Me confused)

Veen: Struggles with that himself. Google is very engineering centric. If something interesting comes up. A prototype comes up with explicit techniques and then an implicit UX and then later asks for a designer. Look at Google Base, it's powerful but not user centered.

Stamen: They get that criticism all the time. But not everything needs to be intresting or useful if they push in a good direction. If you are thinking about usability you shouldn't look to the future, to web 3.0, you should look to the past. Wait for things to iterate before focussing on usability.

Uzuntu: They are a small company but they have found engineers who really seem to empathize with users. Really respects engineers who can see ahead and make that happen. Why don't innovations come from us? We must imagine what the next thing is going to be and work with engineers to make what people want.

Merholz: There is time for two more questions and this is the first. One thing that was alluded to in the keynote is a shift away from page design and container design, a space filled with stuff. How do you design when you are not designing for laying things out on the page, for designing things that people are going to change.

Stamen: Don't like to talk much about a project for an architect. Created a space for lot's of photos to go to. Built it on flickr. Expected a dozen photos per project but they loaded it with content and the thing creaked under its weight.

Uzuntu: Focussed on intention. When you are thinking about moving from space to space the emphasis is about showing what's changed and what you can do with it.

Guy: Start with what you know to be true, with the 80% of what users will put into these containers. This is the type of content you expect for the structure so start there.

Q: Here's a back button idea. If the user can't undo what they did with what they just used to make a change the user will go to the back button.

Veen: One more thing... This can continue at a party Jared Spool is organizing. It will be at Heritage India at six pm.

[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]

Starting a recent project:

• Set up a basecamp

But collaboration is not about project management. PM is important but you need to collaborate before the to-dos, milestones, and deliverables.

First things first:

• E-mail address
• super-secret AIM name
• mobile number

But then there's the other things:

• del.icio.us links relating to the project
• blog name
• bloglines OPML
• IM status
• flickr
• twttr

So why these things?

Communication, status, and attentuation; from explicit to implicit. It's easy to ignore e-mail, hard to ignore IM.

Governance architecture is important here. How do you coordinate activities across systems so you can get from A to Z. This is a system for using simple tools. With a little training and management you can go a long way. This is about circumventing big tools that don't let us work the way we work today.

Thing of these things as a toolbox. You move from hammer to table saw, etc. through an agreed upon framework.

Part One: How we got here

What happens out of the office, slow decision making, email overload, and "where'd we put that."

We are trying to avoid lack of alignment. Redundancy, miscommunication. We are siloed and this doesn't work. It's like starting a conversation in the middle without context. We are trying to avoid anything out of left field. Collaboration prevents this.

Note that when we are talking about collaboration for millions of people Lotus Notes is collaboration.

The downfall of Lotus was predicted in 1998 but it isn't happening. They face challenges from Exchange. If you look at Microsoft's brochure they sell "e-mail based collaboration."

Perish the thought...

We have e-mail overload. We've tried to use highly structured platforms to capture highly unstructured activity. We want to push an interest into a project.

We have a swiss army knife that does everything really poorly.

We have a centralizazd platform that doesn't do the job.

Bad top-down solutions give people the excuse to go in one of two directions.

1. They forgo using anything. This is why people shout across the office. This is tool aversion, a natural instinct to complicate things, to not put a tool between you and your information. This is short site, there is no artifact of this communication. There is no way to pass it on.
2. You experiment with other small tools to avoid the big tool. The great thing is that it really works for you.

So what is AP using now?

Tools that facilitate distributed and autonomous collaboration. You don't want to send a feature request to a programmer and wait for a top-down process. That doesn't work.

We have a ton of options so evaluating tools is really important. And this is beyond good or bad, this is about:

• Appropriateness: Does it work for what we are doing
• Commonality: Can we all use it and can we use it anywhere
• Centralization: Is it simple and straightforward
• Portability: Can I get in and out of it
• Uptake: How quickly can we get it common

There are many styles of collaboration tools.

• Status: Are people available and in the tool right now? Is there continuous presence. flickr is a great example of this, it let's you communicate current place and thus status information. This is somethin Dodgeball gets wrong. Status is more than location. This is why IM status messages are really powerful. "poll: what's a portal site?" is a great example of a way to ping everyone and solicit information. Throw what's going on with you out into the world. Another example is twttr. Group SMS mailing lists to single numbers. Nudge is a great feature that let's you request status from your group. It is a great way of getting lightweight status messages. So how do you adopt these status tools? SMS and IM don't need help. Encourage narcissism, you want to know what's going on with everyone. Tell me if you need help of if you are cranking and need to be left along.
• Real-time editing: E-mail wasn't built for version control! Why are people sending six versions of Excel sheets in e-mail? It is clearly not for this purpose. Writely is an amazing example of this. So is Google spreadsheets. You make changes as they happen. But the problem with this is the same as the conference WiFi problem. Response slowness is a big issue here. This is the strength of SubEthaEdit. It doesn't depend on http. Writeboards are different. They are not real time but do offer great versioning and URL sharability. You don't have to worry about sending things around and iterating and it is super easy to get out of it. The goal is to get rid of email as versioning. The thing to focus on is appropriate context.
• Attenuation: We need to get at what people are thinking and whats going on. Blogs are great for this. Use a company blog for contribution and reading. When you are way you can read the blog and know what's going on in people's heads. You will catch up on what new ideas are going around. These are visibile trails, artifacts in the world of thought. They are things that your colleagues think are interesting and worth caring about. Blogs are persistent, they offer a timeline so you can watch ideas develop. Content is also easily repurposed, they can fit into any governance architecture. Copy to a wiki, send the URL around (make em into a whitepaper). Establish guidelines with these but not rules. You don't want to set hard and fast rules, you want to collaborate. "Put it on the blog" becomes a mantra. This also connects to del.icio.us. You can see great primary source info. If you tag appropriately this can be very effective. Ma.gnolia is also a handy tool for this.
• Visualization: Many people use Netmeeting and other conference call tools. This is more than just talking about it, this is about seeing what other people are dong. Instant setup is crucial, no fussing about IP setup. Screen sharing is more important than seeing a face. Pointing with a mouse and talking gets you 90% of the way there. What's wrong with WebEx and Placeware? They are expensive, slow, and often don't work. Go for free tools and common tools. Check out vyew. VNC is a geek solution to this problem. Instead of trying to share a screen, just try to do a presentation. Check out thumbstacks. Tread carefully with these tools. Don't try them out in an important meeting. They will detect that you need them and then promptly stop working.

So what's the 800lb gorilla: wikis.

And we have to talk about wikipedia. It is a great example and resource.

You want to establish an intranet quickly, let employees manage docs, and it needs to be cheap or free. Wikis make great intranets. Email is a bottleneck.

Wikis let you share information so people can help solve their own problems. The democratic nature of wikis make them perfect for sharing information.

When you are adopting wikis you can't have adoption be the goal, make objectives discrete, measureable, and attainable. Measure e-mail usage before and after. Much like "put it on the blog" add "put it on the wiki" to your lexicon.

So what happens next?

Recentralization... Lotus is coming out with a new version. It's slick looking but still doesn't solve the problems that need to be fixed.

Jotspot has incorporated calendaring into wikis. This brings things back to a centralized tool.

Another thing is OSA Foundation's Chandler PIM.

We need to get to a point where we can work together without horrendous top-down tools.

[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]

Jeffrey Veen

This is about the web. All week we've talked about other things, about larger topics of design.

WEB 2.0 is what he's been talking about lately. There is growing skepticism because it is associated with hype but that's shame. Let's look at the design aspects of this new web 2.0. Let's look at boom and bust cycles to understand boom 2.0.

It makes Jeff nervous to see what we do on the cover of Business Week. Looking at an article about Blogs in corporations. But the definitions they use don't make any sense.

Let's look at historical boom and bust cycles. In the seventeenth century something very similar happened in the Netherlands. There was an innovation, a ton of funding, and a massive change in the economy. The change was in shipping routes and tulips came from Turkey. There was a fungal infection and tulips started growing in crazy colors. People started speculating and investing in tulip bulbs, mortgaging their houses and everything! This of course collapsed.

The invention of the steam engine has similarly intense impacts. It took away the need for the market to be where the resources were. Same with the car and the assembly line.

Even in Tokyo in the eighties. Look at the real estate market there (or here now for that matter).

We all remember the first boom. We remember when the fifth pet stored IPO'd on the web. But this boom was followed by a bust. This is because people assume the hockey-stick growth will continue forever.

If you look at the industry today venture capital is way up, especially at the Angel level. But this can't go on forever. Boom and bust cycles will go on forever. We'll go up and then the market will correct for itself but there will still be lasting change from new developments.

So what can we pull out of web 2.0, what can we take with and do good work because that's the point.

The term comes from O'Reilly media. They were trying to decide what to name a conference and came up with the well-known meme map.

All of these elements: community, the long tail, platform, etc.

So let's stick some of these web 2.0 concepts into the elements of user experience and see what we get.

The Blogger design. It is hip and trendy but what is this thing? This was no longer the original Blogger app, this was now a Google property that new people were discovering every day. They took the features and elements of the application and represented that on the homepage. The structure is the IA end of things. How is the content organized and how is that organization expressed.

A layer up from that is the scope. What do we do that can make it to the web site? What piece is going to need human interaction? What piece will be handled in other realms like call centers or face-to-face interactions? We have to be clear to not let that scope get too big.

And then the highest level: what is our strategy? With all the interest and attention, what do we do?

So let's look at these.

Surface problems are something that everyone has an opinion about. When looking at a redesign this is what everyone comments on. Wow that logo is big or wow that's really blue, not wow the scope is too large.

Let's look at an actual example: We have a bunch of data, how do we explain it someone else? We need to use design to communicate this information. Looking at number we have no context, so let's add some meta-data.

We add a title: Average Rainfall. Now we have gone from data to information. We've added column and row names. Now we have meaningful information.

So let's add a dash of Tufte. Better font. Scale back chart junk. Emphasize the data with bold. Let's add some color where the background color intensity and the number correlate.

So how can we make this better? Should we scale back granularity? Who is the audience? Meteorologists might want all the numbers but maybe a sidebar on Expedia only needs a graph.

Ah, USA Today. Decorating data is not communicating.

Let's replace the numbers with scaled raindrops that still have the varying color intensity. Now we have a design for a particular audience.

For hundreds of years designers were used to having total control. On the web that just isn't true. On the web we can build tools. Maybe we could build an app. Use design techniques to let users control data. We need to step back and give up control and give control to our users.

It's about building trust very quickly.

"Even if a web site is highly usable, provides useful information in a logical arrangement, this may fail to impress a user whose first impression of the site is negative." This is after 1/20th of a second. From Carlton University survey. Also see Emotional Design and Persuasive Technology.

No matter how much work you have done, it's all about trust on the surface.

• Visual appeal
• Cognition & Emotion
• Halo effect

If you start with data you need to give that data to your users. Let them control it and feel like they have control over things.

So let's look at the skeleton of this, putting items on the screen so people can use them.

A few years ago Jeff was comfortable with this. Collaborate on a white board. Draw an interface. Turn this to wireframes. When you click on this, this thing happens. That's it.

For some reason, everything changed. It wasn't a technological innovation. It was companies like Google taking mail and maps and thinking of them as more interactive experiences. There isn't anything technologically new about Ajax, it is about a stable enough platform used by an audience that has matured enough to be able to take this collaboration of technologies and really use it.

Kayak is one of these Ajax enabled search sites. What is great about this is that you can play with the results. This is about users exploring without the penalty of navigation.

Ajax is like "roller skates for the web."

Core principles:

• Discoverability
• Recoverability
• Context
• Feedback

Discoverability: Make finding stuff easy

Look at the Kayak autocomplete airport box. Not really possible without Ajax but such an effective use of the technology. It helps users avoid mistakes and find what they want.

Look at Google maps. The discoverability of features is a mixed bag here. Realizing that you can drag it around what difficult but once we understood it was impossible to work without it. A fundamental change.

Look at the Panic shopping cart. Is the drag-and-drop shopping cart discoverable? Maybe but innovating in the shopping cart is risky.

Recoverability: Actions should be without cost

Catch errors before they happen. Look at iFilm's sign-up form. It validates e-mail and username uniqueness in real-time as you type. Such a simple example of helping users not mistakes instead of simply recovering from mistakes. They had to take it down because of the back-end engineering challenges. These changes have pretty profound impacts on our teams and our organizations. Can we make them Ajax enabled is not just user experience, it is the whole infrastructure.

Look at Ajax enabled file upload meter. This is a very simple way to help people through the experience of dealing with the web.

Feedback: How does the system respond

We got lazy with this. In the past someone would do something, hit a button, the browser would take the page away, a new page would come back and the user would look for a change. With subtle interactions without reloading pages it can be disorienting. See the yellow-fade effect.

So the structural level, how we organize this data.

Look at your Documents folder on your Mac. You create a folder, you throw stuff in there after your Desktop has too many files on it. But we don't do this any more because search on the desktop has gotten so good. Look at Spotlight and Google Desktop Search.

Instead of living in the Finder, we now live in search. The filing metaphor is breaking down and being replaced by ad hoc personal systems of metadata. What is interesting is how this has migrated to the web. See del.icio.us. You navigate by tags that you have created.

Tags allow us to organize content for ourselve in ways that have arbitrary meaning. Look at flickr tags like on this photo Jeff took of a lizard in the park.

The way people tag content is the structure of flickr. The experience is all about manipulating and exploring this ever-changing structure. Global use of a tag, popularity of tags, clusters, through time, finding people by tagging, friend networks, comments, etc. Instead of finding these connections manually they just happen and they just work.

This is about stepping back and enabling users to have their own experience instead of trying to control every piece of their experience. This is about making tools.

So let's talk about scope.

Scope is increasingly interesting because of commoditization. In 1996 you had to go raise ten million dollars for your big idea. You had to be a category leader. You had huge startup costs and needed to be huge.

Now we buy commodity hardware, use free software, and use pay-for-click advertising. This leaves us with the ability to try out any idea for virtually no money. That's why you see all these new startups with a relatively small amount of startup capital.

Everyone thought maps was solved. But Google Maps came along and took this old problem and solved it in a new and innovative way with a new emphasis on audience participation.

An example is the CMS. These used to be beastly, complicated, and seen as necessary for most content on the web. But they fail. Using simpler solutions to constrain the problem has been very successful. The problems were not about controlling the sea of data, they were about access. What if you start with a blogging platform instead of building a new platform. (This is what web frameworks are all about. If you start with a framework and operate in the happy land of convention then you don't have to worry about configuring things that aren't mission critical.)

These new technologies, something simple as blogging, give us amazing abilities.

One of the other innovations of Google maps was about making the API open. And thus came mashups. For example Chicago Crime. This is citizen journalism by one guy that build a powerful app without having to worry about building a mapping interface.

So let's look at Measure Map. Most people are interested not in the things most analytics apps focus on, instead they want to know who is linking to them. The big idea is that your idea, your site, is just one sliver of the overall experience. People pick and choose all over the place. Embracing the idea that you play well with anyone else.

Who talked to a person to book their travel to come here? Nobody. A layer of the travel industry was wiped out by giving people the ability to book their own trips.

This is happening everywhere. This is about the Amateurization of the economy, the architecture of participation is all about this. If we are going to treat our audience like peers we want to make them experts in whatever they are doing.

A few years ago there was a landmark moment between blogs and journalism. The Dan Rather Bush memo story. Blogs asked "is what CBS is saying is true?" A guy looked at the document and happened to an expert on old typewriters saw that the apostrophe couldn't be made that way. This doesn't mean that the MSM is going away, it mean that there is a radical change in the way media exists in our lives. It was a huge deal.

Powerful tools in the hands of passionate amateurs changes all the rules.

If you can find the inefficiencies that industries have been making money on. Look at Craigslist, it took away the business model for local newspapers.

But back to travel. We put powerful tools in the hands of people. Now the next step is showing them to be expert. For example, flyspy and farecast. Look at TripHub.

Look at what Blogger did. Now look at Vox. They not only make it easy to write, they make it easier to know what to write about.

Yes there will be another correction but there's a lot we can do to avoid the mistakes of the past and can learn from what's going on now.

[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]

Lane Becker

Today's tracks are more bifurcated than the last two days.

[Overview of today's speakers]

But Jeff Veen will start today off. He is by far the best web designer Lane has every worked with. Here's the thing about Jeff: He's not just an amazingly talented web designer, he is a talented designer. Beyond that it has to be the best design, but its no design at all if it doesn't get implemented.

It doesn't matter what background someone has, everyone has to be brought into this process.

[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]

[A panel discussion with Jeremy Alexis (IIT), Shelley Evenson (UB), and Nancy Kaplan (CMU)]

IIT: The ID is a graduate only program with about one hundred students working on one of three programs. Once you are in the school there are three tracks. Communication and Product Design are self explanatory while Design Planning is more like the talk earlier today.

UB: Masters in Information Design and IA and an applied doctorate. Also two graduate certificates. Designed for working professionals. Sixty percent of students work full time. Since so many people don't have education in this field why is it important to foster graduate education in this discipline?

Should we have credentialing? This is something schools do. Schools can also do applied research that businesses won't do. The results are made widely available.

CMU: Two masters degrees and a phd program. Because they are at a big school they have loads of resources. The two degrees are in communication planning and interaction design. The program is two years long. Courses the first year are shared. The PhD can focus on any of the topics within the discipline. In HCI they incorporate CS, social science, psychology, and design. It is a one-year program. They also have an undergrad program in industrial design and communication. Many undergrads are now doing an accelerated masters degree.

MODERATOR: How are your schools ahead of the curve? What are you dealing with now that practitioners will deal with in a few years?

CMU: That's a marvelous question. The tale is that the schools are behind and instead they are ahead. We might be behind Europe in service design but we are making ground in the United States. Colleagues are doing great work in elder care and robotics. Getting out in the world and seeing how technology can be incorporated into people's lives. The way that they structure their project courses in the foundation year is in some ways ahead of practice. It helps prepare them for the way they will be working soon in the world. There's also the research topics but those are high level.

UB: The practice of participatory design is more alive in academic settings than in business settings. This notion that you go out and prototype before you define requirements. The other thing is specialized populations. The kinds of things that don't have clients yet but will have clients in the real world. Free to do things that don't have payoff on the bottom line.

IIT: ID bills itself as a methods based school and is constantly looking for new methods. Currently working on incentives design. What about the idea of integrating incentives to the UX process. Also looking into risk mitigation within organizations. How can design be applied to that goal? Exploring niches that design can work on. The ID is a testing lab for those new methods.

MODERATOR: Design has become so broad. How do you teach it in two years? What are you trying to get across? It could involve so many things, what do you try to impart in the two short years you have with students?

CMU: Try to help students gain framing so they can work with things in the future. The process for going through the foundation studio project is very rigid so all students can take that framing and innovate from there. You can't do everything in two years. What's nice about the foundation year followed by the thesis project they can find where they want to stand and concentrate on that in the second year. It's like eating your vegetables.

UB: Education is fundamentally different than training. It's about scaffolding for future development. Getting a PhD was getting a good license to learn. Similarly a masters degree is a license to learn. We are trying to teach them how to identify and frame a problem space. How to find prior solutions. How to identify tools and learn future tools. It's hard to define but when students come out they still have to learn best practices. The academic setting has a better handle on truth claims based on data. The academic setting is about the larger picture.

IIT: Critical thinking is one of the key elements. The three programs here all focus on that.

Q: Context is Georgia Tech HCI. What she noticed is that the designers graduate without hard skills. The higher level thinking is more of a senior role. Georgia Tech is making it hard to hire these people. They don't know the basic documentation and detail work.

UB: We teach people wireframes and deliverable and user research and contextual inquiry in the field. We don't just teach theory. We try not to get tool dependent but we do teach techne.

[stupid wifi dropped out so I lost some notes about mobile web questions]

Q: Design as saving people's lives and democracy and all those missed opportunities to apply the best and brightest minds to these fundamental challenges. In a commercial world it seems that the best minds don't get applied to these issues. As an industry what do we need to do to inspire people to do these projects?

IIT: Large project called bottom of the pyramid that is looking at creating tools for people living in rural China and rural India. This is a commercial enterprise but also serves people with real needs. It does not need to be purely altruistic. There are ways to make big organizations realize that there are opportunities in these markets. Overall this is a challenge. It is easier to go to a consulting firm.

UB: You can't tell students to go work for nothing. So will people volunteer their time to do good work in this arena. Open source has a role to play here.

CMU: It's hard for students who want to get for-profit jobs to show non-profit work and be taken seriously. This is a difficult challenge but some students do it and make it work.

Q: How did you get into the academic environment? How would professionals get into teaching?

IIT: Came through consulting and had spent time on the road. The director of ID invited him to go teach a few classes and he realized that the best day of the week was the day he was teaching. When a full time position came up he took it because it gave him the chance to think about long term problems.

CMU: Was a consultant for a long time. One thing at CMU is the Nurnberg (sp.) chair which is occupied by outside people for one year. Taught half face-to-face and half remotely. That experience was great and when the full time position came up she applied for it because she liked consulting but wanted to be able to bring that background to students.

Q: These programs had to start somewhere? Did they come from student demand? Consultant and professional demand? Faculty driven? A school near him doesn't serve his needs?

CMU: A committee from many departments and outsiders made it happen.

UB: Saw other schools doing things and pushed for it.

IIT: ID has always to some extent live under the shadow of the college of architecture since Mies and Nagy started it. The school needed to move out of the architecture building and worked to identify a niche. It was a way for the school to survive and flourish.

[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]

[Designing for Service presented by Shelley Evenson of Carnegie Mellon]

Recently she has been exploring the idea of designing for service.

Why service? Because that's where the economy is going. If you look at US GDP you see the extreme dominance of services in the economy.

Three kind of jobs:

1. transformational - making stuff
2. transactional - process stuff
3. tacit - creative stuff

The data is good but the names are weak. Uday Karmarkar wrote a paper called Will Your Survive The Services Revolution where he looks at services splitting into four poles.

Knowledge based services have been growing in importance in the US and other economies but how has service been defined? IBM has attempted to define this but this list doesn't seem to clarify this issue.

Services are activities that form a product through an interaction with representatives of the service organization, the customer, and any mediating technology. Services are also performances as choreographed interactions manufactures at the point of delivery that form a process and co-product value, satisfaction, and delight in response to human needs. When Beni Hana (sp.?) started the performance was very important because Americans weren't comfortable with foreign food. Think about the height of a table as the kind of thing that gets taken for granted in this interaction.

So what do we mean by design? We mean the process of identifying and agreeing on goals and then conceiving planning and sometimes iteratively constructing a framework.

Service design is all about understanding people through research and using that research to make interface and evidence (physical objects in the world).

In service design we create the resources to choreograph interactions that result in a compelling experience for the participants.

Imagine that its winter and you are taking someone you really care about to go get a colonoscopy. You have to them because they won't be able to drive so you go with. You go in and your spouse checks in. You look around the room and there's no place for your coat. You brought work and there's no place to do that. There are those magazines that are always in those environments but they're old. The Today Show is on the TV. You're sitting there and you work. People are coming and going. A long time passes and you notice that everyone you came in with is gone. That seems a little odd. Then the physician walks out from behind a door and now there's this doctor person for the first time. That person walks over to you and asks them to go with you. You think should you bring stuff so you do. You follow the physician to a dark room because the environments been set up to keep the lights off but when you walk in the lights turn on very brightly. You are asked to sit down and tells you that your partner has cancer. You lean across the big table and ask what? The doctor tells you that your partner is groggy so you need to help explain this to your partner. And you have to do this now. What do you with this? What resources are in that space to help deal with that situation. There's not much there. There's not much.

This service stuff is all about restaurants but its also about these important interactions. And its not just about face to face interactions.

At Carnegie Mellon they have an experience called Student Health Center. In her course Designing for Experience her students looked at the Student Health Center. The patient walks in, fills out a form, and puts the form in a slot on a door. After a period of time someone comes out and tell you whether or not you have an appointment because they are triaging. This sets the stage for the interaction.

Ok, everyone talks about the iPod so here goes. It has a compelling experience. It is a different kind of product but its different because it enables users to participate. Apple goes beyond. They sell songs for ninety-nine cents and let you manage it all in iTunes and this makes the experience. Steve Jobs was able to do the deal that let's people buy individual songs instead of albums and now this system exists to support a carefully controlled experience. It's through the design of the system that the iPod has been embedded in people's lives. The design of a system that reduces friction.

Analysts are now predicting that Apple will do the same thing with mobile telephony.

Look at Rearden Commerce. They aggregate service suppliers in a marketplace enabling employees to purchase personalized travel, entertainment, meeting services, etc. Employers gain control with embedded rule-based purchase options. This enables employers to manage their expenses while allowing employees to book their own flights in the way they want through the corporate site.

Do these new kinds of product/ service systems that we're creating really deliver? How do we understand how to design for this knowledge based environment without losing our human centered stance?

First look at context. Then look at setting, the servicescape of resources in the environment and how they mediate the interaction. Then on one side you have people or machines and on the other side you have touch points. Groups of touchpoints can be called the Service System Interface. If we're really trying to understand the complexity we need to define what we are talking about.

So service system interactions:

• person to person
• person to machine
• machine to machine

So what's a touchpoint? Sets or collections or resources. The service system interface connects touchpoints so they can sense, respond, and reinforce one another. The interface framework must reflect the expectations that people bring to the experience.

The cycle of experience is a model for understanding the customer's journey.

Connect & Attract > Orient > Interact > Extend & Retain > Advocate

I have to see something, know what to do with it, be able to do it, know how to evaluate the experience so I can use it again, and then can tell other people that the interaction is easy to figure out.

The Starbucks journey is a great example of this.

Another cycle is:

Awareness > Investigation > Evaluation > Trial > Repeated Use > Commitment

In this model, trial is the most important phase. If someone tries something you are halfway to getting them to try it again.

Think about designing resources across all components so they reinforce each other.

One way that is important to do that is through the conscious creation of a design language.

So what's a design language? In creating the resources we can't design experiences. What we can create are the resources for people to have experiences. We are creating explicit language elements to design for interaction that we write and the people on the other side read.

We need a process for developing languages to produce service system interfaces that both choreograph and encourage participation.

Think about Michael's logo this morning. He made a mark that people took and made their own. They could type it in any font and use it. They could own it.

Traditional new service development breaks the process up between Front End Planning and Implementation. Will this approach deliver service choreography?

If you think that requirements drive prototypes instead of the other way around the traditional process will work. If we don't then we need something else.

It seems that the Europeans are way ahead on this. See the European Service Design Network (I think I wrote that down wrong)

An alternative process:

Exploratory > Generative > Evaluative

People get the sense that you just do research at the beginning and evaluation at the end. Instead you go out in the world in the beginning to do direct observation. Bring in artifacts, look at parallel situations and then work in a generative phase with user participatory design techniques. Some people think these should be reversed. Then do evaluation all the way through as you make prototypes.

So what's different about this from the textbook operational model? Instead of starting by defining a strategy you start with exploratory research. Even in interaction design classes you start with a problem statement and then go out in the world to see what's actually going on with real people. These analogous situations can be instructive. If you are working on an MRI machine look at processes around other medical equipment. f you are designing a car look at the extremes of car design like the pimp my car people.

So here's an example from her course: Parking Pleasure Project.

Goal: Design the most efficient and effective way for CMU parking to handle normal customers of the East Campus Parking Garage and the overflow customers that need spaces for special events. Meet or exceed the expectations of all constituents.

So people drive up and see a full sign. They drive up anyway and see all these reserved spaces near the entrance. They have to back up but other people are behind them and its a mess.

In the discovery phase the students described the environment. What are the touchpoints in the physical world? What is the web interface like for getting a permit? What do you need to do to get a guest pass? Etc.

Lot's of stakeholders. From the center of the garage to people who live nearby with everyone in between.

Often the parking garage is the first physical instantiation of the University. It is the first brand touchpoint.

Once they gathered the discovery data and identified the stakeholders they mapped the process. See service blueprinting. Come up with user profiles/ customer typologies. Experience prototyping, look at real experiences (look at whole interactions, like integration testing in Rails)

Do more refined experience prototypes. Model new programs in real experiences. Add a cell phone component and new signage to your model and then prototype how it changes the experience.

There's lots of things you can do but what's the value relationship. Look for the highest user benefit for the lowest cost.

Ok.

Yeah its a garage but it reflect many of the things that were talked about earlier today. The ideas that the students came up with were fun but they also represent that they did the work to understand what the needs are.

It's an interesting issue because it is not a core function of the University. Its even something they are considering outsourcing. (Interesting and troubling that this initial brand experience could be written off. It reminds me of the stupitidy of companies who outsource customer service and then drive me to hate doing business with them through bad experiences.)

So back to the student health center. How do you find it? What do signs mean? What is the space communicating?

Define the ideal customer journey as clear steps.

The IRB is a challenging aspect to working in healthcare. You have to get permission to do any kinds of experiments with human subjects so they couldn't easily do research about the environment.

Map the stakeholders. Most of the SHS patients are international students and so the stakeholder map grows to include their families who care about the quality of service they are getting in America.

They used day-to-day journals to document the staff experience.

They then used these in collaborative worksessions with other artifacts to discover and discuss, sketch and comment, and present and reflect on the concepts.

Ultimately they did four week testing of signage and after two iterations made recommendations for resources within the University that SHS can work with to make this happen.

This process is much more inclusive. It engages end users and the people who actually work in and use the service. It is also an example of how important the service delivery experience is.

The mediation process is the key. The right resources must be presented at the right time and you can get people to engage.

So the future of design?

Addressing the challenges in designing for dynamic and more adaptive service systems.

When we design for dynamic instead of static experiences we need to build flexible platforms.

We write the design language, they read it, and they write. We design the resources for them to write for themselves. Good form encourages participation. Meaning is socially constructed.

So Web 2.0 from her perspective is about changing the web from a place to an activity. It demands active participation, you are doing stuff. It is shaped by everyone in the community. It improves through use.

Look at International Remix and zonetag.

We are going from "what it is will be up to us" to "what it will be is us."

Things to think about:

• It's about acting in the present to preempt the future
• Design the dynamic not the static
• Platform thinking should be at the center of every design decision
• Continuously extend the language we use to create new realms of experience
• The most important features are populated almost entirely by living structures

Q: People don't recognize the place that the web2.0 mindset has to influence service design. What have you seen bringing it into physical spaces? (merholz asked)

A: A homeless shelter in Cologne where the participants run a coffee shop to earn money to be able use the showers and other facilities. Originally it banned pets but lots of homeless people have dogs. So the place evolved and is now also a place for dogs.

They put the right things in place. They got a facility and then made a working running organization.