Lowering Barriers to Participation - Bradley Horowitz

Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo! guru gave a talk on participation: how do you make it easy for people to get involved with your site? Bradley talked about Yahoo!’s philosophies of creating engaging experiences that users can’t help but get involved with.

Horowitz stated that Yahoo! is the biggest group of people using Agile programming methodologies.

Horowitz believes that Yahoo! developer network takes a backseat role to the coders working with the technologies they provide: "We’re the roadies" "We’re the session musicians." (That’s a really solid example in how much Yahoo! believes in getting people involved: the build technologies (APIs, etc.) to let people play; that’s the whole reason they’re building things. They devlop just for facilitating the creativity of others.

Horowitz supports Yahoo!’s "Hack Day," where all 12,000 people in the company spend a day building something cool. Each person (or group) has 90 seconds to wow the others. The quote: "mash-up or shut up."

Often, competitors are using another competitors’ API. Instead of shutting APIs, Horowitz believes competitors should operate under the motto "if you provide us an API, we’ll provide one for you."

Horowitz spoke next on community dynamics. He states that for each single content creator there are 10 who synthesize that content and 100 consumers of all those products. Indeed, creators are also consumers (even of their own mashed-up content). This synthesis of materials leads to people Horowitz term "happenstance artistes": amateurs who build something cool by sticking small, separate pieces together. Anyone with a keyboard is now an author. Anyone with an iPod is now a DJ. Anyone with a [blank] is now a [blank]. These are happenstance artistes.

This rise of the amateur leads us to ask: is it all great content, or is most of it just "stupid human tricks," like many of the (in)famous viral videos found on sites like YouTube. Even though there is a glut of bad content, there is still an abundance of great content [here Horowitz showed a series of beautiful images from Flickr]. Users and the system surfaced these photos as the most interesting; they combined to promote great content.

Horowitz asked, "What makes Flickr special?" (This is a terrific question: Flickr is the epitome of the Web 2.0, experience-and-community driven site). Flickr is special because:

1. It features user-generated content.
2. Computer vision is hard. Here Horowitz showed The ESP Game, an attempt at double-blind tagging for images. Flickr is powerful, in part, because of its user-organized content: a computer does not need to see an image to tag it "dog," the user tags it such. Users add all value around the content for each other.
3. User-distributed content.
4. Opening up Flickr as an API (which made it even more popular as the mash-ups exploded).

Horowitz then got into search, using the innovations on Flickr as examples. Link flux and page rank believe that importance is based on link structure or the number of incoming links to a page. Flickr introduced the concept of "interestingness" as a new way to measure results. (As an aside, I’m not using sort by most interesting exclusively when jumping through Flickr images. Tons of great stuff comes back, and you can really feel the serendipity).

Horowitz is looking at clustering as another search feature of Flickr (search for dog and it returns dog-related results). Clustering looks at co-occurences between words. It lets us sift quickly through groups and dates.

Finally, Horowitz talking about Yahoo! Answers, which Horowitz believes will lead us to "better search through people." In Korea, this type of search (asking a question which is then answered by other users) dominates the market, and is run by a service called neighbor. Yahoo! Answers, like neighbor, connects people to a community who is best suited to answer their question. Search connects people to pages, with the caveat that the page must exist: that’s the only way it becomes a result. Answers can be concepts, ideas, or knowledge: there needs to be no single destination page to have a meaningful result.

[Audience question] What techniques are there to seed participation after a soft launch (the gradual, no-publicity release out of beta that is now the norm)?
Start conditions are super important. If you’re not careful, suddenly you’re the world’s best site in Brazil (is that really what you were trying for?). Yahoo!’s My Web was announced to the Flickr community only because that was the best audience for the product. You must have patience. It’s easy to over-promote, but that kind of behavior destroys the community and ecosystem already thriving around that product. Horowitz said this is precisely why Yahoo! will never promote Flickr on the Yahoo! homepage: the great increase in signups would destroy the community; organic, word-of-mouth signups are what keep Flickr’s commuity strong.

Everyone who’s everyone uses Firebug with FireFox to debug pages during web development. Firebug lets you get to the root of pretty much any problem you’ll come across. But what happens when you’re trying to make a page work in IE? It used to be like a black box … until now! (Now the box is like a light gray).

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Beta matches almost all Firebug functionality, while adding a few new, great things. In fact, IE dev toolbar combines the winning qualities of several of the top FireFox dev extensions into one package. Simply put: download this now to make debugging happier. Very quick install, and no need for a browser restart! (As an aside, if you ever want to wow one of your designer friends, whip out a screen ruler - one’s built in to the IE dev toolbar - when working with them on their design. Say, “nope, that’s correctly to the pixel.” They’ll peacefully go back to their Macs.)

technorati tags:development toolbar, ie, ie6, web development, web developer toolbar

Blogged with Flock

the “Web 2.0″ browser: it’s pretty much integrated every possible thing you’d want to do - from tagging to blogging to photosharing - right in the app itself. I’ll be checking it out for a little while, and I’ll post my thoughts.

First off, easy and painless install. Big props for that. It easily hooked itself in to all my accounts with very little hassle. +10 points. I’m still getting the hang of everything, but the quality of the install was huge: not many browsers - heck, not many software platforms of any kind - pull off something that smooth. I’ll keep going and see how long it sticks.

technorati tags:flock, web 2.0, browser

Blogged with Flock

Alex Bosworth’s How To Provide A Web API is a pretty solid primer for what we should be doing in our mash-up world. Web 2.0 is not only a revolution in user-centered design, it’s a revolution in user-centered data.

People want to be able to get at their data in any format they choose. They don’t want to have to visit your site, log in, and browse around before finding what they need: they want to be able to see it next to new blog posts in their RSS reader; they want to be able to jack it into an AJAX app they write for their blog.

So, how do you create a usable API? (And, believe me, as someone that’s used a lot of APIs from a lot of different applications, this is a question that needs to be asked a lot more). First, document the hell out of it. For every function you write, write a concrete *-doc version that explains it, then go a step farther: show the code in actual use (Ruby on Rails does a good job of this); without examples, you have almost no idea what the API is expecting, or how it should be used. (Call me crazy, but I like to see how functions are called, and what they return in actual code rather than having to infer it from a method signature). How else can we make these things better? Jared Spool wondered the same thing at UX Week 2006.

technorati tags:api, usability

Blogged with Flock

The Brave New World: Usability Challenges of Web 2.0 - Jared Spool

Jared Spool is, without a doubt, one of the top usability researchers in the history of usability research. If it’s been built on a computer, he’s probably tested it. Now, Jared, and researchers like him, are faced with a new beast: Web 2.0. Jared knows Web 2.0 is much more than a fad, and he gives us ideas on how to make it usable.

The entire role of the usability professional is to eliminate the frustration caused by the introduction of technology. If you’ve used something, be it a website or a toaster, and you can’t for the life of you figure it out, you know the frustration felt by most users of most products firsthand.

When 37signals asked its users what Web 2.0 is, they got answers ranging from "Marketing buzzword" to "mainly AJAX" to "AJAX and interactive applications." Jared believes Web 2.0 is really "small pieces, loosely joined." These small pieces include APIs, RSS, and folksonomies.

Design mutates: it lives a lifecycle. First, technology design focuses on getting the technology to actually work. It moves next to feature design, or providing "extras" that make the design worthwhile. Finally, technology design moves to experience design. Literally, you move from "just get it working," to "add features," to "build an experience," or commoditizing your design. (Design here is a rough term encompassing any innovation, from a computer, to a website, to a stereo).

Web 2.0 is:

• Designed around user experiences
• "Small pieces, loosely joined
• A set of common design attributes:
  • APIs (mash-ups)
  • RSS
  • Folksonomies
  • Social Networking (the "Wisdom of Crowds" or, as Wired Magazine likes to put it "Crowdsourcing")

These lead to some unique usability challenges for Web 2.0: APIs make everyone a designer, while RSS has no defined experience.

APIs’ Challenges

• How do we assess the usability of an API?
• How do we create a seamless experience with code from different sources? (And, believe me, if you’ve ever tried to select, and work with, the best AJAX library out there, you know it’s more difficult and time consuming than brain surgery).
• What happens when everyone is designing interfaces?
• How do we ensure design skills are available to new experience designers?

RSS Challenges

• Can we come up with a way to explain how RSS works? (Ask your Mom and Dad what it does and see how well the current explanation is spreading, if it’s spreading at all).
• Subscribing is complex (even with services like Bloglines).
• Interactions are unpredictable (one day, my Yahoo! UI blog feed mysteriously stopped working for no real reason I could ever discern).

How do we properly communicate how to tag? On social tagging sites, like Flickr and del.icio.us, we face the "Kitchen Cabinet Problem", the same problem you face when you’re visiting a friend’s house, and find yourself searching for the kitchen garbage can: you know where you put your things, but not where other people put theirs.

Folksonomies have an inherent challenge: there are a lot of different ways to say the same thing.

Taking Netflix as an example of social networking, we run into a big challenge: how do we boot one of our friends out of our social network? If your buddy keeps recommending horrible movies, how do you politely remove him from your network circle? Social systems, be they real-world or online, are really complex.

The long tail or behavior pattern was applied to a large collection of books. Looking at most frequently used words, "and" and "the" showed up most often, with less-common words making up the tail. This same behavior predicts the popularity of web pages on a site: there’s a few popular pages that everyone hits, with views trickling down the tail, and finally winding up on that press release from March 18th, 1992. Microsoft’s site has over 800,000 pages that have never been seen. Even by spiders. The long tail challenge forces us question how we can write interfaces that support the 2% of users that do their own thing.

[this is a ranom point -ajm]: Experience design is affected by bugs in the data. [Other peoples' notes seem to be saying, as best as I can sum up, that bad data causes a bad experience: if your bank AJAXes your account information to you and it's incorrect, you'll have a negative experience regardless of the site's design. Design is now just one factor, sometimes, with some interfaces a very passive factor, in a user's overall experience].

Finally, Jared stated that Web 2.0 has momentum. It’s not a fad, and is certainly more than a buzzword. In fact, I really think that it’s the experience revolution, the set of seamless experiences, that the Web has been waiting for. If not, it’s certainly more than rounded corners, pastel colors, and the permanent beta.

This was an absolutely killer talk. I took 10 pages of notes, and I’m sure I could have filled up a bunch more if I could write faster. Jeff Veen is not only an Internet pioneer, but he’s still pushing along, and, most importantly, comes across as geniunely enjoying what he does; it was no surprise when he spoke of working at a job versus working in your vocation (he’s in the latter). To the notes on "Designing the Next Generation of Web Applications."

Jeff opening talking about having a job versus having a vocation: do you work because you have to, or because you love what you doing?

He moved on to a few questions we all hear about Web 2.0. Are you tired of the phrase? Is it a marketing ploy? "[It's] a way to raise venture capital without doing anything." He then went on to say, historically, this is "Boom 2.0": it’s the second time in the Internet’s short history that it has exploded with exponential growth (and hype).

Is this newsworthy revolution good or bad? "It makes me nervous when the things we do make the covers of business magazines" because those magazines exist only to promote fear. In reality, there’s nothing scary about this new boom: except the inevitable correction.

There have been plenty of boom and bust cycles thoughout world history. In the Netherlands in the 1700s innovation (in tulip horticulture) led to a rush of capital towards innovation (people sold everything for flower bulbs) which in turn caused the market to correct itself; the product was a lasting change. The invention of the steam engine followed a similar patter. "As technology has turned wealth into information, it’s gotten faster" Innovation always draws speculation; overspeculation always leads to a correction. Now, we work in terms of years instead of decades and change comes quickly.

Veen brought up real estate speculation in Tokyo as another example of "absurdity in the markets then change." "At some point, it’s going to correct."

Jeff showed the Web 2.0 Meme Map, and said that Web 2.0 is not about doing redesigns yearly, but gradually adapting our applications. The old cycle of build it, use it, blow it up for change’s sake, has been replaced by the idea that we can take a good application and slowly, over time, make it great: instead of disrupting the experience just for the sake of change, we now perfect the experience just for the sake of the user.

Jeff then related The Elements of Web 2.0 to Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience. Jeff broke down each of JJG’s elements, and noted how their used in - and ultimately shape - Web 2.0. The Elements of Web 2.0 are:

1. Surface - How it looks (design).
2. Skeleton - Interaction design. Expressing features and functions as ideas on the page.
3. Structure - Information Architecture
4. Scope - "What do we do on the web?"
5. Strategy - "What does our company do?"

Surface - Everybody thinks thinks they know about visual design. It’s easy to comment on visual design (and just try to design anything for someone else if you don’t believe it). What makes a good design, or a design that does what it should? Such a design exposes metadata: it makes data more accessible. A good design turns data into information. It makes data "accessible, usable, and actionable" Good design turns data from numbers into concepts. Design can be dangerous, though: try too hard to explain what’s going on with your data, and you end up with something like the USA today Info Graphic: a pretty picture without any substance (see The Onion Infographc for a great spoof). Good design is about "letting go of design control. Designers are used to having control over their medium." Let users do what they want. "It’s about [users] controlling their own experience: Web 2.0 is bubbling that up. It’s about building trust very quickly on a website."

Jeff stated that you must build trust on the surface. Trust is the product of a site’s visual appeal, cognition and emotion, and ultimately, the Halo Effect (here Jeff cited the works of Gitte Lindgaard). Lindgaard’s research shows that you have under a second to win over your users: you must build trust in less than the blink of an eye. Jeff recommended Emotional Design by Don Norman and Persuasive Technology by BJ Fogg as two required reading for all those who wish to build that trust that is the key component of a winning design. Ultimately, designers must think of users as peers, with whom they are collaborating on websites: the site becomes "a converstaion" between the user and the designer; it becomes a living space that leaps off the page. Ultimately, the Web 2.0 surface is one on which users control their own data.

Skeleton - AJAX is an innovation of perception. It "allow[s] users to explore without the penalty of navigation": it promotes recoveribility. (As an aside, most people can’t figure out where they need to go on a site, no matter how well it’s designed. If clicking one obvious button can get the job done and save the user from having to complete a form, click through three pages, hit the back button a few times, and click yet again, let them click that button). AJAX has become "roller skates for the web": there’s no need to walk when you can glide along.

AJAX and Interaction Design combine in the skeleton to build the powerful, enabling principles of discoverability and recoverability.

Discoverability means finding stuff is easy: finding what you want is now "simple and obvious." The drag-and-drop shopping cart used on one example site is a negative example of discoverability: it’s "cool, but has no discoverability."

Recoverability is the idea that "actions should be without cost." Like the old iFilm login, sites should catch errors before they happen. iFilm had a great little interface that would report back your status (is that username you want taken? did your passwords really match?) without a submission to the server. But, one day, it disappeared. Why? The developer that wrote it left the company, and no one else could make it work. Web 2.0 isn’t just about user experience, but company competencies: it’s nice to dream big, but you still need the smarties that can make the dream come true.

Context - Web 2.0 builds context (and promotes context) by giving feedback. Take an AJAX-enabled file uploader for example: gone is the submit and wait experience; now you see how long things will take. Feedback removes the subtlety from subtle interactions: everyone’s seen the Yellow Fade Technique. Another popular feedback technology is something I personally implement all the time: graying out the entire screen with a message.

Structure - Experience as architecture. On a computer, the filing metaphor breaks down after you reach 1000s of documents. The search metaphor (type and there it is! instead of having to remember that precise path) works better. Architectures enable ad hoc conventions (how do you tag your images on Flickr? so people can find them easily). Take del.icio.us, where you tag for easy-to-remember searches.

Tagging really enforces the concept of experience as architecture: indeed, you’re creating a whole architecture for your life on the web based only on the ideas that the experience you had when visiting a site triggered in your head. "Tagging creates a trail behind us that becomes a trail I visit in the future."

None of the data in Flickr is provided by Flickr. None of the architecture is provided by Flickr. Everything is provided by the users through their experiences (and the ad hoc conventions that the community built for itself). Overall, the architecture of a site used to be hierarchical; now, it’s based on use patterns (everyone clicks a single tag, it gets bigger in size, more people click on it; Yahoo! built a link structure that promotes frequently clicked items to the top for easier clicking). Stepping back, instead of trying to control user experience, provide the containers for experience.

Scope The startup in 1996 versus the startup in 2006: in 1996 you had to have a big idea. In 2006, most server software is free. Servers are cheap. We no longer pay for impressions, we pay for clicks. "You can try out almost any idea for virtually no money." Old problems are solved by new platforms with an assumption of audience participation, in which the audience members control their own experience.

The old problem: CMS (a very complicated solution).
The new platform: customization to TypePad or free software. (The problem was access).
Participation: Aggregating feeds. Rich metadata.

Old problems: Map quest search engine.
New platform: Google maps (fluid).
Participation: API (mashups).

Old problems: Analytics - Enterprise-level software provides "everything but…"
New platform: Measure map - focusing scope on just bloggers
Participation: API

"Your site is just one piece [of the overall experience someone is going to have]. Play nice!"

Strategy - "The Web puts powerful tools in the hands of passionate amateurs." The travel industry has transformed to give people the power to do it themselves (the last time you flew, did you call a travel agent?). This lets to "amateurization." Take the George W. Bush flight status fiasco from CBS. One guy who wrote a typewriter blog figured out the famous Bush memo was faked. "If you can find the inefficiencies big companies have been capitalizing on, you can drop the bottom out of their market." Craiglist attacked the classified ad space, which the big newspapers relied on for a huge source of capital. Wikipedia killed the "one big company puts out a huge volume of books each year" domination of the knowledge publishing industry. Wikipedia is " changing the way we think about people’s knowledge." However, "don’t just put tools in people’s hands, show them how to be experts." Flyspy.com and Farecast don’t just let us pick a flight: they give us predictive modeling on when to book. We’re not just figuring out how to book or where to book, we become experts in booking: we now know when to book to get the cheapest ticket. TripHub gives us the power to be a tour guide. Blogger makes it effortless to update a website. Six Apart’s Vox gives inline tips in the experience. The successful Web 2.0 strategy? "Manage the risk in a way that will let [you] explore a very simple idea."

[Jeff’s slides are available at http://www.veen.com/nextgeneration.

The Elements, Laws, and Characteristics of Interaction Design.

Another stellar PPT presentation that I heartily recommend downloading (PDF). This guy totally knows his stuff (which could be said about the other presenters, too). I’ll try to give the slide-by-slide recap and I’ll put the slide number in ().

• (3) Before you engage with a service you have to trust it.
• (4) Would you buy stuff from a pharmacy like this?
• (5) Would you trust these people with your money?
• (6) How something looks gives you a context and indications of how it should be used.
• (8) James Gibson and Don Norman created the idea of "affordance," which means how well a product lets you know what you can do with it.
• (9) Smart = Products that do things for human beings that they couldn’t otherwise do themselves.
• (10) Google’s processing power winnows down search results, overcoming our human data processing limitations.
• (11) We don’t have access to this raw data. Amazon crunches it for us.
• (15) George Miller - The human mind can only keep seven (plus or minus 2) items in memory.
• (17) When I do something with a product or service, I want to be acknowledged.
• (18) The Web 2.0 "Twirling, swirling thing" gives no indication of what’s happening. It makes the user wonder "what’s going on?" Something is, but you don’t know. Progress bars or other indicators that something’s going on make waiting seem like it takes less time.
• (19) All interactions take place over time: from nearly instantaneous to decades. Computer time is not equal to human time; the screen’s slowed down for you to use. We can manipulate time to make things better.
• (21) Delays in response can create frustration!
  Anything under a half a second delay is probably OK.
  > .5 seconds < 1 second - Users will think something is wrong
  > 1 second < 10 seconds - Work is completely disrupted
  > 10 seconds - put an indication that something is going on.
  Remember: Even if your app takes 1.2 secons to load, you can still - and should! - provide feedback! -A
• (22) Feedback - "crooked voting" - do it early and often. Feedback should be a direct response to what’s happening, whether that’s an error or an affirmation.
  Feedforward - Lets you know what’s going to happen before you do it.
  • What happens when you click a button that says "Click?" How about when that same button says "Create a blog?"
  • Targets in anchor tags versus "click here."
• (25) The things we create must be appropriate for the cultures in which we create them.
• (26) This version of Yahoo! is set up for people in China; it’s appropriate for their use.
• (27) "Microcontexts" - The check in kiosk, of which we’re only occasional users, cannot be as complicated as MS Excel.
• (28) Texture tells us about context.
• (29) The objects’ distinct textures imply distinct contexts of use.
• (31) Sound can really annoy, bother, and distract people if it’s used incorrectly. Sounds is a good periphery-type of feedback. (Use sound as a background element).
• (33) Clever designing is anticipating things human beings will do with your device, then designing for it. It anticipates need then designs for that need.
• (34) Drawing highlights the huge pause button and 8-second rewinds button, both of which anticipate an expected use of the TiVO remote.
• (35) Ah, Clippy. It’s not clever because it anticipates needs you don’t have and tries to offer unrelated help you don’t need.
• (36) Poka-Yoke stems from Toyota’s QA. Poka-Yoke is idiot-proofing a product: essentially, you’re making sure accidents and problems don’t happen before they happen. You’re preventing a mistake from ever evening happening.
• (37) The USB plug anticipates an accident: it only fits in the proper slot so you can’t wedge it into the power socket.
• (38) (Larry) Tesler’s Law states that for every process, there is some amount of complexity that cannot be simplified. In digital process, there are some things you cannot leave out.. Good interaction design helps to relieve or reduce these complexities by assisting the user while the user works through them. In email, the necessaries are: to (which the mail client fills in), from (which the mail client offers assistance on), and that’s it. The client helps the user do the necessary work.
• (40) A Ludic design is "playful." It invites us to learn new things about it by playing and experimenting with it.
• (43) The Ameritrade app is designed to be playful. You can play around with and learn the app by playing with owning stocks until you’re comfortable enough with the app that you start to use real money and real purchases.
• (44) For digital objects we can either:
  • Directly interact with them (and providing more direct ways for interaction is a good practice,
  • Or, indrirectly manipluate them (with something like Select All).

  Direct manipulation is far more intuitive: if you click it and it changes, you understand why the change occurred: you did it, it was out in the open.

• (46) For things to interact, they must move. Think of a videogame: you get engrossed because it’s moving, it pulls you in, and, suddenly, you’re moving with it.
• (47) How the cursor moves, how the dropdown opens, and how fast the folder opens all influence our feelings and emotions when we’re using a product or service.
• (49) All things move through space.
• (52) Fitts’ Law: The time it takes to reach a target is determined by the size of the target and the distance to the
  target (really simplified translation: it’s easier and faster to click a big button that’s close to the end of a
  form).
• (53) To design with Fitts’ Law in mind: keep buttons close; move navs to the top of screen.
  "Star menus" (like that rater on amazon) are
  easier and faster to use than dropdown menus, because the clickable elements are so close
  together.
• (54) A pleasurable design is a design in which function and aesthetics are close together and
  blend into each other.

What is Interaction Design? Dan Saffer

This one’s another offline-readable PowerPoint presentation. I only took a few notes on my slides, which I’ll share below. The quick summary: if you’re not sure about what Interaction Design is, or even are only kinda sure, read through the deck.

• (Slide 10) Putting napkins on top of your drink so it’s "saved" is a behavior. As such, it can be designed for.
• (Slide 11) It’s about people connecting to other people through the products we use. We connect through products like: email, stereos, personal shoppers, and food servers at restaurants.
• (Slide 13) Interaction is: the message itself, the shape of the message, the deep connections between people.
• (Slide 20) Design is a slippery term people are uncomfortable with.
• (Slide 21) Interaction Designers (IDs) focus on the user (their motivation, results…). They focus on how people are able to do tasks and goals they want to do, and optimize for that.
• (Slide 22) IDs create alternatives.
• (Slide 23) Design doesn’t always product the solution, but produces a solution.
• (Slide 26) Emotional resonance is an important piece of interaction: lifeless products just aren’t pleasant to use.
• (Slide 28) UX Design - Encompasses everything that makes up an experience. Industrial design - creation of forms. HCI - quantitative perspective. Communication design == graphic design. IA/CD/UI Engineering/ID - how interface will work.
• (Slide 29) (right-hand image) What happens when I press the screen? How does this product get delivered to me?

  Interface design is the physical expression of interaction design. (Or, ideas created by interaction designers are expressed in - and shape - the design of the interface).

• (Slide 30) How this product works is governed by interaction design; it’s the layer that sits above the product.
• (Slide 36) These products were dumb. They had no idea they were being operated on.
• (Slide 38) Old computer punchcards === difficult and complicated.
• (Slide 39) Industrial designers first began designing for people, not designing things that would exist, oh yeah, and people would use those things.
• (Slide 41) This is the text of the first email ever sent.
• (Slide 42) Xerox PARC creates the first interface we’re used to.
• (Slide 43) Thus begins the shift from hardware to software. This begs the question, "Who is the computer really for?" It’s no longer just for the engineers.
• (Slide 45) Software finally takes over. It’s more important than the hardware. (In fact, now we buy new hardware to support better software because it’s the software we want. Programmers don’t dumb down software; we buy smarter machines).
• (Slide 48) The web becomes a platform for application development. It pushes the boundaries of what the web was supposed to be like. (Text. Link. Text. Link. Repeat).
• (Slide 49) The shrinking of hardware leads to mobile computing.
• (Slides 50 and 51) A robot and an RFID tag respectively.
• (Slide 52) How do people interact with an "Internet of things?" We answer this question through interaction design.

Creating tangible value with design, Parts I and II, Brandon Schauer and Steve Toomey

This presentation has two great sets of slides available. I wrote most of my notes right on the slides themselves, so they’re a really good resource. Brandon and Steve did a great job of creating a presentation that tells a good story, even off-line on paper in black-and-white.

I’ll present my notes and ideas for this talk (and most of the others save the keynotes and panels) in bullet form. Post a comment if you’d like me to provide some clarifcation or elaboration.

• Design is the "Third Place" in peoples’ lives: it’s very much the experience that people have in between home and work; it’s a pretty huge chunk! Does that create value? If done well, design can create a massive amount of value. [my thought]
• Starbuck’s. The Nexflix package. Flickr. Good designs. Great experiences.
• (Slide 26) Taylorism -> the work of Fredrick Taylor
• (Slide 35) Why does Flickr succeed? They " stay tuned to what [their] business does well and what [they] know how to create." Flickr didn’t try to cover all the bases: they picked a few and did them better than anyone else could hope.
• (Slide 39) The "Portfolio Mentality" - Google makes a ton of products. A ton aren’t successful. But, because they follow the idea of the portfolio (see GE and the 95,000 things it makes), they achieve growth: the cash cows more than pay off the losses of the dogs.

End of Part I

• Steve and Brandon took a moment to state that the Adaptive Path report "Leveraging Business Value" addresses many of the business-related points of this talk.
• (Slide 65) Left-hand side percentage = interest rate; right-hand side = return demanded by shareholders.
• (Slide 66) Hurdle rate == (weighted average) cost of capital
• (Slide 67) We’re using the hurdle rate as the discound rate in this calculation.
• (Slide 72) Just focus on 1-2 key metrics your project is changing. Don’t worry about explaining how it’s tangentally improving something in Q3 ‘08.
• (Slide 73) The two-way street: what is the measure of success for my work? What do I send up? What do they send back?
• (Slide 79) Stage Gate is a product dev. / go or no go software package.
• (Slide 80) How do we make more of an impact? We work further upstream in the user experience value chain. It’s something I always try to do in my work: if you can catch something early, you’re in much better position to help correct it (speed it up, help it, slow it down, move it around) then you are at that moment it’s dropped in your lap.
• (Slide 83 - black) Model the business -> of UX before your project, after you helped launch that new product, etc. Did you help? Did something else hurt and you could say, "See? Let’s learn from that."
• (Slide 86) Preface this with "How does UX start to affect…"
• (Slide 98) This is a form factor of a medical device, created by IDEO. (I thought it was some kind of toy gun :-)).
• (Slide 103) Panel 1 - Relationship to current experience. Panel 2 - Who gets this? When? Panel 3 - Metric: Click-through
• (Slide 104) Is this an activity we want to engage in? Are we capable? Put your prototype on a scale with vividness and effort on the axes. Lo-fi prototype < --> Comic Scenario < --> Box (cereal box packaging your idea) < --> "Artifact" from the future.
• (Slide 105 - black) Model the business -> connect business with user behavior -> prototype the strategy.
• This process helps drive design decisions. You need this input before making that design decision; it can guide you in the direction, but not if it’s already too late!

Q&A

• How do you apply this when people making the design decisions aren’t the financial backer in a B2B environment? (ex. IT user goes to to buy.)
  [You need to determine whether you're] looking for other kinds of value (financial metric -> cost reduction or revenue generating [and gear your design that way].
• Managerial judgment governs decisions when it comes down to opportunity costs. (Most managers would disagree, but you can’t do everything at once). Managers must decide "how much money are we missing?" "What’s possible versus what we have to go after?"

I wound up this session with the following quote: "The Universe is enormous; we can only see fragments" (Stephen Baxter). I’m not really sure how it popped up, but it’s an interesting thought, especially in light of the final "opportunity cost" discussion: we never really know if we’re doing the best thing for business; we can only really stick to our guns (and cross our fingers and hope).

This is a point that popped up a lot during the conference: design has the power to create a ton of tagible value because it really shapes almost all of peoples’ lives. You’re at work: your sitting in a chair that was designed to fit your body, working on a desk designed to promote productivity, typing into a computer designed to trasnlate your ideas and thoughts into "the next big thing". Good experience design, and good design in general, almost blends into the background: it’s so seamless, you’re not even aware how good it is. It’s the "delightful", "witty" medium in which you move from place to place. Good design is a positive experience; or, more rationally, a positive experience stems in no small part to good design. Bad (experience) design? Think of how much you enjoy waiting in a long, long, slow, long line to get your driver’s license renewed. Exactly.

Seasoning with Stakeholders - Charles Warren, IDEO

Could also be titled “Delight” or “Wit” in design.

IDEO (idee-oh) is a design/innovation consultancy.

Charles says we should make big systems "witty". How do we do that? Through inclusion
and tyranny. He wonders: "we’re meant to inspire, but are we selling Chinese food?" That is, are we constantly trying to be innovative just for innovation’s sake? Do we worry about building something that’s cool and new just to build something that’s cool and new?

Warren says we’re "curating an experience" through design; each design is "telling a story" to the end user. If the end user doesn’t buy the story, they won’t buy the product.

Companies nowadays have "business model ADD": they’re trying to do everything instead of
just focusing on being good at any one thing, really selling and improving the experience around that product or service.

Charles once worked on a project with 700 stakeholders. How do you catalogue that many possible ideas and opinions? IDEO built a virtual space to "suck up" all that information.

Warren believes that there’s nothing better you can give someone than visualizing their idea: instead of listening and walking away, designers should throw down that stakedholder’s idea, even if it’s just in a rough sketch or comic.

Charles has three principles for winning over stakeholders:

• "Stakeholderstorming" - Brainstorming with all the stakeholders and remembering to get all their names so you can send them feedback and get their additional
  buy-in.
• Workshops - which all you to gather input efficiently
• Rough concepts - creating a wide range of choices for stakeholders to react to

Warren’s ideal production cycle (or production day), looks something like this: a few people converge; the designer gets permission on a design concept from the big group; the designer stands for the user in any and all discussions; working itensely and alone, the designer builds a product for an end-of-day critique; the end-of-day critique is the place for convergence and judgment.

Warren says we should aim to create a "Delightful Experience" How do we do that? By brainstorming with 5-10 people (or more with rigorous facilitation). In these brainstorms, we aim for divergent thinking instead of convergent thinking. Divergent thinking lets everyone put out their own ideas (everyone writes their idea on a Post-it and sticks it on the board), while convergent thinking features one recorder who can and their own view or terminology to an idea.

Q&A

• What’s the best way to train someone in facilitation?
  Designers are good at being facilitated. You have to practice and coach.
• Case Western promotes “appreciative inquiry,” which Charles recommends. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appreciative_inquiry”>Appreciative inquiry involves asking these three questions:
  1. What did we do that helped the process?
  2. What do we wish we could do next time?
  3. What do we want to try next time?

  Appreciative inquiry helps us to learn faster because we learn faster by repeating things we did right.

• How long do you wait to hand back a design concept?
  As close to real-time as possible. Put materials on a wiki to facilitate debate and review. Vote on concepts.
• Warren believes in openness to stakeholders
• Always brand it, put ideas in physical space
• Getting wit wrong: the Microsoft paperclip. It’s when you miss the basics first (you need to put get the basics of the experience down before you pepper it with wit).
• The core group is the client. Read Growth as a Business Practice, by GE’s Jeff Immelt.
• Can wit be boxing yourself in with an attitude?
  Maybe wit isn’t the right word?
  [Audience member]: Wit is the interface standing in for the human.

I think that my adapted version of that audience member’s session-closing comment is profound. It’s much easier to interact with an interface if the interface is interacting with you. We’d all rather be speaking to a human being, so humanize a design with "wit" or "delight." Think of an error message: the user is already ticked off because something broke. Tell them you get it by giving them the response you would want to receive if you were in their situation. Make the user feel like you’re sitting down with them, you’re sitting down with them, and you’re already trying to find a way to help.