Sorry it took so long to get all the recaps done, but I wrote notes until my hand locked up, so there was a lot of material to cover. Here are my thoughts and observations on the conference:

• Web 2.0 is not just a marketing buzzword. In fact, Web 2.0 is the next step in the de-emphasis of marketing, and the emergence of user experience is a driver of business. Pretty much every service is covered on the web. We all know that, after commoditization of a product or service, comes competition based on differentiation bred by customization, positioning, and, ultimately, quality of service. In the web’s case, quality of service is primarily influenced by customer experience: provide a rich experience, and you’ll gain - and retain - customers. Successful sites have great experiences; great experiences build great communities; great communities will pay just because they like the service. Notice how there’s no marketing involved here: there’s not million dollar media buys, email spam, and text links wherever you can get them. Word-of-mouth is king.

  Take Google. I love their services; they provide me with a great customer experience. I would gladly pay $5-10 a month just to keep using things like their search and Gmail. Did I decide to do it because I saw their ad during Lost? Nope: They don’t advertise at all. There’s no need to market a great product or a great service that is built into a great experience. (Or, perhaps, this anti-marketing is the next step in the evolution of marketing?)

• Good design is not often innovative design and a good design for one site may fail miserably on another. There’s no formula for a good design (no, "clean" is not always best; look at Netflix which is very usable but kind of cluttered). In fact, good design is a design that enables the user: it exposes and emphasizes the features and paths that the user needs, provides easy methods to interact with the site and data, and provides visible and immediate feedback on user actions. A good design for a site may not be beautiful, but it succeeds because it is functional. Great designs wrap beautiful presentation around beautiful channels for interaction, around easy-to-use features, and easy-to-find paths. A great design builds that great user experience, which in turn builds a popular site.
• Usability is now totally different. We’re mixing the context of applications with the context of web browsing. How do users see complex web applications? Should they react more like desktop application - with full undo, state saving, etc. - or should they work more like traditional web pages, only with a few souped-up features? It’s too early to give a sound recommendation, because users haven’t formed any distinct mental models around what Web 2.0 apps are supposed to do. After more exposure to advanced web apps, users will slowly begin to decide that "this is what a web app is supposed to do."
• Web 2.0 is about the creating the "duh" service. A site that lets people collaborate on projects? Duh. A site that lets you keep track of people in your network? Duh. A site that lets you meet friends with similar interests? Duh. That’s what Web 2.0 is. Web 1.0 (maybe Web beta?) was about seeing what could be done and living off the "wow, this is cool!" factor that arose because we’d never seen this stuff before. Now, it’s very much "been there, done that" when it comes to the sheer technological wow factor. Now, we actually want to use things that serve some sort of purpose: the "only cool" products burst with the rest of the bubble. Web 2.0 is about finally putting products that serve a need, no matter how small, on the web; it’s mass production to serve mass needs. The "duh" services are driving the new boom: think of Flickr (let’s make photosharing easy, duh!), Basecamp (people need to collaborate on projects, duh! let’s do that), and YouTube (there’s a lot of great videos out there, what if we could collect them all so, duh!, they’re easy to find and search). These are the services that are now spiraling to huge popularity and massive VC funding.

The new generation of web applications are about giving users access to the things they need and the ability to do what they want with their data. More and more, companies are starting to realize that success comes to companies that give users what they want, not to those that try to market things down users’ throats. By creating user-focused web applications with enabling designs, companies can create engrossing experiences, the type of experience that brings users to a site and develops strong communities around those sites. By focusing on engrossing, positive user experiences, Web 2.0 means success for both companies and, ultimately, users.

Next Generation of Web Applications - Panel (Jeff Veen, Google; Mike Migurski, Stamen; Steve Mulder, Molecular; Rashmi Sinha, Uzanto; Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering.

[This was pretty rapid fire, so there may be more ideas than salient sentences. The panel members had a lot of fun goofing around and interacting with each other while producing some great ideas on the next generation - or some might say now-current generation - of web apps. Jeff Veen led the panel; all questions, unless indicated otherwise, came from Jeff.]

Uzanto produced The MindCanvas for rapid customer research.

Stamen - Mappr and Digg Labs. Stamen focuses on loose client relationships, on goals versus a set project. 3-4-5 month engatgements where you think about what to do. "We put out the kind of work we want to do."

MindCanvas - [in a demo of the MindCanvas card sort app, Veen drags Yahoo! and Microsoft into a group which he names "Stuff I don't use."]

Marketing MindCanvas? Just word of mouth: "No-effort marketing."

Why Flash? Flash provides an immersive experience (sound, etc.). When building applications like these "use what makes sense." Don’t be locked into Flash or AJAX for rich apps: use the platform that best enables your idea.

Stamen - Visualization technologies: AJAX limits you to "right angles."

Development process? Three people working together. Sometimes the amount of people is dispersed. Too many projects is a problem.

How do you collaborate? Definitely [can't read my writing sorry]. They use Optiwrite to turn a wall in their office into a collaboration space.

How do you convert or build ideas to Flash? Go down to the deep back-end level early. Flash is a "last step" after data.

JV: How about with Mind Canvas We’re a remote team. How to work together is a huge learning. It’s either email or Basecamp. Each morning we have a "scrum" meeting to see what’s going on. [I've seen that a lot with small companies or small project teams: with a very small, close-knit group it's very easy to have a quick sit-down meeting each morning to figure out the plan for the day, discuss what everyone's working on, set priorities, and talk about anything that just popped up. -A] At most there’s five people on a project. Their work process:

1. Prototyping
2. Paper
3. Draw together (using Yahoo! Doodle over YIM
4. PowerPoint

[Steve]: PowerPoint can be used as a design tool for animated wireframes. [shows a quick demo of a pretty interactive PPT mockup]. "It’s got the YFT [yellow fade technique], right in the wireframe! Come on!"

In many cases, designers need an anti-prototype tool to avoid customers saying "let’s ship it now!" You have to make it intentionally unshippable.

[JV] What about the usability challenges? How does the fundamental way people think of web apps change? I slide a slider: what does the back button do? We can teach them.

Some thoughts on that? [Jared] It’s all about context. It looks like there’s nothing happening. Make sure where they’re trying to go is clearly delineated. The browser wasn’t intended to be dynamic. [The back button] is almost vestigial.

[JV to RS] I notice you turn off all the chrome [in the browser].
It’s about grabbing all the attention. To date, nobody has ever said they have a problem.

[JV] It may be heuristics or context sensitive.

[Audience] Trying to communicate which context you’re in (application vs. browser) is the most difficult.

[Aud.] How do you involve users in building apps?
[JV] I’m working on a project where we did a lot of up-front research. It’s more about how are people successful and how do they show their success within the organization. [After that research we] moved immediately into prototyping.

[JV to Steve] Do you use prototyping in PPT to users (or show PPT prototypes to users for testing, interaction, etc.)? It’s limited because there’s only one path [in a canned prototype]. We’ll do a quick HTML prototype that’s just rich enough to be testable.

[JV] My team is comforatble with throwing away their work. 90% is thrown away.

[MM] We try to start building from the start.

[RS] We did user testing throughout and iterated off that. We weren’t testing for usability only: we were testing for [whether or not the user was having] fun.

[JV] With current web apps, is there any difference in usability testing techniques?

[JS] Whenever you put a design in front of people, you’re trying to see it through their eyes. Anything that gets them to share what’s in their head is good. Paper prototypes. Clickable PDFs [are the same as paper], that’s just work that isn’t returning any value. Just draw things out on paper. Paper prototyping is worth investigation. You just need to sit next to soeone and watch them use it.

[One of the presenters mentioned Paper Prototyping by Carolyn Snyder].

[Aud.] My company is just starting on a global project. How (do we do it, get started, etc.)?

[SM] Go to the customers. A lot of what doesn’t change is know your audience, know what they need. Getting out there and talking with real people is always first.

[Aud.] How do we [I believe they meant designers] drive technology so that Web 3.0 is what we need? How do we harness the development energy?

[JV] Projects come up through &quot20% time." By the time it’s on the radar, it’s already developed. This generates a lot of technical innovation, but then we get things like Google Base, which makes people scratch their heads.

[MM] It distributes the idea process. Not every release has to be successful. If you’re thinking about usability, you should find context in the past.

[RS] Everyone at my company cares about design. I have a great deal of respect for the engineers. We as a design crowd need to think like that. Just thinking about usability can hold you back. Marry technology with what people want.

[Merholz from audience] PPT wireframes show tension between page design and space design. How do you design these spaces people will be using?

[MM] We built a prototype. It crashed under unexpected weight. It’s definitely a crapshoot.

[RS] The key element is what people are focusing on, what they’re watching. [Letting them know] this is available.

[SM] Optimize for common usage, then make it scalable. Build hooks and flexibility around it.

[Audience guy] Here’s how to standardize the back button: if a user can’t undo the last change they made, they’ll go for the back button, and that’s what it should do (act as undo).

[I'm all in favor of a back button API that would let us hook undo functions into back, but just image the implications of a programmer taking over a user's back button and overwriting a browing session's history, essentially hijacking a session. Perhaps, there should be a hook for CTRL + Z or Edit -> Undo that would let programmers provide code for backing out changes? That would be GREAT! -A]

Mobile Experience Design - Anita Wilhelm

"The future is mobile"

What do you think of when you think mobile design? [audience] screen space, no keyboard, no standards

Mobile design must take into account that we’re now interacting with devices that weren’t meant to do what we’re trying to do with them. We’re left with using the phone as a joystick due to differing hardware, and poor APIs.

mFoundry, a mobile UI company, has built an interface that makes it easy to input data, but, still, how do you submit a form?

The common metaphors we see in the web space are changing in the mobile space: hardware buttons must take the place of software buttons. Mobile design is not just about a smaller screen, it’s about cramming the web experience into a phone, which is ultimately design first for calling.

Furthermore, when we’re designing for phones, we are designing as we’re moving through users’ lives: users are always connected to their phones, they always have them.

4info has adapted search to the mobile market. In part, they are successful because they don’t overburden the user with information. They’re also monetizing their offering.

Caterpillar, Anita’s company, learned in user research that advertising in SMS that it doesn’t matter how many ads the user gets as long as the ads are always relative to the txt message or further helpful: if a company pushes an ad for Fandango to a user txting searches on movie times, then the user will accept those ads and act on them.

A new question that pops up in the mobile space is what happens when all a user’s personal info is stored in a mobile device? We’re then forced to move into the realm of "private" design: finding ways to hide users’ personal information while not being too intrusive.

[audience] What is the disconnect between the US market and high-tech Japanese phones? [AW] The US is 2-3 years behind. It’s not a cultural difference but is more due to [carrier] business decisions.

[audience] Is the mobile market piling on too many features? [AW] When you start coupling all these things together, you’re taking away from the best design possible. The phone soon will become almost like a backup to other devices: the computer will have the rich interface; the phone will have a scaled down interface as it’s a secondary device.

[audience] What about voice-driven apps? [AW] They should be the key, but voice recognition software is not very good. It’s difficult for the end-user to set up (and a difficult set up means little to no adoption - A). Voice recognition is not a very near effective solution for interfacing.

[audience] With hardware manufacturers cramming more features in, what about older users? (A - he seemed to be saying that, as users get older, they’ll have an increasingly harder time to actually see and type into whatever interface we put in our mobile device). [AW] As interfaces get better, it will be easier to read these things. Bigger phones have more weight making them easier to hold and use.

[aud.] Location-based services: can technology development outside the mobile industry functionally go around the carriers? [AW] The only thing that would be possible [to let developers do an end-around the carriers] would be something using Bluetooth because US carriers own all the highways.

[aud.] What’s a good move in the short-term to boost e-commerce on mobile devices? [AW] In South Africa, it’s cheaper to install mobile infrastructures. There, you can buy goods in the market with your phone, helping farmers to keep track of their inventory. E-commerce is driven by need; cheap mobile satisfies that need.

[aud.] How far ahead are other countries? [AW] In Europe, you can buy train tickets with your phone. In Germany, you can rent bikes with SMS.

[aud.] How do you advertise mobile software? [AW] 1.) Many game publishers have the option of going straight to a carrier. However, there’s a big push to go around carriers. These publishers believe that "if we own the users, we don’t need the carriers." 2.) Use non-traditional media and direct marketing.

[aud.] What is the dispartiy between doing client-side apps and SMS on a mobile phone? [AW] The pure benefit is presentation. It keeps the user locked into one experience. Once a user has opened an application - which is the hardest thing - you can load more information with HTTP GPRS than with SMS.

[aud.] Is there an organization helping to organize a standard devlopment platform for mobile devices (there’s BREW, J2ME …)? [AW] I don’t think it will be as standard as the web. There are too many manufacturers, and all think the phone has different functions. In the future, there will be more compliant APIs that will allow developers interact with new parts of the phone, like cameras and keyboards.

[slide notes]
(3) There are three times more phones than laptops. In most of the world, the first Internet experience someone will have will be on a phone.
(9) The phone is an intimate device: you always have it with you.

[AJM] This is where it’s going. The real challenge for designers is working with a lot less real estate at a lot lower resolution: there’s not much room to play with, so choosing which features to present and which features to make prominent can make or break an interface. For anyone doing anything in the mobile market, the challenge is figuring out whether to work with or work around mobile carriers: they have the market locked up, but, if you build a product that people love, they’ll use that product whether or not it has their carrier’s stamp of approval. I believe that the carrier is secondary: users see - and want - the products first. If you make it great, they’ll buy it.

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.

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.

Facilitating Collaboration

You’re running (or even working on) a project, and you want everyone to be on the same page. How do you get there? Ryan Freitas from Adaptive Path, known around his office as the productivity / collaboration guru, gives his thoughts on new technologies - and new methods - for facilitating group production. (From his talk, this is definitely a well earned moniker.)

Everyone’s heard of 37signals’s Basecamp. It lets a group keep track of tasks and milestones, features a document repository, and definitely fosters collaboration while allowing for coordination (two important ‘C’s of a winning project).

What is colloboration? To Ryan, it’s fostering ideas, intentions, and interests. Collaboration is not just working on a project together; it’s moving beyond team to close-knit interdependent group. In Ryan’s idea of a team, there’s no possible communication failure: technology enables each group member to make the others aware of their every thought.

What do we actually use to accomplish those goals, to create transcendent teams? Email, IM, and the phone. Email, IM, and the phone do not help teams succeed on their own.

Look at del.icio.us. It lets you show your group what you’re reading; what your reading influences what you’re thinking. If your team knows what you’re thinking about, they’ll be better able to anticipate your ideas before you have them.

Collaborative tools all help teams in different ways along the various types of collaboration, found in this chart below:

Ryan believes great collaboration tools help form a "governance architecture" which begs the question: "how do you put your systems together in a sensible pattern?"

Part I: We need to fix "out of office," slow decision making, and email overload, which lead teams to lose track of our documents and thoughts and wonder "Where’d we put that?".

This lack of alignment leads to redundancy as team members work separately in silos. Take MS Exchange, which is billed as "email-based collaboration." When we use a platform like Exchange (or Lotus), "We’ve tried to use highly structured platforms to capture highly unstructured activity."

Part II: Moving past the Swiss Army knife approach to colloboration tools, which are nothing more than bad top-down solutions. When we forgo using any tools, "we tend to should": if the tools we’re using don’t support our activities, it’s a lot easier to just shout questions to each other across the office. Do we shout ourselves hoarse (and who keeps track of the shouted reply?) or do we begin to experiment with lightweight, ad-hoc tools?

Part III: What we’re using now: tools that facilitate distributed and autonomous collaboration. How do we evaluate collaboration tools; what criteria do you use?

• Appropriateness - does it get the job done
• Commonality - "is it something we can all access" how quickly can we all get to the same place?
• Centralization - are we forced to use this through a dashboard? (Like in Lotus Notes and Exchange, the dashboard often hurts collaboration: the software is a feature-bloated, jack-of-all-trades, master of none).
• Portability - can I get things out of it? Can I get things into it?
• Uptake - you have to be able to consider that we must share it with others. What will it take to get everyone on the same page?

The styles of collaboration tools are (or, in another sense, just what the heck they do):

• status
• realtime editing
• attenuation
• visualization

(Here, in my notes, I jotted down a great project-process quote: "It’s not toast yet, it’s still bread." That’s a great way to say something needs a bit more polish.)

Status - Twitter (or twttr) is a social texting service: send a message to twttr and it txts your group or team; its function as a group-send SMS tool lets you "nudge" groupmates.

How do you get people to adopt status tools? Encourage narcissism: encourage people to share their photos, txt ideas back and forth, and generally - and geniunely - feel like their sharing their lives, not just their work, with their team. Built a team by building friends.

Realtime editing - Because email wasn’t built for version control.

• Writely - realtime word processing
• Google Spreadsheets - lets you see changes as they happen. No need to wait on version 2 to be emailed; start working together on version 3.
• SubEtha Edit - a Mac-only collaborative text-editing tool that lets users send invitions to live-edit documents.
• 37signals’s Writeboard

How do you get people to adopt collaboration (real-time editing) tools? Context is everything. Use the right tool for the right job.

Attenuation - Paying attention to what other people are doing. Blogs— "I had no idea you were thinking about that." Blogs help us leave visible trails that our groupmates can persue to see what’s in our heads at the moment. Blog entries are there for everyone to read, and they are persistent. Blog content is easily repurposed.

How do you get people to adopt blogs? Establish guidelines, not ruels. Encourage everyone to "Put that on the blog." Why? Because "I want to know what inspired you to write." magnolia and bloglines really help us build these visual thought trails.

Visualization - Seeing what one another is doing.

1. Instant setup is crucial
2. Screen sharing is more important than seeing someone’s face

What’s wrong with Webex or Placeware: they cost a lot, suffer from high latency, and, most importantly, don’t work.

VNC, Vyew, and thumbstacks let us build and collaborate visually (and, in the case of the latter two, online).

If you’re thinking of adopting these visual tools, only experiment with them in a safe environment. If you’re pitching something to a client and need that screensharing program to work, you’d better test it beforehand.

Wikis - "The 800lb. Gorilla of Collaboration." The wiki can work as an intranet: it breaks the content bottleneck that companies suffer from when each department must name that one guy who gets stuck with typing up all the ideas and making every update.

On adopting wikis: make sure to work on fostering grassroots behavior. Wikis work best when you’re not required to use them, but encouraged to use them as a place to stick your ideas or processes or innovations, or to improve the ideas, processes, and innovations of others.

What happens next? "Re-centralization": MS and Lotus are trying to crank out new versions of tools that don’t work. Look at the innovation from Jotspot: they’re building a calendar and wiki, running out two successful products to combat that monolithic email/productivity/office app. "Chandler" is being developed by the open source community as a "Personal Information Manager" (PIM): essentially, it promises to be a free alternative to keeping track of all of your info (appointments, etc.) for sharing with your workgroup.

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.

Adaptive Path’s Lane Becker gave the Wednesday introduction, for keynote speaker Jeff Veen.

Becker joked that he was the only guy from Adaptive Path giving an introduction that hadn’t coined a tech buzzword: Jesse James Garrett minted “AJAX” and Peter Merholz tabbed “blog.” He then went on to say he’s at least partially responsible for “blog”: before putting it on his then-weblog, Peter allegedly used the term to try to pick up a chick at the bar while Lane was buying the drinks, so Lane owns at least a little bit of the term.

Becker noted Veen was responsible for perhaps the greatest of all Web 2.0 trends: he was the first to use rounded corners when he designed Blogger. He also said Veen was in the room when someone invented banner ads. (Depending on your views of the web, he’s either famous for those two things or infamous because of them :)).

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.