I was very happy to buy a copy of Desktop magazine today and see two of my photos of my workshop planning process and sketchnotes nice & big in an article on the UX Australia conference by Neil Simpson.

I was however less than happy to not get any credit for the photos. Considering they’re about half of the two-page spread, you’d think I’d get at least my name (and maybe a URL) in there somewhere, wouldn’t you?

Hey Desktop, how about a free life-time subscription and we call it even?

Update: I’ve exchanged some mail with Neil, and he’s explained that he did the right thing and passed along my name with the images. The missing credit appears to be an oversight of the magazine, and not any kind of wrongdoing on Neil’s part.

Update again: just to be absolutely crystal clear, what happened is Neil, the author of the article, asked me if he could use my photos and promised me a credit if they got printed. I agreed and sent him the hi-res files. He passed the files and my details along to the magazine, and the editor screwed up. Neil and I have been in touch and there’s no hard feelings at all; in fact we’re talking about future possibilities of doing something similar together.

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• UX Australia Sketchnotes

Photo by bernardoh

When I told the girl at the front door that I had an appointment, she checked her iPhone, found my name, and with a smile she sent me up to the second floor. There, another color coded girl (the “ushers” wear orange, the geniuses wear blue) checked her iPhone, asked me to take a seat and said it’d be just a minute. A simple but beautifully designed screen behind the geniuses showed me my own name, reassuring me that I was next in line. The smooth friendliness made it rather difficult for me to maintain my irate customer stance, but I set my jaw, determined to give the so-called genius a piece of my mind if he hesitated for even a second to replace my iPhone.

Luckily for Tom, my genius, he didn’t hesitate at all. In fact, upon seeing the missing button on the top of my phone, he said, “let’s get that replaced then, shall we?” I blinked, nodded, and two signatures and 3 minutes later I had a brand spanking new iPhone in my pocket. Tom gave me exactly what I’d been hoping for (but assuming wouldn’t happen) and was extremely friendly through out our brief transaction.

The Weakest Link

Our experience with the brands we love (and hate) is a chain of mini-experiences:

• Advertising links to…
• In store or web site purchase links to…
• The box links to…
• Unboxing links to…
• First time use links to…
• Learning & regular use links to…
• Customer service links to…
• Repair or replacement links to…
• Next purchase links to…

Any brand that can construct a solid chain from beginning to end, has a good chance of linking the end to the beginning and creating a permanent loop of consumption, something that Apple’s become pretty good at.

Expectations

Apple’s advertising, packaging, product design and so many other links in the chain have always been such good experiences for me, so I was shocked at the problems I encountered trying to book a genius bar appointment. If DELL or Microsoft gave me those kinds of problems, it would confirm my opinion of them and would therefore, in a way, be more bearable. But when Apple drops the ball I’m shocked. They’ve trained me to expect perfect experiences as my right as an Apple customer. Tom the genius restored my faith, but the hassle of booking an appointment to see him is now part of the chain in my memory.

Other than that, the repair or replacement link is the absolute worst part of the chain to disappoint a customer. If I have your broken product in hand, my expectation in that moment is that you suck. There’s no other point in the chain where it’s more important to prove the opposite.

A Simple Fix

Keeping all of this in mind, it’s not really a big challenge to improve the appointment booking process without changing anything but the copy. If Apple were to take this “piss of” screen:

And simply change the text:

…and give me the ability to jump straight to the page and check back - without clicking through six time-wasting screens over and over again - I’d be a very happy customer, and Apple’s otherwise perfect chain would be a perfect circle.

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The keyboard arrived this morning, and I was reminded again—from the design of the outside of the box, to the experience of opening it, to the minimalistic eloquence of the object’s design—that Apple are the uncontested masters of experience design. I mused briefly on how far behind them every other company I know of is, and clapped myself on the shoulder for being a discriminating customer with taste.

Fast forward to lunch. I pick up my iPhone, tap something into it, and go to push the little button on top that locks the screen.

It’s gone.

The ingredients of experiences are feelings, and this is a story about feelings. That button seems to have just fallen off. I’m a little surprised and disappointed, but I’m not fanboy enough to expect that Apple’s products are indestructible. I’m willing to forgive. “No big deal,” I think, “I’ll just go down to the Optus (my mobile provider) shop and get them to replace it.” Considering Optus’ reputation for service I wasn’t surprised that they palmed the whole thing off to Apple in about 5 seconds.

At this point I was, oddly enough, relieved that I didn’t have to deal with Optus fools who never give me the help I’m after. Instead I had a perfect excuse to enter the beautiful Apple Store down on George St. and I was looking forward to them handing over my shiny new replacement iPhone.

To get a date with an Apple Store “Genius”, you book an appointment online. So off I went to Apple’s lovely web site, clicked around a bit (Support > Repair > Enter serial number > Make an appointment), and landed on this screen:

Ahhhh, just the kind of design I like: clear options, no fluff, and an overall feeling of simplicity. Lovely. I was pleased to be here, and optimistic about wrapping up this appointment business quickly. I’ve got an account at Apple, so I clicked “Member”. After two screens they want my membership number for something I’ve never heard of called “One to One”. No explanations. I feel a bit stupid and confused as I return to the screen above and start again. Let’s click “Guest” and see what happens.

Sign in, easy, quickly done. I like these kinds of tasks, this is obviously where I want to be. Next!

I obviously want technical support. Click! Now I’m getting somewhere! Maybe I was stupid to click “Member” back there, but let’s forget about that shall we? I’m smart now and my new iPhone can’t be far away!

iPhone of course! Click! Rolling along now, almost done!

A layer warns me to update my software and backup my data before I come to the store. Prudent advice. I’m not very interested right now to be honest, but it does heighten my optimism —if they’re telling me what to do before coming to the store, then I’m almost there, right? Continue! Click!

Uh. Wait a sec.

Confused. Also disappointed but mostly just confused. Surely after asking for my info, and even instructing me what to do before I come to the store, surely after all of that it must be possible to get an appointment? And if there’s no appointment, surely Apple wouldn’t just slam the door in the face of a customer with a problem? Even if they were to offer me an appointment in two weeks or two months time, it’d be better than this. Must just be a bug. Surely. Or maybe I did something wrong?

There are only two options: “Done”, which I’m not, and “Exit”, which most certainly won’t get me what I want. They might as well reduce it to a big “Piss off” button. For lack of any more sensible option, I click “Done”, which brings me back to the support start page. I dig the serial number out again, click click type type click click. Perhaps I’m in denial, but I’m determined to get an appointment.

Imagine calling tech support, and after a couple of questions the operator states flatly, “I can’t help you,” and hangs up. This is what just happened to me. Twice. No help. No option how to continue. Just a refusal to give me an appointment. This is what we call angry. I try it all one more time for good measure, which only makes me angrier.

So I ask my friends if they know what’s up. One of them replies, “it always says that.” With that I decided the whole thing’s hopeless, and made a plan to put on my irate face and drop by the Apple Store (without an appointment) to make the life of some clerk (they’re obviously not Geniuses) uncomfortable until I get my replacement.

And this morning I was in love with Apple.

Update: I did eventually get an appointment and everything went great. Which somehow makes this experience even more disappointing.

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Photo by the talented JJ Halans

Now that Web Directions is over, and now that I’ve had a weekend to sleep it off, I’ve got to say it was excellent! As you’d expect of a conference with three tracks and 670 attendees, it was two days of agonising over what to see, rushing from room to room and sketchnoting ‘til my hand was sore. This was all well balanced by the best conference wifi I’ve experienced yet, highly drinkable free coffee, and relaxing, drinking and laughing at the great after-parties.

The information was pretty dense in almost every presentation so I didn’t manage to sketchnote everything I saw, but here are a few of my favourites. You can see all of my Web Directions sketchnotes here.

Mark Boulton

Having had a slightly too big night the day before, I missed Matt Webb’s keynote (which I’ve heard was pretty damned grouse) so Mark Boulton started my Web Directions. Mark’s a designer of note and author & publisher who’s worked at the BBC, recently redesigned Drupal and runs a small agency in South Wales. His talk on typography was broad, and in places deep, going from typographic basics to a structure for type thinking to the challenges of embeddable fonts. He inspired some grumbling, but echoed my thoughts, when he said:

I don’t think Comic Sans really is that bad. There are no bad tools, just bad designers.

And his take on embeddable fonts was interesting: he said working within constraints and concentrating on structure makes for good typography, and warned that “opening the flood gates” with @font-face, Typekit and the like will lead to an extremely ugly, chaotic web. I strongly agree with the former, and fear the latter may be spot on. You can see his slides here.

Suze Ingram

Suze introduced us all to service design, something I’ve been hearing murmurings about for a while, but couldn’t have really said exactly what it was. Suze has obviously been paying a little more attention than I have, and gave a clear and concise introduction to the topic. Thanks Suze! She’s also obviously keen for service design to grow and flourish in Australia and has started the Service Design Hub to encourage that growth, and is working on “Service Design Camp” in 2010. Suze is keen to collaborate and drive service design forward—let her know what you think.

The web designers and information architects of five years ago are now calling themselves user experience designers, and a cynic joked after Suze’s presentation that we’ll all be service designers next year. Considering how much most service experiences suck today, I can certainly imagine worse outcomes. Check out Suze’s slides here.

Donna Spencer

As always, my friend Donna was charming & smart as she presented the basic information seeking behaviours that all users exhibit.

This was a list presentation, so no mind-bending new insights, but it went a long way to shake the accepted “people either search or navigate” myth out of my head. She showed that people explore, refine & narrow, compare, discover and more, depending on how much they know, what they’re looking for and how goal oriented they are at that moment. The bit that really made me sit up and think was when Donna quoted Cheryl Gledhill, who said in her presentation:

Recently I’ve been searching less, but finding more.

I’m hoping Donna’s next presentation on information seeking behaviours will deal with exactly this “bubbling up” behaviour we’re seeing more and more of on Twitter and other social networks. Have a look at Donna’s presentation here.

Christian Crumlish

Christian gets my vote for best presentation of the conference, and not just because I got to get up on stage and introduce him. He was very clearly passionate about his subject, got quite a few laughs out of his audience, and backed it all up with rock solid information and examples.

The self-described “Pattern Detective” of Yahoo’s Pattern Library (and ukulele virtuoso) gave us the five principles of social interface design:

1. pave the cowpaths
2. talk like a person
3. play well with others
4. learn from games
5. respect

The rest of his talk revolved around a fascinating diagram, showing the various elements of the social ecosystem, designed by Erin Malone, the co-author with Christian of the recently published “Designing Social Interfaces”. After his high-energy, insightful talk, I’ll definitely be buying the book.

I was also pleased to get to know Christian and his charming wife during their stay here in Sydney, and look forward to visiting them in San Francisco! That’s hands down the best bit of any good conference!

Grouse!

Writing a wrap-up like this can’t really capture the atmosphere of exchange, sharing and inspiration, nor the jokes shared over a beer or the intense discussion at dinner. Due to these, as well as the smart & generous presenters, Web Directions was indeed grouse! Some of my other favourite moments:

Elliot Jay Stocks:

Beauty is the experience’s visual layer.

Dan Hill:

IT is too important for the IT department.

Mark Boulton:

The fundamental flaw in Jesse James Garrett’s model is that he relegates typography to the surface.

Kelly Goto:

Hybrid designer / coders are magic people.

I’m now very sorry I arrived too late for Web Directions last year, and I’m already looking forward to seeing everyone again in 2010!

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Now that the audio’s available, here are the slides from my UX Australia presentation.

Any stack of paper can be printed with words which, when read, convey insightful, interesting & exciting thoughts to the reader. The same words can be posted on a web site and have the same effect. But when we present our ideas, it’s a completely different kind of communication, far closer to theater than it is to writing. Presenters who subject their audience to slide after slide of text are where the term “death by powerpoint” comes from, and the most ground-breaking ideas can induce catatonia when delivered by a monotone speaker who sounds anything but passionate about his subject. The best presentations I’ve ever seen were dominated by images, contained no more than a few (if any) words on each slide, and were presented by a speaker who knew his material backwards and delivered it with confidence, passion and humour. When I present, I try to be that guy.

This style always causes the same dilemma: should I share slides which make no sense at all without me talking & waving my arms in front of them? Luckily, Donna Spencer organised excellent recording for all of the presentations at UX Australia, and Slideshare makes it possible to sync audio to slides.

But most presentations on Slideshare don’t have any audio. I’m curious: when you put together a slide deck, do you keep Slideshare in mind and try and make your slides readable, or do you concentrate on the event, and try and put on a great show?

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Okay, so I’m not that lazy.

I’d never attended Oz IA before, and after my experience at the IA Summit this year, I was a little afraid Oz IA would be a navel-gazing IA rockstar festival, but I was happily surprised. Everyone (okay, almost everyone) was down to earth and had practical, useful stuff to say.

Too Fluffy

One of my personal favourites was Anthony Colfelt’s talk, “We’re Still Too Fluffy”, although I got the feeling it wasn’t so popular with the rest of the crowd. It was a wake-up call to information architects that see commerce as dirty, and expect clients (and the general populace) to see their skills as valuable and shower them in riches, just because they exist. Anthony urged us all to more clearly define what it is we do, learn to convince others of the value of design, and to learn to sell. Amen, brutha!

Here’s what I captured during Anthony’s talk…

Is it Art?

Another big hit with me, and apparently many attendees, was “I don’t know much about the web, but I know what I like”, by the manager of information at the Gallery of New South Wales, Jonathan Cooper.

Compared to almost every other presenter, Jonathan’s talk was poor on hard data, research findings and user personas, none of which kept it from being the most engaging, entertaining and interactive talk at the conference. Like all good presentations, showing you his slide deck wouldn’t even impart 10% of the experience of watching him throw rubbish on the floor and transform it into art. If anyone out there has a video I could post, let me know!

Not surprisingly, Jonathan’s show produced my favourite sketchnotes…

On the Job

The experience of sketchnoting Oz IA was a bit different than at UX Australia:

After all the positive feedback from UX Australia, I was more confident, which translates directly into better visual ideas and a stronger line.

Since Eric was sponsoring me, I was under a different kind of pressure: I wanted to give him value during the conference, so I was running out in between sessions to photograph and upload my pages. This had a very exciting immediacy about it — one guy told me on the second day that he’d spent the night before trying to copy my first day’s sketchnotes — but it also meant less chatting and hanging out, and a fair bit of rushing around.

The sketchbook & pen combination from UX Australia didn’t work — the Sharpie bled through the soft pages. Using a pocket-sized Moleskine with heavy sketchbook paper and a Uniball Signo cartridge hacked into a Pilot G2 Mini body proved to be perfect. Thanks yet again to Mike Rohde, sketchnote king.

Looking at my sketchnotes now, I find them very light on information. I still haven’t found the right balance between taking the time to draw and making sure I don’t miss something important.

Even though some of my drawings completely sucked (see for example my portrait of Joji Mori) people were very encouraging anyway. Thanks folks!

Closing the Book

Oz IA was another great conference that I look forward to attending next year. And my second round of conference sketchnoting proved challenging, highly enjoyable, and a great way to concentrate and absorb and save more. If you liked the sketchnotes above, you can see all 13 spreads from Oz IA in my Flickr set.

I can’t wait to capture more sketchnotes at Web Directions this week. See you there!

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UX Australia

I spoke and gave a workshop on sketching at UX Australia a few weeks ago. Here’s my talk, which without the actual talking is perhaps a little obscure - I’m promised that the audio’s coming soon…

OzIA

Coming up this week is OzIA. After seeing my sketchnotes from UX Australia (below), Eric was nice enough to sponsor me to be the official sketchnoter of the event. Thanks Eric! Can’t wait!

Web Directions

I was too slack and otherwise occupied to get a proposal in for Web Directions (boo!) but it’s on next week and the program looks like it’ll be a blast (yay!). I’m especially looking forward to hearing Mark Boulton talk about type, listening to Christian Crumlish talk about social interfaces, and playing with the augmented reality t-shirt, designed by Miss Failwhale herself, Yiying Lu and made technically possible by my mates at MOB. The whole week is set to be amazing, as it’s the inaugural Australian Web Week! After arriving in Australia two weeks too late to attend last year’s Web Directions, it feels like it’s about time I got to attend!

Edge of the Web

Last but certainly not least is Edge of the Web, out in Perth November 6th & 7th. I”m honoured to say I’ll be flying over to the left coast to talk about the train wrecks and best practices of online shop design, and attend the award ceremony for the Australian Web Awards, which I helped judge. Gary Barber was nice (or crazy) enough to let me ramble on about job titles to avoid, photography for failed painters and our the reality of augmented reality in a recent interview, which you can read here.

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Specifically two interesting projects have come to my attention, and they couldn’t be more different.

Practical Post

So far most AR I’ve been able to find has either been in the alpha stage, or pure gimmickry. So it was refreshing to find something that is practical and useful to average folks, right now, today. It’s not a game changer and it doesn’t redefine any paradigms, but if you need to know if your stuff will fit in a postal box without going down to the post office, this could be extremely handy. [Found on core77]

Finnish Fluff

If Nokia Research had set out to make a video demonstrating how augmented reality could one day become barely more useful than my iPhone, they couldn’t have done better than this concept video. Unfortunately, I think they really mean it. [Thanks to @MichelleGilmore for the heads-up]

If I’ve understood correctly, in the future I’ll need a hideous pair of glasses, a bracelet, cordless earphones and a phone in order to send and receive text messages, surf the web and check the weather. Okay, okay, I’m being a bit harsh, but let’s break it down:

• The lady only ever sends smileys, which is convenient considering how difficult it would be to actually send text using the proposed interface.
• Imagine yourself walking down the street in New York with a few hundred people & cars passing you every minute. Now imagine trying to keep your eyes focussed on your music player’s menu and not bump into anyone or get run over.
• If we accept that she’s able to navigate through her music with her eyes, why does she need a wrist/bracelet twitch to accept an incoming text message?
• I vaguely remember seeing a study of disorientation caused by goggles back in the bad old days of VR, and as I remember it one of the primary causes of nausea was projecting static, non-moving images over a moving background.

It’s a nicely produced video, and it does have a soft glow of cool, but does it really show an innovative way to improve how we communicate, connect, and navigate the world and our data? Meh, not really. If that’s what the future looks like, I’ll just keep my iPhone, thanks. My tip for the Nokia Research AR team: spend half as much on the next video, and put in twice as much time thinking it all through.

And it’s off-topic, but I’m curious: does anyone understand why the guy in the boat is wearing a kevlar vest?

Fluff with Style

A “one-day” vision video doesn’t have to fall so short of the mark. This video from the architecture faculty of Valle Giulia gives us a feeling for how AR might one day be used to make the study of architecture more engaging, fun and informative.

That’s what an exciting vision looks like! And apparently you don’t have to look like a complete dork just because you’re wearing AR glasses.

Yes, it’s a Game Changer

I loathe the phrase as much as anyone, but AR is a game changer. For us designers, the “game” for the last 20 to 30 years has been two-dimensional planes inside the monitor’s magic box. AR not only gives us a whole new dimension to work & play with, but also breaks the magic box and spills our interfaces out into the world we spend all our time in.

The only question Nokia Research answered above is “how can we get the functions of today’s phone out of the phone?” which to me doesn’t go nearly far enough and is, well, boring. The question I want AR to answer is “where are my superpowers?” Is that too much to ask for?

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As part of my series of interviews, I asked Dan: what’s design mean to you?

My favourite bit is what Dan has to say about defining the problem that design is there to solve:

I don’t think it’s served design or designers well to run away from that part. I think designers need to step up their game. If they’re not able to step it up to where they’re really good at that, they should at least not be satisfied with being told what it is at the end of the day.

Thanks for the interview Dan!

Click here to see all “What’s Design Mean to You?” interviews.

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Back in 1992, I helped set up a virtual reality lab at VCU where I was studying design. I’m not ashamed to admit that, at the time, I thought people would be wearing gloves & goggles to conduct their daily business in the Not Too Distant Future. I got over it, of course.

One of the most exciting things I found at the time was a book called Artificial Reality II by Myron Krueger. In it, he put forward the idea of a layer of information projected inside your glasses, synced with the reality outside your glasses. So, for example, you could write a sign in the air with your finger saying “This is it!” outside your house, and save it on a friend’s private channel to help them find your house for the first time. Pretty heady stuff back in 1991, and today almost a reality.

The field’s called Augmented Reality or “AR”, and I’ve been hearing more and more about it every day, but until now, not really paying it too much attention. I took a closer look this week, and here are some of the most striking examples I found, which give a pretty good overview of the state of the field today.

Sixth Sense

Probabaly the most exciting AR application I’ve seen so far, Sixth Sense is unique in that it augments reality by projecting graphics & data out onto the world.

Browsers

An augmented reality browser is software that puts a layer of information over reality, exactly as Myron Krueger foretold back in ‘91. I think it’s inevitable that these will become the hub of our digital lives and a software battlefield.

Layar

Nearest Subway

Marketing

Wherever you’ve got a new technology, you’ll always have someone trying to use it to better sell you stuff. Most of the AR marketing is extremely gimmicky so far, so here just a couple of well-done examples.

Lego

Mini Cabrio

Games

I predict that games will be to AR what porn was to the early internet. It’s just too good a match. Maybe it’s just because it’s so new, but AR feels like magic — it’s fun just because of what it is, no matter what you do with it. Employing that sense of magic in play is a no-brainer. I also predict a rash of rather painful real-world accidents, if the Roku’s Reward video below is anything to go by.

ARhrrrr!

Roku’s Reward

levelHead

PITStrategy

Art

It doesn’t seem like there’s too much experimentation going on in this space yet, but as this video shows, there’s plenty of potential.

Tagged in Motion

Weirdness

Of course, just like marketing gimmicks, wherever there’s a new technology there will be someone building disturbing, sleazy software to entertain creepy, sweaty geeks. Ewww.

Manga Girl

What’s Coming?

Augmented Reality is a very young field, and exciting enough that we designers should be keeping a close eye on it. But just like any technological jump, everyone will eventually get used to it, the sheen of coolness will fade, and it’ll go from being a sexy gimmick to an everyday tool. What then?

AR is such a large enough step away from the desktop / window / mouse world we’ve been clicking in for so long, that I’m certain it will totally bend the brains of us experience designers. We’re so used to thinking in 2D layers of information and linear paths of interaction, it’ll be a while before we really figure out how to squeeze the most out of AR experiences. At the moment the space seems to be dominated by academics on the one hand, and money-grubbing marketers on the other. I’d personally like to see a few of us practical, out in the real world, thinking designers make something out of the AR primordial soup, and I’d love to have a chance to get into it myself.

To keep up with the world of AR, check out these blogs:

• augmentedblog.wordpress.com
• augmented.org
• artimes.rouli.net

There’s Got to be More

These videos are surely just the tip of the iceberg, but I’m pretty new to the world of AR. Have you seen anything stunning out there that should be here too? What’s your favourite AR app? Which of your day-to-day tasks do you look forward to having augmented in the future? If you could have any AR app you wanted, what would it be?

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So here’s the interview with Steve Baty, user experience strategist, one of the organisers of UX Australia, and an awfully nice man.

Thanks Steve!

Click here to see all “What’s Design Mean to You?” interviews.

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At SxSW and the IA Summit this year, I continued a little project I started around this time last year when I was at Reboot — I sat down with smart people who use the word “design” to describe at least some of what they do, and asked them what the word means to them.

In honour of the recent UX Australia conference (which was a grand pleasure) and its organisers, Donna Spencer and Steve Baty, I’ll be posting their videos first, and after that getting on to Dan Willis, Nick Finck, Michael Angeles and Leah Buley. So here’s Donna, in the extremely civilised atmosphere of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis!

Thanks for the interview Donna!

Click here to see all “What’s Design Mean to You?” interviews.

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In an attempt to control the utter panic that overtook me at having committed to doing a workshop, and inspired by my friend Donna Spencer’s blog post, How I Draft an Information Architecture, I went back to a method I’ve often used in the past to organise my thoughts for a pitch presentation. I thought you might find it useful, so here it is.

What You’ll Need

It starts (as so many good things do) with a stack of index cards and two Sharpies, black and red. You’ll also need a large, flat surface where you can spread a large number of cards out and move them around. It might sound odd, but I recommend that you pick a surface that isn’t white, or if your surface is white, use cards that aren’t. This allows you to really see the structure you’ll be creating. I used to use a pinboard and pins for this, but it’s far quicker and easier to place and move the cards around on a horizontal surface.

Brain Dump

The first step is to get everything out of your head and onto cards. Take the stack of cards and your black Sharpie, write an idea on a card, and throw it onto the pile. Then another, then another, and so on. Only write one idea (rule of thumb: maximum 5 words) on each card, and don’t worry about penmanship or eloquence - you’re the only one that needs to understand these. Don’t worry about order, don’t worry about “getting it right”, don’t sort as you go - there will be time for all of that later. Just like popcorn, when your ideas stop popping, you’re done. Don’t fight to squeeze every idea out - as you move along, more will come. Pick the low-hanging fruit and move on.

Rough in Some Structure

Now that you’ve got a stack of ideas, start sorting them. First, flip through the stack quickly and make a few smaller stacks of ideas that go together. Now look at each of those stacks and sort them into some sort of order, as in “this idea leads to this ideas leads to…” Now take your sorted cards and lay them out on your table. We read top-to-bottom & left-to-right, so I tend to put “chapters” one after the other from the top, and within the chapters ideas build up from the left, as you can see in the photo above.

Get the Details In

Odds are that you got new ideas and noticed things missing (hrm, how do I get from that idea to there?) while laying your cards out. No problem, think a moment and add what you need at this point. If you can’t think of what you need right away, don’t get hung up on it - make a note in red, and move on. At this point you can also add chapter titles (in red in the photo above), timing (the stopwatch icons on the right of the photo), notes to yourself about possible imagery or diagrams, whatever.

Now step back and take it all in. Read through the cards from start to finish and note where the ideas flow, and where the holes are. Move chapters around and see if things flow better. If you want you can take the time to fill the holes now, although the point of this exercise is to get ideas & structure down quick.

Once you’re more or less satisfied, do what you need to move this structure into Powerpoint or Keynote. Take a photo to refer to, write down a hierarchical list, or bring your laptop over to the cards and whack in a slide with each card’s text, which is how I do it. Now the real fun begins - Powerpoint acrobatics! But that will have to wait for the next post…

What a Blast!

Although I was terrified, the workshop seems by all accounts to have been a success, and I enjoyed it immensely! The nine remarkably nice participants made my day by kindly and obediently jumping through whatever hoops I put before them, and they remained creative, friendly and funny throughout. Thanks guys! More than one of them best possible feedback afterwards, “I never thought I could draw, but now I know I can.” And that was the whole point.

I enjoyed it all so much, I can’t wait to do it again! If you think you and your colleagues would benefit from breaking down the “I can’t draw” barrier to collaborate & communicate better, generate ideas faster & easier, and simply enjoy your work more, let’s talk.

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This year’s UX Australia conference served as a perfect place to get started. Considering how smart & inspiring most of the speakers were, I had the right amount of “yeaaaah!” to almost get myself going. Considering that I taught a workshop called “Scribble Your Way to Success!” – during which I taught people who thought that they couldn’t draw that this belief was complete bullshit – I had the right amount of guilt to actually get myself going.

So, instead of spending hours agonising over the best way to describe the best UX conference I’ve ever attended, I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

What I learned from these sketchnotes (other than the smart things the speakers said):

• Sketchnoting makes for stronger, more memorable notes than just text notes. I assuming this has lots to do with the left/right brain activity I talked about in my workshop.
• The paper in the Windsor & Newtown visual diary I’ve ben using is too thin, and there’s quite a lot of bleed-through. I also miss the warm tone of Moleskine paper, so I’ll be going back to the good old Moleskine sketchbook with the thick drawing paper.
• I’m not confident enough with sketching people, so I dodged the portraits through the whole conference, although I did draw half of Alex Wright, a little Paul Otlet, and Guillermo Torres and Ayne Valencia’s hair. Next time I’ll suck it up and see if I can’t get closer to Mike Rohde’s great little portraits. Being afraid to suck at something shouldn’t keep me from trying.
• Other than the fact that he’s a far better illustrator than I, Mike Rodhe’s sketchnotes hang together so well due to the simple, consistent elements and the large text, among other things. I’ll emulate those aspects of his notes a little closer next time.

What these sketchnotes don’t convey about UX Australia was how surprised and impressed I was with the sense of community in the Australian UX scene. By way of comparison, last year’s IA Summit in Memphis was full of navel-gazing, rockstar posturing, and no small amount of friction, which left me with little desire to attend in 2010. Now that UX Australia exists, I know I won’t have to. It was full of practical ideas that I can use in my work, fun jibes at how seriously we sometimes take ourselves, and intense conversation between intelligent, grounded individuals. By the time Friday night arrived, I wanted to start a company with all attendees so we could do this sort of thing every day.

It’s been said many times already, but here’s mine: congratulations to Donna Spencer, Steve Baty and all their helpers for not only hammering a stake into the ground of the international UX scene, but also hosting one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to. I can’t wait for UX Australia in Melbourne next year!

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So when UX Australia announced their badge design competition, I just had to jump on it.

To make the best badge possible, I decided to share my rough designs on Flickr and get your feedback. The first version went up yesterday and plenty of people left helpful comments, so today I threw together a revised version.

Please do me a favour and click here to see the latest version, and leave a comment on Flickr. It’d also be lovely if you would post a link to Twitter and help me get more feedback. Thanks!

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Happily, I stumbled across Klim, a so far unknown to me foundry in New Zealand, and their lovely font Newzald, which may be just what I’m looking for. But lovelier still (to my eyes) are the pages of their sketchbooks that they’ve posted. If you’ve ever wondered what kind of creative process and painstaking craft goes into forging a beautiful typeface, you must take a look. It’s all there on the page, for anyone to see.

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I’ve never really understood collecting - the feverish desire to have more, preferrably all of a particular thing - well, it’s always seemed a little bit soft-brained to me.

Then I looked in my drawers.

I have to admit it: I’m a little soft-brained too. I own so many nicely designed t-shirts, I could easily wear a fresh one every day for over three weeks without doing laundry. And as a designer, I’m more than a little in love with typography. Typographic t-shirts are like upperbody heaven to me. Maybe that’s something I should seek professional help with, or perhaps you understand?

So here’s my monster have/want list of typographic tees. Enjoy, and be sure to share your own favourites down in the comments.

Typefaces

Shirts not only set in, but also about particular fonts. No surprise: Helvetica wins the most love, hate, and love to hate.

Ampersands

Everybody’s favourite funky typographic symbol, the ampersand’s become quite a popular subject for shirts. In case you were wondering, according to Wikipedia the ampersand is a logogram representing the conjunction “and”. The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, Latin for “and”.

Numbers

I was surprised at how unpopular numbers are on typographic t-shirts, but there are a few good ones out there.

Hand-Drawn Type

All the warmth and analogue fallibility that Helvetica is lacking radiates from hand-drawn typography, which always brings a smile to my face.

Design Nerdery

In-jokes, obscure jargon, phrases repeated to clients over and over and over… these are the shirts to warm the cockles of any designer’s heart.

Just Shirts with Sweet Type

And the grab-bag of shirts that have nice type, but don’t quite fit into any other category.

If you’re a fan of type tees, there’s more here:

• The typography tag on Rumplo
• TypoTees blog
• The typographic t-shirts group on Flickr
• T-shirts on I Love Typography
• Tees on Typographica

Have a favourite type tee that’s not here? Throw it in the comments!

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Photoshop CS4 is the only exception.

Extremely frustrating problems include:

• up to 10 second pause before refresh when zooming in and out.
• 5 to 20 second pauses when selecting/deselecting layers.
• stuttering and crippling lag when dragging an image around, especially when zoomed in.
• unresponsive reactions to layer nudging.
• anywhere from 10 second to 5 minute (not an exaggeration) pause while saving for web, accompanied by frequent crashes.
• all of the above problems are completely random and not consistently reproduceable, though they occur very regularly.

As a professional designer, I’ve been used to ignoring Photoshop CS3 and concentrating on the work I was doing. This is exactly how a good tool should function. With Photoshop CS4 I spend far more time frustrated and conscious of the unresponsive & clumsy tool than I do paying attention to what I’m trying to do. Apart from being constantly and unbelievably frustrating, it’s costing me time, and therefore money, and affecting the quality of my work.

Dear Adobe, you should be very worried. I have spent a great deal of energy lately wishing for an alternative to Photoshop. Having customers whose loyalty is based on nothing more than a lack of viable alternatives to your product is a perfect opportunity for a competitor to drink your milkshake, and earn the gratitude of customers like myself. You, the creators of the Quark killer InDesign, should know that very well.

The first Photoshop CS4 update, 11.0.1, solved none of my problems. As a customer who bought CS4 new, and not as an upgrade, I don’t have the option of downgrading to CS3, although I would dearly love to. Providing me with a free downgrade wouldn’t really solve my problem – Photoshop CS4 would still be painfully slow – but at least I could work in peace again.

How about it Adobe?

Are you a designer using Photoshop CS4? Tell me about your experiences in the comments below.

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The beta version of the fourth Web Trend Map is out, and it’s gorgeous. Go have a look at all the beautiful details, and if you’ve got any feedback, let them know. They’re only printing 1000 of them, so shoot them a mail to reserve a copy! It’s a lovely piece of info-porn for the studio wall.

And if you like this one, the first, second and third web trend maps are well worth looking at as well, even if they’re completely outdated by now.

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Here are ten practical tips for giving good deck, aimed at geek conferences, but hopefully useful for others as well.

1. Make sure that your Twitter handle is big and clear on the first slide. If you say smart things, people will want to follow you, and the backchannel will want to use the shortest name they can find for you.
2. Likewise, don’t forget a hash tag for your session, and keep it short. #gp is better than #greatpresentation, for example. Eating as few of the backchannel’s 140 characters as possible is good for your karma.
3. If you’re on a panel, tell the audience to ask questions through Twitter. It can be a nice way of answering what you want when you want, and dodging the long, drawn out, “I have something to prove” questions that everybody hates.
4. Use LARGE typography. From the back of a big room, type smaller than 64 px is going to be hard to impossible to read.
5. We’ve all got laptops with us. If we want to read, we’ll use them. Keep your slides visually interesting, but go light on the text. The best presenters use the least text in their slides.
6. Do not put slide-junk like the date, the name of the conference and your logo on every slide. We all know where we are, who you are and what day it is, and we’re having a hard enough time concentrating on your incisive insight without unnecessary distractions.
7. Anything you really want people to see should be in the top two thirds of any slide. People’s heads will invariably block the bottom third.
8. You never know how well set up the projector and screen will be, so keep away from the edges of your slides to make sure nothing gets cut off. As a general rule, keep a 10% zone on top, bottom and both sides free of content.
9. Make sure your type/background combo is high contrast. If you present in a well-lit room, grey on black will be hard to read. Highest contrast, but boring, is black on white. White - or any bright colour - on black works too, and generally looks fancier.
10. Unless you’re presenting some massively complex essay, present your material, don’t read it. If you’re reading your presentation, you seem stiff and you can’t connect to the audience. Even if you flub a line or two, you’ll always get more sympathy if you present without reading. Reading is a refuge for nervous presenters, but one you should work on getting over as soon as you can.

These tips won’t make you a great presenter, but they will ensure that your great presentation can be seen, looks good, and encourages backchannel discussion. Hope it helps!

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